Living Hell Read online

  Conscription provides us with some of the most compelling vignettes of the modern state’s machinery of compulsion in action. On an avenue in D.C. during a warmish afternoon, we may observe with Walt Whitman the chilling powerlessness of men caught in a moving prison box: “passing up, in the broad space between the curbs, a big squad of a couple of hundred conscripts, surrounded by a strong cordon of armed guards and others interspersed between the ranks.” Or, in Atlanta, we can accompany men of Edward Walthall’s Mississippi Brigade engaged in “conscripting a theater.” Sealing all exits during the play, they create a huge mantrap that bags some three hundred souls caught without papers, sent then under guard straight to the Virginia front. Sergeant J. W. Simmons comments phlegmatically, “We knew the city was full of able-bodied men who ought to be in the army as well as us.”60

  Finally, on a street in Lexington, Kentucky, we might pause in September 1862 as a kindly local physician stops to talk with a young soldier, part of the invading Rebel army. The youth sits by the roadside, looking washed out. “My poor boy,” says the older man, “you oughtnt to be here. You ought to be home with your mother.” The youngster claps his hands in response to this gesture of sympathy: “Oh, I do wish I was home. I don’t know who or what your are sir, but I am a union man & I was forced into the army else I wouldnt have been here.” For this brief moment, an anonymous boy steps out of history’s murk to deliver poignant lines; then he returns to obscurity, his fate unknown.61

  Conscripted men never made up a majority in either section, because the draft laws aimed to stimulate volunteering in communities that wished to avoid being tagged with the unpleasant stigma of compulsion. Possibly just 20 percent of Rebel and 8 percent of Union forces resulted from conscription. Partly, the lower Federal number reflects a manpower resource available to assist volunteering and avoid drafting men, inconceivable in the Confederacy until too late in the war: African Americans.62

  Initially, most Federal commanders in the field hesitated to rattle the status quo, leaving the structure of slavery intact and returning fugitives to their masters. But by early 1862 the advantage of recruiting people of color appeared too clear to ignore. The Militia Act of July 16, 1862, authorized the President to use blacks “for any military or naval service for which they may be found competent.” A month later, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton cleared General Rufus Saxton to enroll up to five thousand Africans, with equal pay for equal work (a promise later reneged on).63

  Despite army prejudice against recruiting blacks, by fall 1862 their experimental deployment occurred in the Atlantic Sea Islands, Louisiana, Kansas, and Missouri. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, further encouraged the service of black soldiers. The final nudge came with March’s Enrollment Act, which, with its threat to draft whites, made large-scale black recruitment attractive. In the blunt words of a popular verse: “In battle’s wild commotion I shouldn’t at all object If Sambo’s body should stop a ball That was comin for me direct!”64

  Many of the blacks recruited in areas of the South under Union occupation suffered forcible impressment, the authorities giving little thought to the impact on the conscripts’ dependents (legislation had failed to provide for freeing slave families of soldiers). Abuses such as kidnap and false inducements occurred across the North, as agents for states like Massachusetts fanned out to find black “volunteers,” saving trained white industrial mechanics from being conscripted.65

  Yet a majority of African American recruitments resulted neither from force nor trickery. Corporal James Henry Gooding, 54th Massachusetts, who served in South Carolina and Florida before capture and death in Andersonville Prison, wrote on May 9, 1863: “Let every man of color consider that he has an interest in this war.” Soldiers of color fought to free their people, and the more advanced thinkers hoped to use the cartridge box to win the ballot box. As the endless fighting sapped recruiting zeal, some sustained a higher level of enthusiasm than whites, even in the face of bad treatment and being sacrificed to save white lives. In bloody, suicidal, actions like the Petersburg Crater, July 30, 1864, they formed the “forlorn hope,” thrown foremost into the assault and sustaining massive casualties.66

  Inevitably, given the racist nature of American society, colored regiments fought a war on two fronts. Confederate authorities threatened to enslave or execute those captured, along with their white officers. The Rebels backed down when Lincoln guaranteed retaliation, but unauthorized murders still occurred frequently, at places such as Plymouth, North Carolina, with black prisoners lined up along the Roanoke River and shot. Following misguided medical theory that Africans did not suffer from diseases prevalent in summer heat, Union officers used them excessively as laborers, digging trenches, latrines, and graves.67

  At Vicksburg, General Ulysses S. Grant rationalized his over-use of black troops on unhealthy fatigue duty by saying, “I do not want the White men to do any work that can possibly be avoided during the hot months.” General John M. Schofield ordered such work for colored soldiers in North Carolina “so as to relieve the white troops from duty where they would be exposed to disease.” Logic would suggest that, as black soldiers suffered a higher rate of pulmonary diseases, they would draw fewer fatigue details in cold, wet weather, but this did not happen. Unsurprisingly, while white deaths from disease versus wounds stood at a two to one ratio, for blacks it was ten to one.68

  Black soldiers received more severe and frequent punishments than whites for disciplinary infractions, even though officers generally agreed men of color exhibited less drunkenness and individual defiance of orders. The only serious resistance to authority occurred in the matter of pay, for the army allotted black soldiers $10 per month, not $13, arguing they did not deserve the extra combat compensation for digging graves, etc. The discrimination led to organized protest, alleged to be mutiny by military authorities. Blacks accounted for 80 percent of soldiers shot for mutiny, including Sergeant William Walker of the 3rd South Carolina (U.S.), executed for stacking arms to protest pay discrimination.69

  Soldiers of color faced charges and executions more frequently than whites for alleged rape. Esther Hill Hawk, a physician with Union forces in the Atlantic Sea Islands, recorded the execution of three black soldiers from the 55th Massachusetts accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. General Milton Littlefield hanged them immediately after a drumhead court-martial that allowed no time to muster a defense. He ordered three black regiments to attend and harangued them about the crime. Dr. Hawk observed bitterly that, if the general meted out the same punishment to white officers and men for raping black women, the firing squads would be very busy and the general “grown hoarse in repeating his remarks.”70

  Black soldiers met barriers to promotion, only a few rising to commissioned rank late in the conflict. Despite all the hurdles, men of color hoped their sacrifice would earn equitable treatment in postwar America. Clara Barton, tending a dying soldier of the 54th Massachusetts, felt moved by his belief that, through his struggle, his children would be free. Legally, they would be, at least by 1865. But General Littlefield’s actions already hinted that the road they would travel in the postwar era would be hard and mostly unfair. Then, disillusionment and a keen sense of betrayal would, for many black veterans, tarnish pride in their war service.71

  — CHAPTER TWO —

  ON THE MARCH

  ×

  AS THE REGIMENTS LEAVE THEIR ASSEMBLY CAMPS, WHERE the recruits have mustered and trained, we will accompany them on their march into the field and observe some of what happens on the road. Numbers of soldiers will find the open-air life healthful and invigorating, but all will be accompanied by the ubiquitous dirt, dust, and mud, along with millions of insects, ensuring that disease will remain a constant companion. Food rations will run short, and always the troops face a universal shortage of water, for drinking, cooking, washing clothes, bathing wounds, and cleaning surgical instruments.

  Large concentrations of men move across the landscape, t
he biggest armies yet seen on the North American continent. They contain largely short-term citizen volunteers, unlike the small professional forces that characterized warfare before the American and French Revolutions of the late 1700s. Those turmoils changed the profile of warfare, making it more the people’s struggles, in which plain folk had a stake and so might take up arms through dedication to a shared cause. The citizen soldier became a new model, radically enlarging the available manpower pool to include the whole masculine population.

  In Europe, the early nineteenth century saw further attempts to extend political freedom through armed revolution at the barricades, while in the United States, building on concepts voiced in the Declaration of Independence, common (white) men surged to prominence during the 1830s presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jacksonian democracy confidently declared that the ordinary man could excel at any task to which he turned his attention. In a military context, this meant that he would exhibit innate soldierly abilities at least equal to those of a “book-learned” and hireling regular. Consequently, the young nation placed its security largely in the hands of a “well-regulated militia,” amateur soldiers exercising their collective right to bear arms in organized state units.

  As a result, the War between the States would be fought by massive levies of ordinary men in uniform—civilians in quieter times—albeit under the orders of commanders largely graduated from West Point and other military academies. The size of these armies became so great that they were compared frequently to moving cities. We have here a good image to bear in mind, because much follows from the analogy. The teeming multitudes of a city require shelter, food, clothing, warmth, water, and sanitary arrangements on a grand scale. The Victorian metropolis did not always succeed in meeting these essential needs. How much more difficult would it be, then, to cater to an urban concentration perpetually in motion, with no stable transportation terminals for supply, no guaranteed water resources, and so on? The city in motion found itself inevitably ill served.

  In theory, by 1860 the technological apparatus and organizational structures had reached a point where governments could put huge bodies of troops in the field and sustain them there. The railroad and steamboat could shift immense amounts of personnel and materials to any designated location, while an expanding network of roads provided links in this transportation grid. Mass production of uniforms, shoes, and equipment ought to have kept the levies clothed and shod. Industrial processing of preserved foodstuffs meant that troops could still eat when fresh meat and produce became unavailable locally.

  The arrangements worked to the degree that the troops stayed in the field and on the march. But theory often failed when confronted by the harsh realities of practice. Railroads became degraded by heavy usage; the crumbling Confederacy could not maintain them. Raiders for both sides tore up track and burned bridges; natural disasters ruined the infrastructure. Ammunition and other vital supplies could be shipped on boats by whichever side controlled a particular waterway, but the final journey from the landing meant trundling over roads wrecked by war. In their construction, many highways had been neither graded nor drained to bear constant heavy traffic, being intended for local use only. F. Colburn Adams, a New York cavalry officer serving on the Virginia Peninsula, noted that, in violent storms, “trees were uprooted, tents blown down, the bridges over the Chickahominy nearly swept away, and the very earth flooded.”1

  Spring and fall rains reduced roadbeds to feet-deep mud churned up by marching boots, wagon wheels, and hooves. Mules drowned in deep potholes. “It is solemnly true,” wrote General Alpheus S. Williams, “that we lost mules in the middle of the road, sinking out of sight in the mud-holes.” In summer, haulage animals and beef cattle intended for the troops succumbed to heat, dust, and dehydration. Suffering the July heat in Mississippi during the 1863 Vicksburg campaign, Tom Taylor, 47th Ohio, asked, “Is it any wonder that men fell down in their tracks and that horses and mules reeled and fell under the saddle—sun struck was a familiar word.” The mud interfered with military operations. Mud, along with diarrhea, stopped Grant’s pursuit of the Rebels after Shiloh.2

  Fodder for beasts ran short. Private William B. Greene, 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, coming upon the carcasses of eighteen slaughtered horses at Bristoe Station, Virginia, on April 6, 1862, noted the Rebels must be short of feed to shoot their mounts this way. The Union alone lost 11,000 horses in the first fourteen months of war and more than a million perished in the overall conflict. Even when roads proved passable, hard-marching generals outran their supply wagons as the vehicles labored over rutted highways. Confederate General Dorsey Pender accused Stonewall Jackson of setting so grueling a pace that no supply train could keep up: “Jackson would kill up an army the way he marches,” when added to “the bad management in the subsistence Dept.”3

  Bad management certainly constituted one factor. Particularly in the early months, thinly staffed quartermaster departments became routinely overwhelmed, but they also bogged down because of red tape and parsimonious accounting methods learned in the old army. Thus, the department medical director at New Orleans denied a shipment of quinine badly needed by troops in the west because of “irregularity” in the submission of the requisition. Soldiers who had set off for war in fine new uniforms might go barefoot and nearly naked when replacement outfits failed to reach them. A New York woman who saw Gettysburg thought that many Union soldiers, “with their clothes ragged and dirty,” resembled “inhabitants of the bottomless pit” of hell rather than respectable defenders of the Republic.4

  Even newly issued uniforms might disintegrate because many consisted of “shoddy,” run up quickly by suppliers for the government market out of a concoction of rag fibers bonded together. “Mud deep and growing deeper. Uniforms in bad plight—feet wet and cold and patriotism down to zero,” declared Corporal C. F. Boyd, 15th Iowa, enduring extreme weather in the western theater, February 1862. The Union army, usually better shod than its opponents, still wore ill-made shoes, often cut to a standard shape, without proper sizing or arches and made for either foot, causing major discomfort. Cardboard soles fell apart on long marches. General Alpheus Williams wrote from the Virginia Peninsula in the Spring of 1862: “I have at least 4,000 men in my division who are shoeless completely, or so nearly that they cannot march.”5

  Confederate soldiers went shoeless in winter as well as summer, leaving bloody prints in the snow. “Many of our men are barefooted, and I have seen the blood in their tracks as they marched,” attested Colonel John S. Williams, campaigning in Kentucky, in November 1861. A common expedient was fashioning crude moccasins from the untanned cowhide of cattle that had been slaughtered for meat, but these shoes shrank drastically as the hide dried, causing constriction and pain. The moccasins also proved so slick underfoot that men fell. Colonel Moxley G. Sorrel, on the staff of General James Longstreet, concluded: “The wearers, constantly up or down, finally kicked them aside and took the road as best they could.” He added that the men had found a large supply of shoes sent from England to be shoddy, falling apart in one day of wet and mud.6

  The gravest supply failure proved to be sustenance. Surgeon General William Hammond correctly asserted the designated Federal ration the most generous in the world, with ample allowances of meat, bread, legumes, rice, potatoes, onions, coffee, tea, sugar, salt, vinegar, and so on. But quantities in the field routinely fell short of the regulation allotment. Private John W. Haley, 17th Maine, admitted that hunger drove the boys to gobble entrails, called melts. “I have never before heard of eating such trumpery as melts, but necessity drives us to sample this disgustingly filthy mess.”7

  When fresh rations reached the lines, men might not be given time to eat them. Illinois Colonel William Camm, 14th Illinois, related the march being ordered before his broiling meat was warmed through, “and I ate my beef raw, without bread and the blood running over my hand.” Gulping a mouthful of scalding coffee, he “swallowed it in agony, and a minute after drew all the skin from my
palate with my forefinger.” Private Lawrence Van Alstyne, 128th New York, described his company tearing raw flesh from freshly slaughtered beef. He dug at the warm liver, eating the sticky shreds that stuck to his fingers, and “kept it up until I had taken the edge off my appetite.”8

  Hunger drove men to actions that would have repulsed them in previous times. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes of the Washington Artillery, Confederate Army of Tennessee, wrote in October 1863: “Daily starving soldiers crave of us permission to pick out of the dirt around the horses the soiled and trodden grains of corn that remained after feed time.” Men in blue and gray ate rats and whole frogs. Private Silas Mallory, 64th Ohio, caught a frog, ripped it apart, ground it up with an ear of corn, and ate the mush for supper. Some also judged rat to be as tender as young squirrel. Desperate men rifled the dead. Private John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade admitted to taking crackers off a corpse, cutting away the bloody edges, and wolfing down the rest.9

  When fresh rations failed, preserved substitutes had to suffice. Bacon found favor with the troops but, in hot weather, or if it had been in the cask too long, it could be rancid. Hungry men ate it anyway. Benjamin F. Jackson, 33rd Alabama, recounted to his wife in June of 1862 that the processed beef, permeated with saltpeter, required soaking overnight (when a water source existed); next, he said, “put it on and boil it half a day and then it will be so tough we can’t chew it.” Plain flour, mixed with water and cooked over the fire in bacon fat, if available, made a bread substitute. The results proved so resilient, wrote physician Esther Hill Hawk from a Union hospital in Florida, February 1864, that “If they could be worn as armor, it would make the men invulnerable.” Prior-baked biscuit or hardtack formed a staple that kept body and soul together, but it took getting used to. Often, only a musket butt could break up this petrified cracker. When damp, it hatched weevils and black-headed worms an inch long. Texas chaplain W. J. Joyce pronounced the crackers “wormy moldy stuff” that irritated the thirsty tongue.10