CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
The Union troops had just been routed at Bull Run. Many in the North thought that the war would be a short one with little disruption of loss of life. Here Norton, like so many others, provided a a more realistic assessment. Also note the reference to “barbarism” in the South, When the Union was formed, the Southern states were not as well developed as the North from an industrial, educational or cultural perspective. There were vestiges of aristocracy, crude law enforcement, and much more poverty (Virginia excepted) than in the North. Most Northerners thought that the South would reform—modernize and become more like the North, but instead the gulf became greater as the North itself developed and changed rapidly while the South was mired in its traditions with their aristocracy gaining more political, economic and cultural control. This attitude of Northern superiority, objectively valid though it may have been, was sorely resented by the South and this resentment has persisted into relatively modern times.
While there were atrocities committed by both sides in the Civil War, the proportion tended to be heavily weighted by Confederate perpetrations. The Confederate officers were not appointed by the command structure and under strict military discipline, but they were elected by the troops and could be so removed (except for the general officers who were appointed by the confederacy). Also, the confederate troops were not as well fed or supplied as the North and they had fewer resources with which to fulfill their obligations to prisoners. In a number of battles, ill-clothed soldiers stripped the Union dead, wounded and prisoners, often naked to use their shoes, blankets and clothing, Union prisoners of war were much more badly abused in the prisoners of war camps like Andersonville which were not under the command of Robert E. Lee.
Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as poet T.S. Eliot.
