by Bruce Catton
Nelson had been feuding with Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, a diligent Republican and one of the party leaders whose support Lincoln was not on any account going to forfeit. Davis (whose quarrel with Nelson was relatively unimportant — one man was overbearing and the other was insubordinate, and both were hot-tempered) was one of Morton’s pets. Buell, who was outraged and was demanding justice, had just had to beat a somewhat inglorious retreat all across Tennessee; furthermore, he had had sharp arguments with Tennessee’s Union war governor, a bitter-end anti-Confederate named Andrew Johnson, who considered him unsound and probably disloyal and who had a voice that would be heard in Washington. Because of all of this, nothing ever happened to Davis. He was not even spoken to harshly; instead, he was soon restored to duty and served throughout the war, a slim, dark-bearded man with haunted eyes, looked upon by subordinates with a certain amount of awe.4
Buell’s luck was not in, this fall, and it was at its worst when he tried to find a replacement for Nelson. He picked Charles C. Gilbert, a regular army captain of the crisp, take-his-name-sergeant variety, who in some vaguely irregular way had recently become a general. Buell and Gilbert believed that he was a major general, the War Department held that he was properly only a brigadier, and the United States Senate finally decided that he was no general at all, refusing to confirm his nomination and letting him slip back to his captaincy. But in his brief career as general Gilbert commanded a third of Buell’s army, and he offered a perfect illustration of the complete inability of a certain type of regular army officer to understand or to lead volunteer troops.
The army had been pushing along hard for days and the men were dead on their feet. Near midnight one exhausted column dropped by the roadside for a short breather when Gilbert and his staff went trotting by. Gilbert saw the sleeping men and was offended that nobody bothered to call them to attention and offer a salute so he collared the first officer he saw — a sleepy captain of infantry — and angrily demanded:
“What regiment is this?”
“Tenth Indiana.”
“Damn pretty regiment. Why in hell don’t you get up and salute me when I pass?”
“Who in the hell are you?”
“Major General Gilbert, by God, sir. Give me your sword, sir, you are under arrest.”
This racket roused the regiment’s colonel, who came up to defend his captain. Gilbert turned on him furiously, saying that he should have had the regiment lining the road at present-arms when the corps commander rode by. The colonel replied with some heat: his men had been marching day and night for a week, and he “would not hold a dress parade at midnight for any damn fool living.” The 10th Indiana, retorted Gilbert, was no better than an armed mob, and he would disgrace it; he would take its colors away that the army might know its shame.
The regiment was awake and on its feet by now, and the color sergeant took a hand in this row between colonel and major general. He would kill General Gilbert, he announced loudly, if he so much as touched the regiment’s colors. There was a loud murmur of approval, and one enlisted man shouldered his way up to General Gilbert and cried: “Here, you damned son of a bitch, get out of here or you’re a dead man.” Someone fired a musket, and some other person thrust a bayonet into Gilbert’s horse, causing the poor beast to spring in the air and take off at a headlong gallop. Gilbert’s staff followed, more horses were jabbed as they went by, and as the general disappeared in the darkness, still unsaluted, the 10th Indiana called after him, in confused angry chorus, that it would happily shoot him if it ever saw him again.… It took a certain knack to handle western volunteers, and not all regulars had it.5
On the evening of October 7, Buell had his army up near the town of Perryville, Kentucky, spraddled out on high ground west of the village along a stream known as Doctor’s Creek. Bragg’s Confederates were in and around Perryville, and apparently neither commander had a clear idea of what either he or his adversary was going to do next. The weather had been hot and water was scarce, advance elements of the two armies began to fight for possession of the pools of water in the little creek, and on October 8 they blundered into a battle that the generals neither desired nor understood.
The Confederates attacked the left end of Buell’s line with vigor, routed the greater part of one army corps, and brought on an unusually savage and expensive fight. On the Federal side there was an almost complete breakdown of communications, and Buell (who was several miles away) did not even know that a battle was going on until it was all over. He found out finally, at dusk, after he had lost some four thousand men. Concluding that the Confederates would renew the attack the next day, he made ready to receive them, and starchy General Gilbert (whose troops were accusing him of posting guards about the water holes to reserve the water supply for headquarters) pessimistically believed that the Confederates were about to win a great victory.
But Bragg had had enough. Kentucky had not risen to support him as he expected, there seemed to be armed Yankees all over the state, and — inexplicably — he abandoned his offensive plans just when he might have made something of them, and started his army back to Tennessee. A Confederate private, remarking that even if Perryville was a meaningless battle it was the hardest fight he was ever in, summed it up: “Both sides claim the victory — both whipped,” and Buell moved forward with great caution, not so much to pursue his antagonist as to escort him out of the state. A Union cavalryman wrote in disgust that his fellows believed Buell to be “either incompetent, a coward or a traitor.”6
In Washington both the White House and the War Department implored Buell to take off the wraps and show a little drive. Specifically they demanded that he march his army over into east Tennessee, as he had been ordered to do a solid year earlier. Buell agreed that there would never be real security for Kentucky (where he felt obliged to leave thirty thousand troops to guard communications and repel raids) until east Tennessee was occupied, but he remarked that there were problems. He could reach east Tennessee only by moving over two hundred miles of very bad mountain roads; he would need a supply train of ten thousand wagons, which he did not have, and the move would stir up a hornets’ nest anyway because the Rebels would consider it the most dangerous thrust of the war and would muster all their resources to stop it.
This did not placate Mr. Lincoln at all, and Buell got a very stiff note from Halleck: if east Tennessee was the heart of the enemy’s resources it might as well be the heart of Buell’s, and his army could support itself there if a Confederate army could. He could get his supplies from the countryside, seizing what he could not buy, which is just what Bragg was doing on his present retreat. The President, said Halleck sharply, “does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives and fight as he fights, unless we admit the inferiority of our troops and our generals.”7
Luckless Buell had all of McClellan’s fatal reluctance to move until everything was just so and, like McClellan, he was describing all of his deficiencies and putting an undue strain on presidential patience. Meanwhile, down in Mississippi there had been an important development.
From the Memphis area Grant had sent troops north to help Buell, and as a result he was short-handed; and while Bragg was moving up toward Perryville, Confederate Van Dorn with twenty-two thousand men swept in to recapture Corinth and knock out the keystone of Grant’s defensive line. There were perhaps twenty thousand Federals in Corinth, rattling around in the old defensive works Beauregard had laid out for an army two and a half times that large, and they were commanded by a heavy, red-faced, impulsive general named William S. Rosecrans, whom they were about to elevate to fame and a dazzling opportunity.
Rosecrans was a genial, likable sort; a West Pointer who was a little more excitable than a general ought to be but who was never in the least afraid of a fight. An Ohioan in his mid-forties, he had taught at West Point, had left the army to make money in business, and had come back in the spring of 1861 as captain of engineers; it was remembered
that he had helped McClellan lay out Ohio’s first camp for recruits back when the war was young. He was a devout Roman Catholic, brother to the Bishop of Cincinnati, and although Ohio Democrats offered to back him for office — even for the presidency — he steadfastly refused to mix politics with military matters.
At Corinth his troops put up an enormous fight. Van Dorn massed his assaulting column and drove it in over a partly cleared field littered with stumps and fallen timber. It broke the Union advance line and came to close quarters around a strong point called Battery Robinet, where men fired so fast that their muskets became too hot to handle and too foul with burned powder to be reloaded. Ohioans and Texans fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed muskets and fists, until at last the steam went out of the attack and Van Dorn’s men ran back, leaving the field strewn with broken bodies. That evening, October 4, the Confederate army drew off in retreat, and fiery Rosecrans visited Battery Robinet, bared his head, and told his soldiers: “I stand in the presence of brave men, and I take off my hat to you.”
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.”8
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.
2. There Was No Patience
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.”1
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.”2
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.3
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.”4
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 freak
ish 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.”