The Human Spirit Endures

Of the treatment for the wounded available even in the last months of the War, Adams had little praise. He was taken to another part of the field where he lay without shelter, almost unnoticed among the hundreds of other wounded collected there. So diligent was the North in certain aspects of the blockade that medicines and drugs were “countraband.” The “Anaconda” systematically prevented shipments of drugs and surgical instruments to the South, a “measure which did not shorten the conflict by a day, but cost the Southern troops untold agony,” as Allen Nevins observes in his essay “The Glorious and the Terrible” Saturday Review, September 2, 1961. Adams had been among the lucky; he had been operated on under benefit of chloroform anesthetic. When he came to, “Of what happened about me during this ten or eleven days that I lay on this part of the Wilderness battlefield, I have but a vague rememberance. It seems like a horrid nightmare. The groans and complaints of the wounded sufferers, the foul stench, the tormenting gnats and flies, the pain and fever, thirst, vomiting and diarrhea, the

So they sang “From Atlanta to the Sea,” and it damn near drove me nuts!    Courtesy Punch Magazine.

sense of loneliness and abandonment, every one around me being utter strangers, the back raw from lying on the ground, the hot sun against which the scanty foliage of the trees afforded little protection, the maggots which got into my wounds—how can I tell all the horror of that time! . .
This then was the end product of the guns of the Civil War. The 620,000 dead in both armies, North and South, were the lucky ones. Those who picked up a Minie ball and lived to regret it carried the terrible memories to the end. Yet somehow the fraternal strife to many was truly over, once the peace at Appomattox was signed. The tales of hospitality on the part of the Southern survivors in their later regimental fraternal associations, to the regimental survivors of their enemies who travelled over many of the battlefields in the 1880’s and even after, and the courtesy and spirit of forgiving friendship with which Northern veterans welcomed Southern parties of visitors, is an incredible sequel to the greatest conflict in the Western Hemisphere. The Nation divided against itself did not fall. Guns North and South boomed defiance and, ultimately, for one side victory and for the other, a curiously honorable defeat. It is this story which the collector, the student, the historian finds today in records of the guns of the Civil War.