When hate seeps into our lives

At 7 a.m. today, 141 years ago, the weather was fine for a bunch of boys from East central Iowa as they moved out onto the Louisiana river plains. The 24th Iowa Infantry had been gathering for several days with regiments from Ohio and New York, preparing to take Shreveport, Louisiana's capital during the Civil War.

These young men, used to open prairies bearing some of the world's richest soil, found themselves occupying the swampy southern end of that state, with almost nothing but semi-tropical bayous separating them from the gulf. After weeks of fighting their way down the Mississippi River, some leaders assured them this would be the decisive battle to end the war in the Western Theater: The Red River Expedition.

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As the South won early victories, during the summer of 1862 a call went out for Iowans to take up arms. With hot winds at their backs, men from Johnson, Linn, Cedar and three other counties left the wheat and oat fields, the city smitheries and mills, and crossing the Iowa and Cedar rivers, converged in Muscatine.

Like the crops most of them had planted only a few weeks before, many of these volunteers were seedlings in adulthood and the art of war. For several weeks, they drilled, practiced shooting and ingrained themselves in the army way of life.

They also learned to objectify Southerners, or the "Rebs" as many of those soldiers referred to the Confederacy in diaries and oral accounts given later in life. Such objectification of the enemy is necessary for a military force to succeed. After all, killing another man only comes easy to those who have lost their moral bearings. As psychologists found after examining adolescents who had killed their classmates during the 1990s, the shooters exhibited no sense of right or wrong.

But one cannot be morally wrong if the enemy is the incarnation of evil.

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None of this is to say the boys of the 24th were not brave or that they did not fight a just cause. Sometimes war is the only resort to stop a Hitler or a Napoleon.

But the common man serving in such armies and navies does not fight Hitler or Napoleon. Instead, he takes up arms against another common man, perhaps someone with a wife back home, maybe someone who only a few months before spent his days raising wheat and oats or working in the blacksmith shop and grist mill.

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By the eve of the Red River Expedition, the 24th had valiantly proven itself many times, at the Battle of Champion Hill, in the siege of Vicksburg, during Gen. William T. Sherman's march on Jackson, Miss. You can tour those battle sites today at the Vicksburg National Military Park. There's even a monument to Iowa's fallen on a park tour road.

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"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself," author Herman Hesse once said. "What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

What was it in Southerners that a Northerner could hate? Disloyalty, possibly. While the Confederacy saw itself as maintaining state's rights and hence personal liberty, the Union thought the South had broken its mutual pledge to give "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

There was the notion of progress. The Confederacy fought for tradition, even believed it upheld the best values of their British forefathers. The North stood for industry and social change, such as the ending of slavery.

But such ideas mean little to the man parted from his wife and the comfort of his fields. To achieve true objectification, the "Reb" became cruel, barbaric. Thomas Nast's drawing "Southern Chivalry" shows a Confederate soldier holding the chopped off head of a Northern soldier and others scalping Blue Coats for trophies.

They showed men who'd lost their moral bearings.

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Spring 1864 proved to be dry. The air grew cold at night with water in the expedition's buckets freezing three-quarters of an inch deep. The boys of the 24th burned fences of abandoned fields to stay warm. Then the roads turned dusty, coating them as their feet kicked up the red clay. Even after a hard rain in late the afternoon of March 24, the muddy roads quickly dried by the following morning.

A diary kept by 27-year-old James A. Rollins, of Wilton, primarily notes weather, if he received a letter from someone, where he camped, and mostly how far he marched - 6 miles one day, 15 miles the next, then 17 miles. By March 31, the men had walked 290 miles.

They feared guerillas who picked them off in ambushes then disappeared into the undergrowth; sometimes in a whirlwind of hate, they took revenge, with Co. I burning two plantations on April 3. When rations ran low, teams foraged for food; sometimes they took local farmers' cattle and oats for meals.

Even amid such destruction, affirmations of the positive remained. There is a spring to Rollins' writing when he receives a letter from his wife. And he records observations that only an Iowa boy might notice: "The country looks fine but none of it farmed" and "Camped ... on a small Bayou Country generally good and very level most of it farmed."

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The expedition did not end with Shreveport's capture. River levels remained too low for boat traffic, and miscommunication left the Union's attack forces uncoordinated. Eventually the 24th would loyally follow Gen. Ulysses S. Grant east. The regiment would boast many great heroes.

But the divisions of that war remain today. An Electoral College map is proof enough.

The source of this division certainly isn't the 24th's battles with the Confederates. Their story merely is one of many about how common men get caught up in history's winds of hate.

(originally published March 13, 2005)