by Bruce Catton
The army had developed a high spirit down on the peninsula in spite of its troubles; a certain cockiness, even, a feeling that it knew of no other soldiers who were quite as good, plus a deep certainty that there was no general anywhere who could be trusted as much as its own commander, General McClellan. But this spirit was dissolving and the certainty was being mocked; and as it plodded on toward the fortified lines at Alexandria it was on the verge of ceasing to be an army at all. Men drifted off through the fields or formed little knots about campfires in the woods and farmyards. The winding columns on the roads stretched as they moved, the head of each column moving just a little faster than the tail. There was no panic, as there had been a year earlier after the first fight at Bull Run, when what had been thought to be an army simply melted into a frantic mob. Save for a bad hour or so at the Bull Run Bridge on the night of August 30, there had been no headlong rush to get away. But the miracle of the spirit which takes thousands of young men, ties them together in strange self-forgetfulness, and enables them to walk steadfastly and without faltering into the certainty of pain and death was wearing very thin. Bickerings and blunderings had sapped its power; where the men went now they went sullenly and only because they must. It would take little more to cause the men to realize that "must" had force only so long as they consented to it.
The army had been gay when it went out. The point that is so easy to overlook nowadays, when all of the illusions about war have been abraded to dust, is that those young men went off to war eagerly and with light hearts, coveting the great adventure which they blithely believed lay just ahead. They went to war because they wanted to go, every man of them, and the obvious fact that in their innocence they did not have the remotest idea what the reality was going to be like does not change the fact. The bounty jumpers and the drafted men had not yet appeared. This was the army of the nation's youth, consciously trying to live up to its own conception of bravery, convinced that a soldier marched forward into high romance; an army with banners that postured pathetically and sincerely as it followed its own boyish vision.
That posturing was of the very essence of the army's spirit, and it caused things to happen that could not happen in the armies of today. We read, for instance, of the father and son who enlisted together in a regiment of Massachusetts infantry. In the fighting at Bull Run the son was killed, and a comrade took the news to the father in the midst of the action. "Well," said the father grimly, "I would rather see him shot dead, as he was, than see him run away." And there is a glimpse of a New York regiment holding the line in another battle under heavy fire. The colonel of an adjoining regiment came over to report that this New York outfit was an especial target because its colors were being held too high: lower them a bit and the fire wouldn't be so costly. The colonel of the New York regiment—himself the most conspicuous target of all, riding slowly back and forth on horseback in rear of his men, who were lying behind a rail fence—looked at the waving flag and said: "Let it wave high. It is our glory." Then there was the colonel of another New York regiment, mortally wounded in a charge, who ordered his men to lift him and prop him up against a tree facing the firing. This done, at whatever cost in pain to the dying man, he said faintly: "Tell Mother I died with my face to the enemy"—and, the message duly noted, died.1
The spirit of the first campaign these soldiers made comes down to us in a journal written by young Captain George Freeman Noyes, a pea-green but ardent officer on General Abner Doubleday's staff, who found himself making a night march up the Rappahannock when Pope was concentrating his army against Stonewall Jackson early in August. Wrote Captain Noyes:
"And so over a heavily-wooded, rolling country, through roads arched with foliage, the moonlight filling them with fantastic shapes and shadows, we pursued our romantic way. The peculiar quiet of the hour, and the weird influence of the forest scenery, with patches of moonlight flung in here and there among the prevailing shadow, every turn of the road seemingly a narrow pass over which giant and grotesque trees stood guard to oppose our progress, added mystic significance to those reflections which our anticipated battle naturally awakened. No longer Yankee soldiers of the nineteenth century, we were for the nonce knights of the ancient chivalry."2
Those fanciful old ideas about the glory of a waving flag, the shame of running from danger, the high importance of dying with one's face to the foe—since that war they have come to seem as out of date as the muzzle-loaders that were used for weapons in those days. The American soldier of later, more sophisticated eras may indeed die rather than retreat, and do it as courageously as any, but he never makes a song about it or strikes an attitude. His heroism is without heroics, and fine phrases excite his instant contempt, because he knows even before he starts off to war that fine phrases and noble attitudes and flags waving in death's own breeze are only so many forms of a come-on for the innocent; nor does he readily glimpse himself as a knight of the ancient chivalry. But in the 1860s the gloss had not been worn off. Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.
The fall was acutely painful, and it was taking place rapidly in the late summer of 1862. The easiest way to see what was going on— in the soldiers' emotions, and in the war itself—is to follow briefly the career of the Black Hat Brigade, which was to become famous.
This outfit was made up of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin regiments and the 19th Indiana—Western troops in an army predominantly of Easterners—and it was assembled in Fredericksburg in the spring and put under the command of young John Gibbon, lately jumped to a brigadier's commission from his position as captain of regular artillery. Gibbon was a West Pointer—a lean, sharp-nosed, bearded man with a habit of blunt speech, who was quietly sorry to have to leave his guns and his tough regulars, where he felt at home, for infantry and volunteers, where he felt strange. He had served on the Western plains under Albert Sidney Johnston before the war; came from North Carolina, had three brothers in the Confederate Army, but for his part had elected to stand by the Union.
Rather to his surprise, he found that he liked his new command, and he wrote that all the men needed was discipline and drill to make first-class soldiers: a judgment that was to be vindicated, for these Westerners turned out to be fighters as good as any the army ever possessed. Gibbon applied the drill and discipline, discovered that volunteers were unlike regulars—praise and the promise of reward were more effective than the fear of punishment which the regulars required—and to tone up their morale he saw to it that they were outfitted, beyond regulations, with black felt hats and white gaiters; hence their nickname, the Black Hat Brigade.
The first combat veterans the boys encountered—Shields's division, down from the Shenandoah Valley after a bloody fight with Stonewall Jackson—jeered at them for bandbox soldiers, but the Westerners retorted that they would rather wear leggings than be lousy like some people, and anyway, they liked their own natty appearance. Like all new troops in that army, when they started cross-country marching in the hot summer they threw their coats and blankets in the nearest ditches, knowing that they could draw new ones, and no questions asked, from the regimental quartermasters. This pained Gibbon's regular-army soul, and he forced the company commanders to receipt for the issue of clothing thereafter, and compelled them to make regular returns on the requisitions, under penalty of drawing no pay.
The brigade carried its coats and blankets henceforward: a thing which caused muttering at first, but morale was high and Gibbon made the men feel like soldiers, and the muttering died away.3
So far the war had been a romantic frolic for these boys. They liked to remember the period of training around Washington, when they had been camped along a stream on the far side of which were home-state neighbors, the 5th Wisconsin. The 5th belonged to General Hancock's brigade, and Hancock had a bull voice that could be heard halfway to Ri
chmond, and the 5th was commanded by a Colonel Cobb, very much of a leading citizen back home but strictly an amateur soldier here like all the rest of them. One day when Hancock was drilling his brigade Colonel Cobb got mixed up and took his regiment off the wrong way in some evolution, and the delighted Wisconsin boys across the river could hear Hancock roar: "Colonel Cobb! Where in the damnation are you going with your battalion?" Thereafter, as long as they were neighbors, it struck the Black Hat Brigade as amusing to go down to the riverbank in the still of the evening and chant in unison: "Colonel Cobb! Where in the damnation are you going with your battalion?"
They had worked out a gag for rainy days, when it was too muddy to drill and all hands were snuggled under their pup tents trying to keep dry and were afflicted by boredom. Some private possessed of a great voice would sing out: "When our army marched down to Bull Run, what did the big bullfrog say?" And hundreds of men would croak: "Big thing! Big thing!" ("Big thing" was Civil War slang for any notable event or achievement—a great battle, promotion to a corporal's chevrons, a two-week furlough, the theft of a crock of apple butter, or anything else worth talking about.) Then the leader would call: "And when our army came back from Bull Run, what did the little frogs say?" To which the answer, in un-melodious screeching trebles, was: "Run, Yank! Run, Yank!" And to close it, the question was: "What does the Bully Sixth say?" The answer, in deep pinewoods bass: "Hit 'em again! Hit 'em again!"
The whole brigade took a queer, perverse pride in the regimental band of the 6th Wisconsin—not because it was so good, but because it was so terrible. It was able to play only one selection, something called "The Village Quickstep," and its dreadful inefficiency (the colonel referred to it in his memoirs as "that execrable band") might have been due to the colonel's quaint habit of assigning men to the band not for musical ability but as punishment for misdemeanors— or so, at least, the regiment stoutly believed. The only good thing about the band was its drum major, one William Whaley, who was an expert at high and fancy twirling of his baton. At one review, in camp around Washington, the brigade had paraded before McClellan, who had been so taken with this drum major's "lofty pomposity" (as a comrade described it) that he took off his cap in jovial salute—whereupon the luckless Whaley, overcome by the honor, dropped his baton ignominiously in the mud, so that his big moment became a fizzle.4
At the end of July the brigade moved out of its camp at Fredericksburg and tramped up the Rappahannock to join Pope—the same movement which led Captain Noyes to see knights of the ancient chivalry marching along the moonlit roads. The men were impatient. They belonged to General Irvin McDowell's corps, and they had been sorely disappointed because orders to go to Richmond and join McClellan's forces there had been canceled at the last minute. Now they looked ahead to action, for it was believed that Pope would plunge at once into battle. Reaching the point of concentration, they did a great deal of marching and countermarching and heard the rumble of artillery duels from afar, and once or twice long-range shells fell among them, but they got into no fighting. And finally they found themselves, with the three other brigades in the division of General Rufus King, trudging off to the northeast on the Warrenton turnpike, heading in the direction of Centreville. Along the way they captured their first prisoner—a straggler from Stonewall Jackson's corps, who had had his fill of fighting and surrendered willingly enough, but who was an authentic armed Rebel for all that. This lanky soldier looked with interest at the full packs carried by Gibbon's boys and remarked: "You uns is like pack mules—we uns is like race horses. All Old Jackson gave us was a musket, a hundred rounds, and a gum blanket, and he druv us like hell."
The men did not know exactly where they were going, but they understood vaguely that Old Jackson was somewhere up ahead; it looked as if they would get into a sure-enough fight this time, and their spirits rose. To be sure, if they were being hurried into action their course was obstructed by numerous mix-ups. They had got into
Warrenton at dusk, hungry, their rations exhausted, and were met by General McDowell in person, who regretted that they could not have any supper but ordered them to move out on the turnpike at once: this was a forced march, no time to draw rations, they had to keep moving. So they started on, found the road blocked by stalled wagon trains, and made a supperless bivouac two miles from Warrenton. The next day they were led down a country lane and thrown into line of battle on some deserted farm, and held there for several hours in complete solitude, before they were recalled and taken back to the main highway; and there they were halted again, to butcher some of their beef cattle and make a leisurely meal. But the men had been soldiers long enough to understand that that sort of thing just went with army life, and their enthusiasm was undimmed. At last, after an afternoon in which they had heard occasional sputters of musket fire far ahead, they went tramping along the pike a mile or two out of the little hamlet of Gainesville, the brigade well closed up, General Gibbon riding at the head, a mile of empty road in front and behind separating it from the rest of the division. It was getting on toward sunset, and the trees on the left of the road were casting long cool shadows. A regimental band was playing a quickstep—one hopes, somehow, that it was the band of the 6th Wisconsin—and the boys were enjoying the war.
The road led straight ahead, like a white dusty arrow, and General Gibbon trotted on in advance to the top of a little rise, where he pulled up to see if he could see anything of the leading brigade. It had vanished, and Gibbon glanced off to the west, to the left of the road. The ground was more or less open there, and it rose in a long, gentle slope; and as Gibbon looked he saw several slim columns of horse—roving cavalry, most likely, he told himself—come trotting out of a grove on the hillside, half a mile away. He was just beginning to speculate whether this cavalry was Federal or Confederate when all the little columns swerved simultaneously, presenting their flanks. At sight of this familiar maneuver something clicked in the mind of this young general who had always been a gunner: that wasn't cavalry at all, it was field artillery going into battery!
Gibbon sent an aide galloping back to the rear of the column to bring up the brigade artillery—Battery B, 4th U.S., the one Gibbon himself had commanded before he became a brigadier of infantry.
The aide had hardly started when six shells came screaming over the road, to burst in the woods off to the right. The colonels of the four infantry regiments, without waiting for orders, swung their men into line facing to the west and got them off the road and had them lie down under cover of a low bank. Battery B came clattering madly up the pike in a cloud of dust, while another salvo from the hostile battery crashed into the treetops. As he cantered into a field west of the road to post the guns Gibbon noticed with approval that his soldiers, although they had been taken completely by surprise, did not seem to be nervous. Perhaps half a dozen men, out of more than eighteen hundred present, had scurried hastily off into the woods when the first shells came over, but they were coming back now with shamefaced grins to rejoin their comrades. Battery B came up, the men tore down a rail fence to make a gateway, and the guns went lumbering into the field beside Gibbon, swinging around and unlimbering with the sure precision of the regulars. In a moment counterbattery fire had been opened.
Up to this point nothing had been seen of the enemy but his six guns. The natural supposition was that they were horse artillery attached to Jeb Stuart's cavalry, engaged in cavalry's favorite practice of harassing infantry on the march. The logical thing to do was to shake a line of infantry out to chase the guns away, and this—after a quick study of the ground in front—Gibbon proceeded to do. The 2nd Wisconsin and 19th Indiana moved forward from behind the protecting bank, broke through a little belt of bushes and scrub trees, and started out across the field to make the Rebel battery cease and desist. The whole thing was done with earnest care, just as it had been done on the drill ground so many times: colonel and lieutenant colonel of each regiment full of business, carefully sighting the lines of direction, sending guides
forward, fussing mightily about alignment, trying their level best to do it all regular-army style—doing it just a little self-consciously, one gathers, because General Gibbon came riding over from the guns to watch, and the general was a regular, and this was the first time under fire. The lines were formed presently and the men went forward, a fringe of skirmishers in advance, and they came to the top of a low ridge. The Confederate artillery suddenly ceased firing, and a line of gray-clad skirmishers rose from the grass in front of the guns and began a pop-pop of small-arms fire.
Then, from the woods beyond, a great mass of Confederate infantry emerged, coming down the slope to give the Westerners their first trial by combat, red battle flags with the starred blue cross snapping in the evening breeze—Stonewall Jackson's men, whose measured conviction it was that they could whip any number of Yankees at any time and place, and whose record gave them tolerably good reason for the belief.
And a long, tearing crackle of musketry broke over the shadowed field, and the Wisconsin and Indiana boys learned what it was like to fight. Gibbon, who had thought he was quelling impudent horse artillery, went spurring back to bring up his other two regiments, couriers galloped down the road to ask for help from the other brigades, and presently the 6th Wisconsin came up to take position at the right of the line. Many years later its colonel recalled with pride the military precision with which his regiment deployed for action under fire. Gibbon threw the 7th Wisconsin in where the 2nd was fighting, and the battle was on.