Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (49 page)

On paper, Civil War regiments were supposed to contain eight to ten companies of approximately 100 enlisted men and officers each, commanded by a colonel, so the full strength of a regiment ought to have been, more or less, 1,000 men. In the Union Army, however, regiments were often allowed to dwindle down to between 200 and 300 men, as the ranks were thinned by sickness and casualties. The reason for this neglect was nakedly political. Since the volunteer regiments were raised by the states, it was easier for many Northern governors to create new regiments, and thus create new openings for cronies whom they wished to reward with officers’ commissions, than to keep refilling the old regiments.

The result was an army of shadow units. When Union general John A. Dix reviewed George Washington Whitman’s 51st New York at Newport News, Virginia, in February 1863, the 51st “could only muster 140 men,” and “when we came along with our old flag all torn to pieces, I saw the old. Gen. eye the flag and Regt. and shake his head.”
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In many cases, it was up to the regimental commanding officer to keep up a supply of new enlistments from back home for his regiment, but most commanders could ill afford to detail their precious supply of junior officers for recruiting duty behind the lines. The Confederates armies, on the other hand, recognized the value of integrating new recruits and replacements with veteran combat regiments, and so the Confederate regiments were more likely to maintain their organizational integrity throughout the war than Union regiments.

If the regiment was the basic unit of identity, the brigade was soon recognized as the basic unit of maneuver on the Civil War battlefield, and most of the movement and action in Civil War combat occurred in groups of brigades. The average brigade consisted of four or five regiments, commanded by a brigadier general, and sometimes they acquired an identity of their own to rival the individual regimental identities—the Iron Brigade of the Army of the Potomac was composed of five western regiments that all retained the use of the black Hardee hat as their badge. The Irish Brigade, another Army of the Potomac unit, was composed of an odd amalgam of Irish-born New Yorkers and Protestant Pennsylvanians who carried a green flag emblazoned with a gilded harp into battle. The Philadelphia Brigade, also in the Army of the Potomac, was the only brigade in either army that took its name from its hometown.

Brigades were themselves usually organized into divisions, comprising two or three brigades, and commanded by either a senior brigadier general or a major general. Finally, the divisions were organized into corps, with both armies making up a corps from two or three divisions. The corps was the real innovation of this war for the American military, and like so much else, it was a borrowing from Napoleon Bonaparte’s determination to create a
corps d’armée
, an all-arms unit big enough to fight anything except the entirety of an enemy’s army but still small enough to be within the grasp of a single commander and nimble enough to march separate from the other parts of an army. Wellington had briefly adopted the corps model before Waterloo, but it never took serious hold in British military thinking, and in the Crimea, the British Army never organized itself at a higher level than the division. Napoleon III resurrected the
corps d’armée
in the North Italian War, and like so much else that was French, it proved irresistible to American borrowing.
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Confederate corps were generally identified by the name of their commanding general, while Union corps were assigned numbers. The corps commanders, usually
senior major generals, were expected (unlike division or brigade commanders) to be able to exercise a large measure of independent judgment and initiative, and the measure of any army’s effectiveness could be reliably prophesied from the quality of its corps commanders. In Lee’s army in 1863, the corps commanders—James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson—were probably the best pair of military talents on the North American continent. The Army of the Potomac also boasted equally outstanding combat soldiers in the commanders of the 1st Corps (John F. Reynolds) and the 2nd Corps (Winfield Scott Hancock).

To the ordinary volunteer, however, the principal concern was not with generals or even weapons but with the experience of war service itself. Much as enlistment propaganda might have initially convinced the volunteer that the Rebel or the Yankee was his sworn enemy, the volunteer soon recognized that the soldier opposite him was an American like himself. No matter how much Southerners and Northerners tried to persuade themselves that they were fighting an alien from an alien culture, soldiers from both armies quickly found that both were usually Protestant in religion, democratic in politics, and fond of the same music.

So, to the despair of their commanders (who feared the leakage of important information on troop movements), they fraternized freely in the quiet periods between battles. Edward King Wightman described such a meeting near Fortress Monroe in May 1863, with a “johnny Reb” who had “laid aside his piece and crossed over in a skiff to exchange papers with our pickets.” Wightman looked over this “very lean black-eyed fellow with long straight hair” and noticed that he “was well clothed in a gray jacket and pants and so forth.” Wightman “bantered him the best I knew how, but he took it very well.” A year later, Wightman saw a more general truce break out between Confederates and Federals on the James River, who created a temporary market for swaps of goods. “One of our men, laying aside his rifle, would walk out boldly half-way to the enemy’s line, leave a little bag of coffee on a stump, and return,” while “Johnny Reb would then issue forth, take the coffee and substitute in its place a big plug of tobacco, which was speedily secured for the service of the Union.” Eventually the “ballygogging” attracted the notice of a Confederate officer, who “determined to make a demonstration.”

All at once the rebs started for cover, but not before they had called out warningly, “Take care, Yanks, we’re going to shell ye.” To this our boys replied by flopping into pits, leaving but one eye exposed and crying with equal friendship, “Lay low, Rebs!” The artillery fire opened on the right, intermingled with rapid volleys of musketry, and worked gradually around to us. In our immediate neighborhood shells were dropped in profusion, spiced with a few rifle balls; but no advance was made and no one was hit. In an hour everything was quiet again, and we all came forth whistling and laughing as before, to cook our supper. The rebs did likewise.
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Wartime fraternization had its limits, and the principal limit was race. White soldiers might profess any amount of fellow feeling, but unsleeping hostility was the rule between black Federals and white Confederates. A Confederate soldier imprisoned at Point Lookout, Maryland, wrote that the “negro troops” guarding rebel prisoners were “as mean as hell,” and Confederates captured at Cold Harbor in 1864 were taunted “revengefully” by black Union soldiers as the Confederates were marched away to a prisoner-of-war camp.
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Soldiers black and white soon learned that the real enemy in the war was not the other soldier but disease, wounds, and the fear of wounds. Disease in fact, turned out to be the real killer of the Civil War. For every soldier who died in battle, another two died of disease in camp, and overall, more than 10 percent of the Union Army and 20 percent of the Confederate Army were killed off by disease rather than by bullets. One principal cause for the ravages of disease was the nature of military camp life in the nineteenth century, which in clinical terms acted as little better than a disease funnel. Americans of the Civil War era knew little or nothing of bacteriology, and so neither the volunteer nor his officers had any idea of the communicative and infectious nature of malaria, typhus, bronchitis, or pneumonia. As a result, men were taken into the armies carrying a number of diseases with them, and then packed into teeming military camps where they could easily spread a vast sampling of pathogens among themselves.

The volunteers unwittingly added to the odds against them by responding to sanitary discipline with the same contemptuous independence they displayed toward military discipline, and only with the greatest difficulty could they be persuaded to take appropriate health precautions. Camp life, for white American males in the nineteenth century, created an inversion of social roles, since male soldiers now found themselves responsible for a range of domestic labors—sewing clothes, cooking meals, cleaning—which were normally assigned at home to women, and many soldiers were unable to make the cognitive adjustment to the performance of these tasks even when their lives depended on it. “I am most heartily sick of this kind of life,” wrote Jacob W. Bartness, an Indiana soldier, to his wife in 1865. “Oh, what a pleasant retreete from the repulsive scenes of this man-slaughtering life, would be the society of my family in some secluded spot, shut out from the calamities of war.”
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On campaign, the constant exposure to all varieties of weather, and the vulnerability of northern-bred systems to the drastic ecological difference of the deep South’s climate and environment, made Northern soldiers particularly vulnerable to
sickness. Charles Jewett of the 2nd New Hampshire wrote home in July 1862 warning a family friend of the rough living that would await him if he enlisted. “If he thinks it would be any Benefit to his health, tell him to try it at home first. Tell him to go out dores and sleep on the ground through two or three rain storms without any thing to put over or under him. If that don’t dishearten him put [a] half Bushel of corn on his back and march all day, then take a Shovel and shovel all night without any thing to eat or drink.”

The impossibility of washing and cleaning on long marches made the volunteer an easy target for infestations of lice, fleas, ticks, and other pests. For John Billings, the constant presence of lice was a great leveler of pretensions, the butt of a good soldiers’ joke. “Like death,” Billings wrote, lice were “no respecter of persons.” The pest “inserted its bill as confidingly into the body of the major-general as of the lowest private. I once heard the orderly of a company officer relate that he had picked fiftytwo graybacks from the shirt of his chief at one sitting.” Soldiers in the 154th New York wrote home in exasperation that “when we were on the march, we had every time we stopped to take off our shirts and drawers and kill the lice, to keep them from carrying us off.” Few soldiers suspected that these pests also helped to transmit bacteria through bites and open sores. In camp, the volunteers carelessly continued to make trouble for themselves. Water contaminated by poorly dug latrines, along with piles of waste and garbage that attracted flies and rodents, brought on waves of dysentery, diarrhea, and typhoid fever, but little could convince the volunteer to protect himself. “Our poor sick, I know, suffer much,” sighed Robert E. Lee, but “they bring it on themselves by not doing what they are told. They are worse than children, for the latter can be forced.”
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The army medical services compounded these problems instead of curing them. Like the army itself, army medical practice, at the outbreak of the war, was almost nonexistent. In 1861, the Union surgeon-general was Colonel Thomas Lawson, an eighty-four-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 who had only 113 other surgeons on the army rolls to assist him (26 of whom resigned to join the Confederacy). Medical screening of enlistees was virtually nonexistent. The volunteers who enlisted in the 143rd Pennsylvania in the summer of 1862 were examined “by a trio of surgeons who told the men “to strip to natures habiliments,” given a cursory inspection lasting no more than three or four minutes,” then told to dress “and get out of there.” The recruits of the 1st Minnesota were asked to walk, “face to the right or the left, and to march a few paces further, then face about,” and that was it. No provision had been made for a system of army general hospitals; not until August 1862 did McClellan recommend the creation of a military ambulance corps for the Army of the Potomac.

Even those surgeons and doctors who were on hand were liable to make matters worse instead of better. Not only were they necessarily as ignorant as everyone else of the most basic notions of bacteriology, but they relied on cures that were often worse than the disease. “God save me from being sick and having hospital care such as I have seen,” wrote one officer of the 154th New York. “Those in Washington perhaps are not as bad,” but in the field and in camp, “the medical treatment is a damning one. Blisters, then diarrhea powders next, then cough powders & damning and so on.” In addition to alcoholic stimulants, opium-based painkillers were unwisely ladled out in fantastic amounts: one estimate suggests that more than 10 million opium pills, plus 2.8 million ounces of opium-related medicines, were handed out by Federal medical officers during the war. The result was widespread addiction, either to opiates or to alcohol, in order to cope with pain and illness, and in some cases with battle fatigue and anxiety. Braxton Bragg’s erratic behavior as a Confederate field commander may have been related to opium addiction; John Bell Hood, an aggressive Confederate field general who suffered a mangled arm and an amputated leg, sustained himself on alcohol and opiates, and they in turn probably helped him lose his luckless campaign in Tennessee in 1864 by sapping his strength and deadening his judgment.
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What made all of this worse was the reluctance of the army medical services to issue medical discharges. Fearing abuse of the discharge system by conniving soldiers, regimental surgeons in the Civil War turned themselves into the first line of defense against military “malingering.” William Fuller, Second Assistant Surgeon of the 1st Michigan Volunteers, seems to have treated men who reported on sick call to a classic case of military catch-22—the more serious an illness, Fuller reasoned, the more likely it was faked. “Vast strides have been made in the proficiency of malingering in this country since the first year of the war,” Fuller intoned solemnly. “When a surgeon has reason to think that a man has an object or a motive for feigning, no statement of his should be accepted as true. …”
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The result of Fuller’s zeal, however, was that sick men were sent back into camp or onto the march, where they only managed to infect other men and further spread sickness.