Beneath all the death and destruction at Cold Harbor, it's easy to forget that the enlisted soldiers are typically the least bloodthirsty participants in any war. For all the ferocity they displayed in battle, Northerners and Southerners between battles could agree that peace was a very fine thing indeed and it could be done if a few men back at home were rounded up and hanged.But there was more to it than just the enlisted men and a lot of the war's fate would rest in the hands of civilians who had never witnessed the horrors of the Bloody Angle. The common soldiers could look ahead to peace without feelings of hatred and if they jibed about the need to hang a few politicians, they did so as men who'd seen so much death that a few more killings wouldn't mean much. Yet there were peaceful civilians who talked of hangings too, men who'd never seen the battlefield yet came to view death and the noose as positive things.Some were men who had always lived by the sword and they saw in this war a chance to reach a monstrous goal, with an undying fire blazing across a wasteland once populated by people they'd disagreed with. But others were moderates and not normally bloodthirsty, now carried away by the furor of war.
There was for example Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, an austere, white-whiskered New Englander and former newspaper editor, devoutly religious and without a sense of humor, who raised a large family, and believed the Union cause a sacred one. During the Cold Harbor fight, Welles, a man who had never seen war firsthand and came to view it as an abstraction, was confiding to his diary that nobody was prepared for the changes the war had brought. He spoke of harsh terms being imposed on the South, yet to not go overboard lest it turn to barbarism. And in his quiet study, where the night's calm was broken by no noise worse than the clattering of horse-drawn carriages outside, he wrote "No traitor has been hung. I doubt if there will be, but an example should be made of some of th eleaders, for present and future good."To be sure, the Confederate leaders might be jailed or exiled once the war was over, but that alone might not suffice. People would try to rescue them and parties form to uphold their principles and in the end these principles might revive and grow strong again. If the men who held these principles were however destroyed, their ideas might die with them. And so Welles concluded: "Death is the proper penalty and atonement, and will be enduringly beneficient in its influence."Maybe hangings wouldn't be possible anyway since men have an inherent compassionate streak in them. In such case, Welles thought, the Confederate leaders might be at least stripped of their wealth and property and their families impoverished. This good family man thought it would have a wholesome effect. Yet in the end that too seemed to be asking a lot and Welles believed "There will be very gentle measures in closing up this rebellion."
Welles might be wrong about the inevitability of gentleness--at a moment when the Army of the Potomac had averaged 2,000 casualties a day for a month straight, it was hard for even many composed men to keep themselves together and not talk of murderous revenge, and one of the hardest tasks Abraham Lincoln had ahead of him was to constrain the blood-soaked fantasies of such men. For Lincoln, more than anyone, agreed with the common soldier that as long as the war went on, it was necessary to do whatever it took to win, but once it was over there must be peace and reconciliation. The soldiers grasped this point perfectly: Hang a few of the politicians who started this entire mess and we'll go home. But in the end, the soldiers had not started the war nor would they end it, they could merely fight it. The hospitals in Washington were full as never before and each day steamers came up the river with more broken bodies, and in such a climate it was hard to restrain one's desire for unmitigated violence.
>>17989188>>17989195>>17989184they were right about how wars start. if these three circus clowns had been hanged from a tree a lot of people would still be alive.
>>17989184Two of my great great great Uncles died at Cold Harbor thanks to General Grant's tremendous military mind.
>>17989296the correct people to blame were the assorted tards in the Army of the Potomac who were still living by the McClellan philosophy of war
