Mr Lincoln's Army (60 page)
7.
For
Meade, see
Letters of a War
Correspondent
and
Meade's Headquarters.
8.
Under the Old Flag.
9.
De Trobriand:
Four
Years with the Army of the Potomac.
10.
For
McClellan's remarks to the soldiers, see
The
Rebellion Record.
3. Tomorrow Never Comes
An odd and frequently overlooked fact about the fighting on
the peninsula is that in no single battle was anything like the whole strength
of the Army of the Potomac put into action. The climactic struggle of Gaines's
Mill was, for most of the soldiers, simply off-stage noises. In many ways
McClellan himself was not much better off than the man in the ranks. A study of
his letters and telegrams in
McClellan's
Own Story—horn
which, in this as in
previous chapters, quotations have been drawn liberally—unmistakably depicts a
man who never quite knew what was going on.
Specific references are:
1.
Howard's autobiography.
2.
For
a good view of Cross—an uncommonly talented regimental com-
mander, and an interesting person—see
Days
and Events,
by Colonel Thomas
L. Livermore, and
A History of the 5th
Regiment New Hampshire Volunteers,
by William Child.
3.
The Diary of a Young Officer.
4.
Moore's
Rebellion Record,
Vol.
V.
5.
Recollections
of
a Private,
by Warren Lee Goss.
6.
General
Philip Kearny.
See also
Major General Hiram
G.
Berry,
by Ed-
ward K. Gould, for an extended description of this incident by Major H. L.
Thayer.
7.
Battles and Leaders,
Vol.
II, Part 1, p. 375.
8.
Ibid., Part 2, p. 431.
9.
Recollections
of
a Private.
10.
Battles
and Leaders,
Vol. II, Part 2, p.
432.
4. Pillar of Smoke
One of the things
McClellan seems never to have understood, in his dealings with the Lincoln
administration, was the weight which the Copperhead movement in the North
threw into the scales against him. There is a wealth of literature on this
move for a negotiated peace. Two studies which were found especially helpful
are
The Hidden Civil War,
by Wood Gray, and
The
Movement for Peace without Victory during the Civil War,
by Elbert J. Benton.
Specific references are:
1.
Pictorial History
of
the Civil War,
Vol. II.
2.
See
A Military History
of
the 8th Ohio Volunteer Infantry,
by Franklin
Sawyer, and
Recollections
of
a Private.. .
3.
Under Five Commanders,
by Jacob H. Cole.
4.
A History
of
the
5th Regiment New Hampshire Volunteers.
5.
General Philip Kearny.
6.
Four Years Campaigning in the Army
of
the Potomac.
7.
Notes
of
a Staff Officer
of
Our First New Jersey Brigade,
by E. Burd
Grubb.
8.
Diary
of
Gideon
Welles,
Vol. I, p. 107.
9.
Abraham Lincoln and Men
of
War Times.
CHAPTER FOUR
1.
Indian Summer
The innumerable regimental
histories now gathering dust on the shelves of libraries and secondhand
bookshops are a rich mine of material on the kind of men who enlisted in 1861,
the spirit with which they came forward, and the strangely innocent way in
which the process of turning them into soldiers was undertaken. In many ways,
most of these histories are very dull—poorly written, uncritical, full of an
inexpert rehash of military history culled from standard texts. But despite
these faults they provide the flavor of the young army as nothing else could
do, giving the homely and often almost incredible little touches which make
those far-off soldiers suddenly come alive. They have been a principal reliance
in the preparation of this book and were used extensively in the preparation of
this chapter.
Specific references are:
1.
For
a newspaper roundup of these rather effervescent activities, see Vol.
V of
Rebellion Record.
2.
Four Years with the Army
of
the Potomac.
3.
The Bivouac and the Battlefield.
4.
References to the friendly reception in Maryland have been
taken from
Musket and Sword,
by
Edwin C. Bennett;
Following the Greek
Cross; The 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion,
by a Member of Company C;
History of the 3rd Regiment of Wisconsin Veteran Volunteer
Infantry; History of Duryie's Brigade,
by
Franklin B. Hough;
Service
with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteers,
and
Battles and Leaders,
Vol. II, Part 2, p. 556.
5.
For the story of this regiment, see the delightfully
artless little book,
A
History of the "Bucktails,"
by
O. R. Howard Thomson and William H. Rauch. Incidentally, while the name
"Bucktails" belonged to this regiment alone, the rest of the army
often applied it indiscriminately to the entire division of Pennsylvania
Reserves.
6.
Another charmingly
unsophisticated history is
The
27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion.
7.
The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns,
by Captain D. P. Conyngham.
8.
For
a good side light on the way in which a regiment was sometimes
recruited, see
History of the 40th
(Mozart) Regiment,
by
Fred C. Floyd.
9.
History of the First Regiment Minnesota Volunteer Infantry.
10.
History of the 3rd Regiment of Wisconsin Veteran Volunteer
Infantry.
11.
For
these incidents, see
History
of the 12th Massachusetts Volunteers
and
Four Years Campaigning in the Army of
the Potomac.
12.
History
of the 10th Massachusetts Battery, by
John
D. Billings. See also
Recollections
of the Civil War,
by Mason Whiting
Tyler.
13.
For
a fine study of the Civil War soldier and his songs, see "War Music and
War Psychology in the Civil War," by James Stone, in the
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
October 1941.
14.
Under
the Old Flag.
15.
Battles
and Leaders,
Vol. II, Part 1, p.
6.
16.
Recollections
of a Private.
17.
History of the 3rd Regiment of Wisconsin Veteran Volunteer
Infantry.
2. Crackers and Bullets
The fact that the Civil War soldier was compelled to solve,
under fire and without much help, a set of quite modeni-lookjng tactical
problems raised by the improvement in his weapons is a point that deserves more
emphasis than it usually gets in Civil War histories. Two interesting
discussions of this matter, written by professional British soldiers shortly
before World War I, are
The
Campaign in Maryland and Virginia,
by
Lieutenant E. W. Sheppard, and
The
War of Secession,
by Major G. W.
Redway. See also
The Generalship of
Ulysses S. Grant,
by Colonel J. F. C.
Fuller.
Specific references are:
1.
Reminiscences of the 19th Massachusetts Regiment.
2.
For a good review of Civil War rations, cookery, and camp
life in general, see John D. Billings's entertaining
Hardtack and Coffee.
Good
details are also to be found in
The
Diary of an Enlisted Man.
3.
Regimental Losses in the American Civil War,
by Lieutenant Colonel William F. Fox.
4.
Reminiscences of the Civil War,
by General John B. Gordon.
5.
From "Field and Temporary Hospitals," by Deering
J. Roberts, M.D., in Vol. VII,
Photographic
History of the Civil War.
6.
The reader who is interested can study these tactical
details in such standard Civil War texts as
Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics,
by Brevet Lieutenant Colonel William J. Hardee;
Manual of Instruction for the Volunteers and Militia of the
United States,
by Major William
Gilham, and
Camp and Outpost Duty
for Infantry,
by Brigadier General
Daniel Butterfield. 7.
History
of Dury&e's Brigade.
3. Generals on Trial
A considerable volume of
correspondence between Halleck and Pope, covering the period of the second
Bull Run campaign and ending with Pope's exile to the Indian wars on the
Western frontier, is available in the
Official
Records,
Series I, Vol. XII, Part
3; and while nothing of very great importance is contained in it, it is worth
reading for the picture it gives of the queer deficiencies of the army's high
command. Studying it, one senses that the army's chief command problem just
then was at the very top, embodied in the person of the general-in-chief. If
McClellan was overcautious, Halleck was just a plain fuss-budget; and if the
need of the day was for someone to infuse drive and energy into army
commanders, Halleck's own dispatches make it clear that he was the last man for
the job. Gideon Welles seems to have been almost alone in his realization that
it was the iron-hard spirit of war that was needed, and Vol. I of his
Diary
has
been drawn on for quotations. For a consideration of the danger of foreign
intervention in the fall of 1862, see James Ford Rhodes's
History of the Civil War.