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.In the worst scenario, they might have to shoottheir brother in the heat of combat or, in the words of Unionist Charles HenryLee, whose first cousin was Robert E.Lee,  engage in fratricidal strife. 24Fratricide was a powerful image looming over border-state families.Letterswritten early in the war are full of references to  fratricidal animosity and the fratricidal war. 25 For some Americans, the specter of brother killing brotherwas an apt metaphor for the nation turning on itself.26 But to border-state fami-lies whose brothers were divided in the war, fratricide was dangerously closeto becoming a reality.Fratricide was not common in midcentury America, butit was widely written about and discussed.Occasionally, newspapers wouldreport the shocking death of one brother at the hands of another.27 Fictionalaccounts of fratricide could be found in the works of James Fenimore Cooperand William Shakespeare, who depicted the murder of brothers in Hamlet.Inthe Bible, stories about brothers such as Cain and Abel were often moral talesthat pitted a good brother against a bad brother and ended in an ignomini-ous death.This was death filled with rage, hate, guilt and jealousy; it was thedeadly culmination of a brotherly rivalry gone bad.28 To invoke the image offratricide in the context of two brothers on opposing sides of the Civil War,then, was to see the worst possible outcome of their division.This possibilitypreoccupied border-state families.Brothers paid close attention to one another s military decisions at the startof the war and tried to influence their male kin not to enlist against them. He must not take sides against me, a Confederate wrote to his sister abouttheir Union brother. I am the oldest and have a right to the first choice.(No brothers in this study appear to have honored birth order seniority inthe decision to fight, however.)29 The specter of fighting one another on thebattlefield drove others to plead with their brothers not to serve in the military. The fact that we may meet you in an opposing regiment is not a very pleasantone, Samuel Halsey wrote his brother Joseph with understated concern. Ihope and fervently trust you will keep clear of military honors & positionsof all kinds. Brothers like these tried to talk their kin out of fighting ratherthan avoiding service themselves.Confederate soldier Henry Stone, whose 72 brothers and sistersbrother Valentine Stone served in the Union army, told his Unionist fatherin 1862 that  I wish to God he would resign. In the next sentence Henrydeclared his own intention to remain in the Confederate army until the endof the war.30The prospect of resigning and sitting out the war posed a tough alternativefor these men.Union and Confederate conscription laws beginning in thesecond year of the conflict made refusal to serve illegal unless the individualhad a proper exemption, and rarely were family relationships considered anacceptable reason to grant such a privilege.Officers did have some leeway toresign their commissions, as did men over forty-five, but even they found itdifficult to break away from military duty.31 For men at midcentury, militaryservice was very meaningful.To serve in the army or the navy was an exer-cise of bravery, honor, and duty  all the markers of masculine authority.Toavoid service was to undermine one s claim to manhood and, in wartime,to shirk one s manly duty or, as some contemporaries put it, to be guilty of skulking. 32Men who had served in the military for a considerable time previouslywere torn by an additional sense of obligation to their comrades.Such wasthe case of West Point graduate Alfred Mordecai, a fifty-seven-year-old majorin the U.S.Army and an ordinance chief serving in Watervliet, New York,in 1861.A native Southerner, Mordecai had brothers and sisters living inVirginia with whom he corresponded during the secession crisis.Moreover,as a prominent military officer, his skill was well known to the leaders of thenew Confederacy [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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