This Hallowed Ground (27 page)

Yet Lee’s assault was made; made, finally, by fourteen brigades, which struggled to cross open ground covered by one hundred guns, with solid Federal infantry waiting with musket fire for close range. Some of the men did reach the Union lines, briefly. Others managed to hold advance positions long enough to inflict a painful fire on Porter’s men. But most of the attacking columns were simply destroyed. The Confederate General D. H. Hill, who led one of the divisions in this attack, wrote afterward of his amazement at discovering that more than half of the six thousand casualties the Confederate army suffered that day were caused by cannon fire. This fight, he said, was not war, it was just plain murder; and on reflection he added that with Yankee artillery and Confederate infantry he believed he could whip anybody on earth.
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Murderous the fight had been, and when night came and the hot cannon were quiet at last, the Union position on Malvern Hill was wholly unshaken. Lee’s army, in fact, had had something like a disaster. The important factor, however, here as in the fight at Mechanicsville, was that neither McClellan nor Lee was prepared to act as if there had been anything but a Confederate victory.

McClellan conceivably might have resumed the offensive next day. He had a firebrand of a division commander, one-armed Phil Kearny, who stormed and swore in great fury because McClellan would not make a drive for Richmond the next morning, and even Porter — very careful and intensely loyal to McClellan — wondered if the army might not have won a great victory on the heels of Malvern Hill. But McClellan would not hear of it. He had Porter bring his men and guns down off the hill after dark, and by the morning of July 2 the Confederates had the place to themselves. McClellan’s army was safe within its lines at Harrison’s Landing, and the great campaign was over.

The soldier who had fought with all the odds against him had taken hair-raising risks and had won; the soldier who had had all of the advantages had refused to risk anything and had lost; and now the last chance that this ruinous war could be a relatively short one was gone forever.

A
FTER
the spring of 1862 the Civil War began to dominate the men who were fighting it. They still had the option to win or to lose, but they could no longer quite be said to be in charge of it. Coming of age, the war began to impose its own conditions; finally it come to control men instead of being controlled by them.

Until that spring ended, the situation was still more or less fluid; the war might yet be disposed of in such a way that it would not become one of the great turning points in history. But after the western army had been scattered and ordered to occupy territory instead of destroying Confederate fighting power, and after the eastern army had been driven into its muggy camp of refuge at Harrison’s Landing, the situation began to harden. From now on many things would happen, not so much because anyone wanted them to happen as because the pressure of war made them inevitable.

This began to be visible that summer in the West.

Grant was holding Memphis, western Tennessee, and northern Mississippi — one division here, two divisions there, detachments spraddled out for hundreds of miles to guard bridges, railroad lines, junction towns, and river ports. Buell was marching east to take Chattanooga. He was moving along the line of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, repairing it as he went, condemned to a snail’s progress. Ahead of him he had Ormsby Mitchel’s division holding a stretch of northern Alabama.

Mitchel was a voice crying in the wilderness. He had been in Alabama since early April, when the rest of Buell’s people went down to fight at Shiloh and take part in the Corinth campaign. Mitchel had gone to Huntsville, where he seized the Memphis and Charleston machine
shops, and he fanned troops out to east and west, taking special pains to take the railroad bridges over the Tennessee at Decatur and at Bridgeport. He kept pestering headquarters with urgent messages, asserting that from where he was he could see the end of the war. If Buell came over fast, he said, he could get into Chattanooga without trouble; after that he could capture Atlanta, and from Atlanta he could march all the way north to Richmond, because all of that part of the Confederacy was “comparatively unprotected and very much alarmed.”
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Mitchel may very well have been right, but he could not get anyone to listen to him — except for Halleck and Buell, both of whom were irritated. He was told to break the railroad bridge at Decatur so that Rebels could not use the Memphis and Charleston if they regained possession of it, and after that he was to sit tight and await developments. He obeyed, fuming with impatience. As a diversion he sent out a handful of men on a long-shot raid to break the railroad that led from Chattanooga down to Atlanta; the raid failed, after a spectacular locomotive chase that has provided material for novelists, dramatists, and feature writers ever since, and most of the raiders were caught and hanged as spies. But finally, after Corinth was taken, Buell was sent over toward Chattanooga, and Mitchel was sternly rebuked for having destroyed the bridge at Decatur and was told to rebuild it.
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He was also told to tighten up on discipline because his troops had been misbehaving badly.

Specifically, there was the case of the 19th Illinois and Colonel John Basil Turchin.

The 19th Illinois was a more or less typical midwestern regiment, but Turchin was neither typical nor middlewestern. He had been born in Russia forty years earlier, had been educated at the Imperial Military School in St. Petersburg, had served on the Russian general staff, and had fought in the Crimea. In 1856 he came to America and went to work in the engineering department of the Illinois Central Railroad, and when the Civil War started he got into uniform and became colonel of this 19th Illinois. He was a stiff drillmaster — he seems to have been a friend of the departed Elmer Ellsworth, whose amateur Zouaves cut such a swath on militia parade grounds just before the war — and when the 19th left Springfield late in the summer of 1861 it was considered something of a crack outfit.

The first thing that happened to the 19th was a train wreck, which occurred in Indiana while the regiment was on its way east to join the Army of the Potomac. The wreck was a horror, killing twenty-four men and injuring one hundred and five, as heavy a toll as a regular battle would have taken, and while the regiment was recuperating its orders were changed and it was sent down to Kentucky to join
Buell’s army. Buell was impressed by the 19th’s smart appearance at drill, and Colonel Turchin soon had command of a brigade in Mitchel’s division.

Whatever its achievements on the parade ground, the 19th had a heavy hand with occupied territory. One of the northern Alabama towns was held by the 33rd Ohio, which did so much looting that on complaint of the citizens its colonel was rebuked and the regiment was withdrawn. The townsfolk exulted only briefly, for the 33rd was replaced by the 19th Illinois; and according to army legend, before the day was over the luckless citizens were begging the authorities to let them have the 33rd again — compared with the Illinois regiment, it was a model of decorum.

The real trouble, however, came in the town of Athens, Alabama, where one of Turchin’s regiments was shot up by lurking guerrillas. Turchin considered this a gross violation of the laws of war, and anyway he seems to have had a czarist officer’s notions about the way people ought to behave in occupied territory. He called up his 19th Illinois and drove the guerrillas away, and after things were under control he told the boys to go ahead and take the town apart — “I shut mine eyes for one hour.” One hour was all the 19th needed. When it got through, Athens looked as though it had been hit by Cossacks. Citizens later contributed forty-five affidavits alleging that personal property to the value of more than fifty thousand dollars had been carried off. Turchin was court-martialed and dismissed from the service (although somebody eventually pulled wires in Washington and got him reinstated); but what had happened really did not have very much to do with him, anyway. It was the Illinois boys and not the Imperial Russian officer who had carried off watches, jewelry, heirlooms, and oil paintings, and all that had been needed to set them off had been one signal.
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It was recalled afterward that a detachment of men from the 19th, given horses and assigned to work as scouts and couriers, promptly became famous as “the forty thieves,” and the regimental historian confessed that “perhaps there was some slight reason” for this title.
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Colonel Turchin may have been unique, but the 19th Illinois was not; it was just about average, and the average soldier in the western armies was learning to regard himself as a cross between licensed freebooter and avenging angel. In northern Mississippi a soldier was writing to his sister: “Our men are using this country awful rough. Such animals as chickens, fences, swine, etc., are entirely unseeable and unfindable within fifteen miles of where our camp has been this last week.” Oddly enough, this reflected high morale: “I never saw men in as good spirits and as confident as this army now appears … I can’t see why people
will stay at home when they can get to soldiering. I think a year of it is worth getting shot for to any man.”
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The generals tried to stop this sort of thing, but they never came close. These volunteer soldiers were bound to get out of hand once they got into what they considered enemy country. Lieutenants and captains lived on terms of approximate equality with their men. They could not be severe with them; would not, in any case, the idea not entering their heads; and although generals might issue stern orders against looting and robbery, these orders were almost completely ignored at the operating level. Subalterns who were Pete and Joe to their men could not keep the army from trailing a cloud of stragglers wherever it went, and the stragglers were under no man’s control. Any farmhouse within ten miles of camp, one soldier estimated, would get at least fifty uniformed visitors a day, begging and cadging what they could and stealing anything that was not offered to them.
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The official records for this period are full of stiff orders from — of all people — William Tecumseh Sherman, who asserted passionately: “This demoralizing and disgraceful practice of pillage must cease, else the country will rise on us and justly shoot us down like dogs and wild beasts.” Even John Pope, whom the people of Virginia would soon consider the very author of lawless war, made himself highly unpopular with his volunteer troops by his efforts to restrain them. He met a party from the 27th Ohio bringing in a wagonload of fence rails for firewood, made them return the rails, and then ordered their colonel to “put these ——————— in the guard house until they could be court-martialed and shot as an example to the rest of the — — volunteer — —”
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None of this did any good (and the volunteers went unhanged) for the fact was that the army saw nothing in the least wrong in taking what it needed from the people of the South. Higher officials were infected as well as enlisted men. Stout German-born General Osterhaus furiously denounced a soldier who was brought before him for killing a cow until he learned that his own cook had the animal’s liver and was preparing it for the general’s supper. Then he changed his tune: “Ah, dot iss it, den? Vell den, you always bring me de livers and den I never know nuttin’ about de killin’ of de animals.” A Wisconsin colonel, lecturing two culprits who had been caught looting, said sternly: “Now boys, I have to punish you. I am so ordered by the General. I want you two to understand that I am not punishing you for stealing, but for getting caught at it, by God!”

An Indiana soldier said that “the generals were slow to adopt the confiscation idea” and issued all sorts of orders against foraging, but “in time the veteran learned to circumvent all such orders, and to
modify the cruel penalty by a system of division with the officers in command, who allowed the boys to construe orders to suit their needs.” Highhanded foraging, he confessed, had “marvellous beauties.” Almost universally, in eastern and western armies alike, company and regimental officers did not even pretend to try to enforce orders against foraging.
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In part, this was just what was bound to happen in a civil war in nineteenth-century America. The rowdy strain was coming to the surface again; it had been called up to help create the war, and there was no way to repress it. Army life at any time lifts from men the feeling of personal responsibility for their acts; it was doing this now in a land where the strain of irresponsibility ran high at the best of times. An army of invasion composed of volunteers who considered themselves free citizens despite their uniforms and their oaths of enlistment was going to “use this country awful rough,” and that was that.

But that was not all of it. Super-patriots back home were demanding a hard war. Newspapers in Chicago and other northern cities sharply condemned the court-martial of Colonel Turchin, complaining that Buell was altogether too kind to the people of Alabama and Tennessee, who, being in a state of rebellion, needed to be punished. The soldiers sympathized with this criticism — the more so, perhaps, since at the moment the war was not being prosecuted very energetically. To protect Rebel property was beginning to look like being soft with rebellion itself; an officer too alert to prevent foraging and looting might very well be an officer secretly in sympathy with the Confederacy. (General Buell was growing immensely unpopular with his men for this reason.) Anything that hurt anyone in the South, probably, would ultimately hurt the rebellion; secession was treason, men who supported it were traitors, and the worst that happened to them was no more than they deserved.
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It was expressed very clearly by the men of the 12th Wisconsin, who occupied Humboldt, Tennessee, that summer. They took over a print shop and for a time got out a weekly newspaper, with enlisted men as editors. The paper spoke the private soldier’s mind, and one of its editorials hit the keynote: “The time for negotiating peace has passed; henceforth let us
conquer
a peace. Let the blows fall thick and heavy, and keep on falling. Let us lay aside the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of war, pull off our coats, and ‘wade in.’ … Let our divisions move on, kill, confiscate or destroy, throw every sympathy to the wind that might stand in the way, and bring the traitors to a traitor’s fate by the shortest and quickest way.”
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