"The blood of the first martyr was shed," announced the Richmond Daily on May 27, 1861. Three days earlier, a Confederate supporter James Jackson was killed by a Union soldier in Alexandria after Jackson himself shot down Colonel Elmer Ellsworth of the Union Army, who broke into Jackson’s hotel to tear the Confederation flag from the roof of the building. Probably the first killed in the war, Jackson and Ellsworth became famous as the martyrs of the cause of the Confederation and the Union, respectively.
"Glorious death!" - proclaimed about Jackson "Dispatch". "There is no mortal in Virginia who would not envy his fate, who would not follow his example, and would rather die than live, breathing air polluted by such morally lepers like these degraded bloodthirsty rascals, whose hands were washed with his heroic blood."
Library of Congress. James Jackson kills Elmer Ellsworth; Jackson was then immediately shot by one of Ellsworth's people. Both became martyrs for their respective parties.These words in Dispatch (probably the main newspaper of the Confederates) were an indication of what should happen, not so much foreshadowing a horrendous number of deaths that took place in the next four years, but rather anticipated two strategies used again and again to convince people to fight for the new people of the Confederation. By joining the army, people risked, on the one hand, moral and spiritual condition, if they were to kill, and, on the other hand, eternal separation from their wives, children, and other loved ones, if they themselves were killed. This article suggests that the northerners deserved death because they were monsters; Ellsworth and his comrades, Union soldiers, were an “invading horde,” consisting of “corrupt, cruel, and ruthless savages.” She also gives reason to think that the Southerners who died defending their country from such monsters would achieve glorious immortality - like Jackson, who deserves envy rather than pity, given that "his fame will be preserved for future generations."
The fact that these strategies are present in this article is obvious; that for a long time it was not clear how often they were used during the war. No historian has yet demonstrated enough patience and attention to detail to read 100,000 articles consisting of approximately 24 million words that the wartime Dispatch contains, not to mention conducting a sophisticated statistical analysis to derive conclusions from these data. However, today there is an innovative technique of working with the text called “thematic modeling”, which allows us to understand the arguments and appeals used throughout the war to convince people to join the army, to engage in the morally difficult task of killing other people and take the horrific prospect of being killed yourself.
Thematic modeling is a probabilistic statistical method that can identify topics and categories in text volumes so large that they cannot be read by an individual. With respect to Dispatch for the entire war, thematic modeling allows us to see both more and less perceptible patterns in the news of the Civil War, which we could not otherwise have found. It also helps historians identify large topics covered in individual articles, and then track these topics in other documents, even as part of entire arrays of large documents like Dispatch.
For example, in the thematic model for “Dispatch,” two themes predominate in an
article proclaiming Jackson's martyrdom — themes that I called “diatribes against northerners” and “patriotism and poetry.” Thematic modeling in this way allows us to take an article about Jackson as a starting point, starting from which we can more fully explore the appeals to nationalism and patriotism, which were used to persuade people to do terrifying deadly work during the Civil War.
Source - Laboratory of Digital Studies, University of RichmondTaken together, the articles associated with the theme “
diatribes against northerners ” justify why it is not sinful, but, on the contrary, righteously and heroically, to kill northerners. To make it psychologically easier to meet and kill them on the battlefield, Southerners fought to bring the Northerners beyond the reach of sympathy and emotional identification. To break the sixth commandment, the Southerner soldiers had to believe that the northerners were somehow fundamentally different from them; those whom they killed could not be the same Christians or the same compatriots or even the same people. Instead, as thousands of articles in Dispatch have consistently claimed, northerners were fanatics and atheists, foreigners and strangers, cattle and demons.
The first accusation was that the northerners were not real Christians. Those of the northerners who were not atheists were dangerous religious fanatics who adopted such radical and supposedly non-Christian religions as
Unitarianism and
spiritualism . Mistakenly and arrogantly mnya themselves "elected by the people, the elect of heaven", and considering themselves "more right than the Bible," according to the "Dispatch", the northerners abandoned Christianity, turning it into an unholy abomination.
Similarly, Southerners blamed the Northerners for being people of a different nationality. Looking north, the Southerners saw an alien immigrant community, a grotesque "heterogeneous mixture ... of the most bloody blood of all nations." Their cities were "gutters into which the whole world poured excess mud and foam." Their armies did not consist of real Americans, like the Southerners, but of "Lincoln's foreign mercenaries."
However, the most deadly was the accusation that by their atrocities against innocent women, children and the civilian population in general, the northerners discovered the absence of elementary humanity. At times, the northerners were described as animals ("dogs, wolves, hyenas", "reptiles" and "wild animals"), at times as supernatural devils ("incarnate fiends" and "gathering of animals and demons that must be destroyed"). In any case, they were not human. On the contrary, they were "monsters in human bodies", "despicable dogs in the image of man" and "demons in human form."
Collectively, these charges guaranteed a death sentence. Predictions of divine retribution to the devilish northerners reappear again and again on the pages of the Dispatch. The “hour of reckoning” for the northerners was rapidly approaching, and they could not avoid the “final punishment of the righteous Lord.” By dehumanizing the northerners, the southerners convinced themselves that by killing them, they did not commit anything sinful, but, on the contrary, do something profoundly righteous: they become an instrument in the hand of God.
Articles related to the second theme, “patriotism and poetry,” provide additional justification for why death at the hands of inhuman invaders is glorious. Throughout the war, hundreds of poems appeared in Dispatch, urging Southerners to rally for the cause of the Confederation, defending their country, family, and honor. These poems tried to turn the South from one place to another, and convince people to risk their lives for it. If the soldiers died on the battlefield, these verses assured them that they would become heroes whose glory will live forever:
... say, not for nothing on the battlefield,
Forever lie down in a quarrel dispute:
Who fell, holding the Liberty shield,
It will not be a dead body without a name;
Therefore, daughters and sons -
Native South Niv free
Ballads will be stacked
About us, noble heroes.
Southerners repeatedly turned to poetry of this kind in order to evoke the strong emotions necessary to give the cause of the Confederation sacred significance and to clothe the monstrous sacrifices called for by the soldiers with transcendental meaning.
Thematic modeling allows us to move even further - from the analysis of typical articles in these topics to the interpretation of the whole set, complementing a thorough reading of individual articles by briefly viewing tens of thousands of others. The following graph shows the relative amount of print space devoted to these two topics - “diatribe versus northerners” and “patriotism and poetry” - on the Dispatch pages from the election of Lincoln in November 1860 to the burning of Richmond in April 1865.
Source - Laboratory of Digital Studies, University of RichmondThe obvious similarity of the “handwriting” of these two themes is striking. If one of them appears in a newspaper often enough at any of these moments, then the second appears just as often. The close connection between these two topics - which would be difficult, and perhaps even impossible to see without our thematic model - suggests that they were always two sides of the same coin (although they very rarely meet together in one article, the Jackson report - a rare exception).
The schedule also allows you to see exactly when the need arose for these calls at specific times. We see a steady increase in patriotic poetry and sharp attacks during secession and in the first months of the war. Later we see a sharp leap accompanying the execution of the law in April 1862. And we see the last breath of patriotism and nationalism of the Confederation at the very end of the war, when the Southerners made their last attempt to rally the troops in order to save their work.
These were moments of great upheaval for the Confederate army: when it was first created, when it tried to gain the necessary strength, and when it faced a final defeat. The army was the flesh and blood of the Confederation, and this schedule is more than the frequency of the appearance of patriotic poems or attacks on the northerners. This is a cardiogram of the people of the Confederation.
Robert C. Nelson - Director of the Digital Studies Laboratory at the University of Richmond