This Infernal War: The Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR "THIS INFERNAL WAR"

Timothy Mason Roberts has unruffled a vitally important collection of correspondence that complicates our traditional understanding of Union soldiers and civilians. The Standards talk in stunning detail about race, politics, and the daily grind of the Civil War on the lives of one particular family who loathed the idea of a war for the liberation of enslaved African Americans. This collection is vitally important to our understanding of the most pivotal chapter in American history.

— BRIAN CRAIG MILLER, editor of Civil War History and author of A Punishment on the Nation: An Iowa Soldier Endures the Civil War (Kent State University Press)

With its combination of military, civilian, home front, and unusual political elements, this volume has wide appeal for both a scholarly and popular audience. The Standards’ frank discussions of race, sex, and the traumatic effects of war on both soldiers and their families make this a particularly valuable collection. There just aren’t many complete collections from a Copperhead couple, and Roberts’s editing and analysis successfully place the letters into proper historical and historiographic context. It is an important work.

— BRADLEY KEEFER, author of Conflicting Memories on the River of Death: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863–1933 (Kent State University Press)

"William Standard was not the soldier we expect to see. He did not go to war to save the Union or free the slaves. More likely he went to stave off creditors and maintain his standing in the community. Both he and his wife, Jane, had family ties to the South, and neither had warm feelings toward Republicans. In fact, both could be counted as Copperheads–antiwar Democrats. We don’t find many letters of Copperhead soldiers in the archives, and that is what makes ‘This Infernal War’ such a gold mine for students of the Civil War."

—JENNIFER L. WEBER, associate professor, University of Kansas

This Infernal War

CIVIL WAR IN THE NORTH

Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union · John M. Belohlavek

Banners South: A Northern Community at War · Edmund J. Raus

Circumstances are destiny: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere · Tina Stewart Brakebill

More Than a Contest between Armies: Essays on the Civil War · Edited by James Marten and A. Kristen Foster

August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman · Edited by David W. Lowe

Dispatches from Bermuda: The Civil War Letters of Charles Maxwell Allen, U.S. Consul at Bermuda, 1861–1888 · Edited by Glen N. Wiche

The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians · Mark A. Lause

Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer · Paul Taylor

Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front · J. Matthew Gallman

A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stängel, 9th Ohio Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry · Edited by Glenn Robins

The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union, from August 21, 1862, to June 6, 1865 · Albion W. Tourgée, Edited by Peter C. Luebke

The Election of 1860 Reconsidered · Edited by A. James Fuller

A Punishment on the Nation: An Iowa Soldier Endures the Civil War · Edited by Brian Craig Miller

Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

The Printer’s Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family · Edited by Patricia A. Donohoe

Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry · Edited by Eric R. Faust

Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers · Roger Pickenpaugh

Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War—for Better and for Worse · Candice Shy Hooper

For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops · Kelly D. Mezurek

Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union · William F. Quigley Jr.

"Our Little Monitor": The Greatest Invention of the Civil War · Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White

This Infernal War: The Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard · Edited by Timothy Mason Roberts

"This

Infernal War"

The

Civil War Letters of

William and Jane

Standard

EDITED BY

Timothy Mason Roberts

The Kent State University Press

Kent, Ohio

© 2018 by Timothy Mason Roberts

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2017016302

ISBN 978-1-60635-335-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Standard, William M., 1822- | Roberts, Timothy Mason, 1964-editor.

Title: This infernal war : the Civil War letters of William and Jane Standard / edited by Timothy M. Roberts.

Other titles: Civil War letters of William and Jane Standard

Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017016302 (print) | LCCN 2017016133 (ebook) | ISBN 9781631012723 (ePub) | ISBN 9781631012730 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781606353356 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Standard, William M., 1822---Correspondence. | Standard, Jane, 1828---Biography. | United States. Army. Illinois Infantry Regiment, 103rd (1862-1865)--Biography. | Soldiers--United States--Correspondence. | Husband and wife--United States--Correspondence. | Copperhead movement. | United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Protest movements. | United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Personal narratives. | Public opinion--United States--History--19th century. | Farmers--Illinois--Fulton County--Biography.

Classification: LCC E505.5 103rd (print) | LCC E505.5 103rd .S75 2017 (ebook) | DDC 973.7/473092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016133

22 21 20 19 18       5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to

Dorothy Standard Currens,

1912–1987

Contents

Editorial Practices, Sources, and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Nobody knows anything about it but them that has the trial

2 I cramped a darkie and a mule

3 Talk of war up at home

4 I am willing to be governed by your judgment

5 This is no place for boys. They soon go to destruction

6 Mown down like grass

7 Good Lincoln times by gravy

Epilogue

Notable Individuals in the Standards’ Correspondence

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Practices, Sources,

and Acknowledgments

The Standards’ letters came into the possession of Dorothy Standard Currens (née Dorothy Ann Standard), the Standards’ great-granddaughter, in 1936. A recent University of Illinois graduate, Dotty Standard carefully removed the letters from their mailing envelopes and ordered and numbered them. For the next few years she submitted samples and book proposals to publishers, though without success. One literary agent wrote that the letters are interesting to read, but there is no drama about them and they do not touch any high spots in the war or at home. I am certain that publishers would demand that in such material.¹ Dorothy had the letters microfilmed in the 1970s. In 2011, in light of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial and to honor his mother, Dorothy’s son, Ron Currens of Atlanta, contacted the editor, a history professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb, near the Standards’ community in Lewistown, about the possibility of editing the letters for publication, and provided the editor with the microfilm. Ron’s father, Ronald Currens Sr., had graduated from what was then Western Illinois State Teachers College in 1923. In 2013, Currens gave the original letters to the Kenan Research Center of the Atlanta History Center (AHC), which posted them online at http://ahc.galileo.usg.edu/ahc/search, keyword Standard. Most of the original letters are quite legible, especially William’s, except a few he wrote in pencil at the bottom of letters from Jane. Some, especially messages by the Standards’ children, are more challenging. Thankfully, neither of the Standards resorted to the common nineteenth-century practice of crossing their letters—that is, of trying to save paper and expense by turning a letter ninety degrees and writing across the message already written. Both the microfilm and the AHC online copies of the letters have been used for their transcription.

The letters have been edited to reveal their historical significance and reduce repetition and confusion to the reader. Occasional profanities, racial epithets, and colorful colloquialisms have been retained to give a sense of prevailing contemporary attitudes and speech patterns, and some of the original spelling has also been preserved to show the Standards’ writing style. However, to clarify the writers’ meaning, substantial corrections have been made to the punctuation and grammatical construction of the letters, and to some of the spelling. Paragraph breaks have been added to indicate clear changes of subject. Silent corrections have been made to capitalization to mark the beginning of sentences and indicate proper nouns. Punctuation has likewise been added or modified to clarify the sense of the text by setting off clauses and sentences and by adding apostrophes into contractions and possessives. Silent corrections have also been made to regularize the spelling and capitalization of common words. For example, months and days of the week have been capitalized; compound words and certain prefixes and suffixes have been closed up; and final consonants have been doubled before adding suffixes. Other changes to punctuation and spelling have been enclosed in brackets, as have editorial clarifications of odd historical spellings. Text added to supply missing words or portions of words or to suggest clarifications of words that may be unclear likewise has been set off in brackets, often with a question mark to indicate doubt. Editorial notations indicating illegible text also appear in brackets.

Portions of a few of the letters are missing. Sometimes entire pages have been lost; in other cases, the letters have holes apparently from animal or weather damage. Such missing text is indicated with ellipses. Ellipses have also been used to indicate the omission of certain passages that are repetitive or that lack historical significance, such as comments on the weather or on farm or military camp conditions, references to unidentifiable neighbors and fellow soldiers, or frequently repeated queries between William and Jane regarding letters gone astray. Finally, about thirty-five of the letters at the AHC have been omitted from this book because they are redundant or do not contain noteworthy information.

Biographical information on many of the individuals that the Standards mention in the letters was traced from several sources, including the History of Fulton County, Illinois (Peoria, Ill.: Chas. C. Chapman and Co., 1879); Fred Delap, comp., Illinois Civil War Muster and Descriptive Rolls, an online database of records held in the Illinois State Archives, at www.ilsos.gov/isaveterans/civilmustersrch.jsp; and the Archives and Special Collections, Malpass Library, Western Illinois University. Other sources are indicated in the footnotes. A few of the Standards’ letters were previously published in Scott Freeman’s article, Dear Jane: A Civil War Love Story, Told in Letters, in Atlanta Magazine, May 2012.

The editor is grateful to several individuals who contributed to this book. Walter Kretchik and Betsy Glade reviewed a proposal for the project and made suggestions on how to emphasize the letters’ significance in communications with publishers. Joyce Harrison, William Underwood, and Mary Young at the Kent State University Press expressed sustained interest in the project and patiently facilitated its development. Bradley Keefer and Patricia Donohoe offered helpful criticisms to improve the manuscript. Marian Buda and Emily Sellers Roberts copyedited the manuscript for readability. The Western Illinois University Foundation provided an early grant to fund research and transcription. Cody Boland, Nathan Doyle, Jeremy Murray, Clark Ramser, and Alexander Vlastnik transcribed some of the letters and researched Civil War conditions in Western Illinois. Jeffrey Hancks of Western Illinois University’s Archives and Special Collections, together with his staff, provided rare and valuable regional historical materials. The editor especially is grateful to Ron Currens, who initiated contact about this project. Determined to honor the wish of his mother, Dorothy, to preserve and share their ancestors’ unvarnished story of wartime love, Ron was faithful through the book’s evolution.

Introduction

The Civil War correspondence of William and Jane Standard, comprising more than two hundred letters, is rare among such collections of letters exchanged between American soldiers and their spouses in its expression of the complexity of their motives and experiences. The attitudes expressed regarding the Union’s conduct of the war and especially those toward African Americans are, frankly, troubling; scholars who argue that the bulk of Union soldiers left their families and went to war to champion republican government or to wipe out slavery will have to account for the Standards’ racial attitudes and rejection of the war’s ideals. Historians have previously studied the ideas and actions of antiwar Peace Democrats, dubbed Copperheads by their opponents, and found that the Copperhead threat was not simply exaggeration by anxious or opportunistic Republicans.¹ The Standards’ letters suggest the regional prevalence of Copperhead sentiments and strategies. They also provide some details concerning how the antiwar movement connected Northern civilians and soldiers. Indeed, Jane’s and William’s opposition to the war helped sustain their commitment to and dependence on each other to survive it. Yet the war changed them in spite of themselves. Jane grew more independent and financially resourceful while William took on new responsibilities, coming to play an important and illustrative role in efforts by the U.S. government and the Union military to persuade many resentful Northern men to support a long, grueling, and, after 1862, revolutionary war on the South.

Perhaps most compellingly, the Standards’ vernacular language and attitudes convey the coarseness of ordinary Americans’ lives during the mid-nineteenth century—but also reveal an unexpected intimacy and candor. The Standards’ wartime relationship, a distant but intense conversation conducted from the fall of 1862 to the spring of 1865, shows two strong-willed people in love, remaining hopeful, passionate, loyal, and even playful as they awaited their own reunion.

In their social conservatism and racial attitudes, the Standards were representative of much of the population of the agricultural Northwest at the time the Civil War erupted. William’s parents, Thomas and Marcy West Standard, were from North Carolina and South Carolina respectively.² William was born in 1822 in Vienna, Johnson County, Illinois, the county named for Richard Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who later served as the U.S. vice president. Johnson County lies within Little Egypt, the area around the border town of Cairo, earning its nickname because of its rich soil, its settlers’ migration from the Upland South, and their continuing affiliation with the culture and economy of areas south of the Ohio River. In 1830, William’s parents moved the family to the town of Joshua, in Fulton County. Jane was born in 1828 in Wilson County, Tennessee, a plantation area with limited chances for land ownership for small farmers. Seeking better prospects on the Illinois prairie, Jane’s father, Isaac Ellis, moved his family to Fulton County when she was two.³ When William and Jane were young, Illinois, particularly its southern and western regions, was experiencing rapid agricultural development and attendant violence as settlers sought to rid the area of potential troublemakers. In 1832, the short-lived Black Hawk War took place, in which a frontier army defeated an attempt by an alliance of several native tribes, led by the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, to regain tribal lands. Differences over slavery and religion also spurred conflict. In 1837, a proslavery mob murdered the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, while in 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was likewise assassinated, and surviving Mormons were driven from the state.

Fulton County, situated amid these conflicts and between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, was culturally Southern from its territorial origins. Twenty percent of the county’s residents in 1850 had been born in the South, and many others, like William, were the children of Southern migrants. A community history published in 1879 described how the Southerners regarded the Yankees as a skinning, tricky, penurious race of peddlers, filling the country with tinware, brass clocks, and wooden nutmegs.⁴ This observation described not the sectional prejudice of the Civil War but the attitude of settlers around Fulton County in 1818, the year of Illinois statehood, toward people from New England settling elsewhere in Illinois. Indeed, until the Civil War, many Illinois laws about race resembled those of the slave states. Illinois was a free state, and in 1836, Free Frank McWorter, a former slave who had earned his name by buying his freedom, established the biracial community of New Philadelphia in Pike County, Illinois, some ninety miles southwest of Fulton County—the first town in the United States founded by an African American. Nevertheless, until the second Illinois constitution of 1848, state law allowed slaveowners to enter Illinois and keep slaves as indentured servants. Moreover, under Illinois black codes, African Americans could not vote, testify, bring suit against whites, or bear arms. And while several routes of the Underground Railroad ran through Illinois, allowing runaway slaves to escape to freedom, blacks, even those carrying a legally mandated Certificate of Freedom, were vulnerable to kidnapping and smuggling in the other direction, into slavery. As late as 1853, local sheriffs conducted sales of runaway slaves caught in the state; such sheriff sales occurred in Alton, near St. Louis, as well as in Chicago.⁵ Because of the general hostility to black people in Illinois, the state had few black residents. The 1860 U.S. Census recorded the Illinois population at 1.7 million, of whom only 7,600 were blacks; within Fulton County, blacks accounted for only 49 of the county’s 33,000 residents.⁶ Before the Civil War, in short, the Standards lived in a society composed largely of white pioneers; for them, people of color were inferior and unwanted.

Given such prevailing attitudes, the Standards had little sympathy for the emerging war goals of the Union. They regarded the announcement of emancipation as a diversion by an increasingly fanatical government from the initial purpose of restoring the Union, enacted on behalf of an alien people. In their letters, the Standards rarely referred to any Union antislavery policy. William mentioned the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only once, in an unattributed newspaper editorial, and neither of them ever referred to Congress’s prior Confiscation Acts. To the Standards, as to many ordinary Northerners during the Civil War, soldiers as well as civilians, the ending of legal American slavery was an inadvertent consequence of the effort to save the Union and not a driving purpose. As William expressed it on August 7, 1864, old Abe wants … to kill off all the northern men and boys, and the entire population of the south to satisfy his own appetite to liberate the slaves. Nonetheless, well before this, he and his comrades took advantage of the Union’s hard war practices, both official and informal, to help themselves to Southerners’ property, including at least one slave.

As suggested by William’s comment, the Standards had little regard for the United States’ sixteenth president, even though Abraham Lincoln spent much of his early career in Springfield, Illinois, only sixty miles southeast of the Fulton County town of Lewistown. Lincoln practiced law in Springfield and there launched his 1858 campaign to win the U.S. Senate seat for Illinois then held by Stephen Douglas, its long-serving Democratic incumbent, by giving his famous house divided speech. Douglas, a champion of popular sovereignty, a doctrine intended to keep the federal government from deciding the question of slavery’s westward expansion, responded with a speech in Chicago outlining that doctrine, an exchange that prompted a series of seven debates between the two candidates. Lincoln visited Lewistown and spoke there on August 17 that year, on his way to his first debate with Douglas in Ottawa. The Chicago Press and Tribune reported that Fulton County met Lincoln with cannon salutes, a cavalcade of one hundred horsemen, and the Canton Brass Band, concluding that altogether it was a magnificent and imposing affair.⁷ On behalf of the Republican Party, a George Phelps, Esq. welcomed Lincoln. Phelps, like Lincoln, was a lawyer. Phelps later quit his practice to join the war, serving as paymaster for the 103rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the unit in which William Standard served.⁸ Lincoln, in response to his warm reception, made a two-and-a-half hour speech. In it, he emphasized that restricting slavery was not an innovation of his generation, recalling that the U.S. Constitution had provided for the abolition of the African slave trade, and that that immortal emblem of Humanity—the Declaration of American Independence, had taught that the whole great family of man had unalienable rights.⁹ In 1894, the town of Lewistown re-erected two sandstone pillars from the Fulton County Courthouse, where Lincoln had made the speech, in the town’s cemetery, dubbing them the Lincoln pillars and placing them in front of a Civil War monument.¹⁰

While Lincoln’s antislavery speech may have resonated with a majority of his Lewistown audience, and his contemplation of black civil rights may even have intrigued a few, the Standards’ wartime correspondence suggests that a sizable minority in the community may have scorned the Springfield attorney’s antislavery sentiments. Lincoln, like the Standards, had not been born wealthy, but by the late 1850s, he was a well-to-do lawyer and known throughout Illinois. He did not support national abolition at the time because it would have been unconstitutional as well as politically suicidal, but he was a moderate opponent of slavery. He had announced his opposition to its westward extension in 1854, in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.¹¹ Moreover, his background as a Whig, his legal work for railroad companies, and, perhaps, earlier travel outside Illinois as a flatboat operator had convinced him of the potential for America’s powerful economic unification—if, eventually, slavery could be ended.

Illinoisans were divided over Lincoln and his liberal platform. The Springfield lawyer was more cosmopolitan and perhaps less typical an Illinoisan than farmers and Southern immigrants like the Standards, and probably from their first encounter with him in 1858, during his race for the U.S. Senate, they saw him as representing trouble: a powerful, ambitious politician who inexplicably condemned the country’s hierarchical race relations and was committed to changing them. As Southern migrants to the Midwest, the Standards subscribed to Stephen Douglas’s assertion of unequivocal white dominance, a policy only slightly less rigid than the views of white Southerners.¹² During the Civil War, William probably cursed George Phelps not only for being his undependable paymaster but also for his devotion to Lincoln, the Republican commander-in-chief.¹³

Clearly, the Standards’ opposition to antislavery politics stemmed more from racial animosity and social alienation than from economic vulnerability. As Illinois farmers, they were hardly threatened by black free labor, and they had an egalitarian status if not outlook, reflective of economic development in the North in the first part of the nineteenth century. In 1860, some 2,700 farms were operating in Fulton County. Of these, only 7 consisted of more than 500 acres, while two-thirds were yeoman farms consisting of between 20 and 100 acres. Indeed, the county’s average farm size of 123 acres was smaller than the state average of 158 acres.¹⁴ The Standards owned farm land, which Jane leased out to tenants during the war, as well as a house in Lewistown, where she rented rooms to boarders. They also co-owned part of a town business lot. Late in the war, Jane wrote to William that she wished to purchase a glass kitchen cupboard, a marker of middle-class standing.¹⁵ In many ways, ironically, the Standards’ circumstances fulfilled the Lincolnian ideal of self-reliant prosperity.

Yet during the war, Jane frequently expressed resentment of more affluent families in the community and sharply condemned Republicans who failed to volunteer for military service or who paid substitutes to serve for them when drafted. She seems to have assumed that all Republicans were wealthy, although she lived cheek by jowl with many of them. Jane’s letters provide a window into midwestern political culture and conflicts during the Civil War, far removed from the voting booth and halls of political power. For his part, William viewed all Republicans as hypocrites, from Lincoln in the White House to Republicans in Fulton County and within his unit, the 103rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Memoirs by fellow veterans of that unit who were little more than half William’s age at the time of enlistment record a perspective very different from his: Republican in outlook and more approving of the war.¹⁶ William’s blistering letter, published during the war in the Fulton County Ledger, criticizes Republicans and African Americans and illustrates not only his versatility as a letter writer but also how antiwar Union soldiers maintained contact with and helped construct sympathetic communities on the home front.

Actually, William displayed his interest in letter writing in far different circumstances, well before he became a soldier. In a charming note to Jane written in 1844, he professed that letter correspondence is something that I do not so readily comply with, yet boldly declared that if she would accept his growing affection for her I shall forever be happy. If not I shall forever be miserable.… [L]et me [k]no[w] your feelings.¹⁷ We cannot know exactly if or how Jane responded to William’s first love letter, as the existing letter collection resumes only after William’s military enlistment in 1862. William’s obituary, however, shows that on January 3, 1846, he was certified to teach orthography, reading, English penmanship, arithmetic, English grammar, modern geography, and the history of the United States, and that he taught school in Fulton County at least through 1849. A student of his that year later remembered him as peculiar, in that he showed no favors among the children, and would lay the gad on a girl as zealously as upon a boy, if she was just pining for a licking.¹⁸ William’s capacity for both romance and discipline would be on full display in his Civil War letters. He expressed his love for Jane by his determination to write as often as possible, whatever the conditions; at one point he revealed he was writing with a turkey quill. Considering all the letters the Standards exchanged during William’s term of military service—from August 9, 1862, to June 21, 1865—Jane sent William a letter about every two weeks, while William sent Jane and the children one letter a week.¹⁹ Remarkably, William wrote his family fifty-six letters in 1864, amid the combat of William Sherman’s campaign in Georgia. The Standards’ discussion of dates on which they mailed and received letters suggests the Civil War postal service’s efficiency. For example, on August 26, 1864, William wrote to Jane using space at the bottom of a letter that she had posted to him nine days earlier, indicating he had received her letter that morning.

Sometime in the spring of 1846, after William became a certified teacher, he and Jane were married.²⁰ They would have six children, including four before the Civil War, although their daughter Harriet died in 1861 at the age of six. The Standards wrote about this tragedy on occasion, although William, as a soldier on the march, had more to distract him from grieving. Surely the recent loss of a young daughter made Jane’s emotional, if not financial, burden all the heavier once she was doubly alone.

So why did William, an educated man of forty years, husband and father of three, living on the margins of the United States and jealous of his independence, enlist as first sergeant in Company A of the 103rd? His enlistment, on August 9, 1862, probably was motivated less by patriotism than in response to pressure to act like other men around him and to avoid dishonor. In 1861, Fulton and its sister counties joined the rest of Illinois in easily raising 50,000 troops in response to Lincoln’s call for recruits to suppress the Confederacy, but that enthusiasm proved fleeting. The 103rd was formed in response to the Battles of Fort Donelson and Shiloh, Tennessee, both dearly won Union victories fought in April 1862, and to the Seven Days’ Battles in Virginia in June, when the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee defeated Union forces under Commander George McClellan. The Seven Days’ Battles inflicted 16,000 casualties on the Union army, the same number as Donelson and Shiloh together, while the Tennessee conflicts left nearly 6,500 Illinois soldiers killed, wounded, or missing.²¹ These conflicts stunned the country, dashing hopes that the war would be short and limited in effect. President Lincoln asked state governors for 300,000 three-year volunteers, assigning each state a portion according to its population. Illinois was required to furnish an additional 52,000 men by August 18, 1862, after which date men would be drafted to achieve the quota.²²

Illinois ultimately would supply 259,092 men for the Union war effort, but Illinoisans like William joined reluctantly. His possible motivations to serve, therefore, show the complexity and challenge of the task of mobilizing a diverse, skeptical society like the antebellum North for sustained offensive warfare. The success of such mobilization depended on push as much as pull factors, to borrow a metaphor from historians’ studies of immigration. For a man to undertake military service only as a result of being drafted was considered a shameful act, almost as dishonorable as running from battle. No such stigma, however, accompanied volunteering.²³ As borne out in the Standards’ comments on the misconduct of other soldiers in William’s unit and how their community was likely to react to such embarrassing behavior, dishonor was a particularly hard character flaw to cure in a small town like Lewistown, even though extensive opposition to the war existed in the community.²⁴

Thus William’s initial motivation to serve in 1862, and his reasons for remaining in the military during the war, probably had little to do with convictions about patriotism or preserving the Union; his story complicates scholarly narratives seeking to explain why other Illinois soldiers joined up and continued to serve.²⁵ His reasons had even less to do with opposition to slavery. While he occasionally mentions fighting against the rebels in his letters, he never expresses a sense that he is fighting for anything, other than the chance to return to his family. He was, however, sensitive to his reputation in the community. Thus this edited collection tells a story more aligned with Bell Irvin Wiley’s argument asserting Union soldiers’ practical and local motives for going to war (even though Wiley focused mainly on soldiers in the Eastern theater) than with more recent interpretations stressing soldiers’ national ideals by such scholars as James McPherson and Chandra Manning.²⁶

A second, more personal motivation of William for joining up may have been his financial or legal difficulties, notwithstanding his solid career background. After starting his career in teaching, he was elected sheriff of Fulton County as a Democrat in 1856 and moved from the family farm into Lewistown. He served as county sheriff for two years, but between 1858, when his term ended, and 1862, when he enlisted in the 103rd, county court records show William as a defendant or codefendant in eight lawsuits heard by the local circuit court. At least four of these cases arose over his failure to follow court orders to collect debts and turn them over to creditors, and two of the cases indicate that Standard was sued as a private citizen for defaulting on personal debts.²⁷ This evidence suggests that William had fallen into debt before the war, and his wartime correspondence hints that he did not reveal the severity of the situation to Jane before enlisting. William also referred to owing money to Jane’s father from a loan to buy land. These personal circumstances were exacerbated by an economic depression that hit the region at the war’s outset. Of 112 Illinois banks solvent at the beginning of the war, only 17 remained so in 1862.²⁸ Given these problems, William probably saw military service as a calculated respite from creditors, whose actions, had he remained a civilian, might have ruined him and his family. Joining the military provided him relief, as Illinois was one of twenty-three states that authorized postponements of legal proceedings against persons engaged in military service.²⁹

Yet if William stayed out of the reach of creditors at home by joining the ranks, he suffered vicariously, as many soldiers with families did, from the stories of scarcity and loneliness expressed by Jane and, on occasion, their three children, George, Perry, and Almira. In 1862, all three were approaching adolescence, with George at thirteen, Perry, eleven, and Almira, nine. In one letter, Almira related a harrowing account of the illnesses from infectious disease of several children in town, news that William probably could have done without. Another time, William learned that George had expressed interest in joining the Union Army; William twice wrote to George to squash any such idea. For the Standards, patriotism meant opposing the war; their attitude was far from the noble endurance encouraged by wartime Union propaganda.³⁰

Interestingly, however, none of the children asked William for counsel in their letters, perhaps refraining under orders from Jane to spare him further anxiety. Otherwise, the letters of William and his children were generally typical of Civil War literature. The children wrote him about their progress in penmanship, and the boys described their raising of livestock and their part-time work in local businesses and for Jane’s father, Isaac Ellis. William, in turn, encouraged them to work hard, to obey Jane, and to go to school. He promised to bring his sons a gun from the war, though, he cautioned, not to shoot boys or men either. His resentment of military and national authority did not bleed into apathy about how his children should behave. His moral instruction revealed his faith that the local community, where his loyalty lay, would remain intact despite the war and his absence, and, notwithstanding a brief, far-fetched plan in the winter of 1863 to emigrate to California, his determination that they should learn how to live productive lives there.

Jane’s writing, however, was less typical and more idiosyncratic than many letters of the period. While the content of some of her letters resembled those of the children in its bucolic narrative of her housekeeping and her monitering of their schoolwork, play, and farm chores, her nearly unbearable longing for William gives her letters a sharp edge; especially in the war’s first years she seems often on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Thrust into managing their farm and other property and raising their children alone, Jane became even more antiwar than William, if only because the war took him from her. William’s concern for his reputation apparently mattered little to her, while national issues of states’ rights and abolition were of even less concern. Scholarship has traditionally explained women’s dissent as a phenomenon of the Confederacy, but Jane’s perspective reminds us of the hardships the war imposed in the often forgotten rural Northern border areas. Her loyalty throughout the war was to hearth, not country.³¹

In spite of Jane’s loneliness, she rarely described friendships or interest in women’s wartime associations. Probably already a loner before the war, during it she sometimes seemed already a melancholy widow. Like William, she comes across as skeptical of organized religion. Both of them mention attending church services, Methodist or Presbyterian, but only a few times during the war, and neither seemed inspired or consoled by the experience. Thus, letter writing provided companionship and meditative as well as conversational space. For Jane, writing to William transported her to a different reality: she occasionally related daydreams, including one of finding another man as her lover in William’s absence. In scheming for how to recapture her husband’s companionship, so that she could return to the role of domestic wife and mother, she thus imagined an alternative role, as an adulterer. The fact that she told William of this desire suggests she did not really mean to act on it, but wanted somehow to impress on him her fragile state and need for his quick return home. Like William, she voiced personal concerns in her letters, complaining, for example, that her hair and teeth were falling out and that her bosom was ravaged by fleas. But she could also be coquettish. The sexual suggestiveness of her Valentine’s Day letter of February 12, 1863, shows her capacity for subtlety, along with her typical impatience toward the Union, the war’s objectives, and, at times, her neighbors.

Jane Standard’s application to receive William’s military pension, 1883. William M. Standard Papers, Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Ga.

Jane’s letters also reveal another side to her war experience, however. Faced with the need to cope alone during the war, she unmistakably became fierce, resolute, adaptable, and self-sufficient, creating a home with her children to make life bearable without a husband and father. Perhaps this was another reason that the children did not seek William’s counsel in their letters to him: she was their authority. Paradoxically, Jane’s lack of social or civic connections before the Civil War prepared her for the solitude it imposed and provided a kind of intellectual latitude for expressing unpatriotic sentiments that other Northern women may have hesitated to think, much less write down. Jane was not an easy read.

The most dangerous appeal that Jane made to William—if he had taken her seriously—was her request that he allow himself to be captured by guerrillas. She anticipated that capture would lead to his parole, although by 1862 Southern guerrillas were sending captured Union soldiers to prisoner-of-war camps or executing them. In thus scheming for his return, she revealed a naïveté.

On occasion, William was as naïve as Jane. In October 1862, two months after he answered President Lincoln’s call to the Northern states for three-year enlistments, he apprised her of the hopeful rumor that his unit actually would not leave the state of Illinois. His comment, terribly mistaken, suggested how little he or any Union volunteer knew of what was impending. A week after this letter, he was on a train to Cairo; two weeks later, he was in the strange environs of Camp Bolivar, in Jackson, Tennessee. Shortly before the war ended two and a half years later, Jane recalled William’s very first love letter: Will don’t you recollect what you told me in a letter you wrote to me before we was married? You said you did not believe in letter correspondence.³² The war forced William to put his orthographical skills to use, not to teach rhetoric, which was perhaps his hobby, but to write love letters to his devoted wife, which became as much a duty as his service to the Union.

After enduring what William often described as the tedious assignment of protecting Union supply lines in northern Mississippi to support the Siege of Vicksburg, the 103rd Illinois left Mississippi in September 1863 to relieve Union forces trapped at Chattanooga, Tennessee. There the regiment saw its first real combat, at Missionary Ridge in November. The following spring, William took part in the invasion of Georgia, participating in the key battles of Sherman’s five-month campaign for Atlanta, including the disastrous Union assault on Kennesaw Mountain. In November 1864, the march toward Savannah began, with the city falling on December 21. From Savannah, the 103rd moved north as part of Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign, which produced the largest surrender of Confederate soldiers in the war, at Durham, North Carolina, on April 26, 1865. William then marched to Washington, D.C., to join the Grand Review of the Armies on May 24. Throughout these movements, especially from the start of the Chattanooga Campaign, William gradually and grudgingly transformed from a reluctant recruit considering desertion into a responsible and competent, if not devoted, soldier. Promoted to first lieutenant on February 23, 1865, he was honorably discharged from the Union Army on June 21, in Louisville, Kentucky.³³ As Jane waited impatiently, he headed home.

CHAPTER ONE

"Nobody knows anything about it

but them that has the trial"

SEPTEMBER 14–NOVEMBER 14, 1862

Following William’s enlistment on August 9, 1862, he remained in Illinois, first in Peoria and then Cairo, for nearly three months before deploying to Bolivar, Tennessee, on November 2. Meanwhile, the Battle of Antietam, Maryland, was fought on September 17 of that year. While hardly a decisive victory, it was the most costly single-day battle in American history and ended the first invasion of the North attempted by the Army of Northern Virginia. Capitalizing on the good news, President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, portending a change in the direction of the war and confounding the Standards’ expectations.

At that time, however, the atmosphere in western and central Illinois remained fairly buoyant; people like Jane Standard probably expected the conflict to be a temporary inconvenience and had little knowledge of the wider issues and strategies involved; no information survives to tell us whether she and William discussed, much less debated, his decision to join the military. Although Jane did describe (in a letter dated September 19) an irate neighbor taking a toy drum away from George and Perry, Julia Dent Grant, wife of General Ulysses S. Grant, wrote that in the town of Galena, 180 miles north of Lewistown, while the men were holding meetings and calling for volunteers, the boys were playing at war, wearing military caps, beating small drums, guarding the crossings, and demanding countersigns.¹ The 103rd’s proximity to home and the certainty of parcel delivery allowed William and other soldiers to enjoy gifts from family and friends. On September 7, a soldier in Company F asked friends to send some butter when you have the opportunity,² while on September 26, Jane entertained thoughts of visiting William, but did not do so. She probably soon regretted that decision, given the concern she was expressing as early as late autumn 1862 over the toll his absence was taking on her condition. On October 2, she sniffed, This is my birthday.

Yet by late autumn, all the Illinois regiments were experiencing the impact of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and other extraordinary war measures taken by the Lincoln administration. On September 18, Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, ordered fugitive contraband slaves shipped northward to Illinois to help with the autumn harvest, provoking charges by Democrats that the administration wished to Africanize the state in violation of its black codes. On September 24, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus for individuals giving comfort to the Confederates. That this action and others by the Union command caused disaffection in the Illinois ranks is confirmed by several comments in William’s letters during this period, relating instances of soldiers in the Peoria camp maiming themselves to avoid deployment, of officers resigning, and of soldiers deserting. More Illinois soldiers left the military in October 1862 than in any other month of the entire war. Illinois’s partisan division between Democrats and Republicans carried into the ranks.³

William deployed to Camp Bolivar, in Jackson, Tennessee, on November 1, and, despite his Southern roots, he probably experienced culture shock on arriving in this slave state. Camp Bolivar was designated as a camp for contraband slaves, and William’s arrival there may well have been his first-ever encounter with people of color. In early November, the Army of the Tennessee launched an initial campaign, marching for Vicksburg through the heart of Mississippi. The invasion was unsuccessful, but it did capture many Confederate soldiers. William expressed sympathy with the prisoners’ antagonism toward New England Yankees, and elsewhere remarked on signs of Southern refinement; he hardly held Southerners responsible for the war’s eruption. He displays a similar ambivalence regarding the political conflicts within the Union’s forces in the western theater, and, to an extent, regarding the risks to the Union cause that certain of their soldiers posed.

Jane to William

Lewistown, Illinois

September 14th, 1862

Dear Husband

I sit down this evening to write you a few lines to let you know how we are getting along. We are all well and have been since you left home. I received your letter of the 13[th] [?] this morning Sunday while I was at the breakfast table.… ⁴ I was glad to get it but would been much gladder to seen you. This has been a long week and a long Sunday. You said you had not got any word from me. I wrote to you last Thursday night. I thought you would get it a Saturday evening.

Milt [?] come up as I told you before on Monday and left on Wednesday; back on Saturday for dinner. [He] stayed until after 3 o’clock this evening and went to Hasson’s to board.⁵ They are poor trash. I was mad all the time[—]so much hard work to do and them to wait on for nothing. I am glad they are gone.

Well Will, I can hardly write. I am so tired and fee[l] so bad that tears do fall and blind me. Will, I’ll tell how I felt last Monday night. I thought I would like to have time enough to write a littl[e] every night of what had pas[sed] through the day but I have so much to think of it is impossible. I do not know that it would be interesting to you or not. I thought it might be. I have got three letters from you. I am sorry you did not get mine before this. That little book I gave it to Almira, she was glad to get it. The children all think you have been gone long enough to come home and stay. I hope you will come soon.…

Our peaches are turning a little. Mr. Freeman went off and got a bushel or two of nice ones to put up for winter uce [use]. He gave a dollar a bushel.⁶

I must quit and get supper. It is hard to [work?] all week and Sunday to[o]. The bell is ringing now. I wish you was here to eat supper with us. I am in the parl[o]r a-writing on the big table. Almira is over to Worley’s.⁷ George and Perry is off a-playing somewhere, I do not know where. Freeman [is] upstairs as usual a-squealing and thumping around, so no more.

Good by

Jane Stand[ard]

George            Perry                 Almira

My writing looks bad by the side of yourn, but so it is.…

Jane to William

Lewistown Illinois

September 17th 1862

Dear Will,

I seat myself down to write you a few lines to let you know how we are getting along. We are all well and hope these may find you the same. It rains and has been raining all night and morning. Everything is wet. I am almost out of heart. Everything goes wrong. I want you to come home and see what we had best do about everything. I sent George up to O[’D]onal the next day after I got your kind letter.⁸ He gave the letter to old [D]onal. He said he would not go unless compelled by law. He has got that 15 acres plowed almost. He swore a little and said we must prove there was but 25 bushels of oats and that can easy be done. I got Freeman to go and look at them after we had empt[i]ed them. He said [he] would not like to take them for 25 bushel without measuring them. Enough about that.

The boys gets discourage[d] and out of humor. They got up two little gags [?] of wood very well. They went after another the other day and got nothing but pis[s] elm green. Come home mad. Great wood to cook with, you know, and so it goes. The little colt is doing fine.…

William and Jane Standard, undated. Courtesy of Ron Currens.

[Isaiah] Worley stopped at the gate a minute as he went by from the cars.⁹ That was Monday about 1 o’clock. He says he is going back on Saturday.

Now if you want anything sent up, write and let me know and it shall be done. We look for yoo home on Monday. Do you intend to come at all? I must quit. It is past 11 o’clock and still it rains. Write as often as you can. I know it is no trouble for you to write. My hand does ache.

Good by Pap

Jane Standar[d]

I hope to see yo[u] soon.

Jane to William

Lewistown Illinois

September 19th 1862

Dear Will

I thought that I would drop you a few lines to let you know that we are all well. We are all [looking] for you home tomorrow [ni]ght.

You said you wanted some butter. I don’t think it worthwhile to send any this time for you must come home Saturday or Monday without fail.

Tell Scott that his wife come over and took the drum from the boys tonight, mad as she could be.… ¹⁰

This is Friday night 9 o’clock. I have not time to write any