Lydia Maria Child and the Anguish of War

ECW welcomes guest author Frank J. Cirillo

Following First Bull Run in July 1861, the writer Lydia Maria Child wrote to a friend. Washington notables had flocked with picnic baskets to witness the first major battle of the Civil War, expecting a quick and painless Union defeat of the Confederacy. But the battle had ended in a bloody Union rout, dashing dreams of a speedy end to the conflict.

As Child confessed in guilt-laden tones to her friend, however, she had not shared in such hopes. To be sure, the Massachusetts native mourned the loss of Northern men at Bull Run. News of the death toll, she wrote, made her “almost down sick. Night and day, I am thinking of those poor soldiers … My heart bleeds for the mothers of those sons.” But with what she later described as a “pang, as if it were something wicked and monstrous,” Child clung at the same time to an unwavering desire that the war – and, by implication, Union losses – continue.^[1]

I first encountered Child in researching my book, The Abolitionist Civil War. When I came across her wartime letters, I imagine that my reaction was similar to that of the readers of this post: I was unnerved by her support for the prolongation of Union suffering. As I learned, however, her beliefs were neither unique nor unjustifiable.

Child, while best known today as the author of the poem “Over the River and Through the Woods,” which later became a popular Christmas song, was a leading member in the abolitionist movement, a group of activists seeking to achieve the immediate end of slavery and rights for African Americans. By doing so, abolitionists believed that they could redeem an errant nation and make it a true beacon of democracy. When the Civil War began in April 1861, Child and the abolitionists made clear that their sympathies lay with the Union over the Confederacy. They could never take the side of a rebellion begun to perpetuate slavery and white supremacy, as they stressed at great length.

Yet the abolitionists were far from satisfied with the Union war effort as it then stood: One fought to preserve the nation, rather than to end the infernal institution of slavery. While Child was not alone in expressing her dissatisfaction, her poetic prose cut better than most to the heart of the matter. As she declared in spring 1861, she could not join in the “universal enthusiasm for the US flag” then prevalent. Her pain evident, Child proclaimed that while she “want[ed] to love and honor the flag…my love of country finds vent only in tears.” Instead of taking steps to dismantle the vast system of slavery, the Lincoln administration was returning fugitive slaves to their enslavers. Child averred that she would gladly “mount [the] flag in my great elm-tree” once emancipation became a war aim. But until then, she would “as soon wear the rattlesnake upon my bosom as the eagle.” As Child concluded, her sense of patriotism impelled her to yearn for a better country, rather than to accept the flawed one as it was.^[2]

Child and the abolitionists, however, were not just idealistic dreamers. As I detail in my book, antislavery activists developed a strategy over the early months of the war to turn a struggle for Union into a crusade for emancipation. They began arguing that emancipation was the only way to cripple the Confederacy, which had a slavery-powered economy, and win the war. But as the abolitionists understood, such an argument required time to take hold. If the Union secured an immediate victory over the Confederacy, there would be no need to change course. Slavery would remain intact within a reunited nation. Abolitionists’ arguments would only gain support if the war ground on, proving the truth in their words–and making Northerners increasingly willing to accept them. As a result, abolitionists had to hope for the war, and the mounting Northern casualties that came with it, to carry on.

While abolitionists firmly believed in the logic of this stance, they were still human. The moral dilemma of their positions took a toll on them as they mourned Union deaths and suffering while simultaneously needing such losses to continue. Again, Child proved better than most such activists in laying out the moral torment they all experienced during the first years of the war. Her anguish was amplified by the fact that many of her friends had sons in the Union military. Sarah Blake Shaw, the mother of the soon-to-be-famous officer Robert Gould Shaw, was her closest confidante. Throughout the conflict, Child remained acutely aware of its human cost. “The war is an unmitigated horror to me,” she admitted. But her bleeding heart could not dissuade her from her conviction that a longer war would ultimately save the nation. “I have said all along that we needed defeats and reverses…to teach us the lesson we needed,” she told a friend after Bull Run. A few more “salutary defeats,” she believed, would turn a Union populace desperate to bring its loved ones home into a nationwide “Anti-Slavery Society.”^[3]

In this belief, Child and her fellow abolitionists were proven correct. As the war dragged on, Northerners came around to emancipation. In no small part due to the abolitionists’ efforts, emancipation became a Union war aim in January 1863. “We are coming out right, at last,” Child exulted. “Our army stand before God the champions of human freedom.” Her relief at finally being able to cheer for Union success, and an end to soldiers’ suffering, was tangible. Writing to a friend, Child prayed for soldiers’ “long-deferred hopes [to] be crowned with victory.” She especially cheered on Robert Gould Shaw as he took command of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Following Shaw’s death at Fort Wagner, Child comforted his mother with her newfound faith in the war effort. By dying “nobly in the defense of great principles,” Child wrote, Shaw had sanctified a great moral crusade. As she affirmed, his sacrifice, much like her own torment earlier in the war, had been worth it for the greater good.^[4]

Frank J. Cirillo is the author of The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union. He most recently served as the Norton Strange Townshend Fellow at the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library.

Endnotes:

[1] Lydia Maria Child to Henrietta Sargent, July 26, 1861, The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880, ed. Patricia G. Holland et al. (Millwood, NY: Kraus Microform, 1980); Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Blake Shaw, June 9, 1862, Shaw Family Correspondence, New York Public Library.

[2] Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Blake Shaw, May 5, 1861, Shaw Family Correspondence, New York Public Library; Lydia Maria Child to Oliver Johnson, June 3, 1861, The Collected Correspondence.

[3] Lydia Maria Child to William Cutler, July 10, 1862, Lydia Maria Child Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; Lydia Maria Child to Henrietta Sargent, July 26, 1861, Lydia Maria Child to Lucy Searle, August 22, 1861, The Collected Correspondence.

[4] Lydia Maria Child to William Lloyd Garrison Haskins, April 30, 1863, Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Blake Shaw, July 25, 1863, The Collected Correspondence.