Introduction
The Epistolary Bridge
The Trans-Appalachian West
August 1862 to July 1865
The U.S. armed forces have depended on many materials to wage war. From bronze and iron to polymers and titanium, the vital stuff of battle has changed across centuries, but one unassuming item—paper—has remained ever indispensable. Never was this more true than during the Civil War. The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies testify to the ways that this bloodiest conflict in American history, a very real struggle of flesh and fire, played out across millions of written pages. That immense collection, spread across four series and seventy volumes, represents only a fraction of the paperwork that documented and animated the contest. Muster rolls organized men into companies and regiments; requisitions brought forth the staggering piles of food and materiel needed to sustain them; and casualty reports totaled the unprecedented number of dead and broken bodies. Legal tender buttressed governments sagging beneath the costs of war; newspapers yielded timely information and bursts of partisan ardor; and the tracts, novels, and printed matter that coursed through army encampments offered comforts sacred and profane.
On a most personal level, paper was the medium through which individuals tried to make sense of themselves and the troubled world they now inhabited. For the generation of people who poured themselves into letters, diaries, songs, and poems, the Civil War demonstrated that they were not only soldiers and civilians, husbands and wives, Unionists and Confederates, but also writers. Paper proved instrumental to the preservation of the republic and its families alike. Whether delivered by post or the kindness of a traveling friend, never before had so many private messages passed between the hands of Americans in such a compressed period of time.1 Henry and Cimbaline Fike exemplified this truth, writing their way through a war that tested their nation and marriage.
Cimbaline Fike was an Illinois homemaker, wife, and mother whose Civil War letters captured her ardent unionism and struggles with chronic illness. Johnson County (Missouri) Historical Society
Henry Fike was a former schoolteacher and principal who served as lieutenant colonel and quartermaster in the 117th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library
The wartime exchanges between soldiers and their families have long been a key resource for understanding the people who endured the Civil War. Illuminating the social, cultural, and political cords that bound households to faraway forts and battlefields, the envelopes that traveled from every corner of the United States held more than the clippings and mementoes tucked within their trifold pages.2 These parcels were an epistolary bridge that anchored civilians and soldiers across prolonged separations and the turbulent changes that suffused the distances between them. Letters became the arena in which the Fikes, like many Americans, attempted to maintain a flesh-and-blood relationship within the handwritten lines they delivered across time and space. Early missives bore the awkwardness of a new courtship, but their stilted formality, marked by Cimbaline’s careful introductions (“It is with pleasure that I take my pen in hand”) and signatures that dutifully noted Henry’s rank and regiment, yielded to a familiarity that ranged from a gentle warmth to plainspoken bluntness. Messages of varying length and sophistication detailed the reconfigured contours of family and work, yet they frequently revealed much more than the familiar marrow of everyday life. Writing to one another prompted a remarkable degree of self-reflection and provided for each person the opportunity to learn anew about their partners, their communities, and themselves.
The Fikes’ affectionate banter affirms what scholars have shown in tracing the rise of companionate marriages; Henry and Cimbaline, it quickly becomes clear, genuinely loved one another.3 Yet marriage remained, in historian Nancy Cott’s apt comparison, like a sphinx, both publicly conspicuous but full of private secrets.4 The deeply personal exchanges kindled in wartime illuminate the intimate dimensions of ordinary Americans’ lives that have too often eluded scholars. A combination of factors has deepened the shadows that obscured the private worlds of working people. Limited access to formal education denied many women and men the tools to document their thoughts and feelings, and many others, although literate, rarely found or made the time to write amid long days of wearying labor.
The Civil War, however, forced on people a protracted isolation from their loved ones and convinced untold numbers to take up their pens, some for the first time in their lives. Letters helped to lessen, though never collapse, the geographic distance. In an age of instant communication, the arrival of a note penned a week earlier might seem a poor substitute for the comforts of immediate connection and physical companionship, but in Civil War America such missives were a treasured life-line, the vital (and sometimes only) means of spanning the chasms of loneliness and uncertainty that separated households and army encampments. A distant correspondence could not reconstitute a marriage in all its fullness, but the comforts provided by its messages suggested that a relationship strained and nearly sundered by war might yet be sustained by words that fastened partners across many miles.
Readers can see in the Fikes’ letters the many ways that the Civil War tested marriages and gender roles in the United States. As many historians have shown, much of antebellum society had clung to the notion that a woman’s place was in the home, while men ventured into the rough-and-tumble public worlds of business and politics.5 In farming communities, the boundaries between the home and the workplace had always blurred and overlapped, and with the coming of war, rural women now had to keep up with both their domestic responsibilities and the chores once handled by their male kinfolk. Women’s responses to these challenges defied simple characterization.6 Cimbaline Fike embraced such newfound independence and the chance to serve her family, community, and nation, yet she came to resent those who failed to appreciate her sacrifices both within and beyond her household.7 The war likewise forced men to reckon with their altered standing as distant husbands and fathers. For Henry, soldiering challenged his manhood not only by testing his courage and prowess but also by exposing his limitations as a provider, far from home and sometimes unable to offer the stable income and emotional support that his family needed. Letters provided the medium through which Cimbaline and Henry confronted their struggles, distant but intertwined, and nurtured their hope for better days.8
Sitting near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers, the western Illinois country where the Fikes lived was a world in motion, but the Civil War marked the first time that they, like many other Americans, ventured far beyond the communities where they grew up. The youngest of eleven children, Henry was born in 1832 at the homestead that his parents had settled on Looking Glass Prairie. Within a few years, other westering migrants established the nearby village of Mascoutah. Hemmed between Silver Creek and the rich, table-flat farmland that stretched to the nearby Kaskaskia River, the town grew quickly, fueled in part by the explosive development of St. Louis, Missouri, some thirty miles to the west. To the east of Mascoutah sat Clinton County, where Lucy Cimbaline Power, born in 1833, lived for her first two decades.
Cimbaline and Henry met at a religious camp meeting in the summer of 1853, but their courtship did not begin in earnest for another year. After marrying on Christmas Day in 1855, the Fikes purchased a home in Mascoutah, where Henry found work as a schoolteacher. The family’s purchase of a farm just outside of town, which they leased for additional income, seemed further proof that they had attained financial security, becoming comfortable by outward appearances although certainly not wealthy. Their first child, a daughter named May, died in infancy. They rejoiced when a second child, Ellie, was born on January 16, 1861. Nineteen months later—more than a year after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter marked the start of the Civil War—Henry mustered into the newly formed 117th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.9
Although born to the same region, the Fikes approached their wartime correspondence from strikingly different directions. By the time Henry enlisted in the Union army, he had spent much of his adult life within the written page, either studying or teaching others in rural schools and churches. A graduate of McKendree College, he frequently wrote for local newspapers and kept a diary that he would faithfully maintain for most of the next half-century. During the war Henry penned 314 letters to his wife, writing with the self-regard of an educated and, now, worldly man. Cimbaline, meanwhile, responded with 126 letters, most of them written from the family’s home. The halting cadence, eccentric spelling, and haphazard punctuation of her early replies suggests that she, like most young women of her day, had fewer educational opportunities than her husband. Yet, in following Cimbaline across the full breadth of their exchanges, one sees how the war served as a most effective classroom, turning a once-reluctant correspondent into a confident, even forceful writer.10
Cimbaline’s literary evolution captures the strength needed to withstand the manifold crises that shook households in wartime. In particular, her letters remind readers that chronic pain and illness were not problems that only swept through battlefields and encampments. To be sure, the infectious diseases that plagued Union and Confederate soldiers were fatal horrors that prompted profound changes in medical science and procedure. Less studied, however, are the maladies that continued to afflict those at home, along with the ways that civilians struggled to recover their health in the midst of war. Cimbaline’s letters detail a debilitating series of ailments: recurrent fevers and headaches, painful skin lesions, persistent melancholy, unspecified chronic illnesses that she described only as “my old diseases,” and such sharp dental pain that she ultimately had most of her teeth removed. Ellie, too, endured repeated bouts of sickness so grave that Henry feared she would die before he could return home. To the Fikes’ enormous relief, their daughter survived, but many other local parents mourned the losses of young children killed by smallpox, whooping cough, and outbreaks they felt helpless to stop. The treatments prescribed by physicians brought some relief, as did the comforts of prayer and family. Letters, too, offered to Cimbaline and other writers a kind of reflective solace, giving them the space in which to find meaning amid corporeal struggles they had to endure but perhaps would never win.
Henry was fortunate that serious illness did not incapacitate him until the final weeks of his enlistment. Until then, his correspondence detailed in remarkable breadth the world of a workaday Union regiment. Like most Civil War volunteers, he joined a company of men who lived only a short distance away. In addition to his neighbors from Mascoutah and St. Clair County, so many college classmates enlisted in the 117th Illinois that some came to describe the regiment as the “McKendree Boys.”11 These comrades elected Henry to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and his subsequent letters detailed with satisfaction how officers like himself enjoyed better lodging, richer fare, and other luxuries that enlisted men did not receive.12 Henry also won appointment as the regiment’s quartermaster, the staff officer who shouldered the responsibility of feeding, clothing, and equipping his fellow troops.
As much as any cog within the Union war apparatus, his position was awash in paper. Each month he funneled to the War Department in Washington a flow of recordkeeping that detailed the quantities of men, mules, and money that passed his watchful eye.13 In addition to documenting the on-the-ground workings of the Union’s logistics operation, or what Henry dubbed “the machine,” his private letters add color and texture to almost every phase of the regiment’s service: the enthusiasm of mustering in, the tedium and diversions of prolonged garrison duty, interminable weeks of marching, the thrills and disappointments of combat, and the weary relief when peace returned at last.14
Henry’s dispatches were also a vivid travelogue of the trans-Appalachian West, affording Cimbaline and readers today a stirring glimpse of the nation’s vast scale and diverse landforms. The men of the 117th Illinois spent almost a year in the occupied city of Memphis, a point from which they warily observed the downstream siege at Vicksburg. They later ventured through the bayous of Louisiana, rocky Ozark hills, the piney woods of the Deep South, and finally the sparkling beaches of the Gulf Coast. Along the way, Henry steamed up and down the major tributaries of the Mississippi valley, describing with great interest the country along the Cumberland, Tennessee, Red, and Missouri Rivers. Letters from the field also captured with unsparing detail the destruction that followed the Union army’s invasion of Confederate states. Henry alternated between expressions of compassion for the miseries of southern civilians and unrepentant anger at the treachery that justified such hardships. “I pity these people, for humanity’s sake alone,” he wrote to Cimbaline, before adding: “Most of them are rebels at heart, and deserve no mercy at our hands. What ought a rebel and traitor to expect from his country.”15
Together the Fikes personified the active nationalism that linked loyal civilians and soldiers across the North. United by their willingness to sacrifice for a cause larger than themselves, Cimbaline and Henry scorned women and men who failed to match such devotion. Letters frequently affirmed their congruent views of manhood and civic duty.16 A person who would not shoulder arms on behalf of his country, they maintained, was neither a true patriot nor a man worthy of respect. As draft calls in Illinois increased through the fall of 1864, many men sought to avoid conscription by finding substitutes to take their place. Henry mocked those who refused to accept “prizes drawn in Uncle Sam’s lottery.” Cimbaline, who established the town’s Union League, wrote that neighbors who hired substitutes “dont show much love for there country,” and added, “I wish they would not alow any one to pay monney to git out.”17 Even Ellie, their mischievous toddler, was proud to tell visitors that her father had gone off to fight the rebels. “Every good man goes,” she explained. “My pa is good.”18
While celebrating their mutual unionism, many of the Fikes’ letters lamented the widening schisms that fissured their community. On multiple occasions, Cimbaline derided the men who would not enlist and threatened violence against those whose dubious patriotism, she thought, verged on treason.19 “For my part I feel like puting on briches now, and fiting some of the copperheads in Mascoutah,” she wrote in the summer of 1863.20 Such exclamations were not merely rhetorical. As hundreds of volunteers left Mascoutah to serve in the Union army, anxieties grew about the shadowy figures who prowled the town’s streets at night.21 Cimbaline resolved to arm herself after learning of the break-ins and threats of sexual violence made against her neighbors. Weeks later, waking to the rustle of a potential burglar, she threw open a window and fired her pistol wildly into the night, scaring away the would-be intruder.22 The “war widows” who struggled with worry, privation, and illness could find vital support from nearby family and friends, but as the war dragged on, these webs of connection often frayed into what Cimbaline called “a big fuss” of ideological strife and personal acrimony.23 “The worst is the women fight,” she wrote. “I thought it was enought to have wore [war] aroung us, let a lone having it among us.”24
The Fike papers, in their frequent depictions of the social and political tensions that shook one rural Illinois community, join a deepening scholarship on the Border West that explores the complexity of a fractious middle ground where North bled into South. Much of this recent work shows how the sharply drawn lines of a political map that separated free and slave states belied the messy realities of places where households divided by loyalty and ideology remained tied by culture, kinship, and commerce.25 Several studies have considered how Abraham Lincoln’s turn toward emancipation alienated many white Unionists in the loyal states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois.26 The Fikes, however, evinced the determined resolve that kept many border households solidly behind the Union cause, along with the ways that the war kindled shifts in racial attitudes among white Unionists.27
The Fikes have largely gone unnoticed by historians, but one rare exception identifies Henry as an example of the pervasive anti-Black racism that prevailed among white Union soldiers, including those who came to accept emancipation as a key war objective.28 Although fair in its broad contours, such an assessment overlooks the fuller context of his evolving ideas on race and freedom. Unlike the white Union troops whose deployments brought their first exposure to African Americans, Henry had moved among people of color, both free and enslaved, in Mascoutah and nearby St. Louis.29 His travels into the South sparked a dawning empathy for African Americans and the injustices that enslavement had inflicted upon them. Like many of his peers and the Union army more generally, Lieutenant Colonel Fike depended on the labor of the formerly enslaved people who served his meals, cleaned his quarters, cared for his horse, and performed myriad tasks around Fort Pickering, but it was the men who volunteered to fight in the United States Colored Troops that garnered, in his estimation, something closer to genuine respect.30 There were clear limits to such changes, however. By war’s end, Henry could marvel at emancipation’s revolutionary implications for southern society, but he remained just as comfortable using racist language to describe the Black people within his orbit.31
The seven chapters that follow trace the Fikes’ wartime exchanges in chronological order, beginning with the dusty afternoon in August 1862 when Henry mustered into service and concluding with the summer day almost three years later when he returned to Mascoutah for good. The chapters are organized by the different western points where the 117th Illinois moved over the course of the war. Aside from Cimbaline and Ellie’s lengthy visits with Henry during the regiment’s stay in Memphis, they otherwise spent the war in western Illinois. An array of primary sources help flesh out the people and places mentioned in the Fikes’ letters. These corroborating sources include Henry’s diary, military records, historical newspapers, census manuscripts, and the diaries and letters produced by his fellow McKendree Boys.
The opening chapter illustrates how the divergent emotions triggered by the Civil War cleaved a single household. Henry, like many of the men who volunteered to fight, eagerly embraced the opportunity and resolved, as “a true patriot to his country,” to endure whatever hardships his three-year enlistment might bring.32 As he joined the army, the war seemed to him a communal enterprise, perhaps the greatest adventure that he and his fellows would ever undertake. They mustered into service at Camp Butler, just a few miles outside of Springfield, Illinois, and by November 1862 several weeks of training transformed these young farmers and other raw recruits into passable soldiers.
Their encampment sat only ninety miles north of Mascoutah, but for Cimbaline it was too often a world apart. She faced her husband’s absence with barely concealed apprehension. Poor health and the frictions that unsettled her community were familiar burdens that loneliness rendered even heavier. Yet both Fikes were buoyed by their developing correspondence and a shared belief in their conjoined duties, knowing that theirs was a struggle worth fighting. “This wor is a horble thing,” Cimbaline wrote. “Wod to god that this rebelion could be put downg in one day.”33 They recognized, however, that a civil war deep into its second year was not likely to end anytime soon. As the miles between the couple grew wider, their letters assumed greater significance, each reply a relational cord capable of spanning whatever distance lay between them.
Within three months of their initial separation, the Fikes found themselves fully engaged by the challenges of wartime, as chapter 2 reveals. In addition to the nonstop efforts of caring for their spirited daughter, Cimbaline took up volunteer work and the necessary chores of managing the family’s finances. Henry’s arrival in Memphis on November 16, 1862, represented his first exposure to the Confederate South, and he quickly noted the danger posed by guerrillas who prowled the woods outside the city. Fort Pickering, the blufftop garrison where the 117th Illinois was billeted, offered a safe vantage from which to undertake the hands-on work of an army quartermaster. Preparations to seize the downstream city of Vicksburg, the final rebel stronghold on the Mississippi River, brought a thrum of activity to occupied Memphis, which bustled with soldiers, cotton traders, and a teeming surge of war refugees.
After January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect and the Union began to muster Black volunteers into Federal service, Henry looked upon the organization of the United States Colored Troops with great interest. He hoped to secure an appointment to lead one such regiment, but that ambition remained yet unfulfilled. Although a shared melancholy dimmed the couple’s first Christmas and anniversary apart, they soon arranged a months-long sojourn to Tennessee for Cimbaline and Ellie. The family’s stay, however temporary, was a precious gift available to officers but not to their enlisted comrades, whose loved ones remained back in Illinois.
Victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July signaled a shift in momentum toward the Union cause, and Cimbaline’s loyalist ardor, as chapter 3 shows, burned more brightly than ever. She was actively involved in the separate Union Leagues established by the men and women of Mascoutah, not only sewing the flag of the male group but also organizing the Independence Day fundraiser for her own association.34 The rapid growth of each league worried neighbors who feared that such fervor might unleash a violent backlash against antiwar dissenters. Cimbaline reported that Mr. Nellson, one local Copperhead, “wos gitting sceard. he wos afraid tha would send him to dixey and burn his property.” Another, Mr. Scharp, “is very much friten. His wife said she nose wose afraid to go to sleep at night for fear she would wake up and find thare hous on fire.”35 A burst of vigilantism several weeks later showed ample reason to be fearful.36
Aside from a brief furlough to Illinois, Henry remained near Memphis, where the sweep of martial law and other transformations sparked by the Federal occupation proved a constant curiosity. Few topics drew more attention in his letters than the surging population of Black refugees who sought freedom behind Union lines but found themselves less secure than they might have expected. Not unlike the vigilantes in Mascoutah, members of the 117th Illinois accused one Black boy of theft, tied him to a tree, and flogged the youth. Such denial of due process, Henry wrote, provoked sharp disagreements within the regiment: “Some say, if the 117” Regiment is going to turn out to tieing up negroes to trees, without trial or jury, and beating them with a horse whip, they beg permission to hand over their commissions, and to be ‘excused.’”37
The Fike family happily reunited in Memphis in October and remained together through the first month of 1864, when the extended garrison duty of the 117th Illinois finally came to an end. On January 28, Henry sailed down the Mississippi River as part of the 16th Army Corps toward a destination unknown to himself or his enlisted comrades. His first real experiences as a soldier on the march—the focus of chapter 4—turned out to be a pair of expeditions into the Deep South, first across central Mississippi and then along the Red River of Louisiana. After a full year spent following the movements of other Union armies through newspapers and regimental gossip, Lieutenant Colonel Fike now relished “soldiering it in earnest.”38 The Federals who marched east from Vicksburg in February saw limited fighting but caused tremendous damage en route to Meridian, destroying railroads, burning farms, and helping to free more than two thousand enslaved people. The Red River expedition, which began a month later, proved to be a dismal failure. Despite the verve of accounts that detailed the battles of Pleasant Hill and Mansfield, a disappointed Henry was eager to return northward.
In his absence, Cimbaline boarded at the Memphis home occupied by the family of Nathan Land, a fellow officer and Mascoutah resident. Newspapers provided a sporadic, occasionally accurate source of information about the 117th Illinois and its movements further south, but personal correspondence remained the most direct and dependable lifeline between loved ones. Even though Cimbaline wrote fewer letters from Memphis, her weariness, too, was evident: “This wore is a very croul an weaked [wicked] one. Making some very unhappy famlys. For my parte I am very tired of it, and wish it wos over with.”39 Henry’s safe return to Memphis brought some comfort, as the Fikes would remain together through the end of summer, but sobering realities, including the inconclusive military developments in the East and the full year that remained of his enlistment, loomed over their reunion.
Events in the final months of 1864, detailed in chapter 5, suggest how their post–Civil War lives seemed both tantalizingly close and unbearably distant. Although the Fikes each steamed upriver from Tennessee, only Cimbaline came back to the family home. Henry instead landed on the west bank of the Mississippi and moved with the 117th Illinois to Jefferson Barracks, the army post south of St. Louis where Federal troops massed in anticipation of a Confederate attack. The double-edged meaning of the regiment’s arrival just across the river from Mascoutah was plain to see. On one hand, its members were closer to home than ever, and crowds of local visitors made the camp look, in Henry’s words, more like a county fair than a military installation. Yet on the other hand, the rebel forces who advanced north from Arkansas brought the war dangerously close to home, fueling wild rumors and setting off alarm bells in the town. Invading troops, however, did not arrive but instead veered toward Jefferson City, Missouri, where U.S. forces had ensconced a loyal provisional government in the first months of the war. With Union soldiers, including Henry, now in pursuit, the Confederates raced west to the Kansas border, where another Federal army waited and ultimately dealt the rebels a smashing defeat.
The improving prospects for Lincoln’s reelection further lifted the Fikes’ confidence, in spite of widening draft calls and the shirking men who still avoided conscription. Yet the fall exchanges also revealed acute stresses on their marriage, and Cimbaline, again wracked by pain and illness, confronted the startling debts that Henry had amassed but not disclosed to her. These obligations, coupled with her unhappiness in Mascoutah and an exodus of friends and neighbors, brought forth a kind of marital reckoning. Although the letters that once trussed their marriage now groaned with suspicion, the correspondence of that autumn managed to hold their marriage together. The Fikes began to imagine a different kind of postwar life, if only they could survive the war to pursue it.
After a miserable trek across the snow and mud of Missouri, Henry savored the respite of a Thanksgiving spent at home. On November 28, his regiment again departed Illinois for Tennessee and began a season of campaigning, documented in chapter 6, which saw military victories but even greater physical challenges than the grueling marches of the past year. In December 1864 the 117th Illinois took part in the Union victory at the battle of Nashville. From there, Henry and his comrades marched southwest across a forlorn landscape, passing through towns that had been nearly obliterated. South of Pittsburg Landing, Henry wrote, “Nearly all that is now left, is the naked chimneys, which seem to stand as monuments of the desolating effects of war.”40 Cold, hungry, and footsore, the Union soldiers finally established winter quarters at Eastport, Mississippi, but weeks later Lieutenant Colonel Fike managed to secure another three-week furlough home. Cimbaline’s correspondence during this campaign had been more sporadic, likely the result of her painful coughing fits and debilitating headaches. As smallpox swept through Mascoutah that winter, killing several people, she took comfort in the prospect of moving with Ellie to the country home of her brother-in-law, writing “I think it will do me mor gud than meddison.”41
The conclusion of that February visit marked the beginning of the Fikes’ final wartime separation. Chapter 7, unlike those before it, includes only letters from Henry since those from Cimbaline have not survived. His dispatches from the Deep South follow the 117th Illinois from New Orleans to Mobile Bay, where the Federals laid siege to the Confederates’ last major garrison on the Gulf Coast. After Union forces captured Mobile, the 117th Illinois marched north into central Alabama. In Montgomery, the original capital of the Confederacy, they at last received word of the official surrenders of enemy armies under Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston. Union forces rejoiced, believing that this long-anticipated news meant their swift return northward.
Weeks of interminable waiting punctured their jubilation. Despite the boredom and illness that gripped Henry and many comrades throughout that enervating summer, they also witnessed scenes of wonder, none greater than the massive crowd of formerly enslaved people who thronged city streets to herald the triumphant arrival of a fleet carrying hundreds of uniformed Black troops. Most white Unionists were nonetheless in no mood to celebrate, even on Independence Day. “Our boys don’t care much about celebrating the 4” in the army. All they think of is getting home,” Henry wrote.42
The Fikes’ Civil War had been a story of perseverance and adaptation, but by the summer of 1865 their flagging endurance neared its limit. Buffeted by loneliness, pain, and mounting financial worries, Cimbaline’s letters repeatedly pressed Henry to resign and return home as soon as possible, some three months before his enlistment was set to expire. He initially demurred but eventually embraced the idea. An epistolary bridge, that vital connection to his wife and daughter, had sustained him through his service; now, with the war won, that same lifeline called him home. “I am bound to get out of this hot country,” he declared on July 9, his final dispatch from the Deep South. “You’ll not catch me here again soon.”43 The arrival of his discharge papers three days later signaled that he was at last homeward bound. A litany of fitful delays stretched his trip across two weeks, but by August 1865 he finally returned home, ill and exhausted but profoundly relieved.
1. The Fikes, like many people during the Civil War, came to prefer sending letters with traveling family members or friends, as they became aware of the disappointing vagaries of the mid-nineteenth-century postal system. Within weeks of Henry’s departure from home, Cimbaline wrote, “I am very sorry that you have not heard from home sence you have been gon I have ritten 4 letters to you, one every day.” Lucy Cimbaline Fike to Henry Clay Fike, August 29, 1862, Henry C. and Lucy Fike Papers (hereafter FP).
2. Frank and Whites, Household War; Roberts, “This Infernal War”; Keating, Greatest Trials I Ever Had; Berry and Elder, Practical Strangers; Donohoe, Printer’s Kiss; Johannson, Widows by the Thousand; Christ, Getting Used to Being Shot At; Silber and Stevens, Yankee Correspondence. For the significance of letters exchanged between Civil War soldiers and their loved ones, see Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 183–190, and Life of Johnny Reb, 192–216.
3. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 43–66; Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War, 148–161; Berry, All That Makes a Man; Rotundo, American Manhood, 130–157.
4. Cott, Public Vows; Fredette, Marriage on the Border; Hartog, Man and Wife in America; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; Mintz, Prison of Expectations.
5. McCurry, Women’s War; Ginette Aley, “Inescapable Realities: Rural Midwestern Women and Families during the Civil War,” in Aley and Anderson, Union Heartland, 125–147; Giesberg, Army at Home; Whites and Long, Occupied Women; Clinton and Silber, Battle Scars; Silber, Daughters of the Union; Lamphier, Kate Chase and William Sprague; Whites, Civil War as a Crisis; Clinton, Other Civil War; Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses.
6. Leonard, Yankee Women; Osterud, Bonds of Community; Faragher, Sugar Creek.
7. Sizer, Political Work, 109–121; Faust, Mothers of Invention; Bleser and Heath, “Impact of the Civil War.”
8. Whites, Civil War as a Crisis; Mitchell, Vacant Chair.
9. Henry C. Fike Diaries (hereafter HFD), August 27, 1853; History of St. Clair County, 277–278.
10. Weir, “‘An Oblique Place.’” For the reliance on phonetic spelling by other Civil War writers, see Private Voices, altchive.org, a digital project curated by Michael Ellis and Michael Montgomery, which has transcribed several thousand letters from common soldiers and their families. See also Ellis, North Carolina English.
11. For volunteers’ motivations and the influence of community ties on Union soldiers, see Mitchell, Vacant Chair, 19–37, 151–160.
12. Cole, Centennial History of Illinois, 280. For the privilege of officers arranging for their kin to move with them into the South, see Bleser and Gordon, Intimate Strategies; Rose, Victorian America, 146–147.
13. Historian Lenette S. Taylor writes, “Every quartermaster, regimental as well as federal, had to submit nine monthly reports and three quarterly returns. . . . The full set of reports required fifty-three separate forms.” Taylor, “Supply for Tomorrow,” 12–17, 203–208.
14. For the immense scale of “the machine,” see H. Fike to C. Fike, December 6, 1862, FP.
15. H. Fike to C. Fike, December 26, 1864, FP.
16. For loyal northerners whose primary motivation remained the preservation of the Union, see Gallagher, The Union War; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 90–116; Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress. For nationalism and loyalty in the North, see William Blair, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham–Eventually: The Problem of Northern Nationalism in the Pennsylvania Recruiting Drives of 1862,” in Cashin, War Was You and Me; Gallman, Defining Duty; Silber, Daughters of the Union. For manhood and duty in the Civil War era, see Berry, All That Makes a Man; Brian Craig Miller, “Manhood,” in Sheehan-Dean, Companion to the U.S. Civil War, 795–810; Grasso, Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy; Mitchell, Vacant Chair.
17. H. Fike to C. Fike, September 24, 1864, FP; C. Fike to H. Fike, September 25, 1864, FP. For draft resistance in the North, see Joan Cashin, “Deserters, Civilians, and Draft Resistance,” in Cashin, War Was You and Me, 262–285.
18. C. Fike to H. Fike, September 16, 1863, FP. Few scholars have studied the experiences of children during the Civil War. A notable exception is Marten, Children’s Civil War, 68–81. For the moral absolutism that shaped children’s understandings of the war, see Peter Bardaglio, “On the Border: White Children and the Politics of War,” in Cashin, War Was You and Me, 315–331.
19. For understandings of duty in the Civil War era, see Gallman, Defining Duty, 188–222; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 22–29.
20. C. Fike to H. Fike, June 25, 1863, FP. For women who took up arms as Civil War soldiers, see Blanton and Cook, They Fought Like Demons. For “the garb of gender” in the Confederate South, see Faust, Mothers of Invention, 220–233. Historian Jennifer Weber’s history of antiwar dissent in the North devotes only a few paragraphs to the wartime politicization of women, but she suggests that outspoken women like Cimbaline were not alone, noting “Women, who were not allowed to vote and many of whom had been political agnostics, grew more vocal about the matters of the day.” Weber, Copperheads, 47. See also Silber, Daughters of the Union; Giesberg, Army at Home, 119–142; Blair, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham–Eventually,” in Cashin, War Was You and Me, 184–191; Jimerson, Private Civil War, 27–49; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 56–84.
21. Muster rolls show that 338 men who enlisted in various Illinois regiments claimed Mascoutah as their hometown. Fred Delap, Illinois Civil War Muster and Descriptive Rolls Database, Illinois State Archives, Office of the Illinois Secretary of State, https://www.ilsos.gov/isaveterans/civilMusterSearch.do (hereafter Delap, ICWMDR).
22. C. Fike to H. Fike, September 13, 1863, FP.
23. Relatively few studies of the northern home front have focused on rural communities. Instead, they typically look at more populous urban areas. Exceptions to this trend are Etcheson, A Generation at War; Raus, Banners South; Doyle, Social Order.
24. C. Fike to H. Fike, October 19, 1864, FP.
25. Phillips, Rivers Ran Backward; Epps, Slavery on the Periphery; Robinson, A Union Indivisible; Earle and Burke, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri; Oertel, Bleeding Borders; Amy Murrell Taylor, Divided Family; Jeremy Neely, Border between Them; Anderson, “Fulton County War.”
26. Phillips, Rivers Ran Backward; Stanley, Loyal West; Astor, Rebels on the Border; Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky.
27. Manning, What This Cruel War. For the need to examine the Border North within the wider regional permutations of Civil War loyalties, see Clinton and Silber, Battle Scars, 11.
28. Historian Chandra Manning notes, with some accuracy, “Henry Fike . . . was anything but a radical abolitionist.” Manning, What This Cruel War, 123.
29. See HFD, January 12, 1851; April 10, 1852; and July 18, 1853. Although the 1860 federal census reported that Mascoutah had a Black population of only 15 individuals (out of 2,076 inhabitants of the town), one of those individuals was Griff, the longtime farm-hand employed by Henry’s parents. St. Louis, where the Fikes frequently traded, had a free Black population of 1,865, along with an enslaved population of 4,346. Kennedy, Population of the United States, 99, 279, 283.
30. Glatthaar, “Duty, Country,” in Cashin, War Was You and Me, 332–357; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 126–131.
31. For the persistence of racist language even among antislavery northerners, see Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 82–117.
32. H. Fike to C. Fike, October 14, 1862, FP.
33. C. Fike to H. Fike, October 12, 1862, FP.
34. In contrast to the male-dominated home guards and volunteer militias organized in eastern cities, the Union Leagues in Illinois were grassroots organizations that included both men and women as members. See Paul Taylor, “Most Complete Political Machine,” 157–177. For the significance of such handmade flags within a context of increasingly commodified patriotism, see Cohen, “‘You Have No Flag.’”
35. C. Fike to H. Fike, June 5, 1863, FP.
36. C. Fike to H. Fike, August 16, 1863, FP.
37. H. Fike to C. Fike, June 21, 1863, FP.
38. H. Fike to C. Fike, April 12, 1864, FP.
39. C. Fike to H. Fike, May 10, 1864, FP.
40. H. Fike to C. Fike, January 2, 1865, FP. For descriptions of the fighting in Nashville, see H. Fike to C. Fike, December 19, 1864, FP.
41. C. Fike to H. Fike, January 3, 1865, FP.
42. H. Fike to C. Fike, July 4, 1865, FP.
43. H. Fike to C. Fike, July 9, 1865, FP.