Mr Lincoln's Army (32 page)

The issue of salt pork was frequently eaten
raw, on hardtack, when the men were on the march, since it was hard to cook
without regular kettles and tasted about as good one way as the other, anyhow.
Occasionally the salt pork was rancid when the men got it.

When
salt beef was issued instead of salt pork the men objected loudly—except, it
was noticed, the men who had been deep-sea sailors before the war; no army salt
beef could phase men who had eaten it out of the harness cask after six months
at sea. The beef was so deeply impregnated with salt that it had to be soaked
overnight in running water to be edible, and for that reason it was seldom
issued as part of the marching ration. When cooked, it generally stank to high
heaven, for it was often very aged. Now and then, when an especially bad hunk
of it was served out, the men would organize a mock funeral, parading through
camp with the offending beef on a bier and burying it—where the colonel could
see, if possible—with fancy ceremonies. Bacon was enjoyed, but on the march the
men preferred salt pork: carried in the haversack in hot weather, bacon had a
way of giving off liquid grease, staining a man's clothing and quickly becoming
unfit to eat.

Herds of cattle usually were driven along
with the army, to be butchered nightly to provide fresh meat; the beef thus
obtained, one veteran recalled, was "not particularly juicy." The
company cooks (naturally) were always accused of keeping the best portions for
themselves, and one officer remembered, with a noticeable shudder of distaste,
the "odious beef served quivering from an animal heated by the long day's
march and killed as soon as the day's march was ended." It was nice, now
and then, to get a piece of fresh beef from which steaks could be cut. The
company cooks would hand the steaks out raw, and each man would broil his own
on a stick.

The coffee ration was what kept the army
going. The government bought good coffee and issued it in the whole bean to
prevent unscrupulous dealers from adulterating it, and the men ground it for
themselves by pounding the beans on a rock with a stone or musket butt. The
veteran learned to carry a little canvas bag in which he mixed his ground
coffee and his sugar ration, spooning them out together when he made his
coffee. The ration was ample to make three or four pints of strong black coffee
daily, and on the march any halt of more than five minutes was sure to see men
making little fires and boiling coffee. Stragglers would often fall out, build
a fire, boil coffee, drink it, and then plod on to overtake their regiments at
nightfall. Cavalry and artillery referred to infantry, somewhat contemptuously,
as "the coffee boilers."

The favorite ration of all was the army bean.
It was no go, of course, on the march, but in settled camps it was one food the
men never tired of. Even the most inexpert cook knew how to dig a pit, build a
wood fire, rake out the coals, lower a covered kettle full of salt pork and
soaked beans, heap the coals back on and around it, cover the whole with earth,
and leave it to cook overnight. The mess kettle, incidentally, was simply a
heavy sheet-iron cylinder, flat-bottomed, some fifteen inches tall by a foot
wide, with a heavy iron cover. When potatoes were at hand they were invariably
boiled in such a kettle, and beef was often added to make a kind of stew. A
real cook could make such a stew quite tasty by adding vegetables (if he had
any), doing an intelligent job of seasoning, and thickening the broth with
flour.
²

As a general thing, even though the
coffee was good and the baked beans were palatable, the food the Civil War
soldier lived on ranged from mediocre to downright awful. Looking at the
combination of unbalanced rations, incompetent cooks, and crackers fried in
pork fat, one wonders how the men kept their health. The answer, of course, is
that many of them didn't. There were many reasons for the terrible prevalence
of sickness in that army—the incomplete state of even the best medical
knowledge of the day is certainly one of them: no one then knew how typhoid
fever was transmitted, for instance, and typhoid killed tens of thousands of
soldiers—but faulty diet must have been one of the most important. (One private
who lived through it all left it as his opinion that the great amount of
sickness was due to "insufficient supplies and brutal, needless exposure
of the men by officers of high rank.")

Surprisingly enough, the health of the
soldiers was better when they were actively campaigning than when they stayed
in camp. The constant exercise and fresh air seem to have counterbalanced the
destructive effects of salt pork and hardtack; or perhaps, bad as that diet
was, it nevertheless was better than the stuff the company cooks turned out
when they had unlimited supplies to draw on. At any rate, the regiments which
suffered the heaviest combat losses were almost invariably the ones with the
lowest losses from disease. From first to last, some 220,000 Union soldiers
died of disease during the war, and a good fifth of them came from regiments
which never got into combat at all. Half of the deaths from disease were caused
by intestinal ailments, mainly typhoid, diarrhea, and dysentery. Half of the
remainder came from pneumonia—"inflammation of the lungs," as it was
called then—and from tuberculosis.

This prevalence of sickness meant that in
every regiment there was a slow, steady process of attrition, which began the
moment the men got into training camp and never ended. And it almost seems as
if the authorities went out of their way to make sure that this attridon would
take place. By modern standards the arrangements for keeping a regiment's
strength up were appallingly bad. Very little was done to keep physical misfits
out of the army in the first place, and there were practically no provisions
for replacing such men when the hardships of army life remorselessly weeded
them out. The 27th Indiana was by no means unique in getting into Federal
service without physical examinations. The same thing happened in many other
cases. A member of the 5th Massachusetts wrote that physical examinations for
his regiment were informal and were not given by a physician—"zeal and
patriotism were recognized as potent factors, and their outward manifestations
were given full credence." The recruiting, of course, was not uniformly
that carefree, but the physical examinations were never really rigid; the men
were expected to be "sound of wind and limb," but that was about all.

Yet if the entrance standards were
excessively lax, the standards by which a man could be given a medical
discharge—a "surgeon's certificate of disability," in the army jargon
of the 1860s—were fairly high. The regimental surgeons were for the most part
able and conscientious men, and when they found that a man was unfit for
active service they said so, and he was paid off. In the spring of 1861 the 2nd
New York discharged 118 men for disability. Most of the men promptly
re-enlisted in other regiments, the war spirit
running
high at the time.

Thus, in actual practice, the rigors of
life in camp in the 1860s did what the original entrance examination is
expected to do now— eliminate the men who, for one reason or another, just
weren't rugged enough to stand the gaff. The result was that no regiment in the
army, at any time after the first few weeks of its existence, was ever anywhere
near its full paper strength. On paper a regiment was supposed to consist of
approximately a thousand men. Actually, very few regiments got to the
battlefield with anything like that number.

The
20th Massachusetts was mustered in, full strength, on July 2, 1861, getting its
first medical exams, incidentally, after the mustering in. By mid-August, when
it left Massachusetts, it was down to 500 men. Recruits and returned
convalescents later brought in 250 more, but that was high-water mark: from
then on its strength went steadily downward. Within a year of its enlistment
the 128th New York was down to 350 men, although it had had few battle
casualties. The 125th Ohio, which enlisted in the summer of 1862, numbered 751
men when it left Ohio for the South. Six weeks later it was down to 572. A
typical entry in the regimental history, made at a time when the regiment was
not in action, shows seven deaths and eight medical discharges for one month.
The 12th Connecticut took a thousand men from home and had 600 "present
for duty" when it lined up to go into its first fight.

Yet with all these losses there were few
replacements. Throughout the war men were recruited by the states, not by the
Federal government. The governors liked to form new regiments—each one offered
a chance for patronage, with a colonel's commission to be awarded to some
distinguished, well-heeled citizen who had exerted himself to round up
recruits. (There is a record of one New York merchant who spent $20,000 to
raise a cavalry regiment. He became its colonel but was never seen in camp,
finding the avenues and hotel bars of Washington much pleasanter. The regiment
finally went off to fight without him, while he, having good political
connections, became a brigadier and wound up in command of some empty barracks
safely inside the Union lines.) The states simply had no arrangements whatever
for recruiting replacement troops, since it was politically more profitable to
form new regiments. Each regiment had to do its own recruiting when and if it
could. Now and then an officer, sometimes a whole company, would be sent home
on furlough to drum up men, but this was seldom very effective. Only Wisconsin,
of all the states, officially recruited replacements for regiments already in
the field, which was one of the reasons why every general liked to have a few
Wisconsin regiments around if he could manage it.

The
result of all this, naturally, was that the war was fought with what would now
be considered skeleton regiments. A colonel who could take 500 men into action
considered himself very lucky indeed. By the fall of 1862, when the army was
drifting up through Maryland after Lee, a regiment which mustered as many as
350 men was fully up to the average, and many regiments were far under that
strength. Technically, a brigade was supposed to consist of four regiments;
later in the war we find brigades with six, eight, or even ten, jumbled
together in a desperate effort to give the organization the man power a brigade
ought to have.

Battle attrition, of course, was deadly.
Hardly anybody realized it at the time, but the Civil War soldier was going
into action just when technical improvements in the design of weapons had
created a great increase in fire power and had given the defense a heavy
advantage over the attack. The weapons those men used do look very crude nowadays,
but by comparison with earlier weapons—the weapons on which all tactical
theories and training of the day were based—they were very modern indeed. It is
not much of an exaggeration to say that the armies of 1861 were up against
exactly the same thing that the armies of 1914 were up against—the fact that
defensive fire power had made obsolete all of the established methods for getting
an offensive action under way. As in 1914, the enlisted man paid with his life
for the high command's education on this matter.

The basic, all-important weapon, of course,
was the infantry musket, and the standard of the war was the rifled
Springfield. This was a muzzle-loader, with an involved procedure for loading.
Drill on the target range began with the command, "Load in nine times:
load!" (The "nine times" meant that nine separate and distinct
operations were involved in loading a piece; recruits were trained to do it
"by the numbers.") The cartridge was a paper cylinder encasing a
soft-lead bullet and a charge of powder. The soldier bit off one end of the
paper, poured the powder down the barrel, rammed the bullet down with his
ramrod, cocked the heavy hammer with his thumb, and had a percussion cap on the
nipple to ignite the charge when he pulled the trigger. For most rifles, these
caps came in long rolls which were inserted in a spring-and-cogwheel device in
the breech, exactly like the rolls for a child's cap pistol today.

This weapon has long since been a museum
piece, but the big point about it then was that it was rifled and had a bullet
which took the rifling properly. The bullet was the Minie, named for the French
captain who had invented it—the bullets were "minnies" to all soldiers—a
conical slug of lead slightly more than half an inch in diameter and about an
inch long, with a hollow base which expanded when the rifle was fired and
prevented leakage of the powder gases. It would kill at half a mile or more,
although it was not very accurate at anything like that distance. Its effective
range was from 200 to 250 yards—"effective range" meaning the
distance at which a defensive line of battle could count on hitting often
enough to break up an attack by relatively equal numbers. A good man could get
off two shots a minute.

Compared
with a modern Garand, the rifle was laughable; but compared with the smoothbore
which had been the standard weapon in all previous wars, it was terrific. Early
in the Civil War, before the government got the rifled muskets into mass
production, many regiments were equipped with the old smoothbores, which fired
a round ball or, sometimes, a cartridge containing one round ball and three
buckshot: the "buck and ball" of army legend. Regiments which had to
use such muskets were disgusted with them. Extreme range was about 250 yards,
and accuracy was almost nil at any range. As one of the backwoodsmen from
Wisconsin remarked, it took a fairly steady hand to hit a barn door at fifty
paces. At very close range, of course, they were quite effective, especially
when firing "buck and ball," which gave a scatter-gun effect. These
primitive smoothbores were discarded as fast as new weapons were produced, and
by the fall of 1862 few regiments on either side carried them.