American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Soldiers occupied their spare hours in time-honored ways: grumbling, gambling, sleeping, reading, foraging, cleaning equipment, washing clothes. Confederate men, it was said, had a special love for singing. Eating was another diversion, but not a very pleasant one. During the early years of the war, soldiers lived mainly on the old army ration of salt pork or beef, hard bread or hardtack, coffee, dried peas or beans, and in the South, grits. Hardtack was a grim joke; it could hardly be broken by teeth or hand, and was best mastered by soaking in soup or water. Especially in the North, as the Union commissary became better organized, the old rations were supplemented with vegetables and fruit. After authorities sent appeals throughout the Northwest for food to prevent scurvy, hundreds of barrels of vegetables, jellies, and dried fruit were soon on their way down the Mississippi to Grant’s regiments. Both Yanks and Rebs lived off the country, picking berries in season, stealing from orchards and gardens, buying from the ever-present sutlers. Cooking was often improvised.

  Improvising, indeed, was the test of the good soldier—resourcefulness in adjusting to new conditions, ingeniously rigging up devices for keeping warm, cooking food, procuring clean water, washing clothes, warding off insects. He was a jack-of-all-trades, mending his clothes, tending to horses, cutting wood, digging fortifications, rigging up shelters, keeping his rifle clean by greasing it with a piece of bacon. Sometimes he had to rise to heights of inventiveness, as when Pennsylvania volunteers ran an entire mining operation, from surveying the ground to setting the charges, or when other infantrymen—mostly landlubbers—took over an enemy riverboat and ran it.

  The army, above all, was a school for practical affairs, where men learned the arts of survival through organization, self-discipline, leadership, followership, collective and cooperative effort. The war had an immense nationalizing and homogenizing impact, bringing together not only Westerners and Easterners but farmers and industrial workers, teachers and storekeepers, college students and common laborers. The war was a geography lesson in which men from Maine occupied islands off Texas, men from Florida marched through the fields of Pennsylvania, men from New Orleans discovered snow and snowballs. The war was a regional exchange in which accents, attitudes, habits collided, coexisted, even coalesced. To a degree the war was a leveling process, though racial and class conflicts persisted and occasionally erupted. Ultimately habits and outlooks were reshaped that would prove indispensable in the organization of the nation’s industrial and financial life in later years. Future workshops of peace were being shaped in the workshops of war.

  Well before dawn, sergeants roused men lying in tents and hutments or in the open. Soldiers stumbled about in the dark as they choked down hardtack, collected their rifles, buckled on their cartridge boxes. Slowly, in thick underbrush, in ravines, out on open fields, men came into formations, answered roll calls, made contact with flanking units. Behind, cannons began to rumble, firing into the darkness ahead. Men waited, fear collecting in their stomachs.

  As dawn broke, officers galloped along the lines. They wheeled about to bring regiments in line, paused to exhort the soldiers standing with rifles at the ready: “Do your duty today like brave men.” Then the command: “Load at will—load.” The roar of battle mounted, sweeping down the lines like the rush of thundershowers across the hard ground of a stubble field, a soldier remembered.

  Then the command to attack. The infantrymen moved out, at first almost perfectly dressed as officers and noncoms ranged back and forth, herding them like sheep. Soldiers’ hearts strengthened as they marched onto the field of battle and saw endless formations of their comrades to the left and right, moving, as one noted, in great billowing waves, their gun barrels and bayonets shining like burnished steel.

  It was after watching such a scene as this at Fredericksburg—in the rear, row after row of artillery spurting flame and smoke, columns of thick black smoke rising far up into the sky, “the massed formations of more than a hundred thousand infantry,” in Nevins’s words, their uniforms and rifles glistening in the sun, with “endless orderly parks of white-topped wagons and ambulances” behind—that Lee remarked to General James Longstreet, “It is well that war is terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.”

  As the attackers marched toward the enemy and fell, officers continued to dress the lines in order to keep contact and intensify the shock effect on the foe. As enemy fire intensified and the attacking lines broke, officers organized short rushes and little flanking attacks. Rarely did men get close enough to use the bayonet. Under withering fire soldiers crawled into holes, pulled back in panic, disappeared in the smoke and dust of battle. Panting, cursing, shouting, their faces caked with sweat and grime, men cried out to one another, but few words could be heard in the inferno of gunfire, cannon roar, whinnying horses, shrieks and groans of wounded men. Soon the battle broke down into numberless tiny encounters in the dust and smoke, without apparent shape or meaning. “Nobody sees a battle,” a soldier reflected.

  In this hell the rifleman was king. Heavy artillery usually failed to soften up defenses—though small pieces on the line spewing out canister could be effective, and cavalry attacks were dramatic and might turn an enemy’s flank. But nothing could substitute for the foot soldier. He did not feel like a king, except that as the struggle swayed back and forth, he tried to build a tiny realm of his own by scooping out a shallow hole or kneeling behind a tree. Here he had a chance to rearm his muzzle-loader by pulling a paper-wrapped cartridge from his box or pouch, tearing open the paper with his teeth, pouring the powder down the barrel and pushing a bullet after it, punching both down with his ramrod, then half-cocking the hammer, putting a percussion cap on the nipple, cocking the hammer, aiming, firing. Most of this he might do while lying on his back, amid the whine of bullets.

  By evening the once-virgin fields, now reeking of the stink and smoke of battle, were littered with discarded rifles, cartridge boxes, knapsacks, mess kits, canteens, parts of uniforms—were strewn also with dead and wounded men and stricken horses. The only sign of earlier formations might lie in the disposition of the dead; at Gettysburg a Confederate officer was sickened to find seventy-nine of his comrades “laying dead in a straight line … perfectly dressed … the feet of all these dead men were in a perfectly straight line,” though some had fallen forward and some back.

  Through the night, wounded men begged piteously for water and succor. But help to the wounded was slow to come, and heavy-handed when it did. Battlefield treatment was chaotic, according to McPherson. “Regimental musicians (many of them younger than eighteen), cooks, teamsters, and other noncombatants were detailed as stretcher-bearers; and civilians were frequently employed as ambulance drivers. More often than not, these men and boys bolted in panic when the fighting became hot, leaving the wounded to lie untended for hours or days.” But nothing could match the torment awaiting those who needed surgery. Amid flickering candles in borrowed wagon sheds or cow barns, men lay on stretchers or on the floor, the cut, maimed, and dying mixed together, some with open wounds covered with flies or maggots, some crying “help” or “doctor” or “God,” others silent but following the doctors’ movements with their pleading eyes. Off to the side stood the surgeons, their gowns and bare arms soaked in blood, cutting and sawing away flesh and bone, as assistants held the patients down and applied ether, chloroform, or whiskey. To the side lay little piles of fingers, feet, legs, arms.

  Gangrene often developed from battlefield conditions, infected instruments, pus-stained coats, sheets, surgical silk. Even with all these battlefield deaths, however, twice as many soldiers died of diseases as in battle. Camp conditions were often atrocious—bad water and food, mosquitoes, poor sanitation. Flies and rats abounded. Soldiers relieved themselves in an open trench or a few feet from their tents. Knowing little if anything about bacteria, officers and men allowed garbage, slops, refuse, horse manure to pile up around camps. Men would go weeks without changing their clothes or even bathing. Countrymen suffered more f
rom illness than city boys, evidently because the latter had already been exposed to more diseases, and the death rate from disease was almost twice as high among black soldiers as white.

  Soldiers’ health improved toward the end of the war, but far more in the North than in the South. The key to this difference was the work of the United States Sanitary Commission, and central to the Commission was the work of women. No mere “sanitation” agency but a huge national effort embracing thousands of local auxiliaries and led by men of such diverse talents as Henry W. Bellows and Frederick L. Olmsted, the Commission raised millions of dollars, recruited nurses and doctors for army hospitals, bought and distributed huge quantities of food, clothing, and medicine, staffed and operated hospital boats and trains—and taught soldiers why and how to use latrines and purify water. Organized in the teeth of hostility from some of the “old army” functionaries but applauded in Congress and in the ranks, the Commission led in the modernization and vast extension of the hospital and ambulance system and in the appointment of an outstanding Surgeon General, William A. Hammond.

  Inspired by the dauntless Florence Nightingale of the Crimean War—a bloodletting in which the ratio of disease to battle deaths was four to one—American women brooked male and female hostility, army bureaucracy, and the dangers of hospital life to bring both professionalism and compassion to the care of sick and wounded. Over 3,000 women served as army nurses in the North, despite an edict by the first head of female nurses, Dorothea Dix, longtime reformer of insane asylums, barring all applicants for nursing who were under thirty and not “plain of appearance.” While slave women served in Southern army hospitals from the start, the Confederacy was slow to authorize women nurses. Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity trained a host of nurses for the Northern army.

  Women worked in general hospitals and—more glamorously and dangerously—in field hospitals just behind the front. Eliza Howland helped convert the Patent Office in Washington into an improvised general hospital. Women nurses and their aides made beds out of large tables, spreading mattresses also on the floors, amid glass cases filled with patent churns, cogwheels, waterwheels, clocks, and mousetraps. Provisions had to be hoisted up outside the building, and Washingtonians gaped at baskets of vegetables and huge chunks of bread creeping up the marble face of the building. Inside, on a Sunday afternoon, Eliza Howland nursed a soldier through a delirium during which he called her Betty—“and, to our surprise, got well, went home, and at once married the Betty we had saved him for.”

  If soldiers north and south feared anything more than becoming wounded, it was being taken prisoner—unless it was being wounded and captured. All the usual miseries of poor sanitation and shortages of food, shelter, and medicine were compounded in the prisoner-of-war camps. About 15 percent (30,000 men) of the Union prisoners died in their foe’s camps, about 12 percent of the Confederates. Part of this difference was due to declining Confederate supplies during the course of the war. Exchanges of prisoners ran up against fierce Southern opposition to treating black Federals as prisoners of war; rather, Richmond warned, they would be turned over to state authorities for possible execution. Toward the end of the war, however, exchanges mounted to almost a thousand a day, and the desperate Confederacy began to enlist slaves in its own armies.

  Lurid tales of prison conditions north and south inflamed passions on both sides. Thirteen thousand Union men died of exposure, malnutrition, disease, and neglect at the most notorious prison, Andersonville. Mainly, though, prison life was nasty, dull, brutish, and long. There were occasional moments of hope, even euphoria. Union soldiers in Libby Prison in Richmond had been thrown into despair on hearing from their jailers that the Confederates had won a great victory at Gettysburg. Then a black man bringing in food whispered that in fact the Union had won, leaving the enemy scattered. As the joyful word raced around the room, prisoners leaped to their feet in a paroxysm of delight, shouting and embracing one another. Chaplain Charles McCabe had read Julia Ward Howe’s new “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the Atlantic Monthly. Raising his powerful voice, he began:

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:

  His truth is marching on.

  Men were joining in the chorus, faces aglow as McCabe rendered the mighty lines: the “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel … sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat … Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet.” Then:

  In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

  With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

  As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

  While God is marching on.

  “Let Us Die to Make Men Free”

  By mid-1864, with Grant’s and Lee’s troops locked in tortured embrace around Petersburg, audacious generals on both sides broke loose elsewhere for spectacular forays.

  Hoping to take some of the pressure off the Northern siege of his Richmond-Petersburg bastion, Lee had sent his fellow Virginian, General Jubal A. Early, into the Shenandoah Valley, where Early routed a Union army and found his way open to the North—and Washington. Breaking through light Federal defensive forces, Early with 14,000 hardened troops crossed the Potomac and neared the northwest defenses of the Union capital. On an appeal from Lincoln, Grant dispatched a heavy force to drive the invaders out of the area; the President himself rode out to watch the impending battle and came briefly under fire. But Early, like a cool fox, retired with his strength largely intact, after levying a $220,000 tribute on Hagerstown and Frederick and burning Chambersburg when its citizens refused to cough up half-a-million. Appointed to a new Shenandoah command, General Philip Sheridan caught up with Early’s forces in the early fall, striking severe blows, and then proceeded to carry out Grant’s orders to ravage the Shenandoah.

  On May Day 1864 another general who preferred dash and maneuver, William Sherman, had stood poised five hundred miles southwest of Richmond behind a steep ridge twenty-five miles below Chattanooga, facing a smaller army under Joseph Johnston. Suddenly Sherman struck, not at the strongly entrenched Confederates but around them. There followed one of the most masterly campaigns in the history of war. Manipulating three armies as lightly as bayonets, feinting Johnston out of position, cutting back from right to left to center to right again, sideslipping around the enemy’s flanks but never too far from the little single-track railroad that meandered toward Atlanta, Sherman repeatedly forced Johnston to fall back toward the key economic and political center of Georgia. By mid-July, Sherman’s men were nearing the capital.

  Furious over Johnston’s retreats, fearful that this Confederate general, with whom he had long feuded, would give up Atlanta without a real fight, Jefferson Davis sacked him and named a more aggressive commander, John Bell Hood, thirty-three years old and already half crippled from earlier battles, to hold the line. Hood struck forcefully at Sherman’s approaching columns, but to no avail. Soon Union troops enveloped Atlanta by swinging fifteen miles to the south of it, and occupied this key hub. But now it was Sherman’s turn to be frustrated. Although Sherman wired Washington, “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Hood managed to keep his force intact and eventually moved north of Atlanta, where he threatened Sherman’s railroad line. By early fall it seemed to many in the North that Sherman was as tied down in the Atlanta area as Grant was in Petersburg.

  But the view from Richmond was far from sanguine. Grant’s and Meade’s troops were being held east of Petersburg—they had blown a tremendous hole in the Confederate lines with four tons of gunpowder, only to bungle their attempt to rush through the breach—but the men in blue were slowly edging their way across Lee’s communication lines south of the city. The Union blockade of Southern ports grew ever tighter. Inflation raged throughout the South; civilian morale san
k; the men in gray lacked clothing, food, even shoes. By September President Davis admitted that two-thirds of his soldiers were absent, most of them “without leave.” Davis was threatening the vaunted liberties of his countrymen by stepping up suspensions of habeas corpus, and shocking them by proposing the arming of slaves.

  And in the major cities, the endless trains arrived bearing the dead and dying and wounded. Mary Chesnut was now back in her native state of South Carolina and worked mornings in the Columbia hospital. She could hardly stand the sight of the “loathsome wounds, distortion, stumps of limbs exhibited to all and not half cured.” But she marveled at the men’s spirit. When she told one soldier, his arm taken off at the socket, that he should quit the army, he flared: “I am First Texas. If old Hood can go with one foot, I can go with one arm. Eh?”

  Nor could Lincoln in the White House escape the anguish of war. Day after day onto wharfs along the Potomac, boats disgorged the walking, tottering wounded, followed by men carrying pine coffins or stiff forms under sheets. There they were swallowed up among throngs of anguished relatives, ambulance men and volunteer nurses, undertakers looking for business. From the river and from the train stations, ambulances carried the wounded to a dozen or so makeshift hospitals, where nurses and surgeons waited. One of the volunteers was Louisa May Alcott, working in an old Georgetown hotel. Like Mary Chesnut, she was repelled by the running, pus-ridden wounds and the amputations without ether, but she carried on. Walt Whitman wrote his mother about the soldiers broken down after years of exposure and bad food and water. “O it is terrible, & getting worse, worse, worse.”