“Infurnal Stuff”: Civil War Soldiers, Experiences of War, and Senses of Hell in Nineteenth-Century America

After spending one year in Virginia wishing to kill Confederate soldiers, Charles Johnson complained that “it is utterly impossable to get a glass of water free from mud!; if the male population of the north are not troubled in future with the ‘gravell’ from drinking this infurnal ‘sacred soil,’ it will be because their bladers were so antagnistical to the ‘southern soil’ as to be able to hold the ‘infurnal stuff.’” For Johnson, the war had exposed Virginia’s “sacred soil” to be “infurnal stuff” that would terrorize the bladders and bowels of his compatriots. The very ground and gravel around him was energized with moral meaning, for it had the power to kill just as muskets and cannons did.

By examining how soldiers’ expressed their experiences during the Civil War through letters and journals and by using new historical attention to sensory studies, my paper will try to understand how northern and southern soldiers made religious sense of their situations by discussing the everyday material objects around them. Whether describing soil, swollen bodies, uprooted trees, or mowed farm lands, many soldiers turned to language of hell and the demonic to articulate how they felt about themselves and the war. In so doing, they invariably linked their physical sensations with senses of the spiritual – heaven and hell, angels and demons. They, like Charles Johnson, linked this world with worlds beyond not simply through their minds and theology, but also through their descriptions of touch, taste, hearing, and seeing.