Originally aired on July 28, 1995 - In part 48 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses the different terminology used by the North and South for army designations, battle names and even military uniforms.
#48 – Civil War Terminology
Civil wars are never easy to understand. The American Civil War has special problems of its own, and many of them have to do with terminology. Although both North and South spoke the same language, they used different labels and titles throughout the contest. The result has been to leave the beginning student of the Civil War somewhat bewildered, particularly when it comes to army designations and battle names. They are good starting points for today’s discussion.
The North named its armies after the closest river or stream. Its western forces marched under such titles as the Army of the Ohio and the Army of the Cumberland. The South, on the other hand, named its armies after regions or locations. Its major command across the Alleghenies was known from first to last as the Army of Tennessee.
Here in Virginia, the main Union force was the Army of the Potomac. Although it had a rotating door of commanders – Generals George B. McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George G. Meade, the Army of the Potomac never changed names.
Its adversary throughout four years of fighting was the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The name began in April, 1862, when General Joseph E. Johnston was in command. However, the Army of Northern Virginia achieved its largest successes under the only other commanding general it ever had, Robert E. Lee.
Union and Confederacy also used different designations for battles. The North, following a similar pattern as its armies, named a battle after the closest stream or water source. In contrast, the South preferred to name battles for the closest town or settlement. Thus, the first major land engagement of the war has two distinct titles. To Northerners, it was the battle of Bull Run; to Southerners, it was the battle of Manassas.
Lee’s 1862 counter-offensive on the Virginia peninsula began with confusion that included terminology. Billy Yanks called the opening battle Beaver Dam Creek. Johnny Rebs referred to it as the battle of Mechanicsville. That same pattern existed in the Western theater. A three-day engagement in Tennessee is known in Northern circles as the battle of Stones River. Southerners call it the battle of Murfreesboro.
With time and usage, both sides have settled on one name in the case of some major engagements. Confederates for years after the war called the bloodiest one-day conflict the battle of Sharpsburg. Today everyone knows it as the battle of Antietam, or Antietam Creek. Likewise, a generation of Northerners wrote dramatically of the three-day holocaust at Spangler’s Spring. Now, to one and all, it is the battle of Gettysburg.
In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the natives smile patiently at a familiar mistake in geographical terminology. The Valley loses altitude as it goes north. Hence, and contract to usual wording, one goes north down to Winchester and south up to Lexington.
One of the most familiar phrases attached to the Civil War is “blue and gray”. Only half of it is accurate. It took a year or more for all Union soldiers to outfit themselves in blue. Gray was the official color of the Confederate army, to be sure, yet the Southern nation never acquired enough gray cloth to make that edict a fact. Most Confederate uniforms in the war came from dead Union soldiers. Southerners learned to take the blue clothing and dye it in a mixture of lye, acorns, and walnut hulls. What emerged was clothing of a beige, or butternut, tint.
Johnny Rebs were often called “Butternuts”. In the postwar years, however, “blue and gray” became a more popular term simply because poets found it easier to use than searching in vain for something to rhyme with “blue and butternut”.
Whoever said that history belonged exclusively to historians?
