Both man and horse require training, and facilities for rambling, with temptation to do so, are increased. There was but little time, and it may be said less disposition, to establish camps of instruction. Living on horseback, fearless, and dashing, the men of the South afforded the best possible material for cavalry. They had every quality but discipline, and resembled Prince Charming, whose manifold gifts, bestowed by her sisters, were rendered useless by the malignant fairy. Scores of them wandered about the country like locusts, and were only less destructive to their own people than the enemy. … Assuredly, our cavalry rendered much excellent service, especially when dismounted and fighting as infantry. Such able officers as Stuart, Hampton, and the younger Lees in the east, Forrest, Green, and Wheeler in the west, developed much talent for war; but their achievement, however distinguished, fell far below the standard that would have been reached had not the want of discipline impaired their efforts and those of their men.
North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance grew so exasperated with the indiscipline of Confederate cavalry wandering through his state that he cried out in 1863: “If God Almighty had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharaoh still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry.”56
If the Civil War departs from the pattern of the Napoleonic wars at any major point, it is in its failure to use cavalry to achieve the kinds of decisive victories on the battlefield that the Napoleonic pattern had taught generals to expect. From the seventeenth century onward, cavalry had been taught to charge home with the sword or lance at the first sign of wavering on the part of enemy infantry. The sheer weight of an oncoming rush of horses and men could strike the final amount of terror needed to convince infantrymen to break and bolt. And when they did, the cavalry could cut them down and scatter them almost at its ease. This sort of cavalry—known as heavy cavalry, from the outsize weight and height of the horses and men chosen for the task—was expensive to equip and time-consuming to train, and one penny-pinching Congress after another had shown no interest in it. Moreover, in the uneven overgrowth of the American landscape, heavy cavalry had little room to develop the momentum needed for its climactic charges; and in the American West, where most of the army’s cavalry was deployed, its enemy were mounted Indians, who required lightness and speed to pursue.57
So, strictly speaking, the army did not even bother to create a cavalry arm until the 1850s; its few mounted units were organized and trained as dragoons and mounted rifles who would use their horses more as a means of transportation than for combat, and dismount in battle to fight on foot with their short-barrel carbines rather than sabers or lances. Cavalry units in the Civil War were also deployed in smaller ratios to infantry than in Europe, and concentrated almost exclusively on the traditional occupations of light cavalry, including scouting, raiding, and skirmishing. The introduction of the Spencer repeating carbine (the downsized version of the rifle issued for cavalry use) only accelerated this trend, making the classical cavalry saber useless as a field weapon. “The only real use I ever heard of their being put to was to hold a piece of meat over a fire for frying,” snorted John Singleton Mosby, the most famous of the Confederacy’s mounted scouts. “I dragged one through the first year of the war, but when I became a commander, I discarded it.” Sabers came out of their scabbards only on the infrequent occasions when cavalry clashed headlong with cavalry; on the even rarer occasions when cavalrymen actually engaged enemy infantry, they dismounted and fought on foot with their carbines. Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle, yet another British observer from the Guards brigade, had no opinion whatsoever of the legendary J. E. B. Stuart’s horsemen. Their battles “are miserable affairs” in which “neither party has any idea of serious charging with the sabre.” Instead, “they hesitate, halt, and commence a desultory fire with carbines and revolvers,” which hardly qualified them to “be called cavalry in the European sense of the word.”58
THE MAKING OF THE ARMIES
The volunteer who mastered the intricacies of his weapon and drill would leave his “camp of instruction” with the rest of his regiment and be shipped off to wherever the main armies might be at that moment. From that point on, the basic organizational unit, and the unit most soldiers used to identify themselves, was the regiment. Unlike the regimental system of the British army, the volunteer regiments of the Civil War had no previous history. They were the creations of 1861, having no existing traditions or institutions with which to shelter and socialize the new recruit, no already existing cadres of officers or non-commissioned officers, and no barracks or recruiting depots. It fell on the volunteers themselves to turn their regiments into either livable facsimiles of home life or freewheeling moral carousels. Some units, like the two regiments of Hiram Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters, prided themselves on living “like a band of brothers, imbued with the one feeling of patriotism in their voluntary enlistment for three years.” Others converted the long stretches of empty camp time into study halls, as did a young lieutenant in the Confederate Army, Basil Gildersleeve, who improved his command of “his English classics” and “his ancient classics.” In the 7th Ohio, the company recruited from the pious students of Charles Finney at Oberlin College made sure that “daily prayer meetings were established.” St. Clair A. Mulholland described the camp of his 116th Pennsylvania as a religious idyll where “seldom was an obscene word or an oath heard in the camp” and “meetings for prayer were of almost daily occurrence, and the groups of men sitting on the ground or gathered on the hill side listening to the Gospel were strong reminders of the mounds of Galilee when the people sat upon the ground to hear the Savior teach.”59
In other regiments, the abrupt transition from domestic routine to the poorly structured life of an army camp meant crossing over a social line where the customary behavioral restraints might mean very little. Prostitution, drunkenness, gambling, and thievery were rife in both Federal and Confederate regiments. “Gen. Meagher got up this morning & drank about a quart of whiskey,” wrote a disgusted Theodore Gates in his diary in 1864, “& went to bed again & has been there all day drunk.” The 154th New York were “good companions” for the most part, “but at the same time there is much going on in camp that is not intended to improve the morals nor the manners or the mind.” Army life “seems adapted to make a man coarse & rough,” and “many a man does that here that he would be utterly ashamed to do at home and excuses himself by saying that others do it or that it is customary in the Army to do it.” Edward King Wightman found that “most of our common soldiers are scarcely above brutes by nature.”
The privates, of course, are not such people as you or any sensible man would choose, or perhaps I should say could endure, as associates. As a mass, they are ignorant, envious, mercenary, and disgustingly immoral and profane. Being as they are here free from the restraints of civil law, they give loose rein to all their vices and make a boast of them. In our whole regiment, I know no private who will not curse and swear and but few who will not, when circumstances favor, rob and steal or, as they more euphon[i]ously style the operations, “briz things.”60
On paper, Civil War regiments were supposed to contain eight to ten companies of approximately 100 enlisted men and officers each, commanded by a colonel, so the full strength of a regiment ought to have been, more or less, 1,000 men. In the Union Army, however, regiments were often allowed to dwindle down to between 200 and 300 men, as the ranks were thinned by sickness and casualties. The reason for this neglect was nakedly political. Since the volunteer regiments were raised by the states, it was easier for many Northern governors to create new regiments, and thus create new openings for cronies whom they wished to reward with officers’ commissions, than to keep refilling the old regiments.
The result was an army of shadow units. When Union general John A. Dix reviewed George Washington Whitman’s 51st New York at Newport News, Virg
inia, in February 1863, the 51st “could only muster 140 men,” and “when we came along with our old flag all torn to pieces, I saw the old. Gen. eye the flag and Regt. and shake his head.”61 In many cases, it was up to the regimental commanding officer to keep up a supply of new enlistments from back home for his regiment, but most commanders could ill afford to detail their precious supply of junior officers for recruiting duty behind the lines. The Confederates armies, on the other hand, recognized the value of integrating new recruits and replacements with veteran combat regiments, and so the Confederate regiments were more likely to maintain their organizational integrity throughout the war than Union regiments.
If the regiment was the basic unit of identity, the brigade was soon recognized as the basic unit of maneuver on the Civil War battlefield, and most of the movement and action in Civil War combat occurred in groups of brigades. The average brigade consisted of four or five regiments, commanded by a brigadier general, and sometimes they acquired an identity of their own to rival the individual regimental identities—the Iron Brigade of the Army of the Potomac was composed of five western regiments that all retained the use of the black Hardee hat as their badge. The Irish Brigade, another Army of the Potomac unit, was composed of an odd amalgam of Irish-born New Yorkers and Protestant Pennsylvanians who carried a green flag emblazoned with a gilded harp into battle. The Philadelphia Brigade, also in the Army of the Potomac, was the only brigade in either army that took its name from its hometown.
Brigades were themselves usually organized into divisions, comprising two or three brigades, and commanded by either a senior brigadier general or a major general. Finally, the divisions were organized into corps, with both armies making up a corps from two or three divisions. The corps was the real innovation of this war for the American military, and like so much else, it was a borrowing from Napoleon Bonaparte’s determination to create a corps d’armée, an all-arms unit big enough to fight anything except the entirety of an enemy’s army but still small enough to be within the grasp of a single commander and nimble enough to march separate from the other parts of an army. Wellington had briefly adopted the corps model before Waterloo, but it never took serious hold in British military thinking, and in the Crimea, the British Army never organized itself at a higher level than the division. Napoleon III resurrected the corps d’armée in the North Italian War, and like so much else that was French, it proved irresistible to American borrowing.62
Confederate corps were generally identified by the name of their commanding general, while Union corps were assigned numbers. The corps commanders, usually senior major generals, were expected (unlike division or brigade commanders) to be able to exercise a large measure of independent judgment and initiative, and the measure of any army’s effectiveness could be reliably prophesied from the quality of its corps commanders. In Lee’s army in 1863, the corps commanders—James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson—were probably the best pair of military talents on the North American continent. The Army of the Potomac also boasted equally outstanding combat soldiers in the commanders of the 1st Corps (John F. Reynolds) and the 2nd Corps (Winfield Scott Hancock).
To the ordinary volunteer, however, the principal concern was not with generals or even weapons but with the experience of war service itself. Much as enlistment propaganda might have initially convinced the volunteer that the Rebel or the Yankee was his sworn enemy, the volunteer soon recognized that the soldier opposite him was an American like himself. No matter how much Southerners and Northerners tried to persuade themselves that they were fighting an alien from an alien culture, soldiers from both armies quickly found that both were usually Protestant in religion, democratic in politics, and fond of the same music.
So, to the despair of their commanders (who feared the leakage of important information on troop movements), they fraternized freely in the quiet periods between battles. Edward King Wightman described such a meeting near Fortress Monroe in May 1863, with a “johnny Reb” who had “laid aside his piece and crossed over in a skiff to exchange papers with our pickets.” Wightman looked over this “very lean black-eyed fellow with long straight hair” and noticed that he “was well clothed in a gray jacket and pants and so forth.” Wightman “bantered him the best I knew how, but he took it very well.” A year later, Wightman saw a more general truce break out between Confederates and Federals on the James River, who created a temporary market for swaps of goods. “One of our men, laying aside his rifle, would walk out boldly half-way to the enemy’s line, leave a little bag of coffee on a stump, and return,” while “Johnny Reb would then issue forth, take the coffee and substitute in its place a big plug of tobacco, which was speedily secured for the service of the Union.” Eventually the “ballygogging” attracted the notice of a Confederate officer, who “determined to make a demonstration.”
All at once the rebs started for cover, but not before they had called out warningly, “Take care, Yanks, we’re going to shell ye.” To this our boys replied by flopping into pits, leaving but one eye exposed and crying with equal friendship, “Lay low, Rebs!” The artillery fire opened on the right, intermingled with rapid volleys of musketry, and worked gradually around to us. In our immediate neighborhood shells were dropped in profusion, spiced with a few rifle balls; but no advance was made and no one was hit. In an hour everything was quiet again, and we all came forth whistling and laughing as before, to cook our supper. The rebs did likewise.63
Wartime fraternization had its limits, and the principal limit was race. White soldiers might profess any amount of fellow feeling, but unsleeping hostility was the rule between black Federals and white Confederates. A Confederate soldier imprisoned at Point Lookout, Maryland, wrote that the “negro troops” guarding rebel prisoners were “as mean as hell,” and Confederates captured at Cold Harbor in 1864 were taunted “revengefully” by black Union soldiers as the Confederates were marched away to a prisoner-of-war camp.64
Soldiers black and white soon learned that the real enemy in the war was not the other soldier but disease, wounds, and the fear of wounds. Disease in fact, turned out to be the real killer of the Civil War. For every soldier who died in battle, another two died of disease in camp, and overall, more than 10 percent of the Union Army and 20 percent of the Confederate Army were killed off by disease rather than by bullets. One principal cause for the ravages of disease was the nature of military camp life in the nineteenth century, which in clinical terms acted as little better than a disease funnel. Americans of the Civil War era knew little or nothing of bacteriology, and so neither the volunteer nor his officers had any idea of the communicative and infectious nature of malaria, typhus, bronchitis, or pneumonia. As a result, men were taken into the armies carrying a number of diseases with them, and then packed into teeming military camps where they could easily spread a vast sampling of pathogens among themselves.
The volunteers unwittingly added to the odds against them by responding to sanitary discipline with the same contemptuous independence they displayed toward military discipline, and only with the greatest difficulty could they be persuaded to take appropriate health precautions. Camp life, for white American males in the nineteenth century, created an inversion of social roles, since male soldiers now found themselves responsible for a range of domestic labors—sewing clothes, cooking meals, cleaning—which were normally assigned at home to women, and many soldiers were unable to make the cognitive adjustment to the performance of these tasks even when their lives depended on it. “I am most heartily sick of this kind of life,” wrote Jacob W. Bartness, an Indiana soldier, to his wife in 1865. “Oh, what a pleasant retreete from the repulsive scenes of this man-slaughtering life, would be the society of my family in some secluded spot, shut out from the calamities of war.”65
On campaign, the constant exposure to all varieties of weather, and the vulnerability of northern-bred systems to the drastic ecological difference of the deep South’s climate and environment, made Northern soldiers particularly vul
nerable to sickness. Charles Jewett of the 2nd New Hampshire wrote home in July 1862 warning a family friend of the rough living that would await him if he enlisted. “If he thinks it would be any Benefit to his health, tell him to try it at home first. Tell him to go out dores and sleep on the ground through two or three rain storms without any thing to put over or under him. If that don’t dishearten him put [a] half Bushel of corn on his back and march all day, then take a Shovel and shovel all night without any thing to eat or drink.”
The impossibility of washing and cleaning on long marches made the volunteer an easy target for infestations of lice, fleas, ticks, and other pests. For John Billings, the constant presence of lice was a great leveler of pretensions, the butt of a good soldiers’ joke. “Like death,” Billings wrote, lice were “no respecter of persons.” The pest “inserted its bill as confidingly into the body of the major-general as of the lowest private. I once heard the orderly of a company officer relate that he had picked fiftytwo graybacks from the shirt of his chief at one sitting.” Soldiers in the 154th New York wrote home in exasperation that “when we were on the march, we had every time we stopped to take off our shirts and drawers and kill the lice, to keep them from carrying us off.” Few soldiers suspected that these pests also helped to transmit bacteria through bites and open sores. In camp, the volunteers carelessly continued to make trouble for themselves. Water contaminated by poorly dug latrines, along with piles of waste and garbage that attracted flies and rodents, brought on waves of dysentery, diarrhea, and typhoid fever, but little could convince the volunteer to protect himself. “Our poor sick, I know, suffer much,” sighed Robert E. Lee, but “they bring it on themselves by not doing what they are told. They are worse than children, for the latter can be forced.”66
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