Glory Road (12 page)

If Lee's army had not suffered much, the town of Fredericksburg had suffered dreadfully. In plain English, the town had been sacked, and the destruction which General Hunt's guns had caused had been the least of its woes. Both before, during, and after the actual fighting, the Army of the Potomac had unleashed upon this historic town the spirit of unrestrained rowdyism. The very divisions which had mustered the incredible heroism to make the repeated attacks on the stone wall had also put on display the very essence of jackbooted vandalism. A veteran of the 118th Pennsylvania left a description:

"The city had been rudely sacked; household furniture lined the streets. Books and battered pictures, bureaus, lounges, feather beds, clocks, and every conceivable article of goods, chattels, and apparel had been savagely torn from the houses and lay about in wanton confusion in all directions. Fires were made, both for warmth and cooking, with fragments of broken furniture. Pianos, their harmonious strings displaced, were utilized as horse troughs, and amid all the dangers animals quietly ate from them." A soldier in another Pennsylvania regiment noted "great scenes of vandalism and useless destruction of books, furniture, carpets, pianos, pictures, etc.," and reported a grotesque carnival aspect in streets still swept by Confederate shell as Union soldiers cavorted about in women's dresses and underwear. "Some of these characters," he added, "might be seen with musical instruments, with big horns, violins, accordions, and banjos"; and he noted that his own regiment took several hundred bottles of wine out of someone's cellar, a part of this wine appearing later on the colonel's own mess table. One illiterate private rifled an express office and carried off a huge bundle of receipts and canceled checks under the impression that he was robbing a bank and getting money.
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Brigadier General Alfred Sully, from Howard's division, took over a handsome house for his headquarters and told members of the 1st Minnesota, of which he had previously been colonel, to go through it and take anything they wanted. It belonged to his brother-in-law, who, he said, was a damned Rebel. Perversely, the Minnesota boys took nothing whatever from it and even established a guard there so that nobody else could loot it either. The regimental historian, maintaining that the sack of Fredericksburg was justified by the laws of war, added regretfully that "it would be pleasanter to remember Fredericksburg had there been no looting."
⁶

Some of the higher officers, indeed, looking back on it, did argue that by the ancient rules of warfare Fredericksburg was properly open to pillage. An inhabited town, it had been called on to surrender before the battle and it had refused, and the troops had then taken it by storm. Since time immemorial, a town taken under such conditions was fair prey for the men who had captured it. But the men who looted Fredericksburg were not going by the books. The Army of the Potomac behaved there as it had never behaved before, and none of the explanations commonly advanced for lawless behavior by Union troops in this war holds good in this case.

Looting, pillaging, and illegal foraging by Federal soldiers are usually blamed on loosely disciplined Western troops, or on the riffraff bounty men, or on the German regiments brought up in the European tradition, or on the excesses natural to an army which is supplying itself from the enemy's country, or on the studied policy of commanders like Sherman and Sheridan who were frankly out to make Southern civilians tired of the war. But not one of these reasons is any good here. Fredericksburg was ransacked, not by free-and-easy Westerners but chiefly by Easterners of the II Corps and the V Corps, crack outfits with excellent discipline. The army contained no bounty men to speak of, and the German regiments were not in Fredericksburg. The army was not living off the enemy's country but was solidly planted on its own supply lines, and it was under the direction of a general who, however breath-taking some of his deficiencies may have been, was at least a good, amiable man who tried not to make war on civilians. If the usual explanations are good, Fredericksburg should have survived the occupation with minor damage. Actually, the army all but took it apart.

It seems that a new spirit was taking possession of this army. It had been visible before the battle; there had been that wild epidemic of sheep stealing and general lawlessness on the march down from Maryland, which was obviously the prelude to the spoiling of a taken town. A soldier in the 24th New Jersey had written that his conscience bothered him when he saw his fellow soldiers "robbing the poor families of all the little they possessed." At breakfast-time camp-fires, he said, it was common to hear men tell how "helpless women cried to see their small stock of poultry carried away."
⁷
A man from the 8th Ohio was heard arguing with a man from the 19th Indiana as to which regiment had managed to collect and send home the greater amount of plunder, and an officer in the 79th New York noted sadly that "wanton destruction of property and all the probable results of a successful siege develop only the most devilish propensities of humanity."
⁸

This officer considered that misbehavior by Northern troops simply strengthened Southerners in their desire for independence. He argued, logically enough: "I think, were low ignorant ruffians to visit my home while I was away fighting, burn my house, lay waste my property, insult mother and sisters, beggar the little children I might love, taunt the gray hairs I might respect, leave starvation in the place of plenty, I should feel singularly strengthened in my early delusion." He blamed the whole trouble on "the accursed conduct of the press with its clamor for a vigorous prosecution of the war," and he spoke bitterly of "the effect of the savage appeals of our journals at home."

The New York soldier was beginning to see it. The war was changing, and it was no longer being looked upon as a species of tournament between unstained chivalrous knights. It had reached a point now where the fighting of it was turning loose some unpleasant emotional drives. It had become a war
against—
against slavery, perhaps against the men who owned slaves, by inevitable extension against that man and his family and his goods and chattels who by living with the hated institution seemed to have made war necessary and who in any case were standing in the road when the avengers came. The people here in Virginia had become aliens, and their land was strange and foreign, and therefore subject to hate. The 14th Vermont came down from the North and went into camp in Alexandria, the very first Southern city the regiment had ever seen, and a member of the regiment promptly commented that "the dirty, filthy condition of the streets in Alexandria is not only discoverable in all Southern cities but exhibits very plainly the blighting effects of slavery." A soldier in the equally green 33rd Massachusetts took his first look at Virginia, found its sleepy hamlets unlike New England's trim villages, and wrote caustically: "Let me say here that the towns of Virginia are composed of a barn, one outhouse, and a haystack."
⁹
Behind such sentences, obviously, lay a feeling of being among the infidels. If the war must be carried on with greater vigor, as all the spokesmen of government were saying, then these infidels were not to be treated too gently, and if bad things happened to them it did not matter very much.

It was not a genteel, restrained, orderly country that was feeling this changed emotional current. It was a nation with the infinite raw strength of graceless youth, moving with gigantic careless energy into a future that was not known to have any bounds whatever. It was feeling its oats and it was flexing muscles bigger than anybody else ever had, and if people got hurt along the way it was not even going to notice. It had been like that from the beginning and it had not yet grown mellow and thoughtful, and it was not for nothing that its national air was a little tune called "Yankee Doodle," which has no words to speak of and expresses no sentiment on earth but sheer perky impudence.

This was the country of the boisterous forty-niner, the hell-roaring lumberjack, and the riverman who was half horse and half alligator. Without rancor (and also without the slightest hesitation) it annihilated Indian tribes so that it could people a wilderness, asserting that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and remarking casually of its own pioneers that t
he cowards never started and the
weak died along the road. As it faced the cathedral aisles of endless virgin forests it shouted for immediate daylight in the swamp, even if whole generations must be brutalized for it. It was the country that invented the bucko mate and the Shanghai passage, and if the skysails of its incredible clippers gleamed on the farthest magic horizon they were taken there by men under the daily rule of clubs and brass knuckles. This nation accepted boiler explosions as the price of steamboat travel and it would boast presently of a dead gandy-dancer for every crosstie on the transcontinental railroad. It wore seven-league boots and scorned to look where it planted them, and each of its immense strides was made at immense human cost. And the army of this country, buckling down to it at last in a fight which had to go to a finish, was going to be very rough on enemy civilians, not because it had anything against them but simply because they were there.

Of genuine hatred this army had practically none. The wild young men who ruined ancestral portraits and pranced in the smoky streets wearing the embroidered undergarments of gentlewomen were expressing nothing but plain hooliganism, which somehow was the obverse side of the medal that had laid nine hundred corpses in front of the stone wall west of town. Both sides of the medal bespoke raw youth which cheered and guffawed by turns, whose noble best forever went arm in arm with its ugly worst.

Before Burnside pulled his men back across the river there was a truce, and details from both armies went out to relieve such wounded as still lived and to bury the dead. In front of that stone wall, where all the dead men were Yankees, the lifeless bodies were nearly all naked. During the cold night needy Rebels had come out to help themselves to the warm coats and pants and the good Yankee shoes which the dead men would no longer need. An officer from the 48th Pennsylvania, supervising the work of one detail, fell into conversation with a Confederate officer, and the Confederate told him: "You Yankees don't know how to hate—you don't hate us near as much as we hate you." The Confederate gestured toward the pitiful naked rows of despoiled corpses and asked in effect: Do you think we could ever treat your dead that way if we didn't hate you?
¹⁰

Whether that Confederate hatred was real or whether the casual stripping of Yankee corpses was simply one more manifestation of the brutally realistic American spirit may be a story in itself. The point is that others besides that one Rebel officer felt the Federals to be lacking in hatred: among them, none other than Burnside himself. Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana, one of the sternest of the abolitionist leaders, had a chat with Burnside not long after the battle and wrote:

"General Burnside told me our men did not feel toward the Rebels as they felt toward us, and he assured me that this was the grand obstacle to our success. Our soldiers, he said, were not sufficiently fired by resentment, and he exhorted me, if I could, to breathe into our people at home the same spirit toward our enemies which inspired them toward us."

Burnside's soldiers might have explained things a little differently if anyone had asked them about the grand obstacle to success. As a matter of fact, they did put it differently—quite differently—and without being asked. A soldier in the 5th Wisconsin wrote after this battle: "Was there ever an army so cruelly handicapped as the Army of the Potomac? Is there, in military annals, any record of men preserving their discipline, patriotism, courage, in spite of such adverse circumstances as beset these men of the North?"
¹¹

However, Congressman Julian had been talking to the commanding general, not to the enlisted man, and no leader of the abolitionists ever needed to be told twice to go out and stir up more hatred. Julian later recounted that in the political campaign of the following summer "I fully entered into the spirit of General Burnside's advice
...
to breathe into the hearts of the people a feeling of animosity against the Rebels."
¹²
The wind was being sown and the whirlwind would soon be ready for reaping.

Yet it seems that the soldiers who would have to be around when the reaping took place had small part in the sowing. This army was doubly deficient—in leadership and in vindictiveness—and the men do not appear even to have tried to hate their enemies. On the contrary, they exercised a good deal of ingenuity in order to open a highly illegal but quite friendly trade with them, with the wide Rappahannock as the bearer of their peaceful cargoes. The classical essentials for a thriving peacetime trade were present; that is, each side had a surplus of goods greatly in demand by the other side, the Federals having plenty of coffee and the Confederates having an excess of tobacco. And as the pickets walked their posts by the river it soon occurred to Northerners and Southerners alike that the war would get on just as well and would be a good deal less onerous to the individual if some of that coffee could be swapped for some of that tobacco.

It is probable that every regiment which was stationed on the river took part in this trade at one time or another, and the routine was always much the same. The following appears to have been typical: