by Bruce Catton
Smith had worked thirty-five years to get his own commission as a brigadier, and the idea that any officer might hesitate to accept such a thing stumped him. Why on earth, he asked, should Wallace not take it?
“Because,” confessed Wallace, “I don’t know anything about the duties of a brigadier.”
Smith blinked at him.
“This,” he said at last, “is extraordinary. Here I have been spending a long life to get an appointment like this one about which you are hesitating. And yet — that isn’t it. That you should confess your ignorance — good God!”
Then Smith reached for the decanter, poured Wallace a drink, and told him to accept the promotion and stop worrying. He dug into a table drawer, got out a copy of the United States Army Regulations, and declared that a general should know these rules “as the preacher knows his Bible.” Then he went on to sum up his own soldierly philosophy in words which Wallace remembered:
“Battle is the ultimate to which the whole life’s labor of an officer should be directed. He may live to the age of retirement without seeing a battle; still, he must always be getting ready for it exactly as if he knew the hour of the day it is to break upon him. And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he must fight!”9
Rebel troops were in Columbus, another column was coming up into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, and a growing Union force was established in Paducah. Kentucky’s neutrality by now had completely evaporated. The pro-Union legislature made it official, adopting a resolution directing Governor Magoffin to issue a proclamation ordering the secessionists out of the state. Magoffin, strong for the Confederacy, indignantly vetoed the measure, whereupon the legislature passed it over his veto, formally invited the Federal government to help expel the southern invaders, and ordered volunteers recruited to meet the state’s quota. The Richmond government countered by sending General Albert Sidney Johnston out to take top command in the West, and a Confederate force occupied Bowling Green and sent out patrols which burned a bridge within thirty-three miles of Louisville. Fort Sumter hero Robert Anderson established Union headquarters in Louisville; then his health collapsed and he had to retire from active duty, and Federal command passed to another of General Smith’s old protégés, a red-haired bristling general named William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman had inherited a perplexing job. Except for Smith’s forces at Paducah, which was out of his bailiwick, there were very few responsible troops in Kentucky, most of the midwestern levies having been sent either to Missouri or Virginia during the period of Kentucky’s neutrality. Sherman had a couple of thousand of the Kentuckians who had been training on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, he had scattering groups of home guards, and there were a few regiments which the prodigious William Nelson had been assembling at Camp Dick Robinson. None of these was ready for active service, and the green regiments which Indiana’s Governor Morton was hurrying down were in no better case. The 38th Indiana, as a sample, was sent to Kentucky just three days after it had been mustered into service, and one of its members wrote acidly that “all the regiment lacked of being a good fighting machine was guns, ammunition, cartridge boxes, canteens, haversacks, knapsacks, blankets, etc., with a proper knowledge of how all these equipments could be used with effect.”10
All the information Sherman could get indicated that large, well-equipped, adequately trained Confederate armies were about to come sweeping up from Tennessee to overrun the entire state. (The rumors were wild exaggerations, but Sherman did not know that until later.) For a short time Louisville itself seemed to be in danger; Confederate Simon Buckner was advancing on the city along the line of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. (His force was so small that two troop trains served to carry it, but the Federals did not realize this.) Providentially, Buckner was delayed — by a patriotic citizen who removed a rail from the track, thus derailing the leading train — until Sherman could get a makeshift force out to meet him; upon which Buckner withdrew, and the panic was over. But it did seem clear that the Rebel commanders in the West had most aggressive intentions.
Sherman was in a bad mood. He was tense, nervous, given to worry; the grim singleness of purpose that marked him later in the war had not yet appeared. Like Grant, he had something to live down. He had resigned from the army in the 1850s and had tried various business ventures, all of which had failed. In St. Louis, a couple of years before the war, Sherman had referred to himself bitterly as “a dead cock in a pit”; now he may have been uneasily conscious that his general’s commission had come to him largely because his more successful brother, John Sherman, was an important Republican senator.
Sherman worried most about the enlisted men in his command. They were woefully untrained, and it seemed to him that to send them into battle — which he might have to do any day — would be plain murder. The sketchy Kentucky cavalry regiments were so busy scouting and patrolling that they had no time for drill. The 1st Kentucky, hastily recruited by a lawyer-politician named Frank Wolford, rode about the countryside without uniforms, armed with infantry muskets, so innocent of proper military usage that when Wolford wanted them to start marching he shouted: “Git up and git!” while he got them from marching column into line of battle by ordering: “Form a line of fight!”11
The farm boys who were grouped together in the volunteer regiments were suffering from the usual camp diseases such as measles. Sanitation and proper medical care seemed to be nonexistent in most camps, and regimental officers who owed their commissions to politics (as practically all of them did) knew not the first thing about taking care of them. An officer in the 53rd Ohio, reporting to Sherman about this time, was surprised to hear the general bark: “How long do you expect to remain in the service?” The officer replied that his regiment had enlisted for three years and expected to serve out its time. “Well, you’ve got sense,” said Sherman. “Most of you fellows come down here intending to go home and go to Congress in about three weeks.” When the officer asked where the regiment should camp, Sherman gestured at the surrounding landscape and said: “Go anywhere — it’s all flat as a pancake and wet as a sponge.” (This, said the regimental historian, was entirely true.)12
Problems of discipline were peculiar. The 3rd Ohio went into camp minus its colonel, who preferred to linger in Louisville. In his absence the lieutenant colonel, who had ideas about discipline, reduced a number of incompetent non-coms to the ranks and stirred up so much antagonism that the enlisted men circulated a petition calling on him to resign and roused all the folks back home — lifelong friends and neighbors of the luckless officer — to write indignant letters to him. The missing colonel then let the men know that if the harsh lieutenant colonel were just dismissed he himself would take the regiment back to Ohio to rest and recruit and would see to it that it was outfitted with gaudy Zouave uniforms. In the end, Sherman got the colonel sent home and the unpopular lieutenant colonel was retained and supported, but the whole flare-up was symptomatic. The raw material of the Federal army in Kentucky had no idea whatever of what soldiering was going to be like.13
It seemed to Sherman that these untaught boys were going to be sacrificed, and his feeling came out now and then in unexpected ways. An Indiana sergeant was detailed for a job at headquarters. When he finished it, Sherman said: “Sergeant, I hear you are short of rations over in your camp.” The sergeant said that this was so, and Sherman told him to wait and went bustling out to the kitchen. He came back in a minute with two slabs of buttered bread, a thick cut of ham between them, and two red apples. Giving these to the sergeant, he said: “There, that will put some fat on your ribs.”14
If the regimental officers were incapable of training their soldiers, professionals who could do the job were beginning to appear; most notably a West Point classmate of Sherman (and thus still another at General Smith’s former charges) named George Thomas, who was put in charge of operations at Camp Dick Robinson.
Thomas was a Virginian, forty-five years old, tal
l and stout and reserved in manner; he rarely laughed or raised his voice, he had a majestic full beard and a general air of kindly sternness, he moved with ponderous deliberation, and altogether he was extremely impressive in appearance. His army friends called him “Old Tom,” and his troops referred to him as “Old Slow Trot” — he had hurt his spine in a railroad accident a few months earlier, and it gave him excruciating pain when his horse moved faster than a walk. He was inclined to distrust volunteers and he was very stiff about matters of training; not for months would his men give him the affectionate title, “Pap,” by which he was to become famous.15
He had been much admired by Jefferson Davis when Davis was Secretary of War, and in 1855 when the crack 2nd Cavalry was organized with Albert Sidney Johnston as colonel and Robert E. Lee as lieutenant colonel, Thomas became one of its majors. In January 1861 he suspected that his spinal ailment might make active duty impossible, and in casting about for possible employment he wrote to the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, applying for the post of commandant of cadets there. This was remembered against him in Washington after Virginia seceded, and the War Department was inclined to doubt his loyalty. Sherman himself had vouched for him; now Thomas was under him, helping get troops ready for the serious fighting which everybody knew must begin in the spring.
It would begin, actually, long before the spring, and when it began it would be very rough. And there were, here in this Kentucy sector, these generals who had imbibed old General Smith’s doctrine: “… he must always be getting ready for it … And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he must fight!”
Chapter Four
TO MARCH TO TERRIBLE MUSIC
1. Sambo Was Not Sambo
THERE was a significance in the crossing of the Ohio River. North of the river was the familiar Middle West; beyond it there was nothing less than the South itself, mysterious, romantic, threatening, strange. The nearest Confederate armies might be scores of miles away, with no faintest intention of coming any closer. No matter: when a soldier crossed the river he felt that he was in the war.
Thousands of sunburned boys in ill-fitting blue uniforms were crossing the Ohio this fall, for Kentucky was the destined point of departure and the government was hastening to build up Union strength in the state. Nervous General Sherman had warned the Secretary of War that before they got through they would have to have two hundred thousand soldiers on this front. His panicky overestimate unsettled the authorities so much that they concluded Sherman was too flighty for his job, and he was replaced by the less emotional General Don Carlos Buell; and for a time Sherman hovered unhappily on the fringes of the war, a general without portfolio, alleged by unfriendly newspaper correspondents to be insane. But although his estimate of required strength had been rejected, the government nevertheless was getting troops into the state as fast as the training camps could send them. (By the war’s end it would turn out that Sherman’s wild appraisal was tolerably accurate, after all.)
The new arrivals were the greenest of recruits, and they came into Kentucky peering nervously about for enemies, tasting the wild excitement of the road to war, seeing a miraculous tonic quality in the sunrise and the crisp autumn wind. Even their officers felt it, even the West Pointers. Ormsby Mitchel, who had been graduated from the military academy in the same class with Robert E. Lee, had left the army to become an astronomer of note and now came to Kentucky as a grizzled brigadier bearing the nickname of “Old Stars” — even Mitchel felt it as he looked about his brigade camp at dawn and saw a haunting mist on the landscape: “Reveille is just sounding from forty drums and fifes and from twenty bugles, all over an area two miles square. It is just coming daylight, but the moon makes it bright as day even at this early hour. The smoke of the campfires spreads a gauzy veil over the white tents sleeping in the moonlight, illumined here and there by an early fire.…”1
They were a heavy-handed and irrepressible lot, these Unionists. There was the 18th Illinois, which was under orders to march away from Cairo when one soldier murdered a comrade. The soldiers immediately took things into their own hands; hustled the colonel off to town on some trumped-up errand, then formed an impromptu court, appointed members of the regiment as attorneys for prosecution and defense, tried the culprit, and forthwith sentenced him to death. The lieutenant colonel led them into a wood, where the murderer was immediately hanged from a convenient tree. When someone suggested that after hanging a proper length of time the man ought to be given a grave, the officer agreed: “Damned good idea. Dig one under him as he hangs and drop him into it.” It was done, the lifeless body was buried, the colonel presently came back from town, and the regiment went off to the wars.2
The impatience was characteristic, although the results were not often so grim. Another Illinois regiment, training at Cairo, was sent across the Mississippi each day to practice the manual of arms, loading and firing with blank cartridges, and after a few days of it the colonel went to General Grant with a complaint:
“General, I can’t take my boys over there to practice any more unless you will furnish us with some real cartridges. For two days past they have attacked those — — weeds and there they stand, as saucy and defiant as ever.” Grant chuckled and issued ball cartridges. Next evening the colonel reappeared, all jubilant, to report: “General, there isn’t a —— weed left standing in front of my command. Now you can turn us loose on the southern Confederacy as quick as you please!”3
As far as the soldiers were concerned the Confederacy began on the southern border of the Ohio River. That Kentucky had maintained a painful neutrality for months meant nothing; that a majority of her citizens now favored the Union rather than the Confederacy meant nothing, either; it was a slave state, and although they had not enlisted to put down slavery, these Middle Westerners felt instinctively that slave territory was enemy territory. As they disembarked at Louisville and marched off through the town the files looked about them in nervous excitement for signs of hostility. The 51st Indiana chuckled when one private, thus marching up a city street, remarked aloud that he wished he could see one real, live Rebel. Instantly a two-hundred-pound Amazon of a woman stepped out from the pavement, came up to him with brandished fists, and cried: “Well, sir, here’s one! What do you want?”
Camp life was taking on its own routine. The big conical Sibley tents, each one large enough to house an entire squad, dotted the meadows, set off by crude charcoal signs: “Bull Pups,” “Bengal Tigers,” “Wild Cats.” At dawn the camps rang with a rhythmical, tinny clangor as the men took the unground coffee beans that made up such an important part of their rations, put them in tin pails, and ground the beans by pounding them with musket butts. Sutlers set up their tents near the company streets, selling indigestible pies, gingerbread, and candy, and it was noticed that hungry boys who patronized them lost appetite for army hardtack and bacon, came down with digestive upsets, and trailed off on sick call. Stray colored men, somehow escaped from bondage, began to filter into the camps, and many of these were pressed into service as company cooks. It was learned that surplus coffee from the army ration was as good as money, and soldiers used it to buy Dutch ovens, potatoes, vegetables, and chickens for these cooks to use.4
The colored people were beginning to influence men’s attitude toward war. Most of these western regiments had very little anti-slavery sentiment as such. They had enlisted to save the Union or because, being young, they had had a special receptivity to the drums and trumpets and cheering crowds, or perhaps just plain for fun, and the peculiar institution had meant nothing much to them one way or the other. Yet here they were, in what they considered to be the South, and there were colored folk all about them; and it began to seem that in the great fight to put down disunion these colored folk were allies, pathetically eager to help, very useful on occasion. Company E of the 33rd Illinois remembered a tour of duty in Missouri when a collection of rifles and a handful of Confederate recruits had been rounded u
p on somebody’s plantation. Unable to think of anything better, the company commander had equipped the plantation’s slaves with the rifles and had them march the captives back to camp, only to draw a stiff reprimand from army authorities, who castigated him for doing “what the President of the United States had not seen fit to do — liberate and arm the slaves.” The prisoners had been released and the slaves had been sent back to servitude, and Company E still felt that there was something about the deal that was not quite right.5
Runaway slaves would come into camp, and the men would try to hide them — moved, apparently, by nothing much more than sympathy for men who had found every man’s hand against them. It was official policy at that time to return all fugitives to their lawful owners, and in most detachments the policy was enforced. Little by little the soldiers began to feel that returning fugitive slaves was helping the rebellion; they objected to it, and some outfits were brought almost to mutiny by the orders, although under ordinary circumstances the men were as ready as any to draw the color line. Slowly but surely the idea began to dawn: these slaves are on our side, and in a state where people keep both Union and Confederate flags and display the one which on any given day seems most likely to be advantageous, these men with dark skins are the ones we can count on as friendly.
Not that the colored people got much out of it. The soldiers felt themselves to be immeasurably superior to all people whose skins were not white, and they had much pride of race. The 77th Illinois laughed at a group of officers who, touched by feelings of romance on a moonlight evening, went to the handsomest mansion in town, stood beneath its windows, and sang sentimental serenades very prettily (encouraged by handkerchiefs and scarves waving from opened windows) until their wind gave out; after which a colored maid came to the front door, thanked them for their effort, and said she was “sorry de white folks weren’t at home to hear it.” A Wisconsin soldier moodily confessed in a letter home: “The black folks are awful good, poor miserable things that they are. The boys talk to them fearful and treat them most any way and yet they can’t talk two minutes but tears come to their eyes and they throw their arms up and praise de Lord for de coming of de Lincoln soldiers.” This same Wisconsin boy admitted that he was greatly surprised to find that none of these slaves had ever heard any of Stephen Foster’s “colored” songs.6