Brother Against Brother
The Story of James and Alexander Campbell
As righteous as we may now find the Union cause, the Civil War was nevertheless inherently tragic as it pitted brother against brother, quite literally in some cases. This is the aspect of the conflict that Disney portray in The American Adventure. The brothers on stage refer to each other as “Billy Yank” and “Johnny Reb”, personifications of Union and Confederate soldiers respectively, before we hear the song “Two Brothers” written by Irving Gordon. The lyrics “one wore blue and one wore grey” illustrate that the brothers choose to fight for different sides in the conflict, one electing to don the blue of the Union, the other adopting the grey of the Confederacy. Ultimately, only one of the brothers returns home: “one came home, one stayed behind. A cannonball don’t pay no mind.” This tragedy is not entirely fictitious for the show though. Familial divisions over the war were not uncommon, and in some cases brothers did fight for opposing sides. Indeed, in the extreme example of the Campbell brothers, they nearly had a rather uncomfortable reunion on the battlefield.
The family about to be torn apart by civil war in The American Adventure. The two brothers stand at the back of the scene.
Second Leiutenent James Campbell, Company F, First South Carolina Battalion.
James and Alexander Campbell emigrated to the United States from Scotland in the 1850s. The brothers settled in different areas of the country, James in Charleston, South Carolina, and Alexander in New York City. When war broke out in 1861, the brothers decided to fight for their adopted states, with James taking up arms in the 1st South Carolina Battalion, and Alexander enlisting in the 79th New York “Highlanders”. On June 16th, 1862, as the Union and Confederate forces faced off at the Battle of Secessionville, Alexander and James narrowly missed a face-to-face reunion. Alexander and the Highlanders attacked a Confederate fort, unaware that his older brother was holed up inside. Learning after the battle from a wounded Confederate soldier that James was in the fort he had been attacking, Alexander worried that his brother had been killed in the struggle. Writing home to his wife Jane, he grimly supposed, “perhaps he is killed for our guns shelled them terribly.” However, James had made it through the conflict unscathed and actually managed to send a letter to his younger brother in the Union camp that same night. Despite familial salutations, it included an ominous warning: “I hope that you and I will never again meet face to face Bitter enemies in the Battle field. But if such should be the case You have but to discharge your deauty to Your caus for I can assure you I will strive to discharge my deauty to my country & my cause.”
Fortunately, this was the closest the brothers came to meeting as enemies. Alexander was wounded eleven weeks later and soon resigned his commission to return home to New York. James, meanwhile, continued fighting in the South Carolina Battalion until he was captured in July 1863. He spent the remainder of the war as a Union prisoner, before taking the oath of allegiance to the United States government on June 12, 1865, and being released from Fort Delaware. The Campbell brothers stayed in touch after the war, and their remarkable collection of letters is preserved at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Their story serves to perfectly illustrate a point about the conflict that Alexander made himself in a letter to his wife: “this is a war that there never was the like of before, Brother against Brother.”
