Grant Moves South (2 page)

Absence from Camp will not be received as a paliation for any absence from duty, on the contrary will be regarded as an aggrivation of the offence and will be punished accordingly.

The guards are required in all cases to arrest all men coming into Camp after retreat unless provided with a pass countersigned by the Regimental Commander.
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This was not the way an officer talked to recruits in the Regular Army, but it was laying it on the line, and the 21st began to respond. Long after the war a veteran said that “the effect of that order was wonderful,” and went on to say that the camp guards were abolished and that there was no absenteeism thereafter.
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As a testimonial to a remembered change, this was good enough, but it was an overstatement; no Middle Western troops at any time in the war ever displayed a pious refusal to slip out after tattoo and go a-roving, and that the guard continued to exist is clear from an order Grant himself signed two days later. The guard, indeed, was behaving no better than the guarded, and Grant's handling of the matter is another illustration of the touch he used in dealing with the Volunteers.

“The following,” Grant wrote, dating the order June 21, “is published for the benefit of this command”:

It is with regret that the commanding officer learns that a number of men composing the Guard of last night deserted their posts and their guard. This is an offense against all military rule and law, which no punishment can be prescribed for by a commanding officer at his discretion but must be the subject for a General Court Martial to decide upon. It cannot, in time [of] peace, be accompanied with a punishment less than the forfeiture
of 10$ from the pay of the soldier, together with corporal punishment such as confinement for thirty days with ball & chain at hard labor. In time of war the punishment of this is death.

The Col. Commanding believing that the men of his command, now in confinement for this offence were ignorant of the magnitude of it, is not disposed to visit them with all the rigor of the law, provided for such cases, but would admonish them, and the whole command against a repetition of the offence, as it will not be excused again in this Regt.
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Not all of this was just a matter of writing orders in the book. There were times, in these Middle Western regiments, when the personal force of the Colonel was all that mattered. He had it, or he lacked it, and that was that. There was a tough private called “Mexico,” rated a dangerous roughneck, who showed up on Grant's second morning with the regiment in what was officially described as a drunk and disorderly condition, and Grant sent him to the guardhouse.

Mexico glared at the 135-pound Colonel, and growled: “For every minute I stand here I'll have an ounce of your blood.”

Grant told the guards to gag Mexico, and pursued his other duties. Some hours later Grant came back, walked up to Mexico, undid the gag with his own hands, and turned the man loose. Mexico took no ounce of anybody's blood, but went quietly about his business; and it was recorded that “all question of Grant's power to command both himself and his men” vanished from that moment.
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Grant cut down the excessive amount of drill which had been prescribed by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander, stipulating that there would be squad drill between six and seven every morning, with company drill running from 10 to 11
A.M
. and from five to six in the evening. The wording of the order hints at previous deficiencies in the work:

Company commanders will have their companies divided into convenient squads and appoint suitable persons to drill them. The officers of Companies are expected to be present and give their personal supervision to these drills, and see that all their men not on duty are present.

Indeed, it was the company officer rather than the enlisted man at whom Grant seemed to be aiming in his first steps toward proper military training. A week after he had taken command he was warning that at least one commissioned officer must be present at all roll calls, this officer to be responsible for making sure that all absentees not properly excused were reported. He went on to spell out the responsibilities of an officer:

All officers not reported sick, or otherwise excused by competent authority, will attend all Drills and Parades. They will give strict attention that the men of their respective commands receive proper instruction. Officers wishing to be absent from Camp at night are required to get the countersign from the Comdg. Officer of the Camp. No one having the countersign will be permitted to communicate it to another for the purpose of enabling him to pass the Guard.
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In centering his attention on the company officers, Grant was approaching the great, enduring weakness of the Volunteer Armies of the Civil War. The volunteer system made it almost certain that neither platoon nor company officers would know anything about their jobs during the precise moment when such ignorance would have the worst effect—the first, formative period in training camp. Company officers were either self-appointed, or elected by vote of the recruits, and in neither case was proper qualification for the job a factor. In time many of these became good officers—like the enlisted men, they were as smart as townfolks, and most of them were almost painfully conscientious—but in the beginning, almost without exception, they knew nothing about what they were supposed to do, and, by the time they had learned, a regiment almost inevitably developed certain defects that could never be cured. Any colonel who hoped to train and discipline his men had to start with the company officers, simply because it was their deficiencies that made discipline so lax and training so imperfect; for although the volunteer system drew into the armies the most superb human material ever put into uniform, it guaranteed that this material would not be used to the best advantage. Taking command of a regiment in which riotous indiscipline had become standard, Grant would have made scant progress if he had simply invoked the brutal code of punishment
which the Articles of War made available to him. He had to begin with the subalterns, to whom nobody had ever spelled out the duties and responsibilities that go with shoulder straps. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander had complained, only a few days earlier, that these officers had lost sight of the rules of discipline; Grant now was undertaking to show the officers just what these rules were.

Before June ended the 21st Illinois was formally mustered into the Federal service for three years. Almost immediately after this happened, the regiment got marching orders: Move to Quincy, Illinois, on the Mississippi River, preparatory to going into Missouri. Training camp days were over: to go into Missouri was to get into the war.

From Springfield to Quincy is about one hundred miles, and the original plan was to send the 21st there by rail. Instead the regiment went on foot, by Grant's decision. All the surviving accounts agree that the march did the regiment a great deal of good, and the only question seems to be why Grant made the decision. Governor Richard Yates remembered that he did it “for the sake of discipline”; a regimental veteran believed that it was “because we needed the drill”; and Grant himself wrote that he thought making the march on foot would be good preparation for the regiment's later experiences. A variant is that the authorities had provided railroad cars, and that a long string of these were backed into a siding at Camp Yates for the 21st to board. The cars were freight cars, they were very dirty, and the soldiers made outcry when they saw them. As free-born Americans they would ride in no filthy freight cars: if the government wanted to send them off by rail let the government bring passenger cars. Grant heard them out and remarked that if they did not want to ride in freight cars they did not have to: they could walk, and they would do so at once, with a few wagons to carry tents and other equipment.
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However all of this may have been, the 21st did make the hike on foot, and it learned a bit more about soldiering as it hiked. It left Springfield on July 3, 1861, and Grant as a troop commander was beginning his first cross-country movement. (He was exactly two years away from Vicksburg, and the talk with John Pemberton under a tree on a sun-baked hill; a world of marching would lie between
this day and that one.) As they trudged along, the soldiers reflected that this colonel of theirs meant business, and when he was near they had a way of breaking into a then popular gospel tune, “Jordan Am a Hard Road to Travel,” with much rolling of eyes at the figure of the Colonel. Grant paid no attention, except that once he was heard to say to the Adjutant: “Yes, Jordan may be a hard road to travel. So is the road to discipline. Both have to be traveled.”
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As it marched—toward Jordan, toward discipline, or only toward Missouri—the 21st learned to be prompt. When camp was made for the night, there would be orders specifying the hour at which the march would be resumed in the morning. It became clear that a company or an individual not ready to move at that moment would be left behind, without breakfast or even, on occasion, without pants; the military machine moved, and it was up to the soldier to move with it. Grant continued to keep an eye on the officers. Three days from Springfield he distributed a broadside:

The Col. Commanding regrets that it becomes his duty to notice the fact, that some of the Officers of this command fell out of ranks yesterday, in passing through Jacksonville without authority to do so; and this whilst the rank & file were guarded most strictly. This being the first offence is overlooked, but in future no excuse will be received.
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The emphasis again was on the officers, but the colonel was not above paying direct attention to the sins of the enlisted man. During a brief halt in one small town, many of the regiment visited the local grocery and filled their canteens and themselves with whisky, and when the march was resumed there was much unsteadiness and wabbling in the ranks. Grant noticed, said nothing, called a halt after a time, and then quietly passed down the ranks on foot, making personal inspection of every man's canteen. If it held whisky, the fluid was immediately poured on the ground and the man was ordered to march for the rest of the day tethered behind a baggage wagon.
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Somewhere near Naples, on the Illinois River, the march was halted; orders now were to wait for steamboat transportation to St. Louis. Grant put the regiment into camp, ordered daily squad, company
and battalion drill, and called on all ranks “to give the strictest attention to all their military duties”; a matter of importance, he wrote, “when it is reflected upon how soon we may be called into actual service, and how important it is that everyone should know his duty.” On this same day, July 9, Grant reflected on what had been done thus far and wrote an odd, man-to-man sort of order to the men of his regiment:

The Col. Commanding this Regiment deems it his duty at this period of the march to return his thanks to the Officers and men composing the command on their general Obedience and Military disipline. Having for a period of years been accostomed to strict military duties and disipline he deems it not inapropriate at this time to make a most favorable comparison of this command with that of veteran troops in point of soldierly bearing, general good order, and cheerful execution of commands; making the real necessity of a Guard partially unnecessary. Although discipline has been generaly enforced, yet, the same strictness would have been unnecessary, but for a few unruly men, who have caused the Regt to be more strictly under regulation for their misdemeaniors. The Col. Comdg. trusts that a repetition of disorder on their part may never occur again; but that all may prove themselves Soldiers, fit for duty without any unnecessary means being pursued by him to make them such.
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The regiment waited for several days, at Naples; the expected steamboat had run on a sand bar somewhere, and by the time the vessel was clear orders were changed again. Boarding the cars at last—Grant noted with pride that it took just forty minutes to get men and baggage all ready to go—the 21st moved on to Quincy by rail, and if the men had complaint about the condition of the cars they kept quiet about it.… At Quincy, Grant parted with his eleven-year-old son, Frederick Dent Grant, who had been with him ever since Grant became a colonel. Mrs. Grant and the children would be campaigners, in this war, and Grant would have some or all of them with him whenever he could. He sent Fred home now, supposing that Julia would be worried if he took the lad on into Missouri—“We may have some fighting to do, and he is too young to have the exposure of a camp life,” he explained—and so he put the lad on a
boat, to go home to Galena by way of Dubuque. Julia Grant, as it turned out, was quite unworried; she wrote to Grant urging him to keep Fred with him, remarking that Alexander the Great was not older when he accompanied Philip of Macedon. (As a soldier's wife, she knew her military history.) The letter reached Grant too late, and Fred went home on schedule, and Mrs. Grant recalled years later Grant was rather amused by her letter.
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By mid-July the 21st Illinois had crossed the Mississippi and was in the war zone, if not actually in the war itself, helping to hold northeastern Missouri, especially its bridges and railroads, against Confederate molestation.

It seemed, just at first, that this assignment might bring excitement and danger. A Confederate guerilla leader named Tom Harris had been making a pest of himself in the area assigned to the 21st, and Grant got orders one day to take his regiment and break up this band of marauders. Harris and his men were supposed to be encamped in a creek bottom twenty-five miles away; Grant led his regiment out boldly enough, but along the way he discovered that command carries its own responsibilities and inflicts its own loneliness and fear. He had been in action often enough in the Mexican War, and had stood up under its dangers as well as a professional officer need do; but now, taking an infantry regiment cross-country toward an engagement which—even though it would be no more than a skirmish—would be his men's first experience of combat, Grant found himself afraid. He wanted desperately, he said, to be back in Illinois; with wry humor, he wrote long afterward that he “lacked the moral courage” even to call a halt so that he could think things over. He just kept on going, dreading the moment when he would bring his regiment over the crest of a hill and find the enemy in view.