Glory Road (3 page)

The welcome was of the coldest, and the ceremony seems to have pleased no one. On one side of the parade stood the four regiments of veterans-19th Indiana and 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin: rangy, sun-tanned men in worn and dusty uniforms, who lounged in the ranks with that indefinable easy looseness which only veterans possess and who wore the black slouch hats which were the distinguishing headgear of this brigade as if they were badges of great honor—which, as a matter of fact, they were. The veterans looked across the open ground at the newcomers with complete and unconcealed skepticism and hostility. In every line of their bearing-in the set of their jaws, the tilt of their heads, the look about their eyes peering out from under those valued hatbrims—they expressed for all to see the age-old, impersonal, unformulated feeling of the veteran for the recruit: We have had it and you have not, and until you have been where we have been and have done what we have done we do not admit you to any kind of fellowship.

The boys from Michigan got the message perfectly. They came up to line nervously that morning, thoroughly aware that the newness and neatness of their uniforms proclaimed them rookies with the test of manhood still ahead of them. Their very numbers were a count against them. Here they were, one regiment, with nearly as many men present for duty, armed and equipped, as were present in all four of the regiments across the parade. With their arrival the brigade had nearly doubled in size. And with the inexorable illogic of the soldier, it was somehow just then the fault of these boys from Michigan, and a just ground for shame to them, that they brought 900 to the field instead of the veterans' 250.

In addition to which they wore the regulation forage caps instead of the black hats which the brigade had made famous.

Yet this mere matter of being new and green and clumsy would not, of itself, have caused real estrangement between the four veteran regiments and the one new one. The veterans would have been wary, of course, reserving judgment until they had seen these newcomers under fire, treating them with a lofty but not really malicious contempt until after their first battle, and then either outlawing them entirely or receiving them to full brotherhood without reservation. But they would not have given them a cold and savage hostility, which was what even the least sensitive mental antennae were picking up on this field today. For a damning word had come to camp ahead of this new regiment. Here, said camp rumor—unsubstantiated, but accepted as gospel—here were
bounty men*

The bounty man was comparatively a new addition to the Army of the Potomac. For the most part, the army was still made up of what even then were beginning to be called "the old 1861 regiments": volunteers in the purest sense of the word, men who had enlisted for no earthly reason except that they wanted to go to war, moved by that strange and deceiving light which can lie upon the world very briefly when one is young and innocent. That light was leaving the landscape rapidly in 1862, and volunteering was much slower. To stimulate it, various states, cities, and counties were offering cash bounties to recruits: solid rolls of greenbacks, adding up, in some cases, to as much as a thousand dollars, and in all cases to several hundreds.

Now this business of the bounty somehow summed up all of the contrasting truths about the war—boom times, noble ideals becoming sullied, great opportunities for the calculating; plus the fact, beginning to be visible to private soldiers, that the man who was moved by pure patriotism and by nothing else was quite likely to get the worst of it. For while the bounties were enabling local units of government to fill their quotas, they were also bringing into the army a great many men whose primary concern in enlisting had been neither the saving of the Union nor the satisfaction of some sacred and indefinable inner instinct, but solely the acquisition of sudden wealth. Some of these men, having taken the money, might earn their wages by becoming good and faithful soldiers. Others would slack and skulk and beyond any question would desert the first time occasion offered— going off to some other state to enlist for another bounty, as likely as not. All of the confusion and contradiction of war were mixed up in this bounty system, in the way it worked and in the fact that it had been adopted at all.

The old volunteer regiments of the army were, conceivably, the last reservoir of the original hope, enthusiasm, and incredible lightness of spirit with which the war had begun. Beyond the scheming and the driving and the solid achieving of the governors and the generals and all the others, the war finally would come down to this spirit that lived in the breasts of the enlisted men. It was what the war was ultimately about, and if the war was finally going to be won it was what would win it, the men who had carried the spirit being killed, the spirit somehow surviving. The veteran inevitably drew a sharp distinction between the man who volunteered because this spirit moved him and the bounty boy who joined up for what there was in it; and here, in the Iron Brigade itself, proudest and hardest of the army's warriors, there was a bounty regiment!

Actually, there was nothing of the kind. Camp rumor once again had outrun the truth. Like every one of the thousands of regiments in the Civil War armies, this 24th Michigan had its own history, different from all of the others, just as each soldier had his individual biography, unwritten but unique. In plain fact, instead of being one of the first of the bounty regiments, this outfit was one of the last of the old rally-round-the-flag groups of simon-pure volunteers.

In July 1862 the mayor of Detroit had called an open-air mass meeting of patriotic citizens to consider how Detroit would provide recruits under the most recent call for 300,000 volunteers. The meeting had been a failure—had, indeed, broken up in an actual row. There had been hissings, catcalls, fisticuffs, until finally the speech-making dissolved in a free-for-all fight, with Southern sympathizers tearing down the speakers' rostrum and manhandling the speakers, and the sheriff and his deputies coming on the scene with drawn revolvers to restore order and send everybody home. Good citizens felt this as a shame and a disgrace. The rowdies who broke up the meeting, they declared, were not native Copperheads but secessionists-in-exile from Canadian Windsor, across the river. Detroit must redeem its good name; it did so, finally, by holding a new, better-policed citizens' meeting at which it was agreed that Wayne County should raise an extra regiment in addition to the six called for by the new quota.

A rousing campaign for recruits was put on. Judge Henry A. Morrow, who had seen some service in the war with Mexico, was made colonel of this extra regiment, and Sheriff Mark Flanigan—he who had led the flying wedge of deputies to subdue secession at the lamentable first mass meeting—was announced as lieutenant colonel; and by the end of August the regiment had been fully recruited. Many of the recruits were wage earners with families, and it would be some time before the army paymaster would make his rounds. To avert hardships, Detroit businessmen raised a relief fund and some of the men drew money from it—whence came the report that the 24th was a bounty regiment.

The 24th took off for the East just before the Army of the Potomac fought at Antietam, and it left Detroit in a fine glow of patriotic sentiment. Nearly all of its officers carried presentation swords—Colonel Morrow's the gift of the Detroit bar, Lieutenant Colonel Flanigan's the gift of the deputy sheriffs of Wayne County, while one of the company officers carried one given by the printers of the Detroit
Free Press,
of whose composing room he had been foreman. The regiment was feted along the road en route east: there is mention of an elaborate banquet at Pittsburgh, where every man was presented with a bouquet by a pretty girl and where, as a veteran wrote later, "a portion of the regiment was in a fair way of being captured." The regiment got to Maryland just in time to see the dusty files of the Army of the Potomac marching up to the shattering fight at Antietam. After that battle was over the 24th was moved up to join the army, and it camped on the battlefield in dismaying closeness to a huge pile of amputated arms and legs.

Then came the ceremony by whi
ch the 24th joined the Iron Bri
gade. Colonel Morrow unfortunately felt that the occasion called for a speech and made one, pulling out all the stops to let the brigade know how glad the 24th was to be here. He drew for his pains a dead silence, not a cheer or a ripple to show that anybody had heard him. A diarist in the 24th wrote glumly: "A pretty cool reception, we thought. We had come out to reinforce them, and supposed they would be glad to see us."
¹⁰

The camp comradeship which these recruits had heard so much about would apparently have to be earned. It could be earned only in battle. Meanwhile, the regiment might as well get ready. It was drilled prodigiously; Colonel Morrow gave the boys battalion drill for six hours every day, with an additional four and one half hours of "other evolutions of the school of the soldier." When General Gibbon left the brigade for divisional command early in November, he told Morrow and the other field officers they had the best-drilled regiment he had ever seen for a rookie regiment.

This was heartening as word trickled down through the ranks. But it was not enough. There were those four veteran regiments which refused to warm up. The brigade broke camp and began a long march from the upper Potomac to the Rappahannock as the Army of the Potomac moved glacially southeast in a well-meant effort to get around Robert E. Lee's flank. As it moved it outmarched the wagon trains and the men went hungry. The 24th, which was living those days under an almost unendurable tension anyway, waiting for the chance to fight its way into the brigade's fellowship, set up a chant one rationless morning of "Bread! Bread! Bread!" The veteran regiments, equally unfed and for that matter equally capable of kicking up a noisy row over it, looked at them coldly and refused to join in the clamor. Once more the 24th had been put
in
its place.
¹¹

December came, and the Iron Brigade, along with most of the rest of the army, went into camp near a little town called Falmouth, a mile or so upstream from the charming colonial city of Fredericksburg. There were flurries of snow and there was a good deal of cold rain, with abominable mud underfoot, and for the 24th Michigan there began that endless process of attrition which, for some regiments, was even more deadly than battle itself. Boys began to get sick, and many of the sick ones died. Like all new regiments, the 24th held formal military funerals in such cases, until one day a rookie soldier on the firing squad mistakenly loaded his musket with ball cartridge and shot a comrade through the body.
¹²
This might have caused the veterans to jeer—clumsy soldiers who shot each other at a military funeral!—but it did not happen. The veterans were not even admitting the 24th to the implied comradeship of derision. They were simply cold and aloof.

This new regiment would have only one chance at salvation. Before long, by signs which even the private soldiers could read, the army would go across the Rappahannock to fight. When that day came, the 24th would have to prove itself. Its salvation, like so many other values in this strange and terrible war, would in the end have to be bought by the stand-up valor of the private soldier.

2. Jordan Water, Rise over Me

A desolate wasteland of war, as bleak and comfortless as what the last man will see when he takes his last look around, lay between Fredericksburg and the Potomac River landings. It had been pleasant enough in that other geological epoch before the war: nice rolling country marked off into plantations and small farms, well timbered between the pastures and the tilled fields, with great houses on the hilltops and small cabins placed at intervals along the meandering roads. Men had lived here for two centuries and they had given the region a look of order and prosperity. But the armies had come, and everything had been swept away.

The railroad line that ran from Fredericksburg to the riverside terminus at Aquia Creek, where travelers from the south in the old days had left the cars to go aboard the waddling river steamers for the last leg of the leisurely trip to Washington—this line with its bridges, culverts, and docks had been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and rebuilt anew. All of the timber had been cut down to make trestles and crossties, to corduroy the unpaved roads, to build wharves and piers and stockades and sheds and huts, to provide fuel for locomotives and steamboats and firewood for the stoves and camp-fires of the soldiers. Colonel Herman Haupt, superintendent of military railroads, complained that the locomotives of his construction trains now had to haul all their own fuel up from the landing, to which place it came down-river in barges. Along the road from the landing up to Fredericksburg there remained now not so much as a stick.

Most of the houses had fared as the wood lots had fared. Some had been torn down for building material, some had been burned by accident, and some had simply been destroyed. A newspaper correspondent saw "tall chimneys standing, monuments of departed peace, in the midst of wastes that had been farms." Nothing else remained. The livestock was all gone, the fences had vanished, every bit of household furniture or farm equipment that could be carried away had disappeared. The desolation was complete.
¹

Much of this was just the inevitable wastage of war. The Army of the Potomac sprawled over a wide strip of land to the north and east of Fredericksburg, close to the Rappahannock River, and its main lines of supply ran back to the Potomac River landings, Aquia Creek and Belle Plain. Over the fifteen or twenty miles of atrocious roads which crossed this country, all of the food, clothing, ammunition, and other supplies for 130,000 men had to be carried—of grain and hay alone the quartermasters had to move 800 tons a day—and the endless wagon trains that lumbered back and forth over the cramped roadways, drivers shouting and swearing and fighting one another for the right of way, were a destroying force that rolled over the landscape and mashed it flat. If a culvert collapsed on a road near somebody's house, the house was torn down to provide timber for a new culvert, and that was that. Moving or standing still, the army could not help creating its own wasteland.