Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  All in all, it was as if a clean wind from the blue mountains had blown through this army, sweeping away weariness and doubt and restoring the spirit with which the men had first started out; restoring, for the last time in this war—perhaps for the last time anywhere— that strange, magical light which rested once upon the landscape of a young and totally unsophisticated country, whose perfect embodiment the army was. In a way, this army was fighting against reality, just as was Lee's army. The dream which possessed the land before 1861 was passing away in blood and fire. One age was ending and another was being born, with agony of dissolution and agony of birth terribly mingled; and in the Army of the Potomac—in its background, its coming together, its memories of the American life which it imagined it was fighting to preserve—there was the final expression of an era which is still part of our heritage but which is no longer a part of any living memories.

  And there was for the soldiers, just then, a brief pause in the war, a quiet, unexpected breathing space between battles, a little Indian summer of the Army of the Potomac. The country was tense and anxious, and in Washington the President and Cabinet and general-in-chief lived through almost unbearable suspense, and beyond the mountains Lee was somewhere out of sight, his ominous designs cloaked by silence. But the Union Army itself was, for the moment, almost peaceful. It moved ahead very slowly, while far in front the mounted outriders cantered with smoking carbines up against Lee's shifting patrols, groping to touch the hard solidity of his massed infantry. By night the army rested in green fields that were like the fields of home; by day, if it moved at all, it moved in leisurely style, cheered by the greetings from farmhouse and village. The men were old soldiers by now, able to live entirely in the present moment. As they moved northwest along the old National Road, the white tops of the wagon trains bobbing in the slow columns like the covered wagons of some unimaginable new folk migration, it was as if they passed in unhurried review, fixing in one suspended moment of time the image of the country that had borne them.

  There was in the army a regiment called the Bucktails: 13th Pennsylvania Reserves, actually, owning a nickname because a private, in training-camp days, had ornamented his hat with a snippet of fur cut from the carcass of a deer hanging in front of a town meat market, and all the other men in the regiment had seen it and had gone and done likewise. The Bucktails had been enlisted in the spring of 1861 in the mountain country of northern Pennsylvania, where leading citizen Thomas Kane had put up placards in all the towns and hamlets stating that he was authorized to accept for service "any man who will bring in with him to my headquarters a Rifle which he knows how to use," and urging: "Come forward, Americans, who are not degenerate from the spirit of 76!" The men came swarming in to the recruiting places and formed scattered companies; and when it was time to assemble at Harrisburg three of the companies bought lumber and built rafts, with a platform on one raft so that the colonel's horse could ride, too, and rafted it down the West Branch of the Susquehanna, camping out nights along the banks and pausing to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" jubilantly after they had shot the rapids above Rattlesnake Falls. Another company, the "Raftsman Guards," coming from farther west, likewise went by raft, down the Allegheny to Pittsburgh, and took the cars thence to Harrisburg.

  The men had thought they were enlisting for three months, under the first call for troops, but when they got to the capital they found the state's three months' quota was filled, so they signed up for three years instead. Company K, lumbermen from Clearfield County, who were recruited at a mountain inn called "Good Intent and People's Line," was a bachelor company; started out with 123 men, found that only 100 could be accepted, and sent home all the married men. When the regiment was finally assembled for mustering in, good Colonel Kane resigned, stating that he lacked military experience—he used to carry an umbrella for sunshade while drilling the troops-and asking the men to elect Charles Biddle, a Mexican War veteran, in his place. The men did so, but insisted on making Kane lieutenant colonel, and when Biddle resigned a few months later to enter Congress, Kane got the regiment after all. He became an excellent soldier, later winning command of a brigade.

  The regiment marched overland from Harrisburg into Maryland in the summer of 1861, and as it drew near to Maryland the men were tense: crossing the Mason and Dixon line would mean stepping into slave territory, into the war itself. So they halted, while a lieutenant seized the colors, ran across the state line, and boldly planted the flag on Maryland soil, whereat the regiment fired a salute, ragged but noisy. They were officially designated a rifle regiment—hangover from the day when a soldier who had and could use a rifle was very much a specialist—and they were equipped with breech-loading single-shot Sharp's rifles.5

  Then there was the 27th Indiana, which came from what was already beginning to be called Copperhead country—the region west and south of Indianapolis, where Lincoln Republicans were not popular and there were strong ties linking the countryfolk with the Southland. The atrocity stories that were spread after the first battle of Bull Run seem to have had a part in pulling these boys into the army; wild tales of Rebels bayoneting prisoners and mutilating corpses "were as a fire in the bones," the regimental historian recalled. The 27th came into the army without any physical examinations whatever; the mustering officer, an overworked major of regulars, simply looked each company over, man by man, before accepting them, and many physical defects were carefully concealed. Men with gray beards shaved clean in order to look younger, or dyed their hair; hollow-chested men stuffed clothing inside their shirts; recruits with crooked arms held them tightly against their sides so the defect would not be noticed; others who lacked fingers held their fists clenched. Underage boys would write "18" on a slip of paper and put it inside a shoe; then, when asked if they weren't pretty young, they could truthfully say, "I'm over 18." Many of the boys came from homes where there was no sympathy with the Union cause, and regimental officers helped them with these dodges to get by the mustering officer before angry parents could come and haul them back home. Sometimes a company was advised to muster in at twilight, when physical defects were less likely to be noticed.

  It was a boast of the 27th that it had the tallest man in the army, Captain David Buskirk, who stood six feet eleven inches in his socks. They tried to give him a solid company of six-footers; couldn't quite make it, but did give him eighty of them. The whole regiment averaged large in size, for all the potential 4-Fs who had slipped in; when the regimental quartermaster drew shoes he had to go around the other regiments, swapping fives and sixes for nines and tens. His favorite regiments for this purpose were the 9th New York and the 29th Pennsylvania, regiments of city chaps who were somewhat undersized. For all that it was from a rural area, the 27th boasted that it was a jack-of-all-trades group. It had bakers, who manned regimental ovens; printers, who could set type and run captured printing presses—they had actually done it while the regiment served under Banks in the valley; engineers, firemen, and brakemen, if they had to operate any railroad trains. The regiment used to wish that it might, in the freakish chance of war, sometime capture a steamboat: it had plenty of steamboat hands, plus a pilot licensed for all Western rivers. As the army marched up into Maryland the 27th's brigade got two new regiments, 13th New Jersey and 107th New York, which came in full strength. The Indiana boys, their own ranks much depleted by hard service, gaped at them. "We had not realized before how large a regiment really was." They noticed, too, that the faces and hands of the new soldiers were white, that their uniforms looked uncreased and new, and that they still had an inexpert way of bundling up and carrying their equipment.8

  New York City had contributed the famous Irish Brigade—63rd, 69th, and 88th New York, Irish to a man, carrying regimental flags of pure emerald green embroidered in gold with an Irish harp, a shamrock, and a sunburst. Brigadier General Thomas F. Meagher led these soldiers. Famous as an Irish patriot who had had a part in the unsuccessful uprising of 1848 and had been sent to Australia on an E
nglish prison ship, he had escaped and come to America and in 1861 saw the Union cause as the cause of freedom. He had raised this brigade with the backing of Archbishop Hughes of New York, and the regimental flags had been presented at a fine ceremony in front of the archbishop's residence on Madison Avenue. Deep-chested, muscular, gay, witty, sporting a trim mustache and imperial, and entirely looking the part of the dashing Irish soldier, Meagher had made the brigade a valiant fighting force. It was in Bull Sumner's corps, and they said that on the peninsula, whenever he had to go into action, Sumner first inquired: "Where are my green flags?" To the brigade had recently been added the 29th Massachusetts, which was Irish enough to keep the average up and fit in all right. As a general rule the brigade did not like New England troops, considering them scheming Yankee bargain drivers and narrow anti-Romanists to boot.7

  The 40th New York was called the "Mozart Regiment," not because the men were devoted to music, but because the regiment had been organized with the special blessing of Mayor Wood of New York City, whose personal faction in the New York Democratic party was known as the Mozart Hall group, in opposition to Tammany. Six of the Mozart's ten companies came from outside the state, four from Massachusetts and two from Pennsylvania. These companies were filled with men who had simply insisted on getting into the war: independent companies, organized in 1861 after their states' quotas had been filled, which had refused to disband and had gone shopping around looking for some regiment that would take them. Mayor Wood had been having much trouble recruiting the 40th New York, his reputation as a devout patriot not being of the best, so by special dispensation the out-of-state companies were taken in. The regiment stayed up all night when it got word that it was to leave for Washington and the front; played tag and leapfrog and fired blank cartridges from the two brass cannon which were at that time part of the regiment's regular equipment. When they started out they needed ten wagons to carry the regimental baggage; now, in the fall of 1862, they carried their baggage on their backs.8

  The 1st Minnesota bragged that it was really the first volunteer regiment to be offered for Federal service in the war. Governor Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota happened to be in Washington when Fort Sumter fell, and he hot-footed it over to the War Department early next morning to offer his men for service, thus making Minnesota the first state to respond to Lincoln's call for troops. The regiment had been built around a St. Paul militia company known as the "Pioneer Guards." Mustered in at picturesque Fort Snelling, it found to its disgust that it was to be assigned to duty on frontier posts watching the Sioux Indians, and didn't get away from Minnesota until mid-June. Lacking uniforms, the state had clothed the men in black felt hats, black pants, and lumberjacks' shirts of checkered red; the boys didn't get regular uniforms until after the first battle of Bull Run. Like the Mozart Regiment, the men stayed up all night to celebrate when orders finally came to start east. They left Fort Snelling by steamboat (no railroad in Minnesota at that time) and took a train east from a port down-river; paraded through Chicago, the mayor riding beside the colonel, and were hailed by the Chicago Tribune as "unquestionably the finest body of troops that has yet appeared on our streets."9

  The country was proud of those early regiments, and it knew how to show it. Traveling cross-country, en route to Washington, was for most of them a long succession of cheering crowds, brass bands, spread-eagle speeches, and banquets. The 3rd Wisconsin, which started east in July 1861, recorded that it was cheered on every farm along the track in southern Michigan, was visited at Adrian by a committee with buckets of iced lemonade, was given a grand banquet at Toledo, and was met at Erie by a committee of women bringing baskets of food. At Buffalo there was a parade through the city and a speech of welcome by the mayor, after which there was a banquet at the railroad depot. Next morning "the ladies of Elmira gave us a sumptuous breakfast"; at Williamsport the ladies gave them dinner and also stuffed their haversacks with cakes and cold meats. It was this regiment, incidentally, which treasured one memory of the battle of Winchester, where Stonewall Jackson routed Banks's corps. The rout having taken place, the men had lost formation and were legging it for the rear, and General Banks rode among them to rally them, calling out earnestly: "Men, don't you love your country?" To which a realist in the 3rd Wisconsin yelled back: "Yes—and I'm trying to get back to it as fast as I can."10

  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.