The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  They’re left behind!

  Our steps are turned away:

  We forward march, but these forever stay

  Halted, till trumpets wake the final day:—

  Good-bye! Good-bye!

  They’re left behind!

  The young and strong and brave:

  The sighing pines mourn sweetly o’er their grave;

  Mute, moving grief the summer branches wave,

  Good-bye dear friends!

  They’re left behind!

  Comfort!—our heavy souls!

  Their battle shout forever onward rolls

  Till God’s own freedom gathers in the poles!

  Good-bye! Farewell!102

  The other way to deal with death in battle was to embrace and revel in the nihilism, disarming death by a rebellious refusal to sanctify it. Cynicism born of experience became a way of flipping the bird at the fates. Charles Wainwright, a Union colonel, reported that when a mortally wounded man fell against him, he had “no more feeling for him, than if he had tripped over a stump and fallen; nor do I think it would have been different had he been my brother.”103 A Confederate soldier described how “we cook and eat, talk and laugh with the enemy’s dead lying all about us as though they were so many hogs.”104 A Federal soldier echoed the sentiment: “We dont mind the sight of dead men no more than if they was dead Hogs.… The rebels was laying over the field bloated up as big as a horse and as black as a negro and the boys run over them and serch their pockets … unconcerned.… I run acros a big graback as black as the ase of spade it startled me a little at first but I stopt to see what he had but he had been tended too so I past on my way rejoicing.”105 Men’s souls became annealed by repeated exposure to death: “By being accustomed to sights which would make other men’s hearts sick to behold, our men soon became heart-hardened, and sometimes scarcely gave a pitying thought to those who were unfortunate enough to get hit. Men can get accustomed to everything; and the daily sight of blood and mangled bodies so blunted their finer sensibilities as almost to blot out all love, all sympathy from the heart.”106

  For many “heart-hardened” soldiers, chaplains were despised as thinly disguised agents of army authority whose job it was to sell the men on the nobility of death in battle. Abner Small describes how before the battle of Chancellorsville the Union chaplains “were eloquent in their appeals to patriotism, and pictured in glowing colors the glory that would crown the dead and the blazons of promotion that would decorate the surviving heroes.” Suddenly, enemy shells start to explode: “The screams of horses, and the shouted commands of officers were almost drowned out by the yells and laughter of the men as the brave chaplains, hatless and bookless, their coat-tails streaming in the wind, fled madly to the rear over stone walls, and hedges and ditches, followed by gleefully shouted counsel: ‘Stand firm; put your trust in the Lord!’ ”107 And to those flag wavers back in the safety of the civilian world, battle-hardened soldiers were only too willing to prick their patriotic bubble: “We ain’t doing much just now,” writes Francis Amasa Walker, a Federal soldier anticipating the next attack, “but hope in a few more days to satisfy the public taste with our usual Fall Spectacle—forty percent of us knocked over.”108

  The ever-present possibility of being killed inevitably unhinged some men, who in their desperation looked to a different kind of magic for protection by investing some mundane object with totemic powers. Colonel C. Irvine Walker recounts how a Confederate private who had previously shown signs of cowardice and had been reprimanded for it took his place in the battle line, “his rifle on his shoulder, and holding up in front of him a frying pan.” He moved forward, from frying pan to fire as it were, and was killed.109

  But for others it enhanced life, making it sharper, more intense. Fear was replaced with an adrenaline surge of exaltation. Rice C. Bull, a Union infantryman at Chancellorsville, describes just such a transformation when the Confederate attackers finally came within range: “Most of us … held our fire until we saw the line of smoke that showed that they were on the ridge; then every gun was fired. It was then load and fire at will as fast as we could. Soon the nervousness and fear we had when we began to fight passed away and a feeling of fearlessness and rage took its place.”110 At Antietam (Sharpsburg), Captain Frank Holsinger felt a similar elation: “We now rush forward. We cheer; we are in ecstasies. While shells and canister are still resonant and minnies [minié balls] sizzling spitefully, yet I think this one of the supreme moments of my existence.”111 Major James A. Connolly described the sheer elation of death defied. Following a successful assault on a Confederate fortification during the battle of Jonesboro, the last such during the 1864 Atlanta campaign: “I could have lain down on that blood stained grass, amid the dying and the dead and wept with excess of joy. I have no language to express the rapture one feels in the moment of victory, but I do know that at such a moment one feels as if the joy were worth risking a hundred lives to attain it. Men at home will read of that battle and be glad of our success, but they can never feel as we felt, standing there quivering with excitement, amid the smoke and blood, and fresh horrors and grand trophies of that battle field.”112

  Taking sensual pleasure—eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping—among the carnage was, however bizarre it may appear, a gesture of affirmation of life. After Antietam (Sharpsburg), Union troops bivouacked among the dead Confederates. “Many were black as Negroes,” notes David Hunter Strother, “heads and faces hideously swelled, covered with dust until they looked like clods. Killed during the charge and flight, their attitudes were wild and frightful.… Among these loathsome earthsoiled vestiges of humanity … in the midst of all this carrion our troops sat cooking, eating, jabbering, and smoking; sleeping among the corpses so that but for the color of the skin it was difficult to distinguish the living from the dead.”113

  For some, killing was another dimension of joy, as though by taking a life the killer replenished his own. Byrd Willis, a Confederate, saw a comrade “jumping about, as if in great agony. I immediately ran up to him to ascertain when he was hurt & if I could do any thing of him—but upon reaching him I found that he was not hurt but was executing a species of Indian War Dance around a Poor Yankee (who lay on his back in the last agonies of death) exclaiming I killed him! I killed him! Evidently carried away with excitement and delight.”114

  Captured black soldiers and their white officers ran a considerable risk of being summarily executed. At the infamous Fort Pillow massacre of April 1864, the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest oversaw a systematic killing of black soldiers and some of their white officers, after their surrender. Texan George Gautier described his regiment’s actions after it had defeated black troops at Monroe, Louisiana: “I never saw so many dead negroes in my life. We took no prisoners, except the white officers, fourteen in number; these were lined up and shot after the negroes were finished. Next day they were thrown into a wagon, hauled to the Ouchita river and thrown in. Some were hardly dead—that made no difference—in they went.”115

  The defeated whites of both sides would be extremely unlucky to be put to death summarily. However, Confederates who had been involved in the Fort Pillow incident were killed. Although many white Union soldiers shared the racial prejudice of their Southern counterparts, Fort Pillow was an insult to the cause that would have to be paid for in blood: “At the battle of Resaca in May 1864, the 105th Illinois captured a Confederate battery. From underneath one of the gun carriages a big, red-haired man with no shirt fearfully emerged. He wore a tattoo on one arm that read ‘Fort Pillow.’ His captors read it. He was bayoneted and shot instantly. Another regiment in Sherman’s army was reported to have killed twenty-three rebel prisoners, first asking them if they remembered Fort Pillow. The Wisconsin soldier who recorded this incident claimed flatly, ‘When there is no officer with us, we take no prisoners.’ ”116

  On the obverse side of the coin, the fellowship of warriors, no matter which side they were on, could save the life of
a captured soldier. Rice C. Bull of the 123rd New York was captured at Chancellorsville, and when a civilian threatened him and his fellow captors with harm, a Confederate soldier stepped in to remind the civilian that “these are wounded men. You have no right or business to insult them.”117 The point was that soldiers inhabited the world of soldiers, and only they could arbitrate its rules; no others had the right to intercede. The rules were, more often than not, respectful and compassionate. A Union soldier noted that Confederates captured at Port Hudson in July 1863 were brave fighters and “in the twinkling of an eye we were together.… The Rebs are mostly large, fine-looking men. They are about as hard up for clothes as we are.… They have treated the prisoners [Union soldiers captured earlier] as well as they could, giving them the same sort of food they ate themselves.”118

  Union soldier William Aspinall of the Forty-Seventh Indiana was wounded at Champion Hill near Vicksburg on May 16, 1863:

  In the evening some of my comrades brought me blankets, doing without themselves, and made me a bed in a fence corner outside of the hospital. In a little while a Confederate soldier came along. He had been shot somewhere in the bowels and was in great pain. I said—“here partner, I will share my bed with you”—and he laid down beside me. He told me that he was from Savannah, Georgia, and that he could not get well. He wanted me to write to his wife and children and gave me a card with their address. I was to tell them that I had seen him and what had become of their beloved husband and father. Being weak and exhausted from the loss of blood, I dozed off to sleep and left him talking to me. In a little while I awoke and spoke to him two or three times, but he did not answer. I put my hand over on his face; he was cold in death. My foe and friend had crossed the river.119

  The problem was the marginals, the pathetic bar-stool warriors, who found themselves for a moment enjoying power beyond their expectations: “Whenever we fell into the hands of veteran soldiers who had fought us bravely on the battle-field, we received all of the kind and considerate attention due a prisoner of war, but whenever we were in charge of militia or that class of persons who, too cowardly to take the field, enlist in the home guard, we were treated in the most outrageous manner.”120

  The distinction between honorable and dishonorable extended to categories of killing. Killing pickets (sentries), for example, was considered a kind of assassination, perhaps because their role was essentially passive and they were too easy a target. There was an understanding on both sides that familiarity with each other’s pickets afforded protection, and killing them when no other general action was going on was denounced as “a miserable and useless kind of murder.” A Southerner who knew he was within range of the enemy felt safe because “we were now real soldiers on both sides and well knew that mere picket shooting helped neither side and was only murder.”121

  Sniping was also considered “dishonorable” and denounced as “murderous villainy,” but it was a villainy indulged in by both sides. As a Union private fulminated:

  Sharpshooting at North Anna [in 1864] was exceedingly severe and murderous. We were greatly annoyed by it, as a campaign cannot be decided by killing a few hundred enlisted men—killing them most unfairly and when they were of necessity exposed.… Our sharpshooters were as bad as the Confederates.… They could sneak around trees or lurk behind stumps, or cower in wells or in cellars, and from the safety of their lairs murder a few men. Put the sharpshooters in battle-line and they were no better, no more effective, than the infantry of the line, and they were not half as decent. There was an unwritten code of honor among the infantry that forbade the shooting of men while attending to the imperative calls of nature, and these sharp-shooting brutes were constantly violating that rule. I hated sharpshooters, both Confederate and Union, in those days, and was always glad to see them killed.122

  As will be seen in the two world wars, “attending to the imperative calls of nature” could be one of the riskiest things a soldier could do.

  THE DEAD WERE able to offer very tangible benefits to the living. Joshua Chamberlain, later to become the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, found himself pinned among the corpses of the attack on Marye’s Heights on December 13, 1862, at Fredericksburg: “The night chill had now woven a misty veil over the field.… At last, outwearied and depressed with the desolate scene, my own strength sunk … I moved two dead men a little and lay down between them, making a pillow of the breast of a third. The skirt of his overcoat drawn over my face helped also to shield me from the bleak winds. There was some comfort even in this companionship.”123

  There was, of course, as there always has been, the stripping of corpses—the “peeling,” as they called it. And sometimes the dead continued their beneficence long after their demise. A Confederate, R. H. Peck, happened to pass over the ground of a particularly hard-fought engagement of nine months earlier: “He would always remember crossing a field where the Yankees had delivered a determined charge. It was only with difficulty that he could keep from stepping on bones still wrapped in torn bits of blue uniform.… While crossing the ghastly little field, Peck noticed a man from his regiment who had been a dentist before the war. Busy examining the skulls to see if they contained any gold fillings, he had already extracted quite a number and had his haversack completely full of teeth.”124

  In other ways, too, the ripple of economic benefit radiated from the killed. They provided a rich feeding ground for energetic entrepreneurs. There were search agencies like the official-sounding U.S. Army Agency (in fact a private company located on Bleecker Street in Manhattan) that for a share of the deceased’s back pay or the widow’s pension would locate the body of a loved one.125 Embalmers such as Thomas Holmes (who processed four thousand bodies at one hundred dollars each during the war), and the manufacturers of metallic coffins—“Warranted Air-Tight”—that could “be placed in the Parlour without fear of any odor escaping therefrom” (fifty dollars each), literally and metaphorically cleaned up.126

  Bodies were utilized in other, less physical ways: as agents of propaganda. Confederate surgeon John Wyeth describes how after Chickamauga, “most of the Confederate dead had been gathered in long trenches and buried; but the Union dead were still lying where they fell. For its effect on the survivors it was the policy of the victor to hide his own losses and let those of the other side be seen.”127 A Union soldier, Daniel Crotty, describes how one could “read” the facial expressions of the dead as justification of the righteousness of the cause: “The dead of both friend and foe lie side by side, but it is remarked by all that the pleasant smile on the patriot’s face contrasts strangely with the horrid stare of the rebel dead.”128 However, another Union soldier, Frank Wilkeson, dismissed the whole fanciful and self-serving notion: “I do not believe that the face of a dead soldier, lying on a battle-field, ever truthfully indicates the mental or physical anguish, or peacefulness of mind, which he suffered or enjoyed before his death.” Wilkeson concludes bluntly, “It goes for nothing. One death was as painless as the other.”129

  And long after the war, the “glorious dead” served yet another profitable function. The grim reality of their deaths was replaced by something altogether more palatable, more stirring … more suitable as a motivation for the next generation of warriors. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who after the war ascended to the Supreme Court, dramatically represents this transition. As a young officer he had been grievously wounded and almost died. He had been through the grinder and, in the process, lost his appetite for the rhetoric of patriotism: “He had grown weary of such words as ‘cowardice,’ ‘gallantry,’ and ‘chivalry.’ ” Disillusioned, he eventually resigned his commission. But by 1885 a complete transformation had taken place. Like some American samurai, he discovered a fervent belief in the mystical importance of a warrior’s unquestioning obedience unto death: “In the midst of doubt, the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt … and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to
a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he had no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.… It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine … our hearts were touched with fire.”130

  * According to William H. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War in America: 1861–65 (Albany, NY: Albany Publishing, 1889), 571. Grady MacWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson put it at 77 (Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982]), 14, as does Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 22.

  FIVE

  AN INVESTMENT OF BLOOD

  Killing and Honor in Colonial Warfare

  IF SOLDIERS HAVE to die it should not be in warfare emptied of nobility. If fate so dictated their deaths, they would wish to give their lives on the high ground, rather than have them carelessly discarded in the scrubby wasteland of history. But in much colonial warfare the deaths of the invaders were denied a noble dimension. Writing in 1904 about the wars of the second half of the nineteenth century between the United States and the Plains Indians, Cyrus Townsend Brady described something of this erosion: