Mr Lincoln's Army (30 page)

If they took the enthusiasm and cheers as
part of the natural order of things, the men in those early regiments were also
suspicious, fancying that treason might be found almost anywhere. Riding the
cars from New York to Baltimore, the 12th Massachusetts felt that the train's
slow progress could only be due to secessionist leanings on the part of the
engineer—who, presumably, wanted the war to end before the regiment got to the
front; so at a convenient stop they put the engineer off the train, while a
private in Company G who had been an engineer before the war went to the cab
and ran the train the rest of the way. The 3rd Michigan had a somewhat similar
experience, riding the train down from Harrisburg to Baltimore. The men were
told (they were never quite clear about who told them) that the engineer, a
Rebel at heart, meant to wreck the train, so they put an armed guard in the
cab, notifying the engineer that he would be shot at once if there was any
funny business. They had an engineer in their own ranks and could handle the
train themselves if they had to.
¹¹

Like nearly all the other Northern regiments
in 1861, this 3rd Michigan was nervous when it came time to march through Baltimore—Baltimore,
strongly secessionist in sympathy, where the 6th Massachusetts had been mobbed
during the first weeks of the war. The 3rd Michigan marched through town with
loaded muskets, its band playing "Dixie"—not yet fully identified as
a Rebel tune: many Union bands played it in those early days—and the colonel
sternly warned the mayor that "if a man in my regiment is hurt the streets
of Baltimore will run with blood." The progress through Baltimore of the
6th Wisconsin was somewhat ignominious. No arms had yet been issued, and the
regiment tramped across the city escorted by a detachment of two hundred cops,
while city roughs stood on the street corners and hooted. The Frenchmen in the
55th New York met jeers but no violence in Baltimore; the colonel wrote that
the men "recompensed themselves by mocking airs and gestures more
expressive than polite."

But if going through Baltimore in 1861 was a
trying experience for nervous recruits, the army to a man enjoyed going through
Philadelphia. At the start of the war a citizens' committee there had
organized what was called "The Philadelphia Union Refreshment Saloon"
and saw to it that every regiment that went by got proper treatment—airy, roomy
washrooms with plenty of soap, hot water and towels, a lobby where the men
could rest and write letters, a big dining hall with an abundance of good food.
Furthermore, this wasn't just part of the enthusiasm of the first few months of
the war; the Philadelphians kept it up right through to Appomattox, and even
opened a second "refreshment saloon" when the first became overcrowded.
A member of the 37th Massachusetts recorded that his regiment visited
Philadelphia six times during the war and got the same friendly treatment each
time. A veteran of the 10th Massachusetts Battery, looking back fondly long
afterward, wrote: "When supper ended we began our march across the city
with such a handshaking with young and old of both sexes, and such a Godspeed
from all the population, as came from no other city or town through which we
passed, and this was continued until our arrival at the Baltimore depot. Could
the wives and sweethearts left behind have seen the affectionate leave-takings
at this place it might have aroused other than patriotic emotions in their
breasts."
¹²

This was a deeply sentimental army, and it
sang a great deal; not stirring patriotic songs, full of rally-round-the-flag
heroism—they were for stay-at-home civilians—but slow, sad tunes that could express
the loneliness and homesickness of boys who had been uprooted and sent out to
face hardship and danger and death. Their favorite was a song called "When
This Cruel War Is Over," by Charles Carroll Sawyer: a song which might
well have been, momentarily, the most popular song ever written in America. It
sold more than a million copies during the war, which would be equivalent to a
sale of seven or eight million today—and that was before the era of canned
music and artful song pluggers, before the day when there was a piano or other
musical instrument, plus some sort of musical training, in every home. The song
went like this:

Dearest love, do you remember,

When we last did meet,

How you told me that you loved me,

Kneeling at my feet?

Oh, how proud you stood before me

In your suit
of
blue,

 When you vowed to me and country

Ever to be true.

And the chorus:

Weeping, sad and lonely,

Hopes and fears how vain!

Yet praying, when this cruel war is over,

Praying that we meet again.

Men
would sing that song and cry. More than any other possession of the army, it
expressed the deep inner feeling of the boys who had gone to war so blithely in
an age when no one would speak the truth about the reality of war: war is
tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death
in battle have been horribly tricked. The higher brass didn't admire the song
at all; some fathead in shoulder straps at one time actually issued an order
forbidding the singing of it in the Army of the Potomac, on the ground that it
encouraged desertion—being quite unable to see that it really worked the other
way by giving the boys a chance to express their war-weariness simply by
opening their mouths and singing rather than by dropping their muskets and running
away. As might be supposed, the order was totally ineffective and was soon rescinded.

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.