by Bruce Catton
But even after the kitchen arrangements were formalized there were many, many occasions when cooking was strictly a matter of each man for himself. On any march where speed was essential, or where there were frequent brushes with the enemy, regiments would be separated from their wagon trains for days at a time. Then the men were given "marching rations"—three days' supply of hardtack, coffee, and salt pork per man, plus sugar and salt, all carried in the haversack—and, as far as the army authorities were concerned, that was what the men lived on until the wagons joined them again. As a result, the experienced soldier always carried kitchen equipment with him: a little tin pail or empty can for a kettle, and a tin plate or half a canteen with an improvised wooden handle for frying pan. With these, and a few splinters to make a fire, he could get by, although what the results must have done to his stomach is enough to make a dietitian wince.
The hardtack was the great staple. It was a solid cracker, some three inches square and nearly half an inch thick: solid, hard, nourishing, and—by surviving testimony—good enough to eat when it was fresh, which wasn't always the case. Nine or ten of these slabs constituted a day's ration, and a soldier who wanted more could generally get them, since many of the men couldn't eat that many and would give some away. For breakfast and supper, when on the march, the soldier was apt to crumble the hardtack in his coffee and eat it with a spoon. Now and then a whole hardtack was soaked in water, drained, and fried in pork fat, when it went under the name of "skillygalee" and was, said a veteran, "certainly indigestible enough to satisfy the cravings of the most ambitious dyspeptic." At times the hardtack was toasted on the end of a stick; if it charred, as it generally did, it was believed good for weak bowels. Boxes of hardtack, piled high, often stood in all weathers on open platforms at railway supply depots. If the hardtack got moldy it was usually thrown away as inedible, but if it just got weevily it was issued anyway. Heating it at the fire would drive the weevils out; more impatient soldiers simply ate it in the dark and tried not to think about it.
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.
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sp; 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.
Yet it was these ineffective old smoothbores on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress—a compact mass of men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away. All offensive infantry tactics were designed to enable a commander to throw that compact, steel-tipped mass against an enemy line of battle.
But with the rifled musket it just didn't work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got in close. The advancing line came under killing fire four or five times as far off as used to be the case. As one student of Civil War casualties remarked: "There was a limit of punishment beyond which endurance would not go, and the old Springfield rifle was capable of inflicting it."3 Like the machine gun in 1914, here was a weapon which upset all the old theories. The natural result was that actual hand-to-hand work with
the bayonet was a great rarity in the Civil War, for all the fine talk of grand bayonet charges to be found in the generals' memoirs. The bayonet was still carried and it was still a threat, but very few men ever used it. Of some 245,000 wounds treated by surgeons in Union hospitals, fewer than a thousand had been made by bayonets. One reason, of course, may be that when a man did get bayoneted he usually died on the spot; nevertheless, the figure is significant.
The Confederate General John B. Gordon, who got into about as much truly desperate fighting as any man on either side, wrote after the war: "I may say that very few bayonets of any kind were actually used in battle, as far as my observation extended. The one line or the other usually gave way under the galling fire of small arms, grape and canister, before the bayonet could be brought into requisition. The bristling points and the glitter of the bayonets were fearful to look upon, as they were levelled in front of a charging line: but they were rarely reddened with blood."4 In several private soldiers' memoirs one finds the remark that the bayonet was really most useful as a candlestick: its point could be jabbed into the ground easily and its socket was just the right size to hold a candle.
