THE SOLDIER
The statesmen and the diplomats did their best to control and direct the war, but the real load was carried from first to last by the ordinary soldier. Poorly trained and cared for, often very poorly led, he was unmilitary but exceedingly warlike. A citizen in arms, incurably individualistic even under the rod of discipline, combining frontier irreverence with the devout piety of an unsophisticated society, he was an errant sentimentalist with an inner core as tough as the heart of a hickory stump. He had to learn the business of war as he went along because there was hardly anyone on hand qualified to teach him, and he had to pay for the education of his generals, some of whom were all but totally ineducable. In many ways he was just like the G.I. Joe of modern days, but he lived in a simpler era, and when he went off to war he had more illusions to lose. He lost them with all proper speed, and when the fainthearts and weaklings had been winnowed out, he became one of the stoutest fighting men the world has ever seen. In his own person he finally embodied what the war was all about.
The first thing to remember about him is that, at least in the beginning, he went off to war because he wanted to go. In the spring of 1861 hardly any Americans in either section had any understanding of what war really was like. The Revolution was a legend, and the War of 1812 had been no more than an episode, and the war with Mexico had never gone to the heart. Right after Fort Sumter war looked like a great adventure, and the waving flags and the brass bands and the chest-thumping orators put a gloss of romance over everything; thousands upon thousands of young Northerners and Southerners hastened to enlist, feeling that they were very lucky to have a chance. Neither government was able to use all of the men who crowded the recruiting stations in those first glittered weeks, and the boys who were rejected went back home with bitter complaints. Men who went off to camp were consumed with a fear that the war might actually be over before they got into action - an emotion which, a year later, they recalled with wry grins.
In the early part of the war the camps which received these recruits were strikingly unlike the grimly efficient training camps of the twentieth century. There were militia regiments which hired civilian cooks and raised mess funds to buy better foods than the government provided. In the South a young aristocrat would as likely as not enlist as a private and enter the army with a body servant and a full trunk of spare clothing; and in the North there were volunteer regiments which were organized somewhat like private clubs - a recruit could be admitted only if the men who were already in voted to accept him. In both sections the early regiments were loaded down with baggage, as well as with many strange notions. These sons of a rawboned democracy considered it degrading to give immediate and unquestioning obedience to orders, and they had a way of wanting to debate things, or at least to have them explained, before they acted. In the South a hot-blooded young private might challenge a company officer to a duel if he felt that such a course was called for, and if the Northern regiments saw no duels, they at least saw plenty of fist fights between officers and men. The whole concept of taut, impersonal discipline was foreign to the recruits of 1861, and many of them never did get the idea.
The free and easy ways of the first few months were substantially toned down, of course, as time went on, and in both armies it presently dawned on the effervescent young volunteers that his commanders quite literally possessed the power of life and death over him. Yet the Civil War armies never acquired the automatic habit of immediate, unquestioning obedience which is drilled into modern soldiers. There was always a quaint touch of informality to those regiments; the men did what they were told to do, they saluted and said "Sir" and adjusted themselves to the army's eternal routine, but they kept a loose-jointed quality right down to the end, and they never got or wanted to get the snap and precision which European soldiers considered essential. The Prussian General von Moltke remarked in the 1870's that he saw no point in studying the American Civil War, because it had been fought by armed mobs, and in a way - but only in a way - he was quite right. These American armies simply did not follow the European military tradition.
One reason why discipline was imperfect was the fact that company and regimental officers were mostly either elected by the soldiers or appointed by the state governor for reasons of politics: they either were, or wanted to be, personally liked by the men they commanded, and an officer with political ambitions could see a postwar constituent in everybody in the ranks. Such men were not likely to bear down very hard, and if they did the privates were not likely to take it very well. On top of this neither North nor South had anything resembling the officer-candidate schools of the present day. Most officers had to learn their jobs while they were performing them, and there is something pathetic in the way in which these neophytes in shoulder straps bought military textbooks and sat up nights to study them. They might be unqualified for military command, but as a general thing they were painfully conscientious, and they did their best. A regiment which happened to have a West Pointer for a colonel, or was assigned to a brigade commanded by a West Pointer, was in luck; such an officer was likely to devote a good deal of time to the instruction of his subordinates.
TRAINING AND DISCIPLINE
There is one thing to remember about Civil War discipline. In camp it was imperfect, and on the march it was seldom tight enough to prevent a good deal of straggling, but in battle it was often very good. (The discipline that will take soldiers through an Antietam, for instance, has much to be said for it, even though it is not recognizable to a Prussian martinet.) The one thing which both Northern and Southern privates demanded from their officers was the leadership and the physical courage that will stand up under fire, and the officers who proved lacking in either quality did not last very long.
The training which a Civil War soldier got included, of course, the age-old fundamentals - how to stand at attention, how to pick up and shoulder a musket, how to do a right face, and so on - but beyond this it was designed largely to teach him how to get from a formation in which he could march into a formation in which he could fight. A division moving along a country road would go, generally, in column of fours; moving thus, it would be a spraddled-out organism eight feet wide and a mile long. When it reached the battlefield, this organism had to change its shape completely, transforming length into width, becoming, on occasion, six feet long and a mile wide. It might form a series of lines, each line one or more regiments in width; it might temporarily throw its regiments into boxlike shapes, two companies marching abreast, while it moved from road to fighting field; if the ground was rough and badly wooded, the ten companies of regiment might go forward in ten parallel columns, each column two men wide and forty or fifty men deep; and the fighting line into which any of these formations finally brought itself might lie at any conceivable angle to the original line of march, with underbrush and gullies and fences and swamps to interfere with its formation. Once put into action, the fighting line might have to shift to the right or left, to swing on a pivot like an immense gate, to advance or to retreat, to toss a swarm of skirmishers out in its front or on either flank - to do, in short, any one or all of a dozen different things, doing them usually under fire, and with an infernal racket making it almost impossible to hear the words of command.
A regiment which could not do these things could not fight efficiently, as the First Battle of Bull Run had abundantly proved. To do them, the men had to master a whole series of movements as intricate as the movements of a ballet; had to master them so that doing them became second nature, because they might have to be done in the dark or in a wilderness and almost certainly would have to be done under great difficulties of one sort or another. As a result an immense amount of drill was called for, and few generals ever considered that their men had had enough.
Oddly enough, the average regiment did not get a great deal of target practice. The old theory was that the ordinary American was a backwoodsman to whom the use of a rifle was second nature, but that had never really been true, and by 1861 it was very full of holes. (Here the Confederacy tended to have an advantage. A higher proportion of its men had lived under frontier conditions and really did know something about firearms before they entered the army.) In some cases - notably at Shiloh - green troops were actually sent into action without ever having been shown how to load their muskets; and although this was an exceptional case, very few regiments ever spent much time on a rifle range. As late as the summer of 1863 General George Gordon Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac, felt compelled to call regimental officers' attention to the fact that the army contained many soldiers who apparently had never fired their weapons in action. On the field at Gettysburg his ordinance officers had collected thousands of muskets loaded with two, three, or even ten charges; in the excitement of the fight many men had feverishly loaded and reloaded without discharging the pieces.
TACTICS AND WEAPONS
Infantry tactics at that time were based on the use of the smoothbore musket, a weapon of limited range and accuracy. Firing lines that were much more than a hundred yards apart could not inflict very much damage on each other, and so troops which were to make an attack were massed together, elbow to elbow, and would make a run for it; if there were enough of them, and they ran fast enough, the defensive line could not hurt them seriously, and when they got to close quarters the advantage of numbers and the use of the bayonet would settle things. But the Civil War musket was rifled, which made an enormous difference. It was still a muzzle-loader, but it had much more accuracy and a far longer range than the old smoothbore, and it completely changed the conditions under which soldiers fought. An advancing line could be brought under killing fire at a distance of half a mile, now, and the massed charge of Napoleonic tradition was miserably out of date. When a defensive line occupied field entrenchments - which the soldiers learned to dig fairly early in the game - a direct frontal assault became almost impossible. The hideous casualty lists of Civil War battles owed much of their size to the fact that soldiers were fighting with rifles but were using tactics suited to smoothbores. It took the generals a long time to learn that a new approach was needed.
Much the same development was taking place in the artillery, although the full effect was not yet evident. The Civil War cannon, almost without exception, was a muzzle-loader, but the rifled gun was coming into service. It could reach farther and hit harder than the smoothbore, and for counterbattery fire it was highly effective - a rifled battery could hit a battery of smoothbores without being hit in return, and the new three-inch iron rifles, firing ten-pound conoidal shot, had a flat trajectory and immense penetrating power. But the old smoothbore - a brass gun of four-and-one-half-inch caliber, firing a twelve-pound spherical shot- remained popular to the end of the war; in the wooded, hilly country where so many Civil War battles were fought, its range of slightly less than a mile was about all that was needed, and for close-range work against infantry the smoothbore was better than the rifle. For such work the artillerist fired canister - a tin can full of lead slugs, with a propellant at one end and a wooden disk at the other - and the can disintegrated when the gun was fired, letting the lead slugs be sprayed all over the landscape. In effect, the gun then was a huge sawed-off shotgun, and at ranges of 250 yards or less it was in the highest degree murderous.
The rifled cannon had a little more range than was ordinarily needed. No one yet had worked out any system for indirect fire; the gunner had to see his target with his own eyes, and a gun that would shoot two miles was of no special advantage if the target was less than a mile away. Shell fuses were often defective, and most gunners followed a simple rule: never fire over your own infantry, except in an extreme emergency. (The things were likely to go off too soon, killing friends instead of enemies.) Against fixed fortifications, or carefully prepared fieldworks, the gunners liked to use mortars, which gave them a high-angle fire they could not get from fieldpieces. They would also bring up siege guns - ponderous rifled pieces, too heavy to be used in ordinary battles, but powerful enough to flatten parapets or to knock down masonry walls. These large guns were somewhat dangerous to the user. They tended to be weak in the breech, and every now and then one of them would explode when fired.
The Federals had a big advantage in artillery, partly because of their superior industrial plant and partly because, having larger armies, they could afford to use more batteries. On most fields they had many more guns than the Confederates, with a much higher percentage of rifled pieces. (An important factor at Antietam was that Federal artillery could overpower the Confederate guns, and Southern gunners for the rest of the war referred to that fight as "artillery hell.") It appears too that Northern recruits by and large had a little more aptitude for artillery service, just as Southerners outclassed Northerners in the cavalry.
For at least the first half of the war Confederate cavalry was so much better than that of the Federals that there was no real comparison. Here the South was helped by both background and tradition. Most of its recruits came from rural areas and were used to horses; and the legends of chivalry were powerful, so that it seemed much more knightly and gallant to go off to war on horseback than in the infantry. Quite literally, the Confederate trooper rode to the wars on his own charger, cavalry horses not being government issue with the Richmond administration. In the beginning this was an advantage, for many Confederate squadrons were mounted on blooded stock that could run rings around the nags which sharpshooting traders were selling to the Yankee government. In the long run, though, the system was most harmful. A trooper who lost his horse had to provide another one all by himself, and he usually could get a furlough so that he might go home and obtain one. Toward the end of the war replacements were hard to come by.
In any case, both horses and riders in the Confederate cavalry were infinitely superior to anything the Yankees could show for at least two years. There were plenty of farm boys in the Federal armies, but they did not come from horseback country; most horses on Northern farms were draft animals, and it never occurred to a northern farm boy that he could acquire social prestige simply by getting on a horse's back. Being well aware that it takes a lot of work to care for a horse, the Northern country boy generally enlisted in the infantry. The Union cavalry got its recruits mostly from city boys or from nonagricultural groups; and before this cavalry could do anything at all, its members had first to be taught how to stay in the saddle. Since Jeb Stuart's troopers could have taught circus riders tricks, the Yankees were hopelessly outclassed. Not until 1863 was the Army of the Potomac's cavalry able to meet Stuart on anything like even terms.
In the West matters were a little different. Here the Confederacy had a very dashing cavalry raider in the person of John Hunt Morgan, who made a number of headlines without particularly affecting the course of the war, and it had the youthful Joe Wheeler, who performed competently; but most of all it had Nathan Bedford Forrest, an untaught genius who had no military training and who never possessed an ounce of social status, but who was probably the best cavalry leader in the entire war. Forrest simply used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say that the essence of strategy was "to git thar fust with the most men." (Do not, under any circumstances whatever, quote Forrest as saying "fustest" and "moistest." He did not say it that way, and nobody who knows anything about him imagines that he did.) The Yankees never came up with anybody to match Forrest, and tough William T. Sherman once paid him a grim compliment: there would never be peace in western Tennessee, said Sherman, until Forrest was dead.
Aside from what a man like Forrest could do, cavalry in the Civil War was actually of secondary importance as far as fighting was concerned. It was essential for scouting and for screening an army, but as a combat arm it was declining. Cavalry skirmished frequently with other cavalry, and the skirmishes at times rose to the level of pitched battles, but it fought infantry only very rarely. It enjoyed vast prestige with the press and with back-home civilians, but neither infantry or artillery admired it. The commonest infantry wisecrack of the war was the bitter question: "Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?"
ROUNDING OUT THE ARMIES
Infantry, artillery, cavalry - these were the three major subdivisions of a Civil War army. Numerically very small, but of considerable value, were the engineer troops. They built bridges, opened roads, laid out fortifications, and performed other technical chores; pontoon trains were in their care, and they were supposed to do any mining or countermining that was done, although in actual practice this was frequently done by troops of the line. Indeed, it was the engineer officer rather than the engineer battalion that was really important. In the Northern armies the average regiment contained men of so many different skills that with proper direction they could do almost anything an engineer outfit could do; it was the special skill and ability of the trained officer that really counted. The Confederate regiments contained fewer jacks-of-all-trades, but this shortage never proved a serious handicap. At the top the South had the best engineer officer of the lot in the person of Robert E. Lee.
It is hard to get an accurate count on the numbers who served in the Civil War armies. The books show total enlistments in the Union armies of 2,900,000 and in the Confederate armies of 1,300,000 but these figures do not mean what they appear to mean. They are fuzzed up by a large number of short-term enlistments and by a good deal of duplication, and the one certainty is that neither side ever actually put that many individuals under arms. One of the best students of the matter has concluded that the Union had the equivalent of about 1,500,000 three-year enlistments, from first to last, and that the Confederates had the equivalent of about 1,000,000. Anyone who chooses may quarrel with these figures. Nobody will ever get an exact count, because the records are very confusing, and some figures are missing altogether. In any case, approximately 359,000 Federal soldiers and 258,000 Confederate soldiers lost their lives in the course of the war. These figures, to be sure, include deaths from disease as well as battle casualties, but a young man who died of dysentery is just as dead as the one who stopped a bullet, and when these figures are matched against the total possible enrollment, they are appalling.
For the unfortunate Civil War soldier, whether he came from the North or from the South, not only got into the army just when the killing power of weapons was being brought to a brand-new peak of efficiency; he enlisted in the closing years of an era when the science of medicine was woefully, incredibly imperfect, so that he got the worst of it in two ways. When he fought, he was likely to be hurt pretty badly; when he stayed in camp, he lived under conditions that were very likely to make him sick; and in either case he had almost no chance to get the kind of medical treatment which a generation or so later would be routine.
Both the Federal and Confederate governments did their best to provide proper medical care for their soldiers, but even the best was not very good. This was nobody's fault. There simply was no such thing as good medical care in that age - not as the modern era understands the expression.
DISEASE, INFERIOR MEDICINE, AND CHARACTER
Few medical men then knew why wounds became infected or what causes disease; the treatment of wounds and disease, consequently, ranged from the inadequate through the useless to the downright harmful. When a man was wounded and the wound was dressed, doctors expected it to suppurate; they spoke of "laudable pus" and supposed that its appearance was a good sign. The idea that a surgical dressing ought to be sterilized never entered anyone's head; for that matter, no physician would have known what the word "sterilized" meant in such a connection. If a surgeon's instruments were so much as rinsed off between operations at a field hospital, the case was an exception.
In camp, diseases like typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia were dreaded killers. No one knew what caused them, and no one could do much for them when they appeared. Doctors had discovered that there was some connection between the cleanliness of a camp and the number of men on sick call, but sanitation was still a rudimentary science, and if a water supply was not visibly befouled and odorous, it was thought to be perfectly safe. The intestinal maladies that took so heavy a toll were believed due to "miasmic odors" or to even more subtle emanations of the air.
So the soldier of the 1860s had everything working against him. In his favor there was a great deal of native toughness, and a sardonic humor that came to his rescue when things were darkest; these, and an intense devotion to the cause he was serving. Neither Yank nor Reb ever talked very much about the cause; to listen to eloquence on the issues of the war, one had to visit cities behind the lines, read newspapers, or drop in on Congress, either in Washington or in Richmond, because very little along that line was ever heard in camp. The soldier had ribald mockery for high-flown language, and he cared very little for the patriotic war songs which had piped him down to the recruiting office in the first place. In his off hours, in camp or in bivouac, he was a sentimentalist, and one of the most typical of all Civil War scenes is the campfire group of an evening, supper finished, chores done, darkness coming on, with dim lights flickering and homesick young men singing sad little songs like "Lorena" or "Tenting Tonight." No matter which army is looked at, the picture is the same. On each side the soldier realized that he personally was getting the worst of it, and when he had time he felt very sorry for himself... But mostly he did not have the time, and his predominant mood was never one of self-pity. Mostly he was ready for whatever came to him.