The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  During 1862 the North urgently put in hand an effort to improve the quality of medical care offered to the wounded. As with other Civil War developments, the battle of Antietam, with its huge casualty list, was the spur. The decisive step had been the appointment in April 1862 of a new director of medical services, William Hammond. Young, energetic, and well educated, Hammond was supported by a voluntary organisation, the United States Sanitary Commission, which became a power in the land. Under the executive secretaryship of the formidable Frederick Law Olmsted, it coordinated the activities of thousands of civilian volunteers, collected medical supplies of all sorts, recruited several thousand nurses, and provided welfare facilities for soldiers, both sick and healthy, all over the Northern states. The Sanitary, as it was known, also acted as a pressure group, prodding Congress and the Union army into the provision of better care for the sick and wounded. There was similar voluntary effort in the South, where a Richmond lady, Sally Tompkins, set up a hospital on her own account and was commissioned a Confederate captain, so valued were her services by President Davis.

  William Hammond was responsible for widespread reform and for choosing able men to fill surgical and medical appointments throughout the Union army, among whom was a contemporary, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, appointed chief of medical services in the Army of the Potomac. Letterman expanded and reorganised the ambulance corps. The first results were seen after Antietam, when the wounded were moved from the battlefields according to a rational and disciplined schedule. Letterman also introduced carefully designed and prefabricated hospitals, the Letterman hospital, which was to remain in use up to the First World War. Modelled on the wooden “balloon” house then springing up in all American industrial cities, it grouped single-storey wards around a central complex of operating theatres and dressing stations, and was properly ventilated and heated. He also insisted on strict standards of hygiene. An important aide in Letterman’s drive to impose correct standards of hygiene and order was Dorothea Dix of the United States Sanitary Commission, who took up work as early as April 1861. The commission was modelled on that of Florence Nightingale, during the Crimean War. Dix had visited the British commission and seen Nightingale’s hospitals. Soon she was active in the dozens of hospitals which began to be opened all over Washington, which was close to most of the major battlefields. Some were improvised in the capital’s public buildings, such as the Patent Office. Others were accommodated in schools and colleges, including Georgetown University. Wooden hospitals were built wherever space was available, until more than fifty were in operation in the capital. One stood on what is now the site of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, another on the south lawn of the White House.

  The original hospitals, since Washington had almost none of its own, were groups of tents, as used by regimental medical teams in the field. They were only slowly replaced by more solid constructions. Either too cold or too hot, depending on the season, they were open to the public, which wandered in and out at whim.

  An early visitor was the poet Walt Whitman, who came to Washington following the evacuation of his brother George Washington Whitman from the field of Fredericksburg. Whitman was a New Yorker who was trying to set up as a professional writer. He did not serve in the army, though another brother did; he was never present at a battle and visited the armies only twice. Nevertheless, the war was to possess Whitman. After finding his brother, he decided to devote himself to the welfare of the wounded; he took a clerical job in the army paymaster’s office and spent the small salary he earned on tobacco and other comforts for the patients, to whom he devoted his time. He wrote copiously during his four years as a self-appointed hospital visitor. By his own reckoning, he attended at the bedsides of 80,000 casualties. He believed that his visits were beneficial and recorded that “the doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs and bottles and powders are helpless to yield.” That medicine was kindness and cheerful attention, particularly in writing and sending letters to the soldiers’ families.

  Whitman, who was to become America’s leading poet of the nineteenth century, was of humble origins and simple nature. He was temperamentally egalitarian and might, had his bent taken him that way, have become a leader in the socialist movement. He was also deeply humanitarian with a heartfelt belief in the greatness of his country and its people. Besides his openhearted goodness, he also had a deep love for the beauties of the American landscape and skies, about which he wrote memorably in his first and best-known collection of verse, Leaves of Grass. The war moved him greatly, at first by its drama and display, then by its tragedy, which he was to express in deeply moving lyrical terms. One of his war poems, published in the collection Drum-Taps, is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of literature the war was to inspire and one of the finest war poems ever written. It came from his experiences as an army hospital visitor.

  COME UP FROM THE FIELDS, FATHER

  Come up from the fields, father, here’s a letter from our Pete;

  And come to the front door, mother—here’s a letter from thy dear son.

  Lo, ‘tis autumn;

  Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

  Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages, with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind;

  Where apples ripe in the orchards hang, and grapes on the trellis’d vines;

  (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

  Smell you the buckwheat, where the bees were lately buzzing?)

  Above all, lo, the sky, so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds;

  Below, too, all calm, all vital and beautiful—and the farm prospers well.

  Down in the fields all prospers well;

  But now from the fields come, father—come at the daughter’s call; And come to the entry, mother—to the front door come, right away.

  Fast as she can she hurries—something ominous—her steps trembling;

  She does not tarry to smoothe her hair, nor adjust her cap.

  Open the envelope quickly,

  O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d;

  O a strange hand writes for our dear son—O stricken mother’s soul!

  All swims before her eyes—flashes with black—she catches the main words only;

  Sentences broken—gun-shot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

  At present low, but will soon be better.

  Ah, now, the single figure to me,

  Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio, with all its cities and farms,

  Sickly white in the face, and dull in the head, very faint,

  By the jamb of a door leans.

  Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs;

  The little sisters huddle around, speechless and dismay’d;)

  See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

  Alas, poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul;)

  While they stand at home at the door, he is dead already; The only son is dead.

  But the mother needs to be better;

  She, with thin form, presently drest in black;

  By day her meals untouch’d—then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

  In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,

  O that she might withdraw unnoticed—silent from life, escape and withdraw,

  To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

  What makes this poem of Whitman’s so heartrending is that everything in it is entirely genuine. Whitman knew what happened to boys shot in the chest; he knew how such news affected families, since he often met them on their visits to the hospitals; he knew what terrible truths the consoling letters sent to families concealed, since he had often written such letters himself. Even though he was not a witness of battle, he knew what results battles caused, since he saw them on the hospital wards. Whitman was a great poe
t of the Civil War, because he understood the purpose and nature of the war, which was to inflict suffering on the American imagination. The suffering was equally distributed between the two sides, and was felt particularly by those not present. The whole point of the war was to hold mothers, fathers, sisters, and wives in a state of tortured apprehension, waiting for the terrible letter from hospital that spoke of wounds and which all too often presaged the death of a dear son, husband, or father. It was a particular cruelty of the Civil War that because neither side had targets of strategic value to be attacked—not, at least, targets that could be reached by the armies in the field (until Sherman took the war to the Southern people by marching into their homeland)—its effect had to be directed principally, indeed for years exclusively, at the man in the field and at the emotions of those who waited at home. Torturing the apprehensions of the non-combatants was a new development in warfare, produced by the rise of an efficient postal service. Before the days of rapid and reasonably certain postal communication, soldiers could be banished to the mind’s recesses after they marched away, because the nearest and dearest knew that they would receive no news of their fate until the war was over, if indeed then. The only certain news of a soldier on campaign came by default, when he did not return. Whitman caught at the truth in an entry in one of his notebooks. “The expression of American personality through this war is not to be looked for in the great campaign and the battle-fights. It is to be looked for … in the hospitals, among the wounded.”

  Whitman’s words would have carried an even stronger ring of truth had he written, “The expression of American national emotion.” Whitman’s keen sense of the national character might have encouraged him to emphasise explicitly the strength and importance of family feeling in nineteenth-century America and the degree to which the brutalities of the Civil War played upon those feelings. He touched on those truths in his great elegy for President Lincoln, which is also an epitaph for the war itself, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d”:

  I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;

  But I saw they were not as was thought;

  They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;

  The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,

  And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,

  And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Civil War Generalship

  AMERICA WAS AWASH with generals in 1865, or at least with men who held that title. It could not have been otherwise, since the armies of both North and South had swollen to comprise dozens of corps, scores of divisions, and hundreds of brigades, command of any of which carried the title. In 1861, however, there had been almost no generals on either side. The only men holding rank as generals were a few ancients who had risen to their rank during the Mexican War or survived from even earlier conflicts. The most important in the hierarchy was Winfield Scott, general in chief of the republic and holding the rank of lieutenant general, previously only held by George Washington. He was an experienced operational commander. By 1861, however, he was eighty-five years old and too stout and feeble to mount a horse. Though his brain was keen and active, he was unable to take the field or indeed to stray far from the invalid chair in his Washington office. As the victor of the war against Mexico in 1846-48, Scott was an experienced military campaigner who also possessed, for a soldier, a high degree of political understanding, having run as the Whig candidate for the presidency in 1852. His main contributions to the conduct of the war were to counsel and encourage Lincoln, which he did with great sympathy and beneficent effect in the opening months and to frame what would become the North’s fundamental strategy, later called the Anaconda Plan. Designed to profit from the geographical advantage the North enjoyed, it envisaged cutting the Confederacy off from contact with the outside world by naval blockade, and bisecting the Confederacy by seizing control of the Mississippi River. Excellent in conception, it suffered from the defect—which was also a defect of Scott’s mind—that it fell short of promising to deliver victory. A blockaded and bisected South would be a poor South but not necessarily one deprived of the power of resistance. Scott could not accept that this constituted a fundamental weakness of his planning, since, like many Northerners, he shrank from the idea of shedding the blood of fellow Americans, nor did he want to inflict disabling damage on the economy or society of the southern states.

  At the outset Lincoln shared many of Scott’s views, and himself lacked any conception of how to transform his desire to crush rebellion into military reality. His first attempt to frame a scheme of decision was far too moderate to have produced a result. It envisaged holding Fortress Monroe, the great fortified place at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, organising blockade, and then mounting a seaborne expedition to attack Charleston, South Carolina. What he needed and begged for from Scott were suggestions as to how to proceed. What he wanted were generals who would give him sound advice and then put plans successfully into action. At the outset, however, he had the greatest difficulty in finding any generals who displayed the least competence or resolution. He promoted dozens of men in 1861, though without confidence that any of them were good leaders, and often because their promotion would strengthen his political position. As a result, many of the first to put stars on their uniforms were local political bigwigs, representatives of European immigrant groups, or state officials, including governors. As he shortly discovered, however, none could offer worthwhile advice and some could not be trusted to command the formations to which they had been appointed.

  The procedure for appointing generals was strangely unsystematic. Because promotion to general’s rank lay in the hands of Congress, those chosen were normally made brigadier or major generals of U.S. volunteers, which were organisations of the states, rather than in the regular army, which was a federal institution. As they took the field and if they proved their worth, they might be given regular rank, which was greatly esteemed. Grant, for example, began his general’s career as a brigadier of Illinois volunteers but was then given a commission as major general in the regular army until, in March 1864, he assumed the appointment of general in chief and the rank of lieutenant general.

  As the war drew out, it became easier for Lincoln to identify which of his appointments were good ones and which merited further promotion. What Lincoln looked for in his generals was the ability to achieve results without constantly requiring guidance from Washington or reinforcement by additional troops. The war produced far too few such men. Lincoln’s first choice, Irvin McDowell, had excellent paper qualifications. He had been to a French military college, had served a year with the French army, until 1870 thought the best in the world, and had served as a staff officer under Scott in Mexico. McDowell, had he been given a properly trained army, might have proved a competent officer. In 1861, however, there were almost no properly trained soldiers or units anywhere in America and those McDowell led to drive the Confederates out of Manassas and away from Washington in July were particularly ill trained. There was nothing wrong with McDowell’s plan of action or with his execution of the opening stages of the battle. What went wrong for the Union is that its untrained soldiers panicked, after failing to carry the position held by more determined if not better trained Virginia troops, then initiated a stampede to the rear and abandoned the field to the Confederates.

  McDowell, for all his credentials, could not survive such a disgrace and was swiftly removed, to be replaced by George McClellan, who had recently won a few very small battles in the western Virginia mountains. McClellan shared some of McDowell’s experience. He had been to Europe to observe the Crimean War and had also served with distinction in the Mexican War. He had more ability than McDowell, particularly in the training of troops, at which he excelled. The Yankee soldiers’ first favourite, though he never served in the West, the “Young Napoleon” was an excellent organiser and a master of the
details of logistics. His armies were always well-fed and supplied and his soldiers held him in high esteem despite his insistence on strict discipline. McClellan was always popular with the troops. That was partly due to his defects as a commander. Because he did not believe in inflicting heavy costs on the enemy, his soldiers were often not pressed in battle to the point of suffering heavy losses. He also, at first, got on well with Lincoln, who admired his intellect. The era of good feeling did not last. Civilian though he was, Lincoln knew what he wanted from a principal military adviser and McClellan quickly revealed that he was not the man to supply it. Appointed to command the Union troops defending Washington in July 1861, and then promoted general in chief in November, he dissipated his and his subordinates’ energies in discussion of projects and in reorganisation during his first nine months of authority. When, in April 1862, he eventually embarked on action, he at once began to exhibit symptoms of caution and defeatism, which proved to be fundamental qualities of his character and which unfitted him for high command of any sort, let alone supreme command. The first stage of his grand strategic idea, the transshipment of the Army of the Potomac by sea and river to the Virginia Peninsula, was inspired and ought to have led on to great results. As soon as his army landed in enemy territory, however, McClellan began to torment himself with fears of being outnumbered. He also failed to do what he could easily have done had he begun forcefully and at once. Confounded by enemy entrenchments across the peninsula, he declined to storm the defences, which were weak and lightly garrisoned. Instead he began to await reinforcements from Washington. When at last the enemy abandoned his positions and began to retreat towards Richmond, McClellan followed lethargically. Though managing to achieve a small victory at Williamsburg, he eventually arrived outside the defences of Richmond in July having scarcely damaged the enemy at all. What followed was even worse than his failure to press his advance up the peninsula. He began to fight, in what would become known as the Seven Days’ Battles, but halfheartedly, so that what should have been victories ended as indecisive defeats, disabling to neither side but fatal to McClellan’s plan of defeating the Confederacy by capturing its capital. Throughout the Seven Days, he pestered Washington with requests for reinforcements, predicting disaster unless he was given more troops. Eventually, he was ordered by Halleck, his successor as general in chief, to withdraw the army by ship from the peninsula and bring it back to Washington. Once arrived he persisted in his distaste for decision by failing to come to the support of General John Pope, who was thereby exposed to defeat at the second battle of Manassas. In its aftermath Lee resumed his advance northwards until brought to battle at Sharpsburg, or Antietam Creek. Antietam was a battle McClellan should have won, since he outnumbered Lee several times. He frittered away the advantage, however, in piecemeal attacks, and although the result was a sort of Union victory, McClellan’s refusal to pursue the badly shaken Confederates resulted in their escape. Antietam was the end of McClellan’s military career. In November 1862 he was removed from command.