Chapter 1: What does 'brother against brother' mean in the context of the Civil War?
The battle is over. It is won. Now the field is quiet and still, save for the groans of the wounded and the slow work of collecting the dead. A Union soldier in dark blue slowly walks a line of captured men in Confederate gray. Many injured, slumping against each other. All are caked in mud and blood, wearing expressions of defeat and defiance.
The soldier moves along, counting each of these captured troops, readying them for transport. But for a brief moment he hesitates, pausing, losing his count. In that line of unfamiliar faces, faces that until hours ago were deadly threats, he sees a pair of eyes that look different. Eyes he thinks he knows, that remind him of home, of cherished childhood, of someone long absent. Could it be? No.
During the Civil War and in the decades after, stories of family separation would come to define how Americans talked about the war. Brother against brother, family against family, a nation tragically torn in two. But how often did this really happen? And do such stories illuminate the agony of the war itself, or just as much the way Americans have chosen to remember it? Greetings and welcome.
I'm Don Wildman. This is American History Hit. The idea of the American Civil War as a family feud, a conflict of brother against brother, house divided, has endured to the present.
Chapter 2: How did biblical references shape perceptions of the Civil War?
It's a powerful image. But like so much else in history, it tells us as much about how the war has been remembered and reshaped over time as it does about the events themselves. The story of the Civil War has been influenced not just by what happened, but how it has been told.
So to help us unpack where this brother versus brother idea came from and why it's proven so durable, we turn to an expert of those troubled times. Aaron Sheehan Dean is a historian of the American Civil War and professor of history at Louisiana State University. His work focuses on the lived experience of the war, how Americans North and South understood and remembered the conflict.
He is the author and editor of several major works of the Civil War era, including The Calculus of Violence, Harvard University Press, Why Confederates Fought, University of North Carolina, and most recently, Fighting with the Past, How 17th Century History Shaped the American Civil War. Dr. Sheehan Dean has joined us for several episodes in the past.
I'll be sure to talk about it at our conclusion. Honored you're back. I gave you the long bio. Dr. Sheehan Dean. Pleasure to be back, and I appreciate all of the celebration there. Yeah. Brother against brother is a phrase that comes straight from the Old Testament. Book of Genesis, Cain and Abel story, chapter 4, 8, verse 8. Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.
How fitting is this, this first murder, the first fratricide, in characterizing the Civil War? It was certainly language that people on both sides used, especially Northerners.
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Chapter 3: What role did geography play in the Civil War's familial conflicts?
And so, you know, there were ministers in those early Sundays in April of 1861 where Northern ministers turned to that text almost as a way of saying, can you believe what's happening? Yes.
that by merely reciting it, you would be able to basically call southerners back to their senses, that you are reenacting the cardinal trauma, one of the cardinal sins in the Bible, this original murder, fratricide, but now on a national scale. And southerners make less recourse to it, though, as the brother versus brother rhetoric is laced throughout.
often in a more kind of wistful or almost elegiac tone in the South. But Northerners throughout, particularly Northern ministers, but, you know, as in the 21st century, not everybody reads the whole Bible, but a lot of people have read those first couple of chapters. And so you don't have to get very far, as you noted, to reach this as a story. And your opening, I would amend your opening.
You talked about the way in which how we have spoken about the war influences what we think of it. This happened in real time too, I guess I would remind listeners. That is, the stories that people told themselves during the war were in some ways as powerful as the events of the war in determining how people understood what it was. So this is sort of key metaphor here is the Cain and Abel story.
Yeah, I just want to root this conversation in that biblical reference stuff, you know, because we're going to get into a factual conversation about, in fact, brothers did fight brothers. But it's so big time, the epic themes that are discussed right at the outset of this war that it's so interesting. and how they frame it is so fascinating in the American story.
Geography plays a big role in this, obviously, because the nation itself was divided, and long before the Civil War, by the Mason-Dixon line, which is a surveyed border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, only a couple hundred miles long, which then extends as the nation does with the Ohio River.
And that creates the legal boundary between, not the legal boundary, but in effect, the boundary between North and South. Slavery back in those days didn't have anything to do with it.
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Chapter 4: How did migration influence family loyalties during the Civil War?
That was everywhere in the 18th century. But it then becomes this kind of, in effect, moral and political division as abolition rises and then secession. But geography is central as well. It is. We tend to imagine, certainly when we talk in sweeping terms about a north and a south, I think a lot of people imagine a very clean and bright line between those two regions.
And there's several important things to remember. One, and I think we're going to talk a lot about the sort of very messy middle, blurry middle of what becomes the border. That is, as you said, the Ohio River Valley, states like parts of southern Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, and then the northern tier of Kentucky and all of Missouri.
that these are states where people are sort of hopelessly mixed in ideological and familial terms, but also remembering that throughout the 1840s and 1850s, there had been a lot more mobility among Americans, many of them moving west to pursue sort of settlement opportunities, white Americans moving west to pursue settlement, but also north and south.
So southerners, elite southerners, when they're being educated, are going to Yale and Princeton. Northerners, particularly northern women who might work as tutors when they're young, are coming into southern households. So there is also a big flow of people born and raised in one section who move to the other.
And then all of a sudden, as the war sort of crystallizes in 1861, those people find themselves in essence kind of stranded. Or maybe they have actually embedded and married people and built lives there. And it brings those value conflicts into much sharper relief. So both regions are much more sort of densely settled with people not born in those regions.
And there are books on Yankees in the South and Southerners in the North. So migration and mobility is indeed sort of the backdrop to understand how this becomes such a fratricidal conflict. Yes. And it's, I mean, let's name the border states, which is what this border creates, the Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, later West Virginia.
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Chapter 5: What are some famous examples of brothers fighting on opposite sides?
Those slavery states that choose not to secede from the Union become those border states and they have a tremendous mixed population in terms of allegiance to one side or the other. And that becomes the story really of how... The most interesting surprise to me was how these troops were, who fought for one side or the other within these states. I mean, you start going through the facts.
In Kentucky, 100,000 people fought for the Union. 35,000 fought for the Confederacy. The Battle of Culp's Hill, which is in July 2nd and 3rd of 1863 at Gettysburg, the Union's 1st Maryland Battalion fought against the Confederates' 1st Maryland Battalion. Oh, my gosh.
I mean, you can only imagine many of those soldiers on both sides weren't so far from home, and many of them might have known each other. Bill, to be sure. No, this was one of my chief confusions when I started studying Civil War soldiers before I really understood the scale of things was clocking that many of those border states had first infantry designations on both sides.
And it was very important to know, in fact, which first Maryland or which first Kentucky or even which first Tennessee you're talking about. Regiments are organized locally, and in a way you can see, let's say the first Maryland's at Culp's Hill as kind of mirrors of each other, but certainly drawn from the same place.
Certainly men who knew one another, and at the very least would have been probably cousins, if not literal siblings. And that problem of literal siblings turns up on a number of battlefields in different places. Sure. It also talks about the split allegiance within even southern states. I mean, Tennessee, very much a split state, east and west are two different kind of places even today.
Virginia, of course, then becomes West Virginia because there's such a split there over slavery. North Carolina has a lot of people that are going for the north as well.
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Chapter 6: How did the Civil War impact family dynamics and relationships?
And some of these things actually play through to today. It's amazing. Yes. I mean, there are unionists in every capital U unionist, the designation we use to describe people who support the North in the war and yet live in the South. There are unionists in every state, some of them in rural areas.
Western North Carolina is famously, and Eastern Tennessee, that sort of Appalachian mountain region is famously settled by Scots-Irish in the 18th century who have little investment in slavery and really resist slavery. the Confederate as a political experiment and also just generally want to be left alone. Yeah. So they're sort of noncompliant.
But even in southern cities, it's not exclusively a rural phenomenon. There are pockets of unionist resistance in Atlanta, in New Orleans, in Mobile. And those pockets are sometimes drawing husbands and wives against each other, sometimes siblings against each other. And, you know, so it's not it is, in fact, a family conflict, fratricidal as a way to describe it. In fact,
limits the scope of the degree to which it is a family war. And part of what we're talking about here is the challenge of loyalty and to whom you owe loyalty and the ways that this war then complicates all sorts of political and social arrangements. The only kind of pure culture in this regard is South Carolina. There's no record of people going and serving the Union from there.
And it's amazingly unique in that regard. But there you go.
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Chapter 7: What were the emotional repercussions of family divisions during the war?
I usually fall back on William Gilmore Sims, the South Carolina writer in the antebellum era who described South Carolina as too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum. He said that, not me. Interestingly, it's where many Northerners are moving these days because they like what they see down there. And it's changing the culture of South Carolina a lot.
from what I understand, in certain pockets. So let's go down to actual brothers or family connections who were known to fight against each other on the field of battle or in military leadership. These are some of the most famous names. And we can actually start with Lincoln himself, not in either of those. Well, I guess military leadership, sure. He married a Southerner, Mary Todd Lincoln.
whose siblings were sided with the Confederacy, whose family was enslaving and so forth. And I mean, Lincoln was, he's a great example. No wonder endless books are written about the man of how so much of the American story courses through his own life.
And the fact that that Mary Todd's family is from Kentucky and Lincoln's family had been in Kentucky sort of briefly as they're moving across originally Virginia. And Lincoln is born in Kentucky. He and Jefferson Davis are actually born the same year, not that far from one another. Right.
And you're right, Mary Todd has three brothers, all of whom fight in the Confederate Army, one of whom actually dies in battle. This is Alexander Todd, her sort of favorite brother. He dies in battle in the Battle of Baton Rouge, which is where I'm calling from.
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Chapter 8: How did post-war narratives reshape the memory of the Civil War?
He dies not a half a mile from where I currently live and where I'm recording right now. He was killed here in Baton Rouge in that battle August 5th of 1862, and then his body returned to their family home, and he's buried in Kentucky. But Lincoln has to, today we would say that Lincoln has to compartmentalize. Yes.
That, you know, he is managing this conflict and yet his wife and his familial attachments are drawing him towards the tragedy of this and the immense personal cost. Mm-hmm.
Mary Todd is uncharitably often characterized as being hysterical, but she has some serious sort of challenges, emotional challenges during the war, most famously the loss of her son, but the loss of this favorite brother is devastating to her. And in a way, her husband is responsible. Yes, indeed.
And she was always so pitted against Robert fighting in the Union, and she desperately did not want him to join for obvious motherhood reasons, but also all these torn allegiance, this feeling of fighting against her own family. Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is.
Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Janaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
Ulysses S. Grant, father-in-law, Frederick Dent, prominent Southern Democrat, same problem. Yes, slaveholder and someone who is sort of publicly and politically aligned against his son-in-law. Grant and his wife, Julia, had this wonderful, loving marriage. And a lot has been written about the affection that they showed one another.
But sort of just outside of that relationship stands these much more fraught tensions. And particularly, I mean, this... It is a theme, and listeners should know that this is a problem, the problem of these families, broken families, that the Civil War media announced frequently. This is not something that sort of historians figure out later. Confederates often refer to Lincoln's relatives.
They refer to Grant's. Northern newspapers do the same. So newspapers are always full of stories. Yeah. And it's a very curious form of rhetoric because it doesn't necessarily, there are forms of rhetoric that easily bring you to demonize your enemy and to kind of embolden your fighting spirit.
And I'm always struck by the degree to which this is just sort of horrible and it does not necessarily make you want to kill your enemy more. It reinforces the sense of the war as a tragedy and an unproductive tragedy. But as I say, those stories are told in the newspapers and retold and copied and
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