Living Hell
Page 8
For believers and skeptics alike, photography offered the comfort of sending home a likeness for about $1.50, ensuring that a tangible image of the soldier would survive. But some men found no consolations. A Confederate nurse divulged the death of a young soldier: “a melancholy case, he was very much frightened, & I’m told wept nearly all day yesterday.” She had been off duty but felt sorry her presence could not have helped “to ease his last moments. I havent a doubt he was some mothers pride, & perhaps her only prop & stay in this world tis too sad.”62
As we leave this section of the road we have marched down with the boys of 1861–65, let us recapture a few moments in the lives of ordinary individuals that illustrate the harsh experiences of campaigning. On a hot dirty road in Maryland in the summer of 1862, we pause to watch Alexander Haskell, a Rebel staff officer, leap from his horse to examine a straggler who has crawled into a fence corner. Perhaps he suspects malingering. But the boy cannot speak and barely breathes, choking because snotty dust clogs his mouth and nose. The officer tries frantically to clear the lad’s nostrils.63
We next peer over the shoulder of a Union regimental commander who has lost his drummer. The dead man had cared for the colonel during an illness and they developed a bond. The officer grieves because he wanted the family to have the remains, but “I cannot send the body home on account of the disease.” The drummer died of smallpox and requires immediate burial; not even shipment in a zinc-lined coffin, with a bed of charcoal to absorb putrefaction, becomes permissible when pox is on the loose.64
We drop in to eavesdrop on the boys of Company B, 33rd Alabama, Army of Tennessee, who wonder whether Private Alfred Bridges, who had severe bowel problems and just died of an opium overdose on August 12, 1862, committed self-murder. A comrade has heard that “He had some opium in his pocket and he took a large dose of it” (opium eased intestinal pain and helped firm soupy stool). Maybe death occurred accidentally, yet “they said he caused his own death.”65
Finally, we listen in to the scuttlebutt circulating in Company G of the 47th Ohio on a hot day in August 1861. A private has shot himself rather than face another grueling march under the sweltering Virginia summer sun. According to rumor, he said at the end that “if he was going to be killed by marches, he might as well die first as last.”66
That “last” he talked about, the end stage of the march, takes soldiers to the battlefield.
— CHAPTER THREE —
CLOSE-ORDER COMBAT
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THE ROADS DOWN WHICH MOST OF THE SOLDIERS TRUDGE through dust and mud propel them toward “the elephant,” the taste of battle. Many boys enlisted mainly to see this exotic beast. Only the greatest circuses featured an elephant so that, in the circumscribed world of plain folk, to have seen this fabulous creature gave extensive bragging rights. So, too, the volunteer might hope that participating in the circus of war would be uniquely exciting and confer some special status back home. In actuality, volunteers could find combat invigorating, but more frequently they found it horrifying, sometimes both. All were caught in terrible episodes where the elephant bellowed and trampled. Some veterans wrote of the experience, then or later. What they say may shock us, but we must not flinch away. For how can we hope to understand or profess to celebrate them if we do not confront what they endured?
When the mass armies, those mobile cities, collided, they wreaked havoc on one another. Developments that put great citizen armies in the field, such as the spread of democracy and innovations in manufacturing, also conspired to put many thousands on the firing lines and equip them with modern, efficient weapons that inflicted enormous casualties. Killing on an industrial scale had arrived. It is hard for us to conceive of the massive losses inflicted by modern arms. But we can do better than simply try to imagine the slaughter; we can relive it in the words of the combatants.
The standard 1860’s shoulder weapons look deceptively antique, akin to the flintlocks carried by earlier generations, such as the British Brown Bess or Tower musket, used from the seventeenth into the nineteenth centuries. This gun fired when the flint struck a spark from the lid of a pan containing gunpowder, causing a combustion that travelled through a touchhole to the charge in the barrel. Because of wear of the mechanism, dull flints, damp or clogged powder, flintlocks often misfired twice in the dozen. The military favored a smoothbore musket without the grooved tube that spins a rifle bullet to impart velocity and accuracy. Admittedly, a smoothbore’s effective killing range was only one hundred and fifty yards, and the ball could even fly wide over fifty yards. But the smoothbore was fast firing; the ball, inserted from the muzzle end, dropped easily down the firing tube as it had no rifling to fit, so a good musketeer could achieve two to three discharges per minute. These characteristics led officers to rely on rapid volume of unaimed fire delivered by packed ranks at “whites of eyes” range, backed up by the bayonet.
From the mid-eighteenth century on, armies issued rifles like the British Baker and American Pennsylvania, but to picked men only. Rifles remained true at a distance, they sustained accuracy for sniping, yet also had the deficit that they continued to be expensive to craft and slow to load. The ball had to be hand cast and painstakingly screwed or hammered down the rifling, which took about a minute-and-a-half, an unacceptably slow rate in close action.
By the mid-nineteenth century, three developments radically improved the standard issue weapon. First, precision machine tools made interchangeable parts that allowed economical mass-production of high-quality weapons. Second, by the Mexican War, a percussion mechanism began superseding the flintlock device. A metal cap containing an explosive charge fitted onto a nipple that replaced the powder pan. When hit by a hammer, the ignition in the cap fired a powder line from the nipple to the main load. Relatively immune to wet weather, the percussion musket, if kept clean, proved 99 percent efficient.
Third, fast-firing rifle bullets appeared, ones that dropped down the tube like a smoothbore load but, when propelled by the discharge, exited as a rifle round. This increased hitting power and accuracy to something like a thousand yards. Although attributed to a Frenchman, Claude E. Minié, who fitted the ball with a wooden base that swelled on discharge to embrace the rifling, James H. Burton, an American armorer, devised the version most used by Civil War soldiers. Burton’s conical lead bullet featured three concentric rings around a hollow base. When the charge fired, gases forced into the cavity pushed the rings out, making a smooth fit with the rifling. The troops dubbed the bullet a “minnie.” The leading percussion rifles, the U.S. .58-calibre Springfield and the British .577 Enfield, conveniently accepted the same round.
In 1861, many troops made do with percussion smoothbores, even flintlocks or shotguns, often loaded with buckshot and ball, deadly close in but erratic at longer range. Large quantities of dubious surplus weapons imported from abroad included used Belgian rifles reputed to be little better than bayonet stands. Steadily, Enfields and Springfields dominated. By 1862, repeating weapons like the Sharps and the Spencer carbine became available, especially in the North, but saw limited service as they expended ammunition at an unsustainable rate. Sharpshooters and cavalry mainly received repeating weapons to offset their disadvantage in numbers when opposing infantry. Troopers also carried revolving pistols, as did officers.
Artillery saw similar advances, both heavy guns in permanent installations and lighter pieces for fieldwork. Grouped in horse-drawn flying batteries, the latter included rifled iron guns, often firing a three-inch calibre shell, effective to a mile and a half. The 1862 Parrott rifle, throwing a 10 lb. projectile, proved particularly lethal. At closer range, the 12 lb. bronze or brass smoothbore Napoleon howitzer effectively smashed enemy formations.
The devastating firepower of the new weaponry might have been expected to change battlefield alignments. We would anticipate commanders spreading out the traditional blocks of men to provide less dense targets, and opening fire at longer ranges, breaking up attacks to avoid face-to-face
butchery. French Colonel Ardant du Picq advocated this adaptation in Battle Studies (1870). But during the Civil War, old practices dominated. Officers still packed men together in close-order columns or firing lines and withheld defensive fire until the enemy came within murderously short range. One study, based on eyewitness reports, estimates that, on average, musket volleys in the Civil War began at 127 yards’ range. In a 113-case sample, no units opened fire over 500 yards, 80 percent waited to 250 or less, 60 percent to 100 or fewer yards.1
Why so? It seems to be a general rule of human nature that our circumstances change faster than our ability to adapt to them. Many officers simply did not see an imperative need to alter. Further, they lacked full faith in citizen soldiers’ discipline under fire: troops spread into a skirmish line with yards between them would lack comforting shoulder-to-shoulder contact; unless highly trained, they might break under the stress of isolation. As late as 1876, crumbling morale on the extended skirmish line helped destroy the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn and British redcoats at Isandhlwana in 1879, panicking under Zulu attack.2
Regular officers often doubted the marksmanship of amateur levies, boxing them together as in the past to deliver a wall of fire in the enemy’s faces, hoping to land a knockout punch, even with indifferent musketry. At Ivy Mountain, Kentucky, in November of 1861, Colonel John S. Williams held fire until the Union advance reached pointblank range, inflicting “terrific slaughter” as each shot “took effect.” However, if you mauled without crushing the attacker, a savage and indecisive firefight usually ensued. In Gettysburg’s Wheatfield, July 1, 1863, the enemy formations exchanged savage volleys at 100 yards; “men were falling like leaves in a storm” and, according to an officer of the 23rd North Carolina, “blood ran like a branch.” Sometimes, as in the Virginia Wilderness fighting of 1864, discharges took place at muzzle point.3
Many officers also failed to register that defensive firepower had shifted the tactical advantage away from the offense. Military training, emphasizing study of the Napoleonic Wars, seemingly reinforced by the Mexican War experience, taught that vigorous battlefield attacks won decisive victories. But in a war where not just a professional army had to be beaten, but a whole people’s will ground down, no single day’s triumph, no matter how dramatic, could bring outright victory. The most famous example is Lee’s gamble on July 3, 1863, that he could achieve a decisive breakthrough by cracking the Union center, opening the road to D.C. and ending the war. It would be a modern Waterloo. The resulting assault failed, with nearly seven thousand casualties. Told to reassemble his division in anticipation of a Union counterattack, General Pickett replied, “General Lee, I have no division now.”4
Whether Confederates like Lee, commanding numerically inferior forces, should have stood entirely on the strategic and tactical defensive, forcing the enemy into costly offensives, remains debatable. Had the Confederate armies concentrated on holding the heartland, taking advantage of a largely sympathetic population, interior communications, familiar terrain, and the ability of smaller numbers to hold ground against an attacker, it might have been possible for the South to exhaust the North’s will to conquer. Perhaps this constitutes second-guessing, and might demand too much innovation of Confederates steeped in the ingrained tradition of the offense. Whatever the case, Lee appears to have been temperamentally unsuited to a passive defensive role, his preference laid bare in a response to Longstreet’s urging of a less costly flanking movement at Gettysburg: “The enemy is there and I am going to strike him.”5
Faith in the offense remained hard to shake. Lee had earlier lost five thousand men in a sweeping attack at Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862. General Porter E. Alexander, studying the open ground with its clear field of fire for Union gunners, puzzled as to “how on God’s earth it happened that our army was put to assault such a position.” The Rebels did not have a monopoly on disastrous frontal assaults. At Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862, Ambrose E. Burnside lost nearly 13,000 men hurling waves of compact lines at Confederates well entrenched on elevated ground. He was shortly replaced but, for the most part, more cautious generals did not find favor with authority, perhaps because they seemed to lack results. McClellan was chary of squandering lives, but Lincoln was also almost certainly right in worrying that George had “the slows.”6
George H. Thomas seems to have been criticized more unfairly. His preference for winning through superior deployment misled others into believing he lacked pugnacity. Thomas’s careful preparations for delivering the coup de grace to Hood at Nashville frustrated his superiors, U. S. Grant and Henry Halleck. Sherman fared better, though he, too, valued maneuvering to find the enemy’s weakness, remarking, “I don’t want to lose men in a direct attack when it can be avoided.” The 1864 jostling between Sherman and Joe Johnston in Northern Georgia has been likened to two canny prizefighters probing for an opening. Jefferson Davis tired and replaced Johnston with John Bell Hood, the epitome of impetuous offensive spirit.7
Early, if costly, tactical successes at Gaine’s Mill and Second Manassas reinforced Hood’s aggressive predilections. In defending Atlanta, he bled his army in wasteful, badly coordinated attacks. The disasters culminated at Franklin, Tennessee, where Rebel charges cost six thousand men in an afternoon, one brigade losing 419 of 600 effectives. At times, Hood’s allegiance to the all-out assault seemed to waver, but he never repudiated it entirely. Indeed, writing after the war, he asserted in his memoirs that only encouragement of the “devil-me-care” spirit created a soldier that “when ordered to charge and drive the enemy, will—or endeavor to—run over any obstacles he may encounter to his front.” He concluded, “I expect to die more proud of my defense of Atlanta & my Tenn. campaign than all my career as a Soldier.”8
In preparing for frontal assaults, generals sought to minimize casualties by artillery bombardment to soften up the target; by coordinated supporting attacks, staggered to drive into the enemy en echelon (or at a slant) and so difficult to break up; and by having troops close fast, starting at the quick step and accelerating into double quick time. The results disappointed. At Fort Wagner, July 1863, the preliminary bombardment failed to dislodge the garrison from its bomb proofs; the supporting brigades, badly handled, had no room to maneuver; and double quick time failed to save the 54th Massachusetts, leading the attack, from suffering 40 percent losses. Colonel John Elwell, watching the attack, cried, “My God, our men are being slaughtered.” The question might be why he was surprised.9
The volume of fire encountered in battle stunned combatants, leaving an indelible impression. General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain said descriptions of projectiles “darkening the air” were not hyperbole but a “dead-level fact.” Cartridge expenditure proved immense. Army of the Cumberland records show 3.5 million rounds expended in June 1864, 2.25 million in July, 3 million in August. (Authorities gave replenishing the ammunition train a haulage priority, explaining why troops often went without rations.) A Rebel brigade under Samuel French, sent to collect spent balls on the field, gleaned 2.5 tons. The general noted, “the ground was literally covered with them—oxidized white like hail-stones.”10
The noise of musketry deafened soldiers, veterans likening it to brick buildings collapsing or a hard rain clattering on a tin roof, while artillery fire, like claps of thunder, made the ground shake and fence rails jump. Projectiles mowed down any vegetation standing in the way. General Raleigh Colston observed at Chancellorsville trees cut off a few feet above the ground as if scythed, and brush fractured in every branch. “The bullets seemed to fill the air and to be clipping every little weed and bush and blade of grass around us,” wrote Corporal C. F. Boyd about Shiloh. “Acres and acres of timber such as small saplings and large underbrush were mowed down and trees one foot in diameter were cut down as if a mowing machine had gone through the field and limbs fell like autumn leaves in the leaden and iron storm.”11
Human flesh fared no better. The musketry grew so intense at Spotsylvania, 1864, reported
Major Thomas Hyde, 7th Maine, that many a corpse resembled “nothing but a lump of meat or clot of gore.” One man could be identified only by beard color as his face could not be recognized, “but appeared more like a sponge.” The features of Frank Arnold, one of William Quantrill’s raiders, hit in the head five times at Baxter Springs, Kansas, in October 1863, “could not be recognized as belonging to a human being.” The corpse of a sixteen-year-old private of the 55th Illinois, hit by seven balls at Shiloh, looked “as red as if he had been dipped in a barrel of blood.” Colonel Charles Phillipps, 52nd Georgia, sustained wounds successively in the left arm, right leg, knee, and cheek at Champion Hill, Mississippi. Also in that engagement, Iowa private John Myers said heavy fire “cut us all to peases and scatred our Regiment.” He got shot in the left ankle and “i hat my bick toe shot off and was struck with a spand grape shot [a spent iron solid shot, golf-ball sized, hurled in a cluster from a Napoleon] on the right nea and left elbow.”12
The metal storm cut down troops en masse. William Fletcher, 5th Texas, in spring 1862 fighting at Gaine’s Mill, Virginia, described Union corpses lying “so close that it put one in mind of a railroad grade with ties laid for ironing.” In one small episode at Antietam, Union General Alpheus S. Williams watched two Napoleons fire canister into oncoming Confederates. “Each canister contains several hundred balls. They fell in the very front of the line and all along it apparently, stirring up dust like a thick cloud. When the dust blew away no regiment and not a living man was to be seen.” Over two hundred had perished, “in two ranks, as straightly aligned as on a dress parade.” Repeatedly, survivors testified that you could walk on bodies without touching earth. Union Colonel William Averell counted over five thousand Rebels sprawled on Malvern Hill. “A third of them were dead or dying, but enough were alive and moving to give the field a singular crawling effect.” Dead Yankees lay so thick in front of the 11th North Carolina’s position in the 1864 Wilderness that they built a breastwork of corpses.13