Plenty of Southerners hated the regime from day one, a feeling that only grew as the war continued. In addition to facing the Union armies, the Confederacy had multiple fractious regions to control, and drawing on a violent tradition already honed on the enslaved, the indigenous, and abolitionists, it often did so mercilessly. The instruments were units dubbed "partisan infantry," "irregular cavalry," or "rangers" whose primary duty was repression. While the war was brutal and Unionist guerrillas resorted to assassinations and sabotage, it was overwhelmingly the Confederacy that used regular massacres and devoted whole units to put down "restive citizens."
Mass killings like Shelton Laurel were carried out from Texas to the North Carolina coast. The fact that history—along with that of the resistance they were trying to crush—was later obscured is not accidental.
That mythology is propped up not just by the words we use, but by the ones we often don't. Civil wars in other countries have regimes, factions, atrocities, corruption, and resistance. But America's is commonly portrayed as long lines of soldiers dying in paintings, "brother against brother," a haze of supposedly equally noble causes laid over the reality of slavery and death.
Even our strife, these lies seems to say, is exceptional, cleaner than other places.
The bodies in the Shelton Laurel snow paint a very different picture. The 64th's war, both before and after that day in January, was not formations and charges. It was that of "caustic measures," torture, burned homes, and summary executions.
After all, the Confederacy was, while particularly American, also something common as dirt: a harsh regime in a violent country, held together by force.
Chivalry be damned, Dixie needed its death squads.
'Press home to his heart with your steel'
Antebellum America's history is often overwritten as a string of half-remembered Presidents, Andrew Jackson, and the country's borders spilling out on a school-room map. In reality it was a violent and unstable place. While the country's founders may have sought the marble stoicism and civic virtue of an imagined Roman Republic, the Rome they got was slave estates, military demagogues, and constant political crises, pushing its tensions bloodily outwards and cobbled together with shaky "compromises."
Any fellow feeling among the citizens of the early Republic was hard to come by, especially as divisions over "the slave power" grew. When the question of slavery in Kansas was thrown open in the 1850s, one pro-slavery Senator swore to Jefferson Davis that "we will be compelled to burn, shoot and hang." They did. The pro-slavery faction's state constitution mandated execution for those involved in the Underground Railroad and prison for anyone criticizing slavery.