Mr Lincoln's Army (29 page)

Men in the Black Hat Brigade noted that
children stood in almost every doorway, offering pies, cakes, drinking water,
and the like, and flags were hanging from almost every window. A soldier in the
9th New York found the streets "filled with women dressed in their best,
walking bareheaded, singing, and testifying in every way the general joy."
Captain Noyes spoke of the passage through Frederick as "one continuous
waving of flags, fluttering of handkerchiefs, tossing of bouquets," and
said the soldiers grew hoarse cheering in response. A veteran of the 7th Maine
extended his grateful benediction to all of Maryland; the regiment found camp
sites "conveniently situated as to chickens and corn and honey and apple
butter, and like the Israelites of old, we looked upon the land and it was
good." Remembering the hostile people on the peninsula, he added:
"The girls no longer made faces at us from the windows, and the people
were down at their front gates with cold water, at least, if they had nothing
better. It seemed like Paradise, this Maryland, and many were the blessed
damosels we saw therein." As French's division passed through one town a
private looked at the flags, the smiling girls, and the general air of
wholehearted welcome and called out joyously: "Colonel! We're in God's country
again!"
⁴

All in all, it was as if a clean wind from
the blue mountains had blown through this army, sweeping away weariness and
doubt and restoring the spirit with which the men had first started out;
restoring, for the last time in this war—perhaps for the last time anywhere—
that strange, magical light which rested once upon the landscape of a young and
totally unsophisticated country, whose perfect embodiment the army was. In a
way, this army was fighting against reality, just as was Lee's army. The dream
which possessed the land before 1861 was passing away in blood and fire. One
age was ending and another was being born, with agony of dissolution and agony
of birth terribly mingled; and in the Army of the Potomac—in its background,
its coming together, its memories of the American life which it imagined it was
fighting to preserve—there was the final expression of an era which is still
part of our heritage but which is no longer a part of any living memories.

And there was for the soldiers, just then, a
brief pause in the war, a quiet, unexpected breathing space between battles, a
little Indian summer of the Army of the Potomac. The country was tense and
anxious, and in Washington the President and Cabinet and general-in-chief lived
through almost unbearable suspense, and beyond the mountains Lee was somewhere
out of sight, his ominous designs cloaked by silence. But the Union Army itself
was, for the moment, almost peaceful. It moved ahead very slowly, while far in
front the mounted outriders cantered with smoking carbines up against Lee's
shifting patrols, groping to touch the hard solidity of his massed infantry. By
night the army rested in green fields that were like the fields of home; by
day, if it moved at all, it moved in leisurely style, cheered by the greetings
from farmhouse and village. The men were old soldiers by now, able to live
entirely in the present moment. As they moved northwest along the old National
Road, the white tops of the wagon trains bobbing in the slow columns like the
covered wagons of some unimaginable new folk migration, it was as if they
passed in unhurried review, fixing in one suspended moment of time the image of
the country that had borne them.

There was in the army a regiment called the
Bucktails: 13th Pennsylvania Reserves, actually, owning a nickname because a
private, in training-camp days, had ornamented his hat with a snippet of fur
cut from the carcass of a deer hanging in front of a town meat market, and all
the other men in the regiment had seen it and had gone and done likewise. The
Bucktails had been enlisted in the spring of 1861 in the mountain country of
northern Pennsylvania, where leading citizen Thomas Kane had put up placards in
all the towns and hamlets stating that he was authorized to accept for service
"any man who will bring in with him to my headquarters a Rifle which he
knows how to use," and urging: "Come forward, Americans, who are not
degenerate from the spirit of 76!" The men came swarming in to the
recruiting places and formed scattered companies; and when it was time to
assemble at Harrisburg three of the companies bought lumber and built rafts,
with a platform on one raft so that the colonel's horse could ride, too, and
rafted it down the West Branch of the Susquehanna, camping out nights along the
banks and pausing to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" jubilantly after
they had shot the rapids above Rattlesnake Falls. Another company, the
"Raftsman Guards," coming from farther west, likewise went by raft,
down the Allegheny to Pittsburgh, and took the cars thence to Harrisburg.

The men had thought they were enlisting for
three months, under the first call for troops, but when they got to the capital
they found the state's three months' quota was filled, so they signed up for
three years instead. Company K, lumbermen from Clearfield County, who were
recruited at a mountain inn called "Good Intent and People's Line,"
was a bachelor company; started out with 123 men, found that only 100 could be
accepted, and sent home all the married men. When the regiment was finally
assembled for mustering in, good Colonel Kane resigned, stating that he lacked
military experience—he used to carry an umbrella for sunshade while drilling
the troops-and asking the men to elect Charles Biddle, a Mexican War veteran,
in his place. The men did so, but insisted on making Kane lieutenant colonel,
and when Biddle resigned a few months later to enter Congress, Kane got the
regiment after all. He became an excellent soldier, later winning command of a
brigade.

The regiment marched overland from Harrisburg
into Maryland in the summer of 1861, and as it drew near to Maryland the men
were tense: crossing the Mason and Dixon line would mean stepping into slave
territory, into the war itself. So they halted, while a lieutenant seized the
colors, ran across the state line, and boldly planted the flag on Maryland
soil, whereat the regiment fired a salute, ragged but noisy. They were
officially designated a rifle regiment—hangover from the day when a soldier who
had and could use a rifle was very much a specialist—and they were equipped
with breech-loading single-shot Sharp's rifles.
⁵

Then there was the 27th Indiana, which
came from what was already beginning to be called Copperhead country—the
region west and south of Indianapolis, where Lincoln Republicans were not popular
and there were strong ties linking the countryfolk with the Southland. The
atrocity stories that were spread after the first battle of Bull Run seem to
have had a part in pulling these boys into the army; wild tales of Rebels
bayoneting prisoners and mutilating corpses "were as a fire in the
bones," the regimental historian recalled. The 27th came into the army
without any physical examinations whatever; the mustering officer, an
overworked major of regulars, simply looked each company over, man by man,
before accepting them, and many physical defects were carefully concealed. Men
with gray beards shaved clean in order to look younger, or dyed their hair;
hollow-chested men stuffed clothing inside their shirts; recruits with crooked
arms held them tightly against their sides so the defect would not be noticed;
others who lacked fingers held their fists clenched. Underage boys would write
"18" on a slip of paper and put it inside a shoe; then, when asked if
they weren't pretty young, they could truthfully say, "I'm over 18."
Many of the boys came from homes where there was no sympathy with the Union
cause, and regimental officers helped them with these dodges to get by the
mustering officer before angry parents could come and haul them back home.
Sometimes a company was advised to muster in at twilight, when physical
defects were less likely to be noticed.

It was a boast of the 27th that it had
the tallest man in the army, Captain David Buskirk, who stood six feet eleven
inches in his socks. They tried to give him a solid company of six-footers;
couldn't quite make it, but did give him eighty of them. The whole regiment
averaged large in size, for all the potential 4-Fs who had slipped in; when the
regimental quartermaster drew shoes he had to go around the other regiments,
swapping fives and sixes for nines and tens. His favorite regiments for this
purpose were the 9th New York and the 29th Pennsylvania, regiments of city
chaps who were somewhat undersized. For all that it was from a rural area, the
27th boasted that it was a jack-of-all-trades group. It had bakers, who manned
regimental ovens; printers, who could set type and run captured printing
presses—they had actually done it while the regiment served under Banks in the
valley; engineers, firemen, and brakemen, if they had to operate any railroad
trains. The regiment used to wish that it might, in the freakish chance of war,
sometime capture a steamboat: it had plenty of steamboat hands, plus a pilot
licensed for all Western rivers. As the army marched up into Maryland the
27th's brigade got two new regiments, 13th New Jersey and 107th New York, which
came in full strength. The Indiana boys, their own ranks much depleted by hard
service, gaped at them. "We had not realized before how large a regiment
really was." They noticed, too, that the faces and hands of the new
soldiers were white, that their uniforms looked uncreased and new, and that
they still had an inexpert way of bundling up and carrying their equipment.
⁸

New York City had contributed the famous
Irish Brigade—63rd, 69th, and 88th New York, Irish to a man, carrying
regimental flags of pure emerald green embroidered in gold with an Irish harp,
a shamrock, and a sunburst. Brigadier General Thomas F. Meagher led these
soldiers. Famous as an Irish patriot who had had a part in the unsuccessful
uprising of 1848 and had been sent to Australia on an English prison ship, he
had escaped and come to America and in 1861 saw the Union cause as the cause of
freedom. He had raised this brigade with the backing of Archbishop Hughes of
New York, and the regimental flags had been presented at a fine ceremony in
front of the archbishop's residence on Madison Avenue. Deep-chested, muscular,
gay, witty, sporting a trim mustache and imperial, and entirely looking the
part of the dashing Irish soldier, Meagher had made the brigade a valiant
fighting force. It was in Bull Sumner's corps, and they said that on the
peninsula, whenever he had to go into action, Sumner first inquired:
"Where are my green flags?" To the brigade had recently been added
the 29th Massachusetts, which was Irish enough to keep the average up and fit
in all right. As a general rule the brigade did not like New England troops,
considering them scheming Yankee bargain drivers and narrow anti-Romanists to
boot.
⁷

The 40th New York was called the "Mozart
Regiment," not because the men were devoted to music, but because the
regiment had been organized with the special blessing of Mayor Wood of New York
City, whose personal faction in the New York Democratic party was known as the
Mozart Hall group, in opposition to Tammany. Six of the Mozart's ten companies
came from outside the state, four from Massachusetts and two from Pennsylvania.
These companies were filled with men who had simply insisted on getting into
the war: independent companies, organized in 1861 after their states' quotas
had been filled, which had refused to disband and had gone shopping around
looking for some regiment that would take them. Mayor Wood had been having much
trouble recruiting the 40th New York, his reputation as a devout patriot not
being of the best, so by special dispensation the out-of-state companies were
taken in. The regiment stayed up all night when it got word that it was to
leave for Washington and the front; played tag and leapfrog and fired blank
cartridges from the two brass cannon which were at that time part of the regiment's
regular equipment. When they started out they needed ten wagons to carry the regimental
baggage; now, in the fall of 1862, they carried their baggage on their backs.
⁸

The 1st Minnesota bragged that it was really
the first volunteer regiment to be offered for Federal service in the war.
Governor Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota happened to be in Washington when Fort
Sumter fell, and he hot-footed it over to the War Department early next morning
to offer his men for service, thus making Minnesota the first state to respond
to Lincoln's call for troops. The regiment had been built around a St. Paul
militia company known as the "Pioneer Guards." Mustered in at
picturesque Fort Snelling, it found to its disgust that it was to be assigned
to duty on frontier posts watching the Sioux Indians, and didn't get away from
Minnesota until mid-June. Lacking uniforms, the state had clothed the men in
black felt hats, black pants, and lumberjacks' shirts of checkered red; the
boys didn't get regular uniforms until after the first battle of Bull Run. Like
the Mozart Regiment, the men stayed up all night to celebrate when orders
finally came to start east. They left Fort Snelling by steamboat (no railroad
in Minnesota at that time) and took a train east from a port down-river;
paraded through Chicago, the mayor riding beside the colonel, and were hailed by
the Chicago
Tribune
as
"unquestionably the finest body of troops that has yet appeared on our
streets."
⁹

The country was proud of those early
regiments, and it knew how to show it. Traveling cross-country, en route to
Washington, was for most of them a long succession of cheering crowds, brass
bands, spread-eagle speeches, and banquets. The 3rd Wisconsin, which started
east in July 1861, recorded that it was cheered on every farm along the track
in southern Michigan, was visited at Adrian by a committee with buckets of iced
lemonade, was given a grand banquet at Toledo, and was met at Erie by a
committee of women bringing baskets of food. At Buffalo there was a parade
through the city and a speech of welcome by the mayor, after which there was a
banquet at the railroad depot. Next morning "the ladies of Elmira gave us
a sumptuous breakfast"; at Williamsport the ladies gave them dinner and
also stuffed their haversacks with cakes and cold meats. It was this regiment,
incidentally, which treasured one memory of the battle of Winchester, where
Stonewall Jackson routed Banks's corps. The rout having taken place, the men
had lost formation and were legging it for the rear, and General Banks rode
among them to rally them, calling out earnestly: "Men, don't you love your
country?" To which a realist in the 3rd Wisconsin yelled back:
"Yes—and I'm trying to get back to it as fast as I can."
¹⁰