Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (51 page)

Wounds to the extremities could be treated only by amputation, in order to head off the onset of gangrene and blood poisoning, and at the height of any major battle, a surgeon’s field or division hospital would resemble nothing so much as a butcher’s shop on market-day—an unventilated tent or barn, with an old door set up on two barrels for an operating table, an unending line of wounded men in various degrees of shock, a pile of amputated limbs that reminded observers of a cord of wood, and a corner full of men with wounds to the abdomen or chest who had simply been set aside as surgically hopeless. Sergeant Hiram Lathe of the 9th New Hampshire lost two fingers of his right hand, but counted himself fortunate compared to what he saw in the field hospital he walked back to. The “hospital” was nothing more than “a field of I should say about fifty acres, where the surgeons were busily at work… on rudely constructed benches, on old tables, or anything that could be extemporized for an operating table.” All around him were men who were wounded

in every conceivable way, from cannon and shell wounds, and burns from exploding shells, with bowels torn out and bodies gashed and mangled from bayonet thrusts, or with heads and faces smashed almost beyond recognition by blows from a musketbreech, though by far the greater part of the wounds were made by the deadly Minie balls. … The ambulances kept coming onto the field loaded up with men, and some of them would be dead when they were taken out, but altogether there must have been several thousand of the wounded there in that field.
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If this horrified the men, it did not have much different effect on the surgeons. “I am not out of [hearing] much of the groans of the wounded from morning till night,” wrote Claiborne Walton, a surgeon with the 21st Kentucky who was clearly teetering on the mental brink in 1864.

My hands are constantly steaped in blood. I have had them in blood and water so much that the nails are soft and tender. I have amputated limbs until it almost makes my heart ache to see a poor fellow coming in the Ambulance to the Hospital. … I could tell you of many yes—of the [most] distressing cases of wounds. Such as arms
shot off—legs shot off. Eyes shot out—brains shot out. Lungs shot through and in a word
everything
shot to pieces and totally maimed for all after life. The horror of this war can never be half told.
⁸¹

Wounds to the abdomen, especially the stomach or the bowels, were simply hopeless—the Minié ball caused too much internal damage, and surgical skills were as yet too poorly developed, to make recovery possible. “Wounds… involving the viscera were almost uniformly fatal,” wrote one Union surgeon. “Opium was practically our only remedy and death the usual result.” He could not remember “more than one incontestable example of recovery from a gunshot wound of the stomach and not a single incontestable case of wound of the small intestines.” Consequently, the Civil War soldier became a quick study in analyzing what wounds meant. Frank Wilkeson, an artilleryman in the Army of the Potomac, observed in 1864 how swiftly a soldier knew what his end might be:

Wounded soldiers almost always tore their clothing away from their wounds, so as to see them and to judge of their character. Many of them would smile and their faces would brighten as they realized that they were not hard hit, and that they could go home for a few months. Others would give a quick glance at their wounds and then shrink back as from a blow, and turn pale, as they realized the truth that they were mortally wounded. The enlisted men were exceeding accurate judges of the probable result which would ensue from any wound they saw. They had seen hundreds of soldiers wounded, and they had noticed that certain wounds always resulted fatally. They knew when they were fatally wounded, and after the shock of discovery had passed, they generally braced themselves and died in a manly manner. It was seldom that an American or Irish volunteer flunked in the presence of death.
⁸²

Perhaps not. But a large number of Civil War soldiers certainly quailed at the prospect of combat, and they deserted the Union and Confederate armies in recordsetting droves. More than 200,000 Federal soldiers deserted during the war, nearly 12 percent of the entire total of Union enlistments, while 104,000 Confederates, as much as 16 percent of the Confederate armies, took French leave. In many cases, it was a risk-free solution. Only about 80,000 Union deserters were ever actually arrested; of the even smaller number who appeared before courts-martial, only 147 received the traditional punishment for desertion: a firing squad or the gallows.
⁸³

Others who might have lacked the will to face enemy fire were set up on their legs by the free use of alcohol. A Confederate newspaper complained that “officers with gold lace wound in astonishing involutions upon their arms” as well as “private soldiers in simple homespun… all seem to drink whisky… in quantities which would astonish the nerves of a cast-iron lamp-post, and of a quantity which would destroy the digestive organs of the ostrich.” Many of the Civil War’s legendary charges into the face of the enemy were made by soldiers who had been drugged into near insensibility by the liberal dispensing of hard liquor before battle. The 16th North Carolina went into action at Seven Pines after the company commissary “hobbled down with several canteens of ‘fire water’ and gave each of the men a dram. He knew we needed it, and the good angels only smiled.” Confederate prisoners taken by Berdan’s Sharpshooters at Malvern Hill had been “unduly excited by frequent rations of whisky… their canteens, some half full of this stimulant.” Members of Confederate general George Pickett’s staff, and even one of his brigadiers, downed a bottle of whiskey over a lunch of cold mutton just before Pickett’s famous charge at Gettysburg.
⁸⁴

On the other hand, officers who prodded men too hard into battle, with or without whiskey, were likely to become targets for disgruntled enlisted men, especially on a battlefield where it was difficult to establish whether an officer’s death was a normal combat fatality or a covert assassination. It was not at all unusual, wrote New Jersey private Alfred Bellard, for overbearing Yankee martinets to receive “a stray ball occasionally on the field of battle.” The major of the 33rd Virginia was described as a “tyrannical little puppy” who “would have been riddled with bullets and not yankee ones either.”
⁸⁵

The most obvious evasion of combat was simple, and usually temporary, flight to the rear. “The
sneaks
in the army are named
Legion
,” remarked Edward King Wightman. “When you read of the number of men engaged on our side, strike out at least one third as never having struck a blow.” Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded his fellow veterans of the 20th Massachusetts years after the war that “We have stood side by side in a line—we have charged and swept the enemy—and we have run away like rabbits—all together.” Sometimes the “sneaks” did not need to resort to the humiliation of running in order to evade battle. Any wounded comrade in a fight became an excuse for one or two others to break ranks and assist the wounded man to a field hospital, and unless a brigade or division commander was unusually diligent in posting a provost guard in the rear of his units, a wounded man’s helpers would simply remain out of sight and sound of the action for the rest of the day.

Only by 1864 were serious efforts to keep able-bodied men from leaking rearward out of a fight really working, as Frank Wilkeson discovered when he strolled too far away from his artillery unit in the Wilderness and was prodded into frontline infantry combat by a provost guard who demanded that he “show blood” before being allowed to move to the rear. Yet however easy it may be to point out the failings of the volunteer under fire, it is also true that the volunteer in the Civil War—Union or Confederate, black or white, however untrained or uncomprehending he might be of the niceties of military life—was being asked to stand up to some of the most savage combat ever met by soldiers in the nineteenth century. War would be easy, Holmes wrote before Antietam, if one could “after a comfortable breakfast… come down the steps of one’s home, putting on one’s gloves and smoking a cigar, to get on a horse and charge a battery up Beacon Street.” The reality, however, was that the soldier faced “a night on the ground in the rain and your bowels out of order and then after no particular breakfast to wade a stream and attack an enemy.”
⁸⁶
If Holmes and his companions sometimes ran “like rabbits,” they had more than enough incentive.

What, then, accounts for the “will to combat” among the green volunteers at a place such as Shiloh, where individual groups of raw soldiers continued to fight on and on despite the dissolution of all direction from above? There were some soldiers who found that they were enthralled by war and the exhilaration of combat. “I love war,” wrote Philip Kearny, one of the most combative of the Army of the Potomac’s division commanders. “It brings me indescribable pleasure, like that of having a woman.” For more than a few, combat was simply a risk to be exchanged for the chance to loot. One officer of the famed Louisiana Tiger battalion was shocked after First Bull Run to find “30 or 40” of his men “marching up with new uniforms on, gold rings on their fingers, and their pockets filled with watches and money that they had stolen.” Henry Blake of the 11th Massachusetts was disgusted by the legion of “army thieves” who “plundered the slain” or “grasped with their remorseless hands the valuables, clothing, and rations of the unwary, wounded soldiers.”

For others, a willing entrance into battle was due to the bravery and example of a regimental or company leader; sometimes it was the powerful incentive of following the colors forward. At other times a strange, hysterical killer instinct took over and banished any consideration of personal safety. Frank Holsinger admitted that in combat, “you yell, you swing your cap, you load and fire as long as the battle goes your way. … It is a supreme minute to you; you are in ecstasies.” Colonel Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin spoke of seeing men at Antietam “loading and firing with demoniacal fury and shouting and laughing hysterically,” while David Thompson wrote of the “mental strain” of combat in which “the whole landscape for an instant
turned slightly red.” Michael Hanifen of the 1st New Jersey Artillery, remembered that “it is a terrible sight to see a line of men, two deep, coming up within 300 or 400 yards of you, with bayonets flashing and waving their colors, and you know that every shot you fire into them sends some one to eternity, but still you are prompted by a devilish desire to kill all you can.”
⁸⁷

For Amos Judson, the shrewd observer of the 83rd Pennsylvania, the ultimate answer to the murderous question of courage in battle lay hidden within each soldier. “In my opinion, what is called courage is very much a matter of pride or principle with others, and a compound of both with all men.” Sometimes it was a result of fear, sometimes a result of being fed sufficiently, and sometimes it was really no more than “a proper sense of duty on the field of battle, and you will consequently find men of the most quiet and apparently timid dispositions at home, to be the most resolute and reliable men in action.”
⁸⁸
The only thing, said Judson, which he had never seen in the war was “any manifestations of absolute fear of trepidation or trembling during a fight, or during even the anticipation of one.” Judson was, of course, telling less then he knew. It might have been more accurate to say that the only shame which the American volunteer of 1861 to 1865 had to endure was that his enemy was another American.

A
s the thin winter sunlight faded over the outer sand islands of the Cape Fear River, an iron-hulled side-wheel steamer slowly slipped away from the dark protection of the inlet. The steamer nudged cautiously down into the ship channel that broadened toward the Atlantic Ocean, her captain anxiously scanning the dark horizon of the moonlit ocean.

Beyond the bar, the masts of ships poked up in the silvery light. These ships wanted nothing so much as to run down the slender steamer, her master, and her crew and put them under lock and key for as long as the law of the sea would allow. For the steamer’s name was
Cecile
, and she was the property of John Fraser & Company, who had fitted her out on behalf of the Confederate States of America to run war supplies through the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Southern ports and rivers. Her captain was Lieutenant John Newland Maffitt, a forty-two-year-old North Carolinian and former U.S. Navy officer whose fifteen years of duty with the United States Coastal Survey had made him the master of virtually every shoal, sandbar, and inlet on the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines of North America. On board the
Cecile
were 700 fat bales of Southern cotton that would buy the Confederacy rifles, shoes, clothing, and food for its armies. Maffitt and the
Cecile
were vital strands in the Confederacy’s lifeline to the outside world, and so the Federal navy hung close to the mouth of the Cape Fear River, hoping to choke Maffitt and his ship and the future of the Confederacy all at once.

The moon sank, and Maffitt urged the
Cecile
over the bar and out to sea, counting on the inky darkness to cloak her stealthy passage through the net of the Federal blockade. Every light had been extinguished, and every command was
whispered; even the steamer’s upper works, formerly white, had been repainted in drab or dark colors. But Maffitt could not disguise the splashing of the steamer’s side-wheel paddles, and as he crept past the Federal ships, a large gas-fired spotlight shot a beam of light across the
Cecile
. There was no need for stealth now. Maffitt roared for full speed as the guns of the blockade ships leapt to life, throwing shells over the
Cecile
and striking her a glancing blow that knocked several bales of cotton into the sea.