The Destructive Nature of War
In the year following the end of the Civil War, King’s new lease on life had begun in New York City, and in a journal entry from December 26, 1865, he stated:
“A year ago I was stationed near Winchester on the Front Royal pike as Chief Quartermaster for Genl Merritt, Commanding the 1st Cavalry Division. The hardships from that time and the dangers encountered until my final resignation and retirement in June of this year are partly recorded in a previous Journal. They are too numerous to be written out entirely.”[1]
The journal King was referring to was his Civil War journal, and the words within its pages act as a tool to contextualize King’s transformation. For example, in a journal entry from November 2, 1864, King stated, “Desolation marks everything. I begin to realize for the first time the fearful horrors of war.”[2] This entry was but the first of his awareness of the atrocities that were taking place around him. In another journal entry just 26 days later, on November 28, 1864, King expressed his uneasiness of the “villages & towns [that he] passed through [that] presented the same ruined & desolate appearance” before stating, “war has operated fearfully agst [against] the people of this section particularly.”[3] These two entries show the destructive nature of the Civil War through the eyes of King, though no entry was more telling of this than in his recollection of the aftermath of the Battle of five forks in which he stated, “took a portion of my train to the field for [the] wounded. The sight was terrible. Beyond description. I never saw dead men so thick before.”[4] Later in the entry, King describes the sight of a dead Confederate soldier, describing the disturbing scene as such; “his face was raised toward heaven… with the hands uplifted as in prayer gave me the impression that he still lived.- A nearer approach assured me that he had gone to his maker there to settle for his deeds & misdeeds.”[5] This pivotal moment during King’s service was perhaps one of the experiences that altered his life course towards religion and his friendship with Beecher, a combination of variables that contributed to other significant changes in his character.
A Transformation of Attitudes
Racial Equality |
Political Ideologies |
As King was no longer a part of the southern-leaning environment of Dickinson College, he was forced to formulate his own opinions of this human rights issue, dissimilar to those he held previously. This is seen in an article written by King in 1875 titled “Slave Songs.” In the article, he states, “the greater part of my life was spent in the South, and among the slaves, and in all my experience I cannot recall a single-colored man or woman who could not sing.”[6] This clearly indicates that King's mind had shifted, but the attitudes of other Union officers at this time gives more contextualization to this claim. In the book Union War, Garry W. Gallagher quoted Ross D. Reid, who wrote of the Union army’s exposure to slavery in the south. He described how the time spent on Confederate grounds revealed to Union officers the “arrogance and cruelty of slaveholders.” Reid later added that this exposure caused a “transformation [that] extended to a stunning reversal of long-standing racial attitudes,” and that the greater part of General William T. Sherman’s troops who had been stationed in the south “believed in social and political equality for blacks.”[7] No quote demonstrates this shift better than an article King wrote later in his life titled, “Recollections of College Life.” Within this article, he declared that “time and circumstances make important mental changes” before adding, “the three years which I devoted to the great war [the Civil War] reversed my attitude towards the slavery question, and no one was happier than myself when the escutcheon of slavery was wiped off our national emblem.”[8] In the first version of King’s article he chose to use the word “changed,” but crossed it out and substituted it for the word “reversed.” The certainty of King in understanding the reversal of his attitude towards slavery is strong evidence of the transformation he underwent during the Civil War.
|
While the words of Reid aid in comprehending the changes that occurred inside the minds of Union officers, King's change in political views works to further contextualize his own transformation during the Civil War. As stated in the Union War, Northern Democrats, such as the younger King, often expressed their anger towards emancipation. This was accomplished in many ways but also through the use of cartoon caricatures on envelopes which would circulate throughout the Union. One of which unflatteringly depicted a Black man "with large red lips and the caption, 'the cause of all of our troubles.'"[9] Additionally, Gallagher stated that a large portion of the Democratic party "stridently opposed emancipation." As earlier indicated, King was the son of a Northern Democratic family with connections to high-status political figures. In his 1915 literary production of the “Recollections of Henry Ward Beecher,” King conveyed that he was “a most enthusiastic young Democrat.”[10] This was true, though King’s Civil War journal shows a different perspective, and on November 8, 1864, he wrote, “Election day. The Soldiers vote 10 to 1 for Lincoln. This is as it should be.”[11] Although diminutive, this quote reveals the development of King’s political opinions. The grounds to establish this claim lay in King’s later denouncement of his Democratic ideologies in his book "Turning on the Light: A Dispassionate Survey of President Buchanan's Administration, from 1860 to Its Close." On the topic of emancipation, King expressed that as a younger man he did not believe in the course of action that Abolitionists had chosen to take, before stating;
"Hence I need not say that I am now ready to admit that the great mass of people--the two great political parties of this country, with whom I was in accord on this subject--were all sinners, and only the Abolitionists saints."[12] |
King's acknowledgment of the moral faults within the Democratic party correlate to his sustained support of the "Great Emancipator," President Lincoln. In a speech from February 8, 1903, King uttered the phrase: “if it is true that circumstances make men, so it is equally true that God raises up men to meet special and great emergencies.”[13] While this quote was about Lincoln’s actions at the outbreak of the Civil War, it says more about the man King became. From the time he was born, King was a man whose circumstances made up his character, though his “special and great emergency” was his accomplishment of overcoming his struggle with creating his own perspectives as these circumstances changed.
|