“It seemed as if a million bees were singing in the air,” said Charles Tanner of Delaware.
Another soldier spoke of “the awful tornado of battle.”
In the middle of the storm was a Union army nurse named Clara Barton. Hunched over to avoid the flying metal, Barton raced from one wounded soldier to the next. When she lifted one wounded man’s head to give him a drink of water, a bullet ripped through her sleeve and hit the soldier, killing him. “I have never mended that hole in my sleeve,” she later said.
She found another man lying on the ground with a bullet stuck in his cheekbone. “It is terribly painful,” he told her. “Won’t you take it out?”
There was no time to wait for a surgeon. Barton took out her pocketknife. Another wounded man, shot in both legs, offered to help with the operation.
“And shoving himself along upon the ground he took the wounded head in his hands and held it while I extracted* the ball and washed and bandaged the face.”
Clara Barton
Then she moved on. And on, and on. “Oh! God—what a costly war,” she wrote in her journal.
Mac vs. Lincoln
More than 25,000 men were killed or wounded in the battle of Antietam, making it the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War. In fact, more Americans died that day than on any other day in American history, before or since. Both sides suffered a similar number of casualties. But since Lee’s army was smaller, it was in much worse shape after the battle. Lee had no choice but to turn around and head south.
“The enemy is driven back into Virginia,” bragged McClellan. “Those on whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it was a masterpiece of the art.”
But from Abraham Lincoln’s point of view, McClellan’s much larger army should have crushed Lee. And after the battle, Mac should have leaped at the chance to destroy Lee’s crippled army as it retreated across the Potomac. Instead, he let Lee slip safely back into Virginia.
Over the next few weeks, an increasingly furious Lincoln kept ordering McClellan to cross the Potomac and attack Lee. But McClellan complained his horses were “too fatigued” (tired, that is). Abe snapped back, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the Battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”
Mac grumbled to his wife, “There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’”
Lincoln was finally fed up—he removed McClellan from command. Little Mac went home to New Jersey. But don’t worry. He’ll be back in the story later.
The Time Has Come
Antietam was not the rebellion-smashing victory Lincoln had been dreaming of—but it was still a victory. It was good enough. Now Lincoln felt he could announce his emancipation plan. “I think the time has come,” he said.
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. Here’s the key passage:
“On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-Three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Okay, this is not the most clearly worded statement ever written. But you get the idea—as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy would be free.
Except for one problem: Lincoln had no power in the states that had seceded from the Union. So slave owners in the Confederacy could simply ignore Lincoln’s announcement. And the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in states still in the Union. (Lincoln felt this would require an amendment to the Constitution.)
So when it was issued, the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually emancipate anyone. And yet it changed everything. Up until this point in the Civil War, the North had been fighting to save the Union. From now on, the North would be fighting to save the Union and to end slavery.
That didn’t mean the North was going to win.
Johnny Reb vs. Billy Yank
Bob McIntosh needed a haircut. This young Southern soldier had wild curly hair that shot out in all directions.
So one quiet day in Virginia, Bob sat down on a tree stump and a soldier named Van started snipping with his scissors. Van shaved the right side of Bob’s head down to the scalp, leaving the left side covered with long black curls.
Van was about to begin cutting the left side when a soldier ran up shouting: “Get your guns! The Yankees are across the river!”
Bob’s Half Haircut
Bob Mclntosh’s haircut was over. He jumped up from the log and raced toward his cannon, a towel still tied around his neck and his half head of curly hair flapping in the breeze. Suddenly he realized how ridiculous he must look. He turned to his friend William Dame and said, “Good heavens, Billy, it has just come to me what a devil of a fix I am in with my head in this condition. I tell you now that if the Yankees get too close to the guns I am going to run … . I wouldn’t be caught dead with my head looking like this.”
Enemy bombs started flying toward them and exploding all around. Bob and his friends went to work on their cannons, loading, firing, cleaning, and reloading as fast as they could. The only problem was, they all kept looking over at Bob—and they couldn’t stop laughing. “I caught sight of that half-shaved head,” William Dame said, “and it was the funniest object you ever saw.”
When the short battle ended, Van couldn’t find his scissors. At least, he said he couldn’t. Bob tried to cut his own hair with a knife, but the blade was too dull. After a week of looking like a clown, he got so desperate, he asked a soldier named Hunter to cut his hair with an ax.
“All right, Bob,” Hunter said, “put your head on this stump and I’ll chop off some of your hair.”
Bob put his head on the stump and Hunter swung down with his ax—but the blade got stuck in the wood, painfully pinning Bob’s hair to the stump.
“He began to call Hunter all the names he could think of,” William Dame said.
“Why, Bob,” Hunter said, “you couldn’t expect me to cut your hair with a hatchet without hurting some.”
Van finally “found” his scissors and finished the haircut.
Soldier life was not usually this entertaining. In fact, Civil War soldiers said they were usually pretty bored. They passed the time in camp by writing letters and reading, by playing cards and singing and putting on shows. They played baseball, held wrestling tournaments, and bowled with cannonballs.
Of course, they also spent a lot of time just talking. A Texas man spoke for soldiers North and South when he named the two most popular topics of conversation. Can you guess what they were?
Hungry All the Time
One was “wives and sweethearts.” The other was “something to eat.”
When you read letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers, you realize that these men were hungry almost all the time. Carlton McCarthy talked about food shortages in the Southern army: “To be one day without anything to eat was common. Two days’ fasting, marching, and fighting was not uncommon, and there were times when no rations were issued for three or four days.”
When the men did get enough food, it was often unhealthy, or plain old rotten. “The beef is so poor, it is sticky and blue,” a Southern soldier wrote. Both armies relied heavily on salted beef and pork—the salt was supposed to keep the meat from rotting. But it also turned the meat into tough, salty slabs. Union soldiers called the stuff “salt horse.”
A young soldier from Illinois described another common problem: “Very few of us knew anything whatever about cooking.” When he and his friends got a little flour, they tried making pancakes. But they turned out “tough as a mule’s ear, about as heavy as lead.”
Hungry soldiers often spent their own money on a little extra food. A Texas soldier named William Fletcher remembered buying a sausage and biting into something surprisingly crunchy. “I found what I supposed was a cat’s claw,” he sai
d. He stopped eating the sausage. “An examination was hurriedly made of the uneaten portion, and a cat’s tooth was discovered.” Soldiers who had no extra money sometimes became desperate. “Once I took some corn from my horse, beat it between stones and tried to swallow it,” a Southern soldier said.
The Union soldiers’ diet was based mainly on hardtack—dried wheat biscuits, or “sheet iron crackers,” as soldiers called them. They were so hard, soldiers had to smash them up with the butts of their rifles before attempting to eat them. Then they mixed the crumbled hardtack into their soup, or fried it up with the grease from their meat. “We had fifteen different ways of preparing them,” a Minnesota teenager proudly recalled.
John Billings of Massachusetts remembered that the most popular way to eat hardtack was to crumble it up into coffee. One problem: hardtack was often home to weevils and maggots and other bugs. “It was no uncommon occurrence for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee swimming with weevils …” he said, “but they were easily skimmed off and left no distinctive flavor behind.”
That gives you an idea of how hungry these boys were.
Almost Time for War
Now it’s time to get back to the fighting … almost. You’ll recall that Abraham Lincoln removed General George McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. In November 1862, Lincoln gave the command to General Ambrose Burnside.
Burnside protested that he was not the right man for this job. People sometimes say things like this just to sound humble. In this case, Burnside was telling the truth. Never known for his brilliance on the battlefield, Burnside was much more famous for his facial hair. In fact, he even inspired a new word for facial hair: sideburns.
Burnside had always been a bit unlucky. On his wedding day years before, the minister asked Burnside’s fiancée, Lottie Moon, if she would take him to be her lawfully wedded husband.
“No-siree-bob!” Lottie sang, and walked out of the church.
Now Burnside had more than 100,000 Union soldiers lined up near the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, on the north bank of the Rappahannock River. He wanted to cross the river and attack Robert E. Lee’s army. But the portable bridges he needed had not yet arrived, and no one knew when they would get there. So Burnside just waited. And this gave Lee plenty of time to get his army ready.
Meanwhile, Northern and Southern soldiers were only separated by a river. One morning Alexander Hunter of Virginia heard voices from across the river—someone was yelling “Johnny Reb! Johnny Reb!” (Northerners called Southern soldiers “Johnny Reb.” Southerners called Northern soldiers “Billy Yank.”)
Billy Yank: Johnny Reb! I say, Johnny Reb, don’t shoot!
Johnny Reb: All right! Come out on the bank and show yourselves; we won’t fire.
Billy Yank: On your honor, Johnny Reb?
Johnny Reb: On our honor, Billy Yank.
Soldiers from both sides walked down to the river’s edge and looked at each other across the water. Then they began talking trades.
Billy Yank: Have you any tobacco?
Johnny Reb: Plenty of it.
Billy Yank: Say, Johnny, want some newspapers?
Johnny Reb: Yes!
Billy Yank: Then look out, we are going to send you some.
Johnny Reb: How are you going to do it?
Billy Yank: Wait and see.
The Northern soldiers had built several tiny sailboats, each one just big enough to hold a couple newspapers. They set the boats on the water and the wind blew them across the river.
Soon the whole river was dotted with tiny trading ships bobbing back and forth. New Jersey soldiers picked up a six-inch boat from the water and found this note from Mississippi men:
Then the Union’s portable bridges finally arrived. Burnside ordered his army to cross the Rappahannock and attack Lee’s army.
“Gents, U.S. Army: We send you some tobacco by our packet. Send us some coffee in return. Also a deck of cards if you have them, and we will send you more tobacco.”
Burnside Blows It
Robert E. Lee could hardly believe his eyes.
He had his entire army in perfect position—lined up behind stone walls on the tops of hills. And Burnside was about to march his men across a huge open field right up to Lee’s rifles and cannons! “What luck some people have,” grumbled a jealous Joseph Johnson, commander of Confederate forces in the West. “Nobody will ever come to attack me in such a place.”
Burnside really should have come up with a better plan. But he didn’t. And early on the foggy morning of December 13, 1862, Union men started marching across the open field.
From their hilltop positions Lee’s men looked down at the field and saw only fog. But they could hear the Union army under that fog: snorting horses, rolling wagon wheels, pounding drums. Then the fog began to burn off and Confederate soldiers saw thousands of blue-coated Union soldiers marching toward them, their colorful flags flapping in the wind. Many Southerners said that it was a beautiful sight.
Then it turned ugly.
As they marched uphill toward the Southern guns, Union soldiers were shot down in entire rows. Still, more soldiers kept coming. John McCrillis remembered that his New Hampshire regiment was ordered into action at about noon. “If I fall, never mind me,” Colonel Edward Cross told the men. “Forward, march!”
The men marched into what McCrillis described as a “rain of death” and “a stream of fire and a shower of leaded hail.” Soldiers fell in bunches. Soon Colonel Cross was wounded and he lay helpless on the ground.
“My mouth was full of blood, fragments of teeth, and gravel; my breastbone almost broken in; and I lay in mud two inches deep.”
Edward Cross
McCrillis saw Colonel Cross go down, along with almost everyone else in his regiment. There was no one left to give orders. “At this time there was no one in sight to my right or left, except the dead or wounded.” McCrillis was hit in the arm and retreated to the rear.
This kind of thing continued all day. Fresh Union soldiers marched forward, faced the deadly Confederate fire, and were blown backwards. Wounded Union soldiers who were lying on the ground actually reached up to grab the legs of advancing soldiers, trying to stop more men from marching into a hopeless attack.
Oh, Those Men!
General Lee watched his army win an easy victory at the battle of Fredericksburg. It was so easy, he had to remind himself that combat was not supposed to be fun. He turned to General James Longstreet and said, “It is well that war is so terrible—or we should grow too fond of it.”
There was no danger of Burnside becoming too fond of war. That night he paced back and forth in his tent, pointing to the blood-soaked battlefield and crying over and over, “Oh, those men! Those men over there! I am thinking of them all the time!”
There were a lot of them to think about. More than 12,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded at Fredericksburg. Lee lost about 4,000 men.
Surgeons on both sides were busy for days. Men who were badly wounded in the vital organs of the chest or stomach had little chance of surviving. Doctors simply did not know how to deal with these kinds of wounds. So surgeons spent much of their time working on smashed arms and legs, often by cutting them off. The best army surgeons could amputate a limb in about ten minutes.
Soldiers got used to seeing amputated arms and legs piling up outside battlefield hospitals. But a Union soldier named William Hamilton saw something especially disgusting at Fredericksburg. “There was a hospital within thirty yards of us,” Hamilton wrote to his mother. “About the building you could see the hogs belonging to the farm eating arms and other portions of the body.”
Sadly, soldiers who had their arms or legs amputated did not always get healthy. Doctors in the 1860s understood a little about germs, but they didn’t know how to kill the germs on their hands or instruments. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pusstained coats,” said one Union army surgeon. Surgeons stuck their ungloved fingers into wounds to feel
for bullets. If they dropped a sponge or saw on the floor, they simply wiped it off with a cloth, or “washed” it in a basin of bloody water. As a result, about twenty-five percent of the soldiers who had an arm or leg amputated later died from infections.
Worse Than Bullets
Soldiers who were lucky enough to avoid getting shot still faced the most dangerous killer of all in the Civil War—disease. Deadly diseases such as typhoid fever and dysentery spread through the camps of both Northern and Southern soldiers. By the time the war was over, twice as many men had died from disease as from battle wounds.
A big part of the problem was the fact that army camps were often disgustingly dirty, allowing germs to spread quickly. For bathrooms, the men dug shallow, open ditches right near their tents. The ditches filled up quickly and got so gross that many of the men preferred to do their business elsewhere. A Virginia soldier found this out the hard way, as he wrote in his diary: “On rolling up my bed this morning I found that I had been lying in—I won’t say what—something though that didn’t smell like milk and peaches.”
Rotting food, animal manure, and dead animals also piled up all over camp. And this stuff seeped through the ground into streams and wells, polluting the water the soldiers drank. At one army camp, a newspaper reporter wrote, the water “smells so offensively that the men have to hold their noses while drinking it.” That can’t be good for you.
The lack of personal cleanliness was another problem. Union army soldiers were supposed to wash their hands and face every day, their feet twice a week, and their whole body once a week. But not everyone did this. George H. Cadman from Ohio remembered that some of the men in his regiment were especially filthy, and “if not pretty sharply looked after would not wash themselves from week’s end to week’s end.
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