The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War

Is it possible to taste the past? What about smelling, hearing, or touching it? Ordinarily, these questions don’t occur to the historian. Evoking the sensory experience of the past is at best a grace note in most books of history — a way of setting the scene before delving into what really matters, which is what people did and said. If historians focus on deeds and words rather than sights and smells, they have at least two good reasons. The first is the nature of the evidence: there is simply no artifact left to tell us, say, what Cleopatra smelled on a hot day in Alexandria or what the rations at Valley Forge tasted like. We are lucky if there are even passing references to such matters in written documents, which have at least a chance of surviving the eons. Second, there is the question of whether sensory experiences are, finally, very interesting. We may be curious to know how it sounded to walk the streets of ancient Rome, but would knowing tell us anything very important about why the Romans thought and acted as they did? (Does the sound of Washington, D.C., affect the way we make foreign policy today?)

The historian Mark M. Smith boldly confronts these doubts in The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege, which its subtitle describes as A Sensory History of the Civil War. It is true, he admits at the start, that the sensorium of the past is irrecoverable. The way we experience the physical world is very different from the way our ancestors experienced it, thanks to changes in technology, population density, hygiene, agriculture, and a whole host of other factors. We may think that eating an apple in 2014 is basically the same experience as eating an apple in 1864, but in fact it isn’t. The apple itself tastes different, thanks to the way it has been bred, but even more important, our whole range and standard of taste has shifted as well. “What we consider stale and unpalatable now,” Smith observes, “was likely deemed edible and appropriate in the pre-refrigerated past; what we think of as sweet-tasting now would have been wholly alien to a tongue in medieval Europe when there was no sugar (only honey).”

Still, Smith believes that, in certain notable cases, it is possible to use historical evidence to imagine what things felt, smelled, or tasted like. And by recovering sensory history, he argues, we can recover the full significance of events that otherwise might remain merely abstract. Using the Civil War as a test case, Smith focuses on five famous episodes, linking each to one of the five senses. Not all of his chapters are equally successful, but at its best, this scheme allows him to zero in on the concrete ways the war changed the sensory experience of nineteenth-century Americans.

The shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861 marked the beginning of the Civil War. When the armed forces of South Carolina bombarded the federal installation in Charleston Harbor, it was the first time Americans took up arms against one another, making a peaceful resolution to the secession crisis impossible. Many histories of the war begin with this incident, as Smith does; but few are so interested in what the bombardment actually sounded like. The rather anticlimactic answer is that it was very loud, as Smith establishes by citing a number of contemporary accounts. “Shot and shell went screaming over Sumter as if an army of devils were swooping around it,” wrote one observer. Another recalled that “the firing of the mortar woke the echoes from every nook and corner of the harbor.”

By itself, the loudness of artillery is not very interesting, nor does it tell us much about the Civil War in particular. (Sadly, humanity has had many chances since to confirm what battle sounds like.) Conscious of this, Smith mounts a larger argument about the aural life of antebellum Charleston, emphasizing that public quiet was a part of the city’s general imposition of social order. Nighttime, in particular, was unusually silent, since there was a strict nine o’clock curfew for slaves. Yet Smith argues that the very quietness of nighttime Charleston was itself a source of anxiety: “the slaveholders had succeeded too well, or rather, their slaves had taken their insistence on quiet so literally that they had turned it into a weapon.” “If they want to kill us,” observed one Southern lady, “they can do it when they please, they are as noiseless as panthers.” The contrast between the sound of war and the quiet of peace takes on, in this perspective, a peculiarly Southern significance.

The first battle of the Civil War, at Bull Run, is another set piece treated in most history books. In his chapter on Bull Run, however, Smith focuses on sight — what the soldiers on the battlefield saw and, more important, didn’t see. Here, again, some of what Smith says is predictable: we might guess that the battlefield was visually impenetrable, as “shots and smoke competed to distract and confuse the eye and bombard the senses, leaving men dazed and numb.” More notable was that, at this early point in the war, the two armies had not yet adopted consistent uniforms, so that it was not uncommon to see Federals in grey and Confederates in blue. The result was chaos, as soldiers took advantage of the confusion to ambush the enemy or lost their lives to friendly fire. Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate hero, ordered his men to identify themselves by wearing a white cotton armband.

Smith faces different challenges when dealing with the more evanescent senses — smell, taste, and touch. Here, again, he is dependent on written sources, which are inherently limited, since language has little power to convey the exact nature of smells and tastes. It is easy to imagine the loud bang of a cannon, even if we have never heard it in real life — at least we have memories of war movies to draw on. But how many of us can begin to guess at the smells that inundated the town of Gettysburg in July 1863, as tens of thousands of unburied corpses baked in the summer sun? This smell is the focus of Smith’s third chapter, in particular the way it was experienced by a volunteer nurse from New Jersey named Cornelia Hancock, who wrote:

Not the presence of the dead bodies themselves, swollen and disfigured as they were and lying in heaps on every side, was as awful to the spectator as that deadly, nauseating atmosphere which robbed the battlefield of its glory. . . . A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of the unburied dead upon which the July sun was mercilessly shining and at every step the air grew heavier and fouler until it seemed to possess a palpable horrible density that could be seen and felt and cut with a knife.

Such a moment drives “sensory history” of the kind Smith is attempting up against its limits. With Gettysburg, as when we read about the hunger of besieged Vicksburg or the cramped quarters aboard a primitive Confederate submarine, we are thrown back on the resources of our imagination, though some Civil War re-enactors do their best to replicate the conditions of the day, wearing the scratchy wool clothing of a soldier marching in the hot Virginia sun. But what does it feel like to starve, to sweat in an underwater coffin, to cut a wounded limb off a conscious man? Walt Whitman wondered about that last question, in the unforgettable lines from “Song of Myself”: “The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table, / What is removed drops horribly in a pail.” And when it comes to evoking the specific sensory experiences of the past, perhaps it is poetry we need, more than history. Even so, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege deserves to be read, if only as a reminder of the full panoply of horrors that the Civil War brought down on our country.