Mr Lincoln's Army (4 page)

The army had developed a high spirit down on
the peninsula in spite of its troubles; a certain cockiness, even, a feeling
that it knew of no other soldiers who were quite as good, plus a deep certainty
that there was no general anywhere who could be trusted as much as its own
commander, General McClellan. But this spirit was dissolving and the certainty
was being mocked; and as it plodded on toward the fortified lines at Alexandria
it was on the verge of ceasing to be an army at all. Men drifted off through
the fields or formed little knots about campfires in the woods and farmyards.
The winding columns on the roads stretched as they moved, the head of each
column moving just a little faster than the tail. There was no panic, as there
had been a year earlier after the first fight at Bull Run, when what had been
thought to be an army simply melted into a frantic mob. Save for a bad hour or
so at the Bull Run Bridge on the night of August 30, there had been no headlong
rush to get away. But the miracle of the spirit which takes thousands of young
men, ties them together in strange self-forgetfulness, and enables them to walk
steadfastly and without faltering into the certainty of pain and death was
wearing very thin. Bickerings and blunderings had sapped its power; where the
men went now they went sullenly and only because they must. It would take
little more to cause the men to realize that "must" had force only so
long as they consented to it.

The army had been gay when it went out. The
point that is so easy to overlook nowadays, when all of the illusions about war
have been abraded to dust, is that those young men went off to war eagerly and
with light hearts, coveting the great adventure which they blithely believed
lay just ahead. They went to war because they wanted to go, every man of them,
and the obvious fact that in their innocence they did not have the remotest
idea what the reality was going to be like does not change the fact. The bounty
jumpers and the drafted men had not yet appeared. This was the army of the
nation's youth, consciously trying to live up to its own conception of bravery,
convinced that a soldier marched forward into high romance; an army with
banners that postured pathetically and sincerely as it followed its own boyish
vision.

That
posturing was of the very essence of the army's spirit, and it caused things to
happen that could not happen in the armies of today. We read, for instance, of
the father and son who enlisted together in a regiment of Massachusetts
infantry. In the fighting at Bull Run the son was killed, and a comrade took
the news to the father in the midst of the action. "Well," said the
father grimly, "I would rather see him shot dead, as he was, than see him
run away." And there is a glimpse of a New York regiment holding the line
in another battle under heavy fire. The colonel of an adjoining regiment came
over to report that this New York outfit was an especial target because its
colors were being held too high: lower them a bit and the fire wouldn't be so
costly. The colonel of the New York regiment—himself the most conspicuous
target of all, riding slowly back and forth on horseback in rear of his men,
who were lying behind a rail fence—looked at the waving flag and said:
"Let it wave high. It is our glory." Then there was the colonel of
another New York regiment, mortally wounded in a charge, who ordered his men to
lift him and prop him up against a tree facing the firing. This done, at
whatever cost in pain to the dying man, he said faintly: "Tell Mother I
died with my face to the enemy"—and, the message duly noted, died.
¹

The spirit of the first campaign these
soldiers made comes down to us in a journal written by young Captain George
Freeman Noyes, a pea-green but ardent officer on General Abner Doubleday's
staff, who found himself making a night march up the Rappahannock when Pope was
concentrating his army against Stonewall Jackson early in August. Wrote Captain
Noyes:

"And so over a heavily-wooded, rolling
country, through roads arched with foliage, the moonlight filling them with
fantastic shapes and shadows, we pursued our romantic way. The peculiar quiet
of the hour, and the weird influence of the forest scenery, with patches of
moonlight flung in here and there among the prevailing shadow, every turn of
the road seemingly a narrow pass over which giant and grotesque trees stood
guard to oppose our progress, added mystic significance to those reflections
which our anticipated battle naturally awakened. No longer Yankee soldiers of
the nineteenth century, we were for the nonce knights of the ancient
chivalry."
²

Those fanciful old ideas about the glory of a
waving flag, the shame of running from danger, the high importance of dying
with one's face to the foe—since that war they have come to seem as out of date
as the muzzle-loaders that were used for weapons in those days. The American
soldier of later, more sophisticated eras may indeed die rather than retreat,
and do it as courageously as any, but he never makes a song about it or strikes
an attitude. His heroism is without heroics, and fine phrases excite his
instant contempt, because he knows even before he starts off to war that fine
phrases and noble attitudes and flags waving in death's own breeze are only so
many forms of a come-on for the innocent; nor does he readily glimpse himself
as a knight of the ancient chivalry. But in the 1860s the gloss had not been
worn off. Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had
grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound
as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.

The fall was acutely painful, and it was
taking place rapidly in the late summer of 1862. The easiest way to see what
was going on— in the soldiers' emotions, and in the war itself—is to follow
briefly the career of the Black Hat Brigade, which was to become famous.

This outfit was made up of the 2nd, 6th, and
7th Wisconsin regiments and the 19th Indiana—Western troops in an army predominantly
of Easterners—and it was assembled in Fredericksburg in the spring and put
under the command of young John Gibbon, lately jumped to a brigadier's
commission from his position as captain of regular artillery. Gibbon was a
West Pointer—a lean, sharp-nosed, bearded man with a habit of blunt speech, who
was quietly sorry to have to leave his guns and his tough regulars, where he
felt at home, for infantry and volunteers, where he felt strange. He had served
on the Western plains under Albert Sidney Johnston before the war; came from
North Carolina, had three brothers in the Confederate Army, but for his part
had elected to stand by the Union.

Rather to his surprise, he found that he
liked his new command, and he wrote that all the men needed was discipline and
drill to make first-class soldiers: a judgment that was to be vindicated, for
these Westerners turned out to be fighters as good as any the army ever
possessed. Gibbon applied the drill and discipline, discovered that volunteers
were unlike regulars—praise and the promise of reward were more effective than
the fear of punishment which the regulars required—and to tone up their morale
he saw to it that they were outfitted, beyond regulations, with black felt hats
and white gaiters; hence their nickname, the Black Hat Brigade.

The first combat veterans the boys
encountered—Shields's division, down from the Shenandoah Valley after a bloody
fight with Stonewall Jackson—jeered at them for bandbox soldiers, but the
Westerners retorted that they would rather wear leggings than be lousy like
some people, and anyway, they liked their own natty appearance. Like all new
troops in that army, when they started cross-country marching in the hot summer
they threw their coats and blankets in the nearest ditches, knowing that they
could draw new ones, and no questions asked, from the regimental
quartermasters. This pained Gibbon's regular-army soul, and he forced the
company commanders to receipt for the issue of clothing thereafter, and
compelled them to make regular returns on the requisitions, under penalty of
drawing no pay.

The
brigade carried its coats and blankets henceforward: a thing which caused
muttering at first, but morale was high and Gibbon made the men feel like
soldiers, and the muttering died away.
³

So
far the war had been a romantic frolic for these boys. They liked to remember
the period of training around Washington, when they had been camped along a
stream on the far side of which were home-state neighbors, the 5th Wisconsin.
The 5th belonged to General Hancock's brigade, and Hancock had a bull voice
that could be heard halfway to Richmond, and the 5th was commanded by a Colonel
Cobb, very much of a leading citizen back home but strictly an amateur soldier
here like all the rest of them. One day when Hancock was drilling his brigade
Colonel Cobb got mixed up and took his regiment off the wrong way in some
evolution, and the delighted Wisconsin boys across the river could hear Hancock
roar: "Colonel Cobb! Where in the damnation are you going with your
battalion?" Thereafter, as long as they were neighbors, it struck the
Black Hat Brigade as amusing to go down to the riverbank in the still of the
evening and chant in unison: "Colonel Cobb! Where in the damnation are you
going with your battalion?"

They
had worked out a gag for rainy days, when it was too muddy to drill and all
hands were snuggled under their pup tents trying to keep dry and were afflicted
by boredom. Some private possessed of a great voice would sing out: "When
our army marched down to Bull Run, what did the big bullfrog say?" And
hundreds of men would croak: "Big thing! Big thing!" ("Big
thing" was Civil War slang for any notable event or achievement—a great
battle, promotion to a corporal's chevrons, a two-week furlough, the theft of
a crock of apple butter, or anything else worth talking about.) Then the leader
would call: "And when our army came back from Bull Run, what did the
little frogs say?" To which the answer, in un-melodious screeching
trebles, was: "Run, Yank! Run, Yank!" And to close it, the question
was: "What does the Bully Sixth say?" The answer, in deep pinewoods
bass: "Hit 'em again! Hit 'em again!"

The whole brigade took a queer, perverse
pride in the regimental band of the 6th Wisconsin—not because it was so good,
but because it was so terrible. It was able to play only one selection,
something called "The Village Quickstep," and its dreadful
inefficiency (the colonel referred to it in his memoirs as "that execrable
band") might have been due to the colonel's quaint habit of assigning men
to the band not for musical ability but as punishment for misdemeanors— or so,
at least, the regiment stoutly believed. The only good thing about the band was
its drum major, one William Whaley, who was an expert at high and fancy twirling
of his baton. At one review, in camp around Washington, the brigade had paraded
before McClellan, who had been so taken with this drum major's "lofty
pomposity" (as a comrade described it) that he took off his cap in jovial
salute—whereupon the luckless Whaley, overcome by the honor, dropped his baton
ignominiously in the mud, so that his big moment became a fizzle.
⁴

At the end of July the brigade moved out of
its camp at Fredericksburg and tramped up the Rappahannock to join Pope—the
same movement which led Captain Noyes to see knights of the ancient chivalry
marching along the moonlit roads. The men were impatient. They belonged to
General Irvin McDowell's corps, and they had been sorely disappointed because
orders to go to Richmond and join McClellan's forces there had been canceled at
the last minute. Now they looked ahead to action, for it was believed that Pope
would plunge at once into battle. Reaching the point of concentration, they did
a great deal of marching and countermarching and heard the rumble of artillery
duels from afar, and once or twice long-range shells fell among them, but they
got into no fighting. And finally they found themselves, with the three other
brigades in the division of General Rufus King, trudging off to the northeast
on the Warrenton turnpike, heading in the direction of Centreville. Along the
way they captured their first prisoner—a straggler from Stonewall Jackson's
corps, who had had his fill of fighting and surrendered willingly enough, but
who was an authentic armed Rebel for all that. This lanky soldier looked with
interest at the full packs carried by Gibbon's boys and remarked: "You uns
is like pack mules—we uns is like race horses. All Old Jackson gave us was a
musket, a hundred rounds, and a gum blanket, and he druv us like hell."

The men did not know exactly where they were
going, but they understood vaguely that Old Jackson was somewhere up ahead; it
looked as if they would get into a sure-enough fight this time, and their
spirits rose. To be sure, if they were being hurried into action their course
was obstructed by numerous mix-ups. They had got into

Warrenton
at dusk, hungry, their rations exhausted, and were met by General McDowell in
person, who regretted that they could not have any supper but ordered them to
move out on the turnpike at once: this was a forced march, no time to draw
rations, they had to keep moving. So they started on, found the road blocked by
stalled wagon trains, and made a supperless bivouac two miles from Warrenton.
The next day they were led down a country lane and thrown into line of battle
on some deserted farm, and held there for several hours in complete solitude,
before they were recalled and taken back to the main highway; and there they
were halted again, to butcher some of their beef cattle and make a leisurely
meal. But the men had been soldiers long enough to understand that that sort of
thing just went with army life, and their enthusiasm was undimmed. At last,
after an afternoon in which they had heard occasional sputters of musket fire
far ahead, they went tramping along the pike a mile or two out of the little
hamlet of Gainesville, the brigade well closed up, General Gibbon riding at the
head, a mile of empty road in front and behind separating it from the rest of
the division. It was getting on toward sunset, and the trees on the left of the
road were casting long cool shadows. A regimental band was playing a
quickstep—one hopes, somehow, that it was the band of the 6th Wisconsin—and the
boys were enjoying the war.