Glory Road (19 page)

For one of the biggest loopholes of all was the fact that doctors in these Northern hospitals were authorized to issue medical discharges. In the forward areas a regimental surgeon naturally would try to make sure that such a release was given only to a man who genuinely deserved it, but a doctor at a Northern hospital was not likely to care very much, and the soldier who was unable to persuade the hospital authorities to give him a discharge was apt to be either tragically devoid of any kind of political pull or flagrantly and incurably healthy. Even if he tried to get a discharge, failed, and then went off home on his own hook, he still had a good chance to make everything legal. For when the War Department began trying to round up these hospital absentees, it ruled in its wisdom that any of them might get a lawful discharge if he could present a certificate of disability signed by any civilian "physician of good standing." The man who, safely perched in his own home town, was unable to come up with such a paper was a poor stick indeed.
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Yet most absentees seem not to have bothered to make the effort. It simply was not necessary.

When the war began there was a standard reward of thirty dollars payable to any peace officer or private citizen who caught and returned to custody a deserter from the army. For some incomprehensible reason, once the war began and desertion became a serious problem, this reward was cut to five dollars and expenses. A tangled web of red tape was then thrown over the business of collecting it. The applicant had to get a voucher from the local provost marshal stating that a genuine deserter, properly identified by name, company, and regiment, had in fact been turned in. The voucher also had to identify, by description or otherwise, the citizen who had brought the deserter in, and expenses incurred had to be specified in detail, with supporting documents to prove that they had actually been incurred and with other documents proving that it had really been necessary to incur them. Any government paymaster, naturally, could keep an applicant for five dollars and expenses at bay for a year with a setup like that. As an inevitable result, no city cop or county sheriff in his senses would bother to arrest deserters unless they became unmitigated disturbers of the peace.
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Before very long it was obvious to everybody that a man who deserted from the army ran very little risk of arrest or punishment. Everything about the situation encouraged the fainthearted and the chronic slackers to desert the first time they got the chance. If such a one, having returned to his home town, felt guilty or insecure, he could make things easier for himself by telling his fellow townspeople tall tales about the fearful treatment a man got in the army. A principal obstacle to enlistments, after the first year of the war, was the presence in every town and hamlet of these deserters "and the false stories they spread abroad of the cruelty and unnecessary hardships to which the men were subjected by their officers."
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Such stories of course were usually much exaggerated. Every generation knows the self-pitying ne'er-do-well who finds himself brutally mistreated when he is required to get up promptly in the morning, keep his clothing and his person clean, and turn in an honest day's work in return for his pay, food, and lodging, and such characters were quite as common and as vocal in the 1860s as at any other time. Although army discipline then lacked the impersonal tautness to which a later generation is accustomed, it apparently had a good deal more of the brutality which comes from sheer thoughtlessness and incompetence; and if the imperfect soldiers who drifted north told tales of hardships, those stories were not without a solid base in unpleasant fact.

At the end of 1862 a brigadier general controlling a camp for paroled prisoners in Illinois sent to the War Department an indignant protest about the treatment soldiers got when they had to travel long distances by railroad.

"If the railroad companies," he wrote, "will put a barrel of water in each car and will make coarse but decent arrangements, as they do in emigrant trains, for the men to get drink and answer the calls of nature in the cars, which is never done, officers could be responsible for their men. Now the instant the train stops the men rush out for these necessary purposes, as they claim, and any man wishing to desert 'gets left' and the conductor assists the deserter by refusing to stop the train, as he must 'make his schedule.' "
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Another officer was even more specific:

"Brave men, including many sick and wounded, have been crowded into common boxcars in the dead of winter without fires, or fuel, or lights, or any other conveniences that had been enjoyed by the cattle that occupied the cars before them, and in this condition the poor fellows were compelled to make journeys of hundreds of miles. In other instances the same class of cars were used in the hottest weather, and without having been cleansed of the filth left by the cattle, hogs, and other stock. Many deaths have occurred from diseases caused by the cold, suffocation, and stench endured in these trains, while a few were not able to hold out to the end of the route and were taken out dead."
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In other words, having shown the soldier that if he ran away he probably would not be bothered, the government was losing very few opportunities to make him feel that running away might be a fine idea. If the stupidity which could produce a Fredericksburg and a mud march failed to teach this lesson, the way in which hospitals in the combat area were directed might suffice. At about the time when Burnside was going through his final
Sturm und Drang
period, in January 1863, the surgeon general of the army had a doctor make a close inspection of the army's camps and hospitals at Falmouth. This officer reported that the regimental hospitals needed almost everything, from ordinary bed sacks on up. Hospital tents were cold. There were plenty of stoves, but they were of no use, some simpleton having ordered huge coal stoves which could not be used in tents. There were on the market plenty of little sheet-iron wood-burning jobs that would do nicely, but this kind the army had not bought. There was a lack of hospital clothing, and the nursing was of the worst: typhoid fever patients had been frostbitten because of lack of care.

"I do not believe," wrote the wrathy inspector, losing a bit of his professional poise, "that I have ever seen greater misery from sickness than exists now in the Army of the Potomac."
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Veteran regiments, he said, which numbered no more than two or three hundred men because all the weak had been weeded out by casualties and disease, and in which the line officers and surgeons had learned by experience how to care for sick men in the field-such regiments usually had hospitals which were "tolerably comfortable in their appointments." (The only catch was that such regiments had few or no sick men.) In the entire army there were perhaps three or four brigade or divisional hospitals which the inspector found fairly satisfactory. All of the rest, especially the hospitals of the new regiments, in which there was the most sickness, lacked almost everything.

The worst single problem was food, and men died because of it. Much of the army's sickness was the direct result of bad diet. The diarrhea, dysentery, constipation, and malnutrition which made men easy victims to other ailments were the natural end products of a steady diet of fried meat, hardtack, and black coffee. (Considering the matter after the war, Charles Francis Adams wrote: "My intestines were actually corroded with concentrated nourishment. I needed to live on bread, vegetables, and tea; I did live on pork, coffee, spirits, and tainted water.")
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The army was even seriously troubled that winter with scurvy—scurvy, the deep-sea malady which even then was recognized as a deficiency disease, to be cured by a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables. The men in the hospitals at Falmouth that winter got exactly the same food that was issued to the healthy men in camp: salt pork, hardtack, and coffee.

This was not happening because the army could not get the right kind of food for sick men. It had bought lavish quantities of the very foods these invalids needed, and these foods filled whole warehouses at Aquia Creek. The whole trouble (as this medical inspector found and reported) was simply this: the army command was so abysmally incompetent that it was quite unable to move the good food from the warehouses to the hospitals.

For there was nobody who was empowered to make out the proper requisitions.

Unable to live by anything more inspiring, the army was living by its paper work, and when the paper work was done wrong, which naturally happened every day, military life being what it is, men died.

The warehouses full of good food lay only a few hours from the most remote of the regimental hospitals. Unfortunately, however, there did not exist any man or set of men whose job it was to see that the food got up to the hospitals where the men for whom it had been bought might actually eat some of it. Nobody made out the required papers, and without the papers the food could not move. In the quartermasters' offices there were the blank forms and in the warehouses there was the food, and in between there were open roads and empty wagons and teams of strong horses; but there was not a regular commissary of subsistence for the hospitals, and so the sick men ate salt meat and hard bread, and the vegetables and fruit and chicken and jellied broth stayed in the warehouses and spoiled, or vanished mysteriously down the channels of petty thievery and corruption. The sick men, often enough, went into new graves on the Rappahannock hillsides. And the men who were not sick faded out of the army as fast as the express trains could bring new boxes of civilian clothing, and it was necessary to picket all the roads around Baltimore and Washington, and President Lincoln had General Burnside's little paper setting forth the conditions upon which the present commander of the Army of the Potomac might consent to remain in office.

These conditions the President decided not to meet. Burnside went to the White House, and his last hour of command had visibly arrived. There issued presently an official document which, instead of cashiering anyone, simply announced that General Burnside was relieved of his command. Then Lincoln wrote a strange and canny letter to Joe Hooker, letting that soldier know that his remarks about the need for a dictator and his bitter criticisms of all of his superior officers had been heard and would be remembered in the White House, but nevertheless placing in his hands, as the prize of much hard striving, the command of this luckless army. General Franklin penned his own verdict on Burnside: "I can only account for his numerous mistakes upon the hypothesis that he is crazy."
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Hooker remarked that he rather doubted if the army could be saved to the country.

It might be that that would largely be up to Hooker. The army would stick around, if he could give it reason to feel that there was any point in it. For the army was still there: the hard core of it, which had come up through great tribulation and which might be indestructible. A veteran in the 12th New Jersey commented that many men had been lost, but said that was only to be expected: "In a company of one hundred enlisted men, only about one third of the number prove themselves physically able and possessing sufficient courage to endure the hardships and face the dangers of active campaigning; the rest, soon after going into the field, drift back to the hospitals and finally out of the service."
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The most drifted out, and a good many died, but about a third remained, and the men who made up that third would stand a great deal of beating. It might even be that the right man could win a war with them.

THREE

Revival

1. Men Who Are Greatly in Earnest

The war was the sum of all the things all the people in the country were doing. It was the weary private plodding through the mud or dying unattended in a cold hospital tent or defying his officers in order to trade coffee for tobacco with men whom he would try to kill as soon as the weather improved. It was also all of the people who were not in the army, whose lives touched this private's life at any point, and the truths about the war were various. At times the truth was what any of these people believed about the struggle that was going on, and at other times it was the contrast between what they believed and what was really so. By turns the truth was greed, and coarseness, and pain, and shining incredible heroism; and somehow, because the war was made up of people and of what people thought and felt and did, the whole of it was mysteriously greater than the sum of its parts. There was an ultimate truth lying half hidden behind what men were saying and doing, and it is rarely possible to single out any one happening and say, "This is what the war really meant." The war meant a great many things, and in the end it may have meant all of them together, with a saving intangible strangely added. But now and then the infinite complexity of this war seemed to be expressing itself briefly through one man or one event, where the currents that moved below the surface broke open with a foaming of great waters and showed how events were trending.

Specifically, in this winter of 1863 there was the barrel-chested governor of the Hoosier state, Oliver Perry Morton, a great bull of a man who fought for the sacred union of the states and also for the greater glory of O. P. Morton, and who did much which he had not set out to do.

Morton was the son of a country innkeeper, and he was bora in rural Indiana one decade after Oliver Hazard Perry won his school-book victory over the detested British on Lake Erie. Morton's parents gave
him
the Commodore's name, which carried magic in the youthful Middle West, and by and by the "Hazard" was dropped. Morton, orphaned before he reached his teens, was reared through adolescence by two maiden aunts in Springfield, Ohio, worked for a time as apothecary's clerk, was bound out to a hatter, and wound up finally as an indifferent student in Miami University, where he managed to complete two years as "an irregular." He left college, married, read law in a country law office, moved to Centerville, Indiana, became county prosecutor and later county judge before he was out of his twenties, and then decided that he could do with more schooling. He went to Cincinnati and attended law school, and in the early 1850s returned to Centerville to become one of Indiana's most spectacular lawyers.