by Tim Rowland
A month earlier, Burnside had made a wreck of the Federal army at Fredericksburg—a slaughter so bad it had nearly brought even the enemy to tears. Burnside now declared the arrival of “a great and auspicious moment” that would allow him to “strike a great and mortal blow” to the rebellion. His plan was to sneak up the bank of the Rappahannock, cross the river on pontoon bridges, and take Lee’s unprotected left flank by surprise. The plan might have been a good one, but no one will ever know because almost immediately it devolved into a horrid failure, even by Ambrose’s storied standards. A brief winter warm-up and ensuing rains turned the Virginia countryside into one big wallow that swallowed Burnside’s soldiers and horses up to the knees. Entire corps became delayed and confused and marched into each other’s paths. The army’s pontoon boats were pulled by one, then two, then three teams of mules and horses, ultimately to no avail. Men joined in on the tugging—up to 150 ropes were secured to each pontoon wagon, and the order given to heave to. One officer recounted, “They would founder through the mire for a few feet—the gang of Lilliputians with their huge-ribbed Gulliver—and then give up breathless.” One New York regiment was able to move only a mile and a half in a day. Burnside, bless his heart, was running up and down the lines in a near panic, doing everything he could to salvage the operation short of tugging on the ropes himself. The general and his horse became a mud-lacquered allegory of despair, as his dream of redemption and glory turned into yet another horrific blunder. A heartbreaking account by historian Ernest B. Furguson, in his book Chancellorsville 1863, quotes a New York surgeon who summed up Burnside’s pathetic situation: “We could but think that the soldier on foot, arm oppressed with the weight of knapsack, haversack and gun, bore an easy load compared with that of the commander of the army, who now saw departing his hopes of redeeming the prestige he had lost at Fredericksburg.”
By this time, the surprise had gone out of his attack of course, but it still might have succeeded if only because Confederates on the opposite bank of the river were paralyzed with laughter at the North’s predicament. They elevated their merriment by painting large billboards with arrows advising THIS WAY TO RICHMOND and offering to help the Yanks place their pontoons, since they were making such poor work of it themselves.
Even as he was losing his mission and the hearts of his men, Burnside wouldn’t give up. In order to boost morale, he ordered the distribution of a healthy ration of whiskey. Strangely, this didn’t help. One officer reported “An indescribable chaos of pontoons, wagons, and artillery encumbered the road down to the river. Horses and mules dropped down dead, exhausted with the effort to move their loads through the hideous medium. One hundred and fifty dead animals, many of them buried in the liquid muck, were counted in the course of a mornings ride.” Burnside and his army finally gave up and slogged back to a camp they had all hoped never to see again.
In fact, this encampment, known that winter as “Camp Misery,” was one of the reasons Burnside felt the need to move his men in the first place. As with Hancock, this was a cold, damp incubator of disease, only on a much larger scale. So happy had some men been to leave that they burned their huts—now they returned to nothing. It was almost more than they could bear.
In one sense, at least for the men, the Civil War amounted to a handful of epic battles flanked by days, weeks, months, and years of mind-numbing inactivity. Camp life could be horribly dull. If not on a campaign, the soldier’s day began at five or six in the morning, and revolved around a series of monotonous practices.
An oft-quoted Pennsylvania recruit summed it up: “The first thing in the morning is drill, then drill, then drill again. Then drill, drill, a little more drill. Then drill and lastly drill. Between drills we drill and sometimes stop to eat a little and have a roll call.” Drilling was not popular and its appeal decreased with each passing year. A petrified old vet wrote, or tried to, “Brigade drill and review today i dont know what will cum tomoror and dont cair one god dam sir.”
In the summer soldiers generally slept in two-man shelters (on the march, each man carried half a tent and the sides were buttoned together in camp). Many soldiers felt these canvas contrivances were little better than “dog houses,” and perhaps this sobriquet was a forebearer of the term “pup tent”. In winter, such as at Camp Misery, quarters were built along organized streets and constructed of logs, much like miniature frontier cabins. They were equipped with stoves and furniture that were as elaborate as the soldiers desired. Some gave their crude homes names such as “The Astor House.”
Soldiers passed the time in a variety of ways. Gambling was important, and so was religion. The prevalence of the two was directly proportional to the immanency of battle. The roads to major battlefields were often littered with dice and cards, tossed aside by those with a heightened interest in salvation.
Perhaps the best virtue-versus-vice story, although also perhaps apocryphal, involved one soldier with a Bible in his breast pocket fighting alongside a man who, instead of the holy book, was carrying a pack of cards. Both men were struck in the same spot, but the bullet bounced off the pious man’s Bible and burrowed into his heart and killed him. The bullet that struck the gambler pierced fifty-one cards but was stopped by the last one, the ace of spades. Soldiers wrote poetry and plays that they acted out for the men. Music was always popular. They fished in the streams and swam in the rivers—it would not have been particularly noteworthy to see Yankees and Rebels swimming in the same hole. They chased greased pigs, ran races, engaged in shooting matches. Baseball was popular, as were reading, playing cards, hunting, snaring rabbits, and writing letters.
In one sense, perhaps, the men got a better education than they would have received at home, since so much idle time was taken up by reading and writing—skills they would not have had time to hone had they been home. Bell Irvin Wiley published fascinating books on camp life ferreted out of more than 30,000 soldiers’ letters home. (These letters are priceless, among other things, for their homespun similes, including “It was short and sweet, like a roasted maggot,” and “These Southerners are poorer than skim piss.”)
Yet for all the terrors of war, and of waiting around for war, some soldiers clearly thought the Civil War was a blast. “Never enjoyed anything in the world as I do this life,” wrote a kid from Illinois. For some in 1860, getting shot at, frozen, half starved, and marched to the point of exhaustion still might have represented a marginal improvement over their current home life up to that point. Some had never seen underwear, nor had any idea of what to do with it. A standing prank among the veterans was to tell the raw recruit that there was a special type of uniform to be worn during dress parades. Pranks were a big deal. When a recruit was stationed as a sentry for the first time, vets would creep out into the bush and rattle around a bit. When the high-strung rookie shouted, “Who goes there?” a voice in the dark would answer “A flock of sheep,” or other nonsense.
Soldiers saved their best humor, however, for the food. Army rations were the most important part of the war and the most derided. At least they were in the North; in the South, rations were so scarce that any food was considered good food. Armadillo, raved one Rebel, was “superior to any possum meat I ever eat.”
Federals had the luxury of grousing. It was a pity, said one, that Sampson was not in possession of U.S. Army butter, because he could have rubbed his bald head with it and the Philistines wouldn’t have touched him.
If men couldn’t cry over the quality of the horribly over-brined beef they could at least laugh. One regiment enacted a grand dress procession, complete with a military band, that gave full honors to a barrel of beef and buried it with a somber twenty-one-gun salute out of respect for “its long service to the army.”
In camp, men who got along well would break out into “messes” of four to eight and take turns cooking, cleaning, and foraging. If they were lucky, they would have black cooks whose skills in the culinary arts far exceeded those of boys straight off the farm. (Courtesy
National Archives)
One Illinois soldier said you could throw the beef up against a tree and it would “quiver and twitch” like a lizard that had been poked with a stick. Another said he suspected the army was feeding mule meat to the troops because their ears had grown three-and-a-half inches since arriving in Annapolis. In the South, this was no laughing matter; a ration of mule went around to the men under siege at Petersburg. Few Confederates were in a position to complain.
Rations could, and were supposed to, include many things, but most reliably for the North they included bread, salt pork, beans, and coffee. The South subsisted primarily on meal and meat that often walked a gray line between bacon and suet. Lee loved it when he could get something as simple and nourishing as a shipment of field peas.
A frequently bent rule was that men were not supposed to steal the edible possessions of private citizens. But hunting was allowed, so hogs were explained away as being “slow deer.” One Irishman was reprimanded when an officer caught him with a chicken hanging from his gun. The soldier protested his innocence, saying he had caught the hen laying eggs for the support and comfort of the Rebels and “Aye stopped that act of trayson on the spot, bejesus.”
Tragically, the South had plenty of food; the problem was that it so infrequently reached the soldiers. Some of this was attributable to the predictable afflictions of graft, red tape, and inefficient distribution. But there were other problems that included a lack of simple shipping containers. And while the South had plenty of food, it did not have much of the key ingredient needed to preserve that food: salt. Thousands of barrels of food spoiled as it sat on railroad loading docks. Consequently, borderline starvation in the South was frequently an issue. Men were known to scrape up the dirt where the horses had been fed and wash the till at night in hopes of salvaging a few kernels of spilled grain. Certainly there were acute food shortages in the North at times, but as a general thing, Federal troops had enough or knew they soon would. When they didn’t, heads would roll.
Our poor friend Burnside lost the faith of his men, but it had less to do with the Mud March than it did his inability to burst the bottlenecks that kept proper rations from reaching Camp Misery. This was the last straw, and Burnside was replaced by a man who, as his name implies, had his own impact on the spare time and society of camp life: Joe Hooker.
Just as Paris Hilton is not the source of the word “hot,” Gen. Joe Hooker was not the source of the common nickname for prostitutes. But by the time he was done, the nation (and history) could be excused for thinking he was. He certainly popularized it. On a surprise visit from Lincoln, a flock of these “soiled doves” reportedly scattered from the doorstep of Hooker’s headquarters like spooked rabbits. Along with the generals who became his drinking buddies, Hooker cultivated an atmosphere in his tent that drew scathing rebukes from the pious and the God-fearing—it was a combination of barroom and brothel, sniffed one officer. But Hooker alone could hardly be blamed for the prostitution that followed the army like seagulls after a shrimp boat.
At the time of the Civil War, prostitution was legal. In Washington alone, there were 500 brothels—creatively named “Unconditional Surrender,” “Headquarters USA,” and such—and 5,000 prostitutes. Washington’s most famous madam, Mary Ann Hall, died in 1886 having amassed a fortune that today would be worth close to $2 million. Female “followers” of the armies tagged along under the titles of being cooks and cleaners, although in truth they did little of either. Memphis, meanwhile, became known as the Gomorrah of the West and Nashville was home to a famous, soldier-friendly strip known as Smokey Row. The women were routinely chased away, but came right back. This was a problem, because venereal disease would ultimately touch eight percent of the army. One general ordered all prostitutes to board a steamboat and sent them upriver, where the mayors of Louisville, Cincinnati, and so on, were waiting on the docks telling the captain to keep moving. Ultimately the ship’s pilot had nowhere to go but back. Nashville’s problem was eventually solved when prostitutes were licensed and checked by doctors. Women who were infected were sent to a hospital funded by a fifty-cent tax on hookers. The system worked splendidly.
The sex trade also included racy books and pictures, which were especially popular with farm boys who, raised in the Victorian age, knew nothing of female forms beyond the reams of fabric in which the women of the day liberally upholstered themselves.
Published matter, bawdy or otherwise, might be purchased from the sutlers who, along with rolling barrooms and whorehouses, shadowed the troops like mobile convenience stores, selling tobacco, tinned meats, newspapers, and other knick-knacks that soldiers might need. Their prices were legend, and they further aggravated the men by tending to disappear not long after payday, when they discerned the bulk of the soldiers’ money had been spent.
And there was no quicker way to spend it than when whiskey was for sale. Commanders had whiskey rations that they could dispense as they saw fit, but beyond that, enlisted men were not allowed to purchase spirits. So frequently was this order violated that an exasperated Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg reckoned that liquor had gotten more of his men killed than enemy bullets. In the 1860s, drinking heavily and drinking on the job and drinking at all hours of the day was accepted, if not always acceptable. Some figured the war itself was caused by whiskey, fueled as it was by hotheaded and often inebriated politicians, newspaper editors, and public rabble-rousers. Thanks to an alleged Lincoln quip, Gen. Ulysses Grant might be the war’s most celebrated whiskey swiller—if excess whiskey contributed to Grant’s performance, Lincoln was willing to have a barrel of his brand shipped to all his generals. Indeed, after the war, a number of generals had whiskeys named after them, including Grant, Sheridan, Jackson, and Custer.
From the time a recruit signed up, the bottle would begin to be passed his way, even though daily whiskey rations in the army had ended in 1830. Someone always seemed to have a bottle or a flask, whether in a position of authority or not. Author Gerald Carson (The Social History of Bourbon) tells of a young fifer who indignantly poured his first discretionary whiskey ration out on the ground. The next time his commanding officer offered a ration he drank it for the first time; and following that experiment, “when the commanding officer gave out whiskey, I yielded to his better judgment.”
If the liquor didn’t lead to anything more serious than a fight, officers generally looked the other way. And soldiers got good at hiding it—a Southern story tells of soldiers hollowing out and filling up a watermelon; one Union soldier was caught taking a big, long belt from the barrel of his rifle.
Prevalent as it was among the enlisted men, drinking on the part of the officers might have been even more deadly and consequential. It was not uncommon for troops to be unable to move because their commanders were drunk. Prior to the Battle of Franklin, the South missed a golden chance to ambush the Union army because senior officers were enjoying too much of the Tennessee whiskey they’d been given as gifts.
Near Leesburg, a drunken Confederate officer ordered a group of Yankees, whom he mistook for his own men, to attack a position of his own men that he mistook for the enemy’s. The Union men, mistaking this drunkard for a member of their own command, did so—and were slaughtered.
Liquor could cause bizarre behavior, but then the war was bizarre in and of itself, and getting more so. The prevalence of whiskey may have endured, but as the war evolved, camp life changed. Modern weapons required a change in tactics, and armies did less marching and camping and more digging in for the long haul. From these entrenchments they would lob shells at each other whenever they were in the mood. On campaigns, the time in between big battles was relatively safe; with trench warfare death might strike from the sky at any moment of any day. In a sense, death was still random, but it was no longer an anomaly.
If war life had ever been fun, as the young Illinois soldier had once claimed, it was becoming less so. What had caused excitement in the beginning now simply made men numb. Everyone was
ready for the end.
CHAPTER 14
A Southern Boy Comes Home
For three and a half years, Capt. Tod Carter of Franklin, Tennessee, dreamed of his father’s supper table. He dreamed of his large, loving family and their modest but elegant brick home. He dreamed of warm biscuits, smoky bacon, crocks of fresh butter, and tubs of sweet preserves. This was not unusual; these would have been the dreams of many soldiers. Like many other soldiers too, Tod Carter joined the Confederacy at an age when procurement of a razor would have been an overly optimistic purchase. He would be dead at 24. He served mainly as a quartermaster in the Western Theater throughout the hills, valleys, and rivers of Tennessee and Kentucky, his service steady but unremarkable until, with a rush, a raging flood of events began to take him farther and farther from his father’s table. Then, by way of a route, and with a suddenness that no one could have imagined, Carter found himself virtually in his father’s front yard, riding a horse named Rosencrantz, screaming above a blinding fray for men to follow him in an attack on his own home.
