The Grim Reaper School of Child Discipline

I'm still working my way through Harry S. Stout's moral history of the Civil War, "Upon the Altar of the Nation.'' And every once in a while, you read something that gets you in the head of someone who lived over 150 years ago, and you know that the weirdness back then still exists in certain people today.
Stout refers to another historian who dug up a letter from Union Private Henry Abbot to his children.
"Now you must be good all the time & remember,'' he wrote, "when you get mad and begin to cry, it makes the rebel bullets come a good deal nearer to me.''
Wow, huh?
At least now when guilt becomes the core of family relationships, there's Prozac and talk therapy to get us through.
Back then, I suppose, you lived with it, and god only knows what happened if your daddy tasted fatal rebel steel.