This Hallowed Ground (33 page)

Not far away, Union stretcher-bearers picked up a wounded Rebel officer, shot down near high-tide mark of the assault on the battery. As they did what they could to make him comfortable he told them: “You licked us good today, but we gave you the best we had in the ranch.”
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In a sense he was speaking for the whole Confederacy.

Terrible battles and dramatic counterstrokes lay ahead, but the South had just made its supreme effort. It had mounted an offensive that went all across the board — a co-ordinated attempt by three armies to win final control of the war, to prevent the inexorable invasion that would desolate southern farms and towns and ruin the proud, static, dream-possessed society that had supposed it could live on in a world of infinite change. It had given the best there was in the ranch, but it had been licked, and now there was a new war to fight; a war that must finally turn into a grim, all but hopeless fight to stave off disaster.

The Federals would pick up now where they had left off last spring, the initiative once more in their hands. They would have some different generals, however. After Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville, the area in which men like McClellan and Buell could be used narrowed to the vanishing point. General Halleck and Senator Sherman had said it: nations in revolution used up their generals pitilessly. This nation was in revolution now; it would do the same.

So Buell was removed, and Rosecrans took his place, the administration being impressed by his avoidance of politics and his uncomplicated willingness to fight. (Grant was not as pleased with him as Halleck and Lincoln were. He felt that Rosecrans should have followed up his Corinth victory by destroying Van Dorn’s army; any battle that left the enemy with any appreciable number of survivors was apt to strike Grant as imperfect.) And McClellan was removed, taking his farewell from the Army of the Potomac amid hysterical cheers, the men lamenting
his departure so bitterly that timid folk in Washington worried needlessly, lest the army mutiny and depose the government. McClellan went home, out of the war forever. Bumbling, well-intentioned Burnside took his place, and the Army of the Potomac gloomily began to move down the Rappahannock River toward a sleepy little city named Fredericksburg.

The reverses of spring and summer had been canceled out. Thousands of men had been killed, tens of thousands had been wounded, there was bleak acceptance of tragedy in homes all across the land, and now there would be a fresh start, a new war with a different goal. The hard year 1862 was ending, to give way to a harder year, and in Virginia, in Tennessee, and in Mississippi the armies would move from their camps, drums muttering in a steady pulse-beat rhythm as the nation resumed its march into the mysterious future.

The armies were moving south, and the land they were entering was not wholly strange. The hills and woods were like those in the North, and men from midwestern farms could look appreciatively at the countryside and feel almost at home in it.

An Indiana soldier in Rosecrans’s army, looking about him in Tennessee, remarked that “a more beautiful country than middle Tennessee would be hard to find anywhere on the map of the United States,” adding that although the land had been tilled for fifty years by slave labor it still produced plenty of corn. He confessed: “Even to men familiar with the rich soil of the Wabash and Ohio River valleys, the long lines of corncribs, full to bursting, on these Tennessee plantations were a marvel.” Reflecting on all of this plenty, he confessed that the men of his regiment were foraging quite liberally. The provost guard, he said, never got into action “until many a chicken had squawked his last squawk, and many a pig had squealed his last squeal.”
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An Iowa boy wrote to his sister with even more enthusiasm. The soil here in Tennessee was not deep, he said, and an Iowa farmer would hardly think of trying to make a crop on it, but it would raise good corn or wheat and would do even better with cotton.

“Farming,” he explained, “is carried on entirely differently than at the north. Instead of the beautiful little farms and houses, every quarter or half mile along the roads, you see the large plantation or mansion.… In front of these planters’ houses are beautiful lawns of five or six acres, covered with the most lovely shrubbery peculiar
to the South, and shell or gravel walks winding round and round until they reach the house. They look quite as lovely in the dead of winter as any we see in the North in mid-summer.”

Scribbling away at this letter and thinking of the charming society that lived in and about these mansions, the young Iowan fell into a daydream that carried him in an unexpected direction and forced him to cut his reverie short on the edge of disloyalty:

“I imagine, should I have come down here before the war, I should have been enchanted by these bewitching scenes and would have loitered in some of these parks, some warm summer day, and met one of those lovely Southern belles — declared my love — asked her hand — and been accepted; the result would have been disappointment, estrangement and separation, with love unworthy a son of the Northland.”
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In the Shenandoah Valley, Union soldiers were learning that southern civilians could be exactly like the folks at home and that there could be a touch of friendship now and then between the invaders and the invaded. The 13th Massachusetts was appealed to by a valley farmer for protection against foragers, and the colonel detailed four men to guard the place. The farmer insisted that they stay in the house and make themselves comfortable; he would go about his duties and would call them if any prowlers appeared. His wife would not let them bunk down in the yard when night came, but put them in bedrooms with soft mattresses and clean white sheets, told them to sleep until they were called in the morning, served breakfast at eight-thirty — hominy and bacon, potatoes and fried chicken, hot biscuits and coffee, all they could eat. When the regiment finally had to move on and the detail was called away, the farmer went to the colonel to testify what fine young men these soldiers were, and his wife sent a huge basket of biscuits and cakes for them to take with them. All the rest of the war the 13th Massachusetts nursed this memory.
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It was not all sweetness and light. Most of the northern soldiers had farm backgrounds, and as they went south they looked appraisingly at southern fields and farms; they remembered the infinite number of pre-war orations by southern patriots describing the “sacred soil” of Dixie, and they picked the words up and made a sneer out of them. A Pennsylvania private, moving down toward Fredericksburg with the Army of the Potomac, took a top-lofty attitude toward farming practices in the Old Dominion as his regiment came over the Potomac:

“We crossed the Long Bridge and set foot on the ‘sacred soil’; the soil may be sacred, but we sacrilegious Yankees can’t help observing that it is awfully deficient in manure.”
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There came to the armies this fall many new recruits, and the fact
that they were coming in now, after the ebbing of the tide, reflected the defects in War Department planning.

Edwin M. Stanton was an energetic and competent Secretary of War, but he gave way at times to freakish impulses, and one of these had seized him in the spring of 1862: he had closed down all army recruiting stations and stopped enlistments, which was practically equivalent to announcing that the war was about over and that no more men would be needed. His timing was unfortunate, because a series of Union reverses immediately took place — heavy casualty lists East and West, defeat in the Shenandoah Valley, defeat at Richmond, Rebel armies of invasion slipping the leash and taking the initiative everywhere. More recruits were badly needed, but the high enthusiasm of early spring had cooled, and when the recruiting stations were reopened they did not do a very good business.

To get more men a publicity operation of considerable magnitude was needed, and it was promptly arranged. The governors of the northern states got together and framed a public appeal to the President, asserting — with blithe optimism — that war spirit was running high and that they would be happy to raise new levies if the President thought he needed them. Mr. Lincoln, in turn, publicly appealed to the governors to get him three hundred thousand men and to get them sooner rather than later. A big recruiting campaign was launched in July, someone wrote a patriotic song with the line, “We are coming, Father Abraham,” and with much drumbeating and oratory the men were obtained.

They spent the summer in training camps, and in the fall they began to reach the armies in the field. Their uniforms were unfaded and unwrinkled and, like all green soldiers, they were heavily loaded down with all sorts of surplus equipment. The veterans jeered at them unmercifully, calling out “Fresh fish!” whenever a new regiment showed up, and making caustic remarks about their possessions.

“Knapsacks,” wrote one veteran scornfully, “were a foot above their heads; overcoats, two suits of clothes and underwear, all kinds of trimmings, bear’s oil for the hair, gifts from loving and well-meaning friends but useless to the soldier. On the back of their knapsacks were strapped frying-pans, coffee pots and stew pans, pairs of boots hanging to the knapsacks, blankets and ponchos, making in weight one hundred pounds to the man, while the vet carried about twenty-five pounds.”

In the Army of the Potomac, old-timers hooted at the new 118th Pennsylvania, which came in equipped with oversized knapsacks, extra pants, and other incidentals, and told the recruits to throw all that stuff away (starting with the knapsacks themselves) and roll up their essentials in their blankets. A rolled blanket could be tied in a horsecollar
loop and worn over the shoulder; it weighed little and there were no straps to cut a man’s collarbones on a long march. The Pennsylvanians refused to take this advice and kept their ponderous knapsacks, and a Massachusetts veteran remarked that the boys would learn: “I don’t suppose there was a spare shirt in my company.”
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Men of the 103rd Illinois, coming down to join Grant’s army, were told that they did not amount to much — they had enlisted only to escape the draft, wear a uniform, get free rations, and enjoy the privilege of marching along with the veterans; when a real fight began they would all scatter and the veterans would have to do the work. When the 24th Michigan arrived near Antietam battlefield to become part of the Potomac army’s crack Iron Brigade, the men were treated as outcasts for two solid months; the veterans had heard that these Michigan boys had enlisted only because high bounties were being offered, and they refused to treat the recruits as comrades until after they had proved themselves in battle.
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Although the veteran refused to carry any more equipment than he absolutely had to have, he considered it his duty to replace his used garments with any new ones that could be lifted from the recruits, and he devised ingenious ways to do this. The commonest was for the old soldier to wander into a green regiment’s camp, select an innocent-looking recruit, sit down beside him, and give him friendly advice about the evils that would befall a man who kept too much in his pack. The recruit would be impressed and before long would be opening his knapsack and pulling out spare pants, shirts, and boots whose weight (according to this expert advice) he would find oppressive. At this point the veteran would peel off his own worn clothing, put on the new, give the recruit a fatherly pat on the back, and strut off to his own regiment. If on arrival he was asked how he had got his new clothing he would grin and say: “By giving a recruit good advice.”
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There was one noteworthy thing about the new soldiers: they believed in foraging with a free and heavy hand. War propaganda had begun to take effect, and recruiting-campaign orators were no longer simply appealing to love of country and the desire for adventure; they were demanding that the South be made to sweat for the crime of secession, and recruits had been receptive. New soldiers in camp around Memphis considered themselves entitled to take anything edible: “They would slaughter a man’s hogs right before his eyes, and if he made a fuss cold steel would soon put a quietus on him.” Commanding generals tried in vain to restrain them. William T. Sherman was especially strict, breaking offending non-coms to privates and ordering men tied up by their thumbs all night long, but it did very little good. On
the march in northern Mississippi, Grant’s men developed the playful habit of setting fire to dead leaves caught in the angles of rail fences; if this fired the fences and in turn set houses and barns ablaze, nobody cared. Along the line of march, any house whose occupants had fled was certain to be burned. An Ohio artilleryman remarked that “the cotton gin was then like the coal-breakers in the time of a great strike — many are burned; among soldiers and miners there is a lawless element that delights in destruction.” Gaunt, blackened chimneys stood where burned houses had been, and when soldiers saw one they would point to it and call: “Here stands another Tennessee headstone.”
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These Tennessee and Mississippi civilians were lucky in just one respect: the Federal armies which were advancing on them at least contained few Kansas troops. The Kansans, rejoicing in the nickname of “Jayhawkers,” were the most notorious freebooters and pillagers of all, and where they marched in Missouri or Arkansas they left a red scar on the land. They brought a personal venom into the war; they remembered the bitter lawlessness of the border troubles of the 1850s, they felt that they had a grudge to pay off, and anyway they tended to be a rowdy untamed crew operating under an uncommonly sketchy discipline. So notorious was their reputation that even their own army was wary of them. A Wisconsin cavalry regiment, moving east from Arkansas, told how in a camp beyond the river one of the Wisconsin troopers had died and a detail went out to the cemetery and dug a grave for him. While funeral services were being held back in the camp, the 5th Kansas found it necessary to bury one of its own men. Going to the cemetery, the Kansans found the open grave dug by the Wisconsin men; they buried their own man in it, put in earth, and went back to camp. When the Wisconsin funeral procession got to the spot and saw what had happened, the men instantly and unanimously accused the Kansans. In all the army, they declared, only the Jayhawkers would be capable of stealing a grave!
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