Glory Road (25 page)

Just now he needed to display none of his more flamboyant qualities, the qualities which seemed to be most characteristic of him, the dash and the rough soldiers'-campfire good-fellowship, and the "sublime courage at the battle front." (That last testimonial comes from an officer in the Iron Brigade, where they tended to be connoisseurs of courage.) The troops, indeed, might make up and gaily sing a little ditty
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which stated:

Joe Hooker is our leader,

He takes his whisky strong—

But what they got from Joe Hooker first of all, what they got that made the rough places straight and convinced them that it was going to be a great day in the morning—what, in fine, was genuinely important to them and to the national cause—was the sober, unimaginative, routine work of eternally checking up on rations, clothing, hospitals, living quarters, and other little details which in the long run make all the difference.

The first trouble was food. The government had bought much very good food, including the fresh vegetables for want of which men sickened and died, in addition to the hardtack, salt pork, and coffee which were the iron rations of this army. The only problem lay in the fact that none of this good food got to the ultimate blue-uniformed consumer. With the canny eye of one who himself lacked innate virtue sufficiently to understand the inner motivations of sinful unwatched man, and who hence knew all of the angles, General Hooker looked into this with a very cold gaze. What he found was that the officers designated as commissaries of subsistence—the officers whose job it was to get this food from the warehouses to the mess kitchens—had discovered in Uncle Sam's bounty a good way to get rich.

The fresh vegetables, the onions and cabbages and potatoes and the patented desiccated vegetables—known to all ranks, inevitably, as "desecrated vegetables," since soldiers will always mispronounce a word if they can manage it—were being sold for cash money to outsiders, including a number of the unredeemed residents of rebellious Virginia. The money thus received went into the commissary officer's private purse, and the monthly returns were falsified in order to show that the soldiers themselves had been the recipients. Nobody had ever set up a system by which there would be a stream of monthly vouchers showing that all of this stuff had gone to the men for whom it had been bought. It was, as a soldier remarked later, "a system of single (not to say singular) entry that enriched many a captain and assistant commissary of subsistence for the rest of his life."
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On this singular system Joe Hooker landed with a heavy foot. There came from army headquarters presently an order announcing that flour or soft bread would be issued to the troops at least four times a week, with fresh potatoes and vegetables coming out twice a week and desiccated mixed vegetables at least once a week. Commanders of corps, divisions, brigades, and detached commands would require any commissary officer who failed to make such issues to file a written statement from the officer in charge of the depot warehouse proving that the warehouse did not have any of the foods in question.
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That took care of the commissary officers.

Next came the matter of cooking. On the march each man cooked for himself, and since the average soldier could do little more than boil coffee and frizzle a strip of bacon or salt pork, the marching ration consisted of fried pork, hardtack, and coffee. In camp things were supposed to be better. And yet, administration having been lax, and foods other than pork and hardtack and coffee having vanished en route to the regiments, in most outfits here in the camps near Falmouth marching rations were the regular diet for troops which were not marching at all. Regimental commanders now were required to see to it that the regular company cooks went to work, and if there were no company cooks they were instructed to create some, so that the soldier could get decent meals in place of the intestine-destroying stuff he cooked for himself.

It was true that most of these company cooks lacked skill. Some noticeably lacked even the desire to be skillful, since most of them were simply enlisted men detailed from the ranks to do a two-month stretch in the mess kitchen. Nevertheless, bad as they might be, it was at least possible for them to cook and serve fresh vegetables. They could use the desiccated foods to make soups and stews, and when fresh meat was issued they could do something besides fry it in pork fat. The soldier cooking for himself, blessed with no kitchen utensils except a little frying pan and a tin can in which coffee might be boiled, could do none of those things no matter what raw materials he might have.

One veteran, reminiscing years later, recalled the new order of things:

"From the commissary came less whisky for the officers and better rations, including vegetables, for the men. Hospitals were renovated, new ones built, drunken surgeons discharged, sanitary supplies furnished, and the sick no longer left to suffer and die without proper care and attention. Officers and men who from incompetence or .disability could be of no further use to the service were allowed to resign or were discharged, and those who were playing sick in the hospitals were sent to their regiments for duty."
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And so between the fresh foods and the better cooking, army surgeons presently noticed the disappearance of the cases of scurvy which had been extending the regimental sick lists. At the same time there was a sharp drop in the perennial scourge of diarrhea, together with a general decline in "all the more serious diseases to which troops in camp are liable, and especially those which depend upon neglect of sanitary precautions." In addition, the surgeon general reported to Hooker that there had been "an improvement in the health, tone, and vigor of those who are not reported sick; an improvement which figures will not exhibit but which is apparent to officers whose attention is directed to the health of the men."
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Part of this was due to better food, and another part because somebody at last made it his business to see that elementary rules of sanitation were observed in the camps. The log-and-canvas hutments in which the men lived had become little better than pigsties, especially those in which the men had raised their shelters over shallow pits dug in the earth. It appears that young men living without women have no especial desire to be clean. Under Hooker's prodding the army's surgeons caught onto that fact and took corrective action. The canvas roofs of all huts were ripped off periodically so that the sun and the clean wind could strike the interior; wherever possible, the entire hut had to be moved to new ground at the end of each week. The worst of the camps were abandoned outright and the troops moved to new camp sites. It was required that blankets and other bedding be aired daily, that hut floors be carpeted with pine boughs or other material so that men would not bed down on the bare earth, and regimental commanders were ordered to require the digging of eighteen-inch drainage ditches around each habitation. Kitchen refuse had to be buried each day, proper sinks were dug for every camp, and "the men should be required to wear their hair cut short, to bathe twice a week, and put on clean underclothing at least once a week."
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Elementary as most of the rules seem to be, the mere fact that they were now embodied in official orders indicates the extent to which they had not been observed previously. The change that took place in this army, once decent food and decent living conditions became the rule, was remarkable. The soldiers themselves testified to the great improvement by setting up wild cheers whenever they saw their handsome general sitting proudly on his big white horse as they passed by. One wrote that "General Hooker proved a veritable Santa Claus to the army under his command." Another said that "the whole army was impressed with the feeling that strength, energy, and intelligence were all working together at headquarters," and a third remarked simply that "under Hooker, we began to
live."
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Writing long after the war, a Massachusetts soldier looked back ecstatically:

"Ah! the furloughs and vegetables he gave! How he did understand the road to the soldier's heart! How he made out of defeated, discouraged, and demoralized men a cheerful, plucky, and defiant army, ready to follow him everywhere!" Most of the accounts agree with another regimental scribe, who recorded that "cheerfulness, good order, and military discipline at once took the place of grumbling, depression, and want of confidence."
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There were furloughs. Thinking along non-military lines, Hooker concluded that if the men wanted more than anything else to see the folks back home the thing to do was to let them go, and there was presently a system by which one man in each company, in turn, could get a ten-day furlough. This could not take care of everybody, of course, but it took care of a" good many, and the effect was good. At the same time, it was made harder to desert. The mails down from Washington were put under control of the army provost marshal, and stern orders were issued governing express packages. No package would be received for transmission to anyone in the army unless it bore an invoice stating that it did not contain civilian clothing, the invoice to be certified by the agent who had accepted the package for shipment. From President Lincoln there came an order granting amnesty to all absentees who returned to the ranks before April. At the same time, the kind
-
hearted President was persuaded to relinquish his right to review all court-martial sentences, and it now became possible to shoot deserters. Picket lines around the army were tightened, parties representing themselves as telegraph-repair details had to exhibit written proof that they were telling the truth, and no wagons of any kind could go north without proper passes, while the pickets were ordered to shoot any wandering persons who failed to halt and account for themselves when challenged. Drinking in the camp was squelched (except among the officers, including especially the commanding general), and the guards on the bridges at Washington were presently confiscating five hundred dollars' worth of liquor a day. One result of this was that regimental sutlers, until the authorities caught on, did a land-office business in such canned goods as brandied peaches.
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There were also many drills—"constant and severe," as one soldier remembered them. If the men were down in the dumps, Hooker did not propose to give them leisure to sit around and brood about it, and from morning to night the drill fields rumbled with the tramp of many feet. Officers went to school evenings and next day went out to maneuver companies, regiments, brigades, and divisions in the tactics thus studied. There were reviews with the old McClellan touch, with everybody in dress uniform, brass bands blaring under the wintry sky, and Hooker looking on with visible pride. A man in the 16th Maine recalled "the evident satisfaction of Hooker and the conscious power shown on his handsome but rather too rosy face."
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It seemed that many men added that sort of qualification when they wrote an enthusiastic verdict on Hooker. He was too handsome, too roseate with good health and vigor, too confident that this army which
was begin
ning to fit into his hand so nicely would prove an irresistible weapon. (He dismayed Abraham Lincoln once this spring by remarking jaunt
ily that the question was not if
he got to Richmond, but simply
when.)
The tide was visibly turning. Hooker himself had caused it to turn, perhaps he would ride the flood to fortune, yet it could hardly be quite that simple. There would always be a catch in it for this army—finest army on the planet, Hooker was calling it; he could march it clear to New Orleans if he had to, and the word would soon be "God help the Rebels."
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It had labored under glamorous McClellan, braggart Pope, and plodding Burnside, coming uniformly to ill fortune under each. Now it had a general who seemed to blend the traits of all three of these predecessors, and it might be that it would do better under him. Yet even while he aroused confidence he created a small grain of doubt. The man whose beautiful skin was a bit too rosy might also, in the end, himself be a little too good to be true.

Yet the army did revive. The rank and file took Hooker at face value, and showed it by their actions. Hooker was proudly writing after a fortnight in command that desertion had practically ceased.
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These soldiers, who were prepared to give everything, could drive no hard bargain for themselves. They wanted to be decently fed and clothed, and they wanted now and then to see some sign that the man at the top knew what he was doing. Beyond that they asked for nothing. They lived that winter in a strange vacant place in the middle of time. Behind them there were terrible names like Antietam and Fredericksburg, proudly written now on the regimental banners which sparkled like marsh-fire flames up and down the long blue columns. Ahead of them, as yet unknown, were other names equally great and terrible, and no one thought about them. The men were veterans and they would live in the immediate present, looking neither before nor after, coming once again to believe in themselves, proudly wearing the new corps badges which Hooker had cannily devised for them, parading when the President and the commanding general passed them in review—a great army with banners, marching through the mud and the dirt toward the battle smoke which veiled the stars.

There were changes at the upper level. Amid rumblings, General Franklin had departed, muttering sotto voce that he would not serve under Hooker. Gone, too, was Baldy Smith, to whom Burnside had confided the first hint of a great and amazing thing which was to happen. With Smith went Burnside's own troops, the faithful IX Corps, sent away to serve once more down the coast, or inland, or anywhere save with this luckless Army of the Potomac. Gone, too, finally, was the stout old Bull of the Woods, Major General Edwin V. Sumner, with his simple code and his unimaginative bravery and his rigid old-army loyalties. He had taken no part in all the backbiting which followed Fredericksburg, telling the congressional committee simply, "There is too much croaking in the army." In midwinter he was relieved, gone forever from the army which for better or for worse he had helped to stamp with his own imprint. He rested in the North awhile, then was ordered west to take command in Missouri and fell ill, an old man worn down by the war, his life coming to its close in a Syracuse sickroom. He lay in a stupor, and as he came out of it he seems to have thought of old battles—perhaps of Seven Pines and its reeking swamps, of the ambush by the Dunker church in the Maryland hills, or of the doomed advance toward the stone wall below Marye's Heights. He cried out suddenly: "The II Corps never lost a flag or a cannon!" His attendant came over to him, and Sumner repeated more feebly: "That is true—never lost one." He was raised in his bed, and the attendant gave him a glass of wine. He took one sip, intoned, "God save my country, the United States of America," dropped the glass, and died, an old soldier gone to join the great God of Battles.
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