by Bruce Catton
Next in popularity, probably, was "Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground"; a song more familiar nowadays because it hung on after the war, being adapted to express the emotions of old soldiers at reunions, whereas "Weeping, Sad and Lonely" wasn't, exactly. There was, of course, not a trace in either song of the jingle and stir of what is commonly thought of as patriotic music. "Tenting Tonight" frankly states the soldier's dejection:
We're tenting tonight on the old camp ground,
Give us a song to cheer
Our weary hearts, a song of home,
And friends we love so dear.
The chorus complains:
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts that are looking for the right,
To see the dawn of peace.
And the conclusion, very soft and long-drawn-out:
Dying tonight . . . dying tonight,
Dying on the old . . . camp . . . ground.
They were sentimentalists, all right, the boys who sang those songs around their campfires, with the regimental bands lifting the slow melodies up to the dark sky like drifting plumes of wood smoke from the embers; but they weren't milk-and-water sentimentalists. If they chose to make a song about "dying tonight," they were the men who had to go out and do the dying, and they knew it. (In the thrice-valiant 2nd Wisconsin the figures showed that by the end of the war nearly nine out of ten men in combat assignments had been shot. If non-combatants like company cooks, officers' servants, ambulance details, and so on, are included, the proportion is closer to nine out of twelve.)
They liked "Lorena," too, although that was perhaps more popular in the Southern armies—"Lorena" with its sugary, paper-lace-valentine romantics:
The years creep slowly by, Lorena,
The snow is on the grass again:
The sun's low down the sky, Lorena,
The frost gleams where the flowers have been.
North and South, the armies sang Stephen Foster—"My Old Kentucky Home," "Old Folks at Home," "Old Black Joe," and "Nellie Gray," especially the latter. Ranking close to "Tenting Tonight" was "The Vacant Chair"-
We shall meet, but we shall miss him;
There will be one vacant chair—
and they liked old favorites such as "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" and "Auld Lang Syne" and—deeply, tearfully—"Home, Sweet Home." It is recorded that during the long winter after the battle of Fredericksburg, when the two rival armies were camped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, with the boys on the opposing picket posts daily swapping coffee for tobacco and comparing notes on their generals, their rations, and other matters, and with each camp in full sight and hearing of the other, one evening massed Union bands came down to the riverbank to play all of those songs, plus the more rousing tunes like "John Brown's Body," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching." Northerners and Southerners, the soldiers sang those songs or sat and listened to them, massed in their thousands on the hillsides, while the darkness came down to fill the river valley and the light of the campfires glinted off the black water. Finally the Southerners called across, "Now play some of ours," so without pause the Yankee bands swung into "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and "Maryland, My Maryland." And then at last the massed bands played "Home, Sweet Home," and 150,000 fighting men tried to sing it and choked up and just sat there, silent, staring off into the darkness; and at last the music died away and the bandsmen put up their instruments and both armies went to bed. A few weeks later they were tearing each other apart in the lonely thickets around Chancellorsville.13
Singing on the march was not very common except among recruits. After the first half-hour an army march settled down to a dull question of endurance; there was mud to contend with, or if there was no mud there were choking clouds of dust, and nobody had any breath or enthusiasm to waste on songs. On special occasions, though, the troops might fall into step and strike up a song; one of the German regiments (all especially noted for their singing) came tramping into Frederick with flags uncased, singing the John Brown song lustily. It was noted, too, that when troops were marched through Charles Town, where old Brown had been tried and hanged, they had a way of singing that song. Once in a while, when the day was cool and the road was good, a regiment might sing a bit on the march out of sheer good spirits; but when it did the song was apt to be a homemade ditty, neither sentimental nor patriotic, like the little song of the Zouave regiments:
Oh we belong to the Zoo-Zoo-Zoos—
Don't you think we oughter?
We're going down to Washing-town
To fight for Abraham's daughter.
When the soldiers used music to complain about their lot, it was not so much the fighting they were protesting against—although, being very human, they would have been glad to be shut of it. Boredom, dirt, disease, bad food, and the general air of doing everything the hard way which is inseparable from army life (it began, no doubt, in Julius Caesar's legions) seemed to cause most of the grousing. A veteran of the 2nd Massachusetts found military martinets the soldier's chief cross. He wrote that his colonel once put a company commander under arrest for talking to a sergeant (during a halt while the army was on the march) without requiring the sergeant to stand at attention—a touch which sounds quite modern, somehow. A man in the 37th Massachusetts thought the worst thing about army life was the long delay, with everyone standing in ranks under full pack, which occurred on every march. In the 21st New York a private wrote that the shoddy uniform was the worst trial; it absorbed the rain and held it next to the skin, keeping the soldier wetter and colder than if he were naked. To the historian of the 3rd Wisconsin, by far the worst feature of the entire war was the camp diarrhea, which hit almost everyone sooner or later and which in many cases became chronic, weakening men and causing them to lose weight, often resulting in death or in a medical discharge. A soldier in the 17th Michigan found war's worst trial "the terrible, nauseating stench that envelopes a military camp." To a young officer in the 57th New York the worst thing was the old army officer from the regular service; such men, he said, "suffered from red-tape-ism, slowness, desire for a comfortable berth, and above and beyond all, jealousy." By contrast, among the enlisted men the regular officers often seemed to be better liked than the volunteers; a private in the 128th New York noted that the one officer in his regiment who tried to look out for the enlisted men was the lieutenant colonel, the regiment's lone regular. The historian of the 4th Rhode Island was bitter about the food given sick and wounded men in hospital; the mainstay, he said, was "shadow soup." He gave the recipe: put a large kettle of water on to boil, then hang a chicken so that its shadow falls in the water, and boil the shadow for half an hour; add salt and pepper and serve.
These were the particularized complaints. But the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. War itself was the real evil, and the charge was never fully formulated. Those soldiers lacked the easy articulateness of the modern youth, and they could never quite say what it was that they hated so much—and so, being unable to say it, they took it out by singing the sad, mournful little songs that come down the years so inexpressibly moving.
Chaplains the army had in plenty—one for each regiment—to give the boys spiritual consolation. Yet as one reads the memoirs and diaries there is a distinct impression that as a group, and with honorable exceptions, the chaplains somehow did not quite measure up.
There were too many misfits; in that free-and-easy age, too many unqualified men, perhaps, had taken holy orders. A Massachusetts regiment had a first lieutenant who was a minister in private life;
he pulled wires to get himself made regimental chaplain, failed, and wound up by absconding with ninety dollars in company funds. A diarist in another Eastern regiment mentioned a chaplain who was
court-martialed for stealing a horse, and added that as a general thing the chaplains were not too highly thought of. For a time the 48th N
ew York enjoyed a special odor of sanctity because so many
of its officers had been ministers. It fell from grace, however, when it was put to work opening a channel for gunboats through some tidal swamp during the expedition to Port Royal and the Savannah delta.
The work was extremely hard and the weather was very hot and steamy, and all hands became excessively profane, ex-ministers and all. A brigadier, watching them at work one day, asked the lieutenant colonel if he really was a preacher. The officer replied apologetically:
"Well, no, General, I can't say I'm a regularly ordained minister.
I'm just one of those---- local preachers."14
With the shepherds backsliding in that way, the 48th as a flock quickly got a reputation for unbridled wickedness. Famous throughout the army was the story told about the 48th in connection with this same coastal expedition. An attack by a new ironclad Rebel gunboat was anticipated, and elaborate plans were made to entrap the monster with submarine obstructions that would cause it to run aground on a mud bank. But then the question arose: how to board the vessel, once it was trapped? It was sheathed in iron and its ports would be closed flush with its sloping sides, and it would be impossible to get into it and subdue the crew. The colonel of the 48th (according to the legend) had the answer. Parading his regiment, he said: "Now, men, you've been in this cursed swamp for two weeks, up to your ears in mud—no fun, no glory and blessed poor pay. Here's a chance. Let every man who has had experience as a cracksman or a safe-blower step to the front." To the last man, the regiment rolled forward four paces and came expectantly to attention.15
Which calls to mind the evil repute of yet another New York regiment, the 6th, which had a large enrollment of Bowery toughs-one officer spoke of it as "the very flower of the Dead Rabbits, the creme de la creme of Bowery society." Army rumor had it that before a man could enlist in this regiment he had to show that he had done time in a prison: a libel, beyond question, but the army liked to believe it. And it was alleged that when this regiment was about to take off for the South the colonel harangued the men; thinking to inspire them, he drew out his gold watch and held it up for all to see. They were going, he said, to the Deep South, where every plantation owner, living luxuriously among his slaves, was waiting to be despoiled of a watch quite as good as this one. If they were brave soldiers each might get one for himself. Five minutes later, looking to see what time it was, he found that his watch was gone. (Writing long afterward, the regiment's historian complained bitterly about the "vicious nonsense" which was circulated about the regiment. He blamed the regiment's colonel, who liked the stories, having "that essentially American cynic humor which often finds amusement in wild exaggeration.")
Those New York regiments seemed to breed odd stories. A devout chaplain, it was said, went to the colonel of a Manhattan regiment which had no chaplain and asked permission to hold services. The colonel was dubious; his men were a godless lot, he said, and he doubted that the chaplain would accomplish much. But the chaplain, who believed in saving sinners where he found them, was insistent. He had just held services, he said, in the neighboring Brooklyn regiment, and—but that was enough. Between the Brooklyn and Manhattan regiments there was a great rivalry, and the colonel instantly ordered the regiment paraded for divine worship, announcing that if a man smiled, coughed, or even moved he would be thrown in the guardhouse. The chaplain held his services, and at the end asked if any men would come up and make profession of faith; thirteen men had done so, he said, in the Brooklyn regiment. The colonel sprang to his feet.
"Adjutant!" he bellowed. "Detail twenty men and have them baptized at once. This regiment is not going to let that damned Brooklyn regiment beat it at anything!"10
For a few days there in Maryland the army came about as close to contentment as an army on active service ever gets. The future did not exist, and the past would somehow be made up for; there was only the present, with easy marches, friendly country, clear weather, and good roads. A veteran in George H. Gordon's brigade has left a picture of a noonday halt: each man building a tiny campfire, putting his own personal, makeshift kettle (an empty fruit can with a bit of haywire for a bail) on to boil water from his canteen, shaking in coffee from a little cloth bag carried in the haversack. "At the same dme a bit of bacon or pork was broiling on a stick, and in a few minutes the warm meal was cooked and dispatched. Then, washing his knife by stabbing it in the ground, and eating up his plate, which was a hardtack biscuit, the contented soldier lit his laurel-root pipe, took a few puffs, lay down with his knapsack for a pillow, and dozed until the sharp command, 'Fall in!' put an end to his nap."17
2. Crackers and Bullets
The best thing about being in Maryland, the soldiers agreed, was that the people had plenty of fresh provisions to sell and were quite willing to sell them. The army was in funds; most of the men had put in four months on the peninsula, a war-ravaged country where the people had no food to spare and in any case scorned to deal with Yankees, and there had been little chance to spend anything. It had been but little different along the Rappahannock, although in the larger towns a man could usually make a deal; the 14th New York was alleged to have passed some three thousand dollars in counterfeit Confederate notes—obtained heaven knows how —among the luckless shopkeepers of Fredericksburg. But now, with money in his pocket and things to spend it on, the soldier enjoyed a few days of better eating than the regulations called for.
The Civil War soldier would have stared in amazement if he could have looked ahead eighty years to see the War Department, in World War II, thoughtfully retaining female experts on cookery to devise tasty menus for the troops and setting up elaborate schools to train cooks and bakers. No such frills were dreamed of in his day; the theory then seems to have been that if the raw materials of dinner were provided in quantity the army would make out all right. In a sense, the government might have been right. The army did survive, although, looking back at the provisioning and cooking arrangements, one sometimes wonders why it didn't die, to the last man, of acute indigestion. For while the government provided plenty of food of a sort, the business of getting it cooked and served was left entirely up to the soldiers.
One regimental historian—whose experience was quite typical—recalled that when his outfit was first assembled in camp the authorities simply issued quantities of flour, pork, beans, rice, sugar, coffee, molasses, and bread, made kettles and skillets available, and then suggested that the men had better form messes of from six to ten members and get busy on the cooking. The men did as instructed, and in each mess the men took their turns acting as cooks. (The phrase, "acting as," seems expressive, somehow.) A few of the fancy-pants Eastern militia regiments which turned out in response to the first call for ninety-day service had no trouble; they hired their own civilian cooks and got along fine as long as they stayed close to town in established camps where ranges, bake ovens, and civilian markets were handy. But these were the regiments where private soldiers wore tailor-made uniforms (bought at the individual's expense, as carefully fitted and frequently as gaudy as a Coldstream Guard colonel's) and they were never characteristic, nor did they last very long.
Neither, for that matter, did the extreme sketchiness of the informal regimental messes. Sooner or later the institution of the regular company cook was established: two to a company, detailed to the job by order and excused from drill and combat duty. Naturally, their quality varied greatly. Here and there a regiment was lucky enough to find that it actually had some professional cooks in the ranks, although that didn't happen often; nobody, from first to last, was ever enlisted as a cook. Mostly, the company cooks learned their trade on the job, and the soldiers had to eat what they prepared while they were learning. A soldier in the 19th Massachusetts, considering the matter with an indignation which a quarter century of peace had not diminished, summed it up in words which most soldiers would have endorsed: "A company cook is a peculiar being: he generally knows less about cooking than any man in the compa
ny. Not being able to learn the drill, and too dirty to appear on inspection, he is sent to the cook house to get him out of the ranks."1 A notable exception to all of this was, as might be expected, the 55th New York, full of transplanted Frenchmen. They knew something about cooking, and their officers' mess, at least, was famous. President Lincoln dined with them once while they were in camp on the edge of Washington, and told the officers afterward that if their men could fight as well as they could cook the regiment would do very well indeed. They had given him, he added, the best meal he had had in Washington.
A good deal depended on the higher officers. If they insisted that their men be well fed, the men usually fared pretty well. Phil Kearny used to have a habit of sticking his head into the company mess kitchens just before mealtime to sample the food. If the cooking was bad or if the shack was dirty, the company cooks—plus the company and regimental officers—were sure to have a bad time of it before the general left.
In many cases that strange Civil War figure, the contraband, came to the rescue. Now and then, among the escaped slaves who attached themselves to the army as the campaigns in Virginia progressed, were house servants who could cook, and when a detachment got hold of one it never let him go. One company in the 21st Massachusetts acquired somewhere along the Rappahannock a contraband named (apparently by themselves) Jeff Davis. He was a first-rate cook, and he served also as a sort of unofficial commissary agent and general factotum for the entire company. They picked up a mule for him from some secessionist farmer's stock, and he loaded the beast with his kitchen equipment and supplies. Every pay day he would pass the hat and each man would chip in a quarter or half a dollar which Jeff Davis used as a mess fund, so that the company often enjoyed extras like fresh eggs, butter, and garden truck, most of them lawfully bought and paid for. This priceless contraband served with the regiment to the end of the war and went north with the men after Appomattox; he setded near Worcester, married, raised a family, and, wrote the regiment's historian, lived happily ever after —one case where emancipation worked out nicely.