Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (50 page)

Eventually, much of the neglect and malpractice in both the Federal and Confederate army medical systems was ironed out. A new Federal surgeon-general, Lieutenant William Alexander Hammond, was appointed in 1862, and from then on Union army medical care drastically improved: 190 new army hospitals with 120,000
beds were established under Hammond’s aegis, and 15,000 new surgeons were recruited. Even the Confederates, shorthanded and undersupplied as they were, created 28 military hospitals in and around Richmond and took over 57 other buildings, the largest of which, Chimborazo Hospital, could hold 4,300 men (making it the largest hospital in the world at that time), and treated more than 77,000 cases during the war.

In the Army of the Potomac, Jonathan Letterman (who was appointed the army’s medical director in June 1862) organized a three-tiered system of field hospitals, post hospitals, and general hospitals for processing battle casualties. The reformer Dorothea L. Dix lobbied successfully to have women recruited as army nurses, and was herself appointed superintendent of army nurses, after the model of Florence Nightingale, in 1861. Additionally, the federal War Department authorized the operation of the civilian-run United States Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission to act as voluntary auxiliaries for providing nursing and hospital care. As a result, actual disease mortality rates fell from 73 percent of all wartime deaths in the Revolution and 86 percent of all war-related deaths during the Mexican War to little more than 61 percent in the Civil War (the rates of death from disease would actually go back up in the Spanish-American War to over 84 percent of all wartime deaths among American soldiers). The disease statistics are appalling all the same, and sickness often decimated a regiment long before it ever fired a gun in anger.
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Without question, the greatest damage to the volunteers’ health was done by the soldiers’ diet. Food preservation was only in its infancy in the 1860s, and as a result, the soldier on campaign was issued only the most portable—and most indigestible—of rations. The marching ration of the Federal soldier in the Army of the Potomac was “one pound of hard bread; three-fourths of a pound of salt pork, or one and one-fourth pounds of fresh meat; sugar, coffee, and salt.” The bread was, in the most literal sense of the word, hard, and so it went by the name of hardtack.
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John Billings described it as “a plain flour-and-water biscuit” measuring “three and one-eighth by two and seven-eighths inches, and… nearly half an inch thick.” Hardtack resembled a large, hard cracker more than anything that could be called bread, and “they may have been so hard that they could not be bitten” and “required a very strong blow of the fist to break them.”

On the other hand, Billings admitted that “hardtack was not so bad an article of food… as may be supposed,” and devising ways of eating it stretched the soldiers’ imaginations in odd ways. “Many of them were eaten just as they were received—hardtack
plain
,” while others were “crumbed in coffee” and “furnished the soldier his breakfast and supper.” Others “crumbled them in soups for want of other thickening” or “crumbed them in cold water, then fried the crumbs in juice and fat of meat,” and still others simply “liked them toasted, either to crumb in coffee or… to butter.” The invariable accompaniment to hardtack, and to any other circumstances, was the soldier’s coffee.

One of the most interesting scenes presented in army life took place at night when the army was on the point of bivouacking. As soon as this fact became known along the column, each man would seize a rail from the nearest fence, and with this additional arm on the shoulder would enter the proposed camping-ground. In no more time than it takes to tell the story, the little camp-fires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains, and as if by magic acres of territory would be luminous with them. Soon they would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an almost invariable rule to cook their coffee first, after which a large number, tired out with the toils of the day, would make their supper of hardtack and coffee, and roll up in their blankets for the nights. If a march was ordered at midnight, unless a surprise was intended, it must be preceded by a pot of coffee; if a halt was ordered in mid-forenoon or afternoon, the same dish was inevitable, with hardtack accompaniment usually. It was coffee
at
meals and
between
meals; and men going on guard or coming off guard drank it at all hours of the night, and to-day the old soldiers who can stand it are the hardest coffee-drinkers in the community, through the schooling which they received in the service.

Last in the soldier’s estimate was the army’s standard meat ration, salt pork, which Billings found “musty and rancid… flabby, stringy, ‘sow-belly’” that was frankly indigestible to anyone but a hungry soldier. “We ignored the existence of such a thing as a stomach in the army.”
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There were, at times, exceptions to this diet. In the Union army’s permanent camps, the soldier’s ration was usually expanded to add vegetables and fresh meat. If possible, the armies would drive their own beef herds along with them on the march to provide more fresh beef. A correspondent marching with William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 noticed that

every corps has with it its own droves of beeves, which are kept in good condition by foraging, and which have a way of absorbing all that are found by the roadside, so that the men have little to complain of in this particular. All along the lines of battle,
when the armies were confronting each other, a few rods in the rear, were little pens of cattle from which the men in the trenches were well reinforced with smoking steaks, added to their coffee and pilot bread; while two or three miles in the rear could be seen large droves, under guard, serenely grazing in the pastures—forming the best possible reserve forces upon which the army could fall back.
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And there were always boxes and packages from home with varieties of good things that the government had no interest in issuing. But even with these additions, the average soldier’s diet did little except further reduce his resistance to infection and exhaustion, and wreak immeasurable havoc with his digestive system.

As for the Confederate armies, the food was not only bad but sometimes nonexistent. The impact of the blockade and the breakdown of the Confederacy’s internal transportation system meant that its volunteers frequently went hungry on campaign, and it could be said without the guilt of exaggeration that through most of the Civil War, the average Confederate soldier lived on raw courage and endurance more than on food and drink. George Asbury Bruton wrote to his brother and sister in 1864, “Our rations is small. We get ¼ pound of bacon per day and 1 pound of corn meal. Sometimes we get a little rice & sometimes we get a spoon full of soap to wash our hands.” Seven months later, Bruton lectured his brother James for not appreciating “home as you ought.” At home, “you have good clothes to put on and good socks to put on before you put on your clothes & best of all a good hot breakfast with plenty of ham & eggs, potatoes, & butter & milk.” Unlike his brother James, George Bruton and the 19th Louisiana were living on “a little piece of half-cooked beef about as big as my 3 fingers for a days ration & 4 doggers of corne bread about the size of a grand mother biscuit. …” In addition to poor rations, there were “thousands without a blanket & more bairfotted & all without socks.” Every stop on the march, wrote one amazed surgeon, was the signal for “every corn field and orchard within two or three miles” to be “completely stripped.”
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Mary Bedinger Mitchell, a Virginia woman, watched in disbelief as Lee’s army passed by her house in September 1862 on its way to Antietam:

When I say that they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes. All day they crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: “I’ve been a-marchin’ an’ a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin to eat ’cept green apples an’ green cawn, an’ I wish you’d please to gimme a bite to eat.”… I know nothing of numbers, nor what was or was not engaged in any battle, but I saw the troops march past us every summer for four years,
and I know something of the appearance of a marching army, both Union and Southern. There are always stragglers, of course, but never… were want and exhaustion more visibly put before my eyes, and that they could march or fight at all seemed incredible.
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The most fearsome thing the volunteer faced, however, was actual combat. The Civil War battlefield presented the volunteer with a frightening variety of sensations, the first of which was the sheer unfamiliarity of the ground he was fighting on. Soldiers’ accounts of Civil War battle are notorious for their uncertain geographical references. Robert Lewis Dabney’s memoir of his commander “Stonewall” Jackson is peppered with bland descriptions of terrain—“alternate woods and fields,” “abrupt little ravines,” “a wide expanse of fertile meadows”—which betrayed how unfamiliar Dabney was with the Shenandoah Valley territory he was fighting over. The colonel of the 19th Virginia described the lay of the land at Gaines Mill on June 26 in terms so vague they could have been applied to almost any ten acres on the North American continent: “Passing through woods we soon reached a large, open, undulating field, with heavy timber on all sides, where we were formed in line of battle and awaited a few minutes the approach of the enemy, which was momentarily expected, as they were exactly in our front.” The Army of the Potomac’s chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, admitted that even on campaign, “maps, wherever possible, must be obtained from citizens,” since no comprehensive topographical survey of the United States existed.
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The noises of the battlefield were even more disorienting, since the concussive impact of artillery and massed rifle fire created an amphitheater of noise unlike anything within the experience of any nineteenth-century American. One Union general tried to re-create the sonic environment of a battlefield by inviting his daughter to imagine, “in fancy, the crashing roll of 30000 muskets mingled with the thunder of over a hundred pieces of artillery; the sharp bursting of shells and the peculiar whizzing sound of its dismembered pieces, traveling with a shriek in all directions; the crash and thud of round shot through trees and buildings and into earth or through columns of human bodies;… the uproar of thousands of voices in cheers, yells, and imprecations… riderless horses rushing wildly about; now and then blowing up of a caisson and human frames thrown lifeless into the air.”
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The low velocity of the Minié bullet gave it a particularly noticeable humming whir, and soldiers devoted considerable time to trying to explain the sound of rifle
fire in letters and diaries. “You never heard such whooping,” wrote private Bruton after Shiloh, “the bullets whistled worse & faster than pouring peas on a dry cow hide.” Another Confederate soldier at Shiloh wrote that rifle bullets sang angrily around him “worse then ever bees was when they swarm.” When a bullet struck a man, it made what Amos Currier of the 8th Iowa called “a peculiar spat.” For others, the sheer volume of unlooked-for terror and confusion in the environment of nineteenth-century battle was so vast that the provincial and localized vocabulary of most Americans was simply beggared by it. “I have not time nor disposition to attempt a description,” wrote James Madison Williams of the 21st Alabama after Shiloh. “When I go home it will take me months to describe what I saw on that terrible field.”
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The most frightening aspect of combat was the chance of being seriously or mortally wounded. Not only was the general inexperience of the volunteer officer more likely to expose a soldier to lethal amounts of fire for longer periods of time than in any other nineteenth-century war, but the soft lead Minié ball (unlike the brassjacketed bullets of later wars) mushroomed upon impact, smashing up bones and cartilage, and making dreadful exit wounds. “Often did I see a simple gunshot wound,” wrote one surgeon, “scarcely larger than the bullet which made it, become larger and larger until a hand would scarcely cover it, and extend from the skin downward into the tissues until one could put half his fist into the sloughing wound.”

Artillery rounds could deliver even more horrifying forms of death, adding to the terror of every soldier nearby, as shell splinters could slice a body into a bloody pulp. A shell plowed through Company E of the 9th Vermont during an attack on Confederate entrenchments below Richmond in 1864, and Colonel Edward H. Ripley looked over to see a favorite corporal “lying on his side and face… his buttocks clear to the thigh bones were both carried away, showing a raw mass of torn flesh with the crushed bones protruding. He was alive, conscious, and brave.” A few moments later another shell crashed near Ripley and “I was dashed in the face with a hot streaming mass of something horrible which closed my eyes, nose and mouth. I thought my head had gone certainly this time.” It hadn’t; instead, it was the “brains, skull, hair and blood” of an artilleryman who had been standing nearby. Ripley had to be cleaned off by a staff officer who “just then came up and happened to have a towel in his boot leg.”
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Nothing in Civil War field medicine was able to deal with the wounds or the trauma inflicted by the rifles and artillery of the era, and not until after the turn of
the century would surgical skill and surgical instruments develop to the point where gunshot wounds to main body parts could even become routinely operable. “We had no clinical thermometers; our only means of estimating fever was by touch,” lamented one surgeon. “We had no hypodermatic syringes,” and so “the mouth and the bowel were the only avenues for the administration of remedies.” This meant that for the badly wounded soldier, the common regimental surgeon was little better than death itself.
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