This Hallowed Ground (38 page)

Grant’s Army of the Tennessee found itself strung up and down the western bank of the Mississippi for fifty miles. The river was abnormally high, much of the bottom land was under water, and only the levee itself seemed to offer camping space. Unending rains beat upon the levee, every company street was ankle-deep with black gummy mud, and there was sickness everywhere. A man in a newly arrived Indiana regiment reported that “scarcely a man had anything like good health,” and said that “the levee for miles is almost one continued mass of graves”; men had to pitch their tents on top of new graves, and the evil scent of death was always in the air. A doctor reported that steamers fitted as hospital ships would come down, load up with sick men, and then reveal a complete lack of nurses, so that helpless invalids had to look out for themselves; on one such steamer, he said, twenty-two men died overnight, “and I believe before God some of them died for want of proper nourishment.”
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All sorts of wild rumors went through camp. Some men asserted that the northern states were going to call their regiments home, and it was believed that if a man ran away from the army his home-state authorities would give him protection. When the mails failed to reach the army for a time it was reported that peace had been declared and that Grant was purposely stopping letters and newspapers “for fear we could not be held in subjection if we knew the state of affairs.” There was an epidemic of desertion, and an Ohio veteran wrote: “Now the hour of darkness began.” In some regiments the sick men outnumbered the well. On top of everything else the army failed to get its paymasters around on time and the soldiers were broke.
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All of this made it look as if the bottom had fallen out of the tub, and the Union cause seemed to be dipping down toward acceptance of defeat in January and February of 1863. But if there was reason for gloom there was also, in these armies and in the country behind them, reason for quiet confidence. Under the dejection there was a certain toughness; the sulkiest of complaints could come from men who really
had no idea of quitting; and soldiers and civilians alike had deep reserves of strength and hope, to be drawn on when most needed. It is not hard to find signs that the will to win was still powerful.

In Iowa an unusual job of recruiting had just been completed. Early in January this state sent to St. Louis, to go marching through the streets to the rendezvous at Benton Barracks, the 37th Iowa Volunteer Infantry, numbering 914 rank and file; a regiment like all others except for one thing — everyone from colonel to drummer boy was safely past the upper military age limit of forty-five years. (Many of the men were over sixty, some were in their seventies, and one sprightly private confessed to the age of eighty.)

This was Iowa’s famous “Graybeard Regiment,” recruited by special arrangement with the War Department as a means of showing that there were plenty of draft-proof citizens who were perfectly willing to go to war. There was a tacit understanding that the regiment would be given guard and garrison duty as much as possible, but there was nothing binding about this. The 37th was in no sense a home-guard outfit; it had enlisted for the full three years and eventually it was to campaign in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hiking in the rain and sleeping in the mud like anybody else. During its three years only scattered detachments got into actual fighting — the total casualty list was only seven — but 145 men died of disease, and 364 had to be mustered out of service for physical disability, and when the regiment at last was paid off, in May of 1865, it was revealed that more than thirteen hundred sons and grandsons of members of the regiment were in Federal military service. So old were these men, and so young their state, that not a man in the regiment could claim Iowa as his birthplace. There had been no Iowa when these Iowans were born.
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An army surgeon in a Kentucky regiment who went down the river with McClernand’s flotilla and saw Sherman’s men just after their repulse at Chickasaw Bluffs noticed no signs of depression among them. Instead, he found these soldiers “the noisiest crowd of profane-swearing, dram-drinking, card-playing, song-singing, reckless, impudent daredevils in the world.” An Illinois recruit who came to the army at this time said that the men thought more of Sherman than of any other man alive but that they never raised a cheer for him when he rode along the lines.
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For the Westerners did not often cheer their generals. In the Army of the Potomac it was different. During the McClellan regime, staff officers would ride ahead of the commanding general when he was about to make an appearance, and would see to it that a cheer was raised; a cheer was accepted as part of the routine, and for the most part the men offered it willingly enough. Officers sometimes went to great lengths
in this business. When the Irish Brigade was paraded to get its first look at its new division commander, General Israel B. Richardson (who was to be killed at Antietam), a member of Richardson’s staff galloped over to the brigade just before the general arrived and made a speech about Richardson’s many virtues.

“And what do you think of the brave old fellow?” he demanded. “He has sent to this camp three barrels of whiskey, a barrel for each regiment, to treat the boys of the brigade, and we ought to give him a thundering cheer when he comes along.”

Naturally the Irishmen gave Richardson a tumultuous reception — not knowing that the staff officer had unblushingly lied to them and that no whiskey had been sent.
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The Easterners took their cue from McClellan, who liked cheering; the Westerners may have taken theirs from Grant, who didn’t care. An officer remembered seeing Grant one night while the army was crossing a bayou on a pontooon bridge during a forced march; he was in the saddle, solid, erect, and brown, keeping the traffic moving with repeated orders: “Push right along, men — close up fast and hurry over.” The men all turned to look at him, made note that the commanding general was in their midst, but said never a word. Looking back on it afterward, the officer mused: “Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar by theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.”
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The Westerners would go where the generals told them to go, and within reasonable limits they would do what the generals told them to do, but they insisted on being unmilitary about it. But when the Potomac soldiers flatly refused to cheer Burnside, it was a sign that they had written him off.

At Murfreesboro the time of sickness and depression did not last long. Rosecrans got his supply lines working in spite of the Rebel raiders and saw to it that there was plenty to eat. The men cut cedar boughs to shade and protect their tents, camps were made clean and were kept well policed, and before long an Ohio private was confessing that “we may be said to have enjoyed all the comforts which can fall to a soldier’s lot.” The army had been badly mangled at Stone’s River; Rosecrans was going to let it get plenty of rest before it began a new campaign. He carried this prescription so far, indeed, that by spring both Halleck and Grant were complaining that his army was not pulling its weight.

Rosecrans himself had put in some of his spare time examining statistics,
as a result of which he told his troops that they were going to have to brush up on their marksmanship. In the Stone’s River fight, he said, a comparison of Federal ammunition expenditures with Confederate casualties showed that it had taken 145 rounds of musketry to hit one Rebel and that a Yankee cannon had to be fired twenty-seven times to inflict a single casualty.
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A resident of Tennessee who had seen a good deal of both Union and Confederate armies wrote out a comparison of his own, basing much of it on what he saw in Rosecrans’s camps.

The Federal soldiers, he said, managed their camps better than the Confederates. Even if they were to be in a place only a few days, men would scurry around to build little beds — usually by driving forked sticks into the ground and laying saplings or planks across them — and they would build little shelters for their cooking stoves. Confederates seldom bothered with such comforts. Where a Union camp would be bustling with activity, a Confederate camp was apt to be a scene of idle relaxation. Union animals were better fed and groomed than those in a southern camp; guns and equipment were kept better polished, and the camp itself was usually cleaner.

But the Confederates were incomparably the more orderly. A Confederate detachment might camp in a place for weeks, without a single hen roost being the poorer; but “when the Union troops came around we all had to look out for our money, jewels, watches, vegetables, pigs, cows and chickens.” Much of the Federal looting was senseless, with men taking things that could be of no earthly use to them. The Tennessean remembered one outfit that stole a shipment of two hundred Bibles and then tore the books up and used them to build fires. The Tennessean believed that these Federal habits developed partly because the men felt themselves to be in enemy country, where anything was fair game, and partly because the Yankee armies contained so many foreign-born and so much “riff-raff from the large cities.”
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One Confederate very well qualified to pass on soldierly attributes was studying the western armies that winter — Joseph E. Johnston, recovered now from the wound that had put him out of action at Seven Pines, and sent west by Jefferson Davis to co-ordinate the efforts of Bragg’s and Pemberton’s armies. Johnston did not enjoy this assignment; the armies were quite a distance apart, it was almost impossible for one man to exercise any real control over both, and most of the decisions he had to make were, he felt, policy matters on which Richmond itself ought to pass. Anyway, Johnston had been comparing the Federal armies in Tennessee with the Army of the Potomac back in Virginia, and he was warning the Confederate Secretary of War not to underestimate the Westerners who were serving under Grant — “his
troops are worth double the number of northeastern troops.”
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The Potomac army was being brought out of its black mood as winter drew on toward spring. Burnside was finally removed, and Joe Hooker at last got the command he had wanted so badly — got it, and a canny letter from Abraham Lincoln telling him that those cracks about the need for a dictatorship had been heard and would be remembered and that what was wanted from Hooker was military victory, as soon as possible.

Somewhat to everyone’s surprise (for the man was thought to be nothing more than a hard-driving fighter), Hooker turned out to be a first-rate military administrator. His contribution to the ultimate northern victory, indeed, was not really a matter of fighting at all; it consisted in the fact that he got the Army of the Potomac back on its feet, shook the kinks out of it, and left for his successors a first-rate fighting machine that would go on functioning to the end of the war.

Hooker did all of this by a common-sense process of removing the causes of bad morale.

The camps were laid out anew, the old pigsty bunkhouses were abandoned, and Hooker’s inspectors saw to it that the soldiers lived in as much comfort and cleanliness as a winter camp might afford. The commissary system was overhauled so that vegetables and potatoes and fresh meat reached camp in quantity; scurvy disappeared, and a clean and well-fed army suddenly discovered that it did not have nearly as much sickness as it had had before. At the same time, Hooker reformed the hospital system so that sick men could get decent care and food, and the appalling death rates abruptly came down.

Hooker’s men had been almost unendurably homesick, and so Hooker gave them furloughs. (Most of the desertions that had been taking place were caused not so much by a conscious decision to leave the army as by a simple desire to get home and see the folks.) At the same time, he tightened up on the security system so that real deserters would have a much harder time getting away from camp.

Finally, Hooker put everybody to work. There were drills — company and battalion drills, brigade and division drills — hour after hour, day after day, with big reviews on weekends and all the pomp and grandeur of war to raise men’s spirits. Cavalry was reorganized as a unified corps and was told that the commanding general expected it to get out and fight. Cavalry rose to the occasion. Before long even the captious Federal infantry was admitting that “our cavalry is something to talk about now,” and was confessing that “Hooker is entitled to the credit of making the cavalry of use instead of ornament.”
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As all of this happened, the Army of the Potomac began to cheer again. Hooker would stage enormous reviews, with whole army corps
marching back and forth on the dusty plains above the river; sometimes President Lincoln would be there, listening with a faint sense of unease to Hooker’s boasts that this was “the finest army on the planet” and that the question was not whether the army would capture Richmond but simply
when
. There was a great jubilant shouting when Hooker rode along the lines. The man had an air; he saw to it that his staff and escort were well mounted and neatly garbed, and to men who thought themselves disillusioned about war he brought back an enduring touch of the color and flashing gaiety of war’s romance. He made army life exciting, and under the excitement he infused a sense of great power and growing strength.

The careful, cautious soldiers were being weeded out. McClellan was gone, the cries of the soldiers who adored him still echoing in his ears, and the kind of war he was able to fight was gone forever. Buell was gone, as well, his kind of war also done for; and the War Department was bearing down brutally to prove to reluctant officers that the day of hard war had arrived. Fitz-John Porter who had led McClellan’s V Corps so ably on the peninsula, had been cashiered, convicted by court-martial of refusing to carry out John Pope’s orders at Second Bull Run. The facts that his conviction and sentence were outrageously unjust and that Pope had in his befuddlement issued impossible orders were beside the point; Porter was simply a victim, beheaded to show the career soldiers that the administration was very much in earnest. Ruthlessly trampling a man underfoot, the administration was also trampling down (as one combat veteran put it) “the damnable heresy that a man can be a friend to the government and yet throw every clog in the way of the administration and prosecution of the war.”
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