Day 75. May 14, 1862. (page 3)
Terrible Swift Sword Bruce Catton P. 29
May 14, 1862
“He went on, eloquently, the only general in American history who felt moved to assure his President that the country’s principal army, on the eve of battle, was actually loyal to the government:
“Any commander of the re-enforcements whom Your Excellency may designate will be acceptable to me, whatever expression I may have heretofore addressed to you on that subject. I will fight the enemy, whatever their force may be, with whatever force I may have, and I firmly believe that we shall beat them, but our triumph should be made decisive and complete. The soldiers of this army love their Government and will fight well in its support. You may rely upon them. They have confidence in me as their general and in you as their President.’”
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 110
“From a house on a hill I watched the advance of our troops in successive lines, listened to their deafening cheers as they double-quicked upon the batteries, and saw the brave hosts melt away before the terrible tempest of iron hurled against them, till nothing but poor weak remnants remained, scattered in the advance, unsupported, and their valor uselessly thrown away. The quick wasting of the Union troops, who disappeared suddenly, as if the earth had yawned and swallowed them, was awful to gaze upon. Yet they still recklessly pounded on, cheering and keeping up a continuous fire of musketry.” Edward King Wightman, 9th New York
DEATH OF A HERO.
“I wonder if I could ever convey to another—to you, for instance, reader dear—the tender and terrible realities of such cases, (many, many happen’d,) as the one I am now going to mention. Stewart C. Glover, company E, 5th Wisconsin—was wounded May 5, on one of those fierce tussles of the Wilderness—died May 21—aged about 20. He was a small and beardless young man—a splendid soldier—in fact almost an ideal American, of his age. He had serv’d nearly three years, and would have been entitled to his discharge in a few days. He was in Hancock’s corps. The fighting had about ceas’d for the day, and the general commanding the brigade rode by and call’d for volunteers to bring in the wounded. Glover responded among the first—went out gayly—but while in the act of bearing in a wounded sergeant to our lines, was shot in the knee by a rebel sharpshooter; consequence, amputation and death. He had resided with his father, John Glover, an aged and feeble man, in Batavia, Genesee county, N. Y., but was at school in Wisconsin, after the war broke out, and there enlisted—soon took to soldier-life, liked it, was very manly, was belov’d by officers and comrades. He kept a little diary, like so many of the soldiers. On the day of his death he wrote the following in it, to-day the doctor says I must die—all is over with me—ah, so young to die. On another blank leaf he pencill’d to his brother, dear brother Thomas, I have been brave but wicked—pray for me.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 744-745
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 18
“Soldiers shouted during battle to relieve stress, encourage themselves and their comrades, or intimidate their opponents. The Confederates often attacked “with a yell and a fury that had a tendency to make each hair on one’s head to stand on its particular end,” a practice that never failed to impress Union soldiers, “Yelling like savages and swearing like demons” was how Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Lippincott of the 33rd Illinois described attacking Southerners at Cache River, Arkansas. During a Confederate assault at Pea Ridge, Captain Robert P. Mathews of the 25th Missouri was surprised to hear the “cheers and yells” of the oncoming Rebels “rising above the roar of the artillery,” something he had not thought possible.”
Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg Bruce Catton P. 57
“I have never, since I was born, heard so fearful a noise as a rebel yell. It is nothing like a hurrah, but rather a regular wildcat screech. And lest that be thought the nervous reaction of a timid noncombatant, here is the verdict of of front-line veteran from the 6th Wisconsin: There is nothing like it this side of the infernal region, and the peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone under these circumstances can never be told. You have to feel it, and if you say you did not feel it, and heard the yell, you have never been there.’”
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 268
“The description of the celebrated “Rebel Yell” is vintage Lanier:
From the right of the ragged line now comes up a single long cry, as from the leader of a pack of hounds who has found the game. This cry has in it the uncontrollable eagerness of the sleuth-hound, together with a dry harsh quality that conveys an uncompromising hostility. It is the irresistible outflow of some fierce soul immeasurably enraged, and it is tinged with a jubilant tone, as if in anticipation of a speedy triumph and a satisfying revenge. It is a howl, a hoarse battle cry, a cheer, and a congratulation, all in one.
They take it up in the centre, they echo it on the left, it swells, it runs along the line as fire leaps along the rigging of a ship. It is as if some one pulled out in succession all the stops of the infernal battle-organ, but only struck one note which they all speak in different voices.’”
The Civil War: An Illustrated History Geoffrey C. Ward P. 255-256 Interview with Ken Burns
“Burns: Someone once remarked that the Civil War occurred during the medical middle ages. What was it like?
Foote: When you see the instruments used in surgery, it’s enough to make your hair stand on end– the bone saws and things. I’m sure they did the best they could. In many instances on the southern side they didn’t have medicines to use. Lack of chloroform,* for instance, during amputations was a horrible thing to contemplate.
They not only didn’t subscribe to the germ theory: they didn’t suspect that it existed. Blood poisoning, erysipelas, pneumonia, even measles was a big killer. They did not know how to treat them, let alone not having penicillin. It was just a question of a crisis and surviving or a crisis and dying. It’s a wonder they did as well as they did.
In the early days of the war especially, a camp, whether northern or southern, was an uproarious thing with the coughing. There was a tremendous amount of coughing in the camps in the early days. They all shook down. You couldn’t tell a city boy from a country boy after they’d been in the army a year or two.
It was tough. There were little things. They made regular twenty-five-mile marches. I made two or three twenty-five-mile marches in the army and I was broken down for days after it. They made them frequently, and when you were issued a pair of shoes in the northern army, they weren’t left foot and right foot, they were the same foot. You wore them into being a left-foot shoe or a right-foot. And when you imagine making twenty-five-mile marches with inferior footwear, let alone barefoot, the way many Confederates were, it’s unbelievable the way they could function.
There was a lot of boredom, as there is in all armies. Combat is a very small part of army service if you’re talking about the amount of time spent in it. Everything is boring. The food is bad. The time on your hands is bad. The lack of reading materials is bad. It’s nearly all boredom. All armies have that saying, “Hurry up and wait.” There was an awful lot of that. The boredom was especially oppressive when combines with the heat of summer, as at Vicksburg or Petersburg. Partly out of bravado but mainly out of boredom, the men would leap up on the parapets and make insulting gestures toward the other side while they shot at him– just from sheer boredom. Some of them got shot doing it, too.
There was no expiration of enlistments on the Confederate side. They were in for the war. There were expirations of enlistment on the Union side and plenty of them. For instance in the trenches at Cold Harbor there were men whose time was up in the middle of the battle and who left, crawling on all fours, to keep from being killed while getting away.
They both had a particular way of yelling. The Northern troops made a sort of Hurrah– it was called by one soldier “the deep generous manly shout of the Northern soldier.” The Confederates of course had what was called the Rebel Yell. We don’t really know what that sounded like. It was basically, I think a sort of fox-hunt yip mixed up with a sort of banshee squall, and it was used on the attack. An old Confederate veteran after the war was asked at a United Veterans of the Confederacy meeting in Tennessee somewhere to give the Rebel Yell. The ladies had never heard it. And he said, “It can’t be done, except at a run, and I couldn’t do it anyhow with a mouthful of false teeth and a stomach full of food.” So they never got to hear what it sounded like!
Burns: How could those men do what they did and make the charges they made? It seems incredible.
Foote: The main reason you did it was because the man next to you did it. It was unit pride. If you stop to think about it, it would have been much harder not to go than to go. It would have taken a great deal of courage to say, “Marse Robert, I ain’t goin’.” Nobody’s got that much courage.
But it’s hard to understand. Those men seem larger than life in what they could endure, especially if you know anything about the medical attention they got. It was so crude, the lack of anesthetics, all those things. It’s almost unbelievable that men could perform over a period of four years. Anybody could go out and perform some afternoon. These men kept it up year after year.
You have to remember that [the men in a regiment] were all from the same state. They had followed the same flag. The names of the battles they had fought in were stitched on that flag. And there was a great deal of unit pride. And I’m sure there was a great deal of sadness over the losses that they suffered. But there was a closeness among those men that came from years of being exposed to the most horrendous warfare that I know of.
There was a big problem with units of men all from the same state or county or even town. If one of those regiments got into a very tight spot in a particular battle, like in the cornfield at Sharpsburg, the news might be that there were no more young men from that town. They were all dead. That happened to units from Clarksville, Tennessee. I once saw some figures on how many men they sent to war and how many came back, and you wouldn’t believe the low number that came back.
Bedford Forrest’s granddaughter lived here in Memphis. She recently died and I got to know her and she even let me swing the general’s saber around my head once, which was a great treat. And I thought a long time and I called her and said, ‘I think the war produced two authentic geniuses. One of them was your grandfather. The other was Abraham Lincoln.” And there was a silence at the other end of the phone. And she said, “Well, you know in our family we never thought much of Mr. Lincoln.” She didn’t like my coupling her grandfather with Abraham Lincoln all these years later. Southerners are very strange about that war.”
Note: Southerners are very strange about that war.
Note: Today the Buffalo Massacre was a few hours ago, 2022, by a teenager motivated by what he thinks is his White Supremacy. The “replacement” theory espoused by Fox&Co., Tucker Carlson, et al. I read his “manifesto” before it came down where he insisted he isn’t mentally ill. Also watched the livestream footage. Propagandized, evil, demented, and mentally ill & I hope he gets the death penalty. The Republican cry “They’re trying to take our guns” doesn’t hold water anymore. What they already took– again & again– isn’t guns, but the lives of people who don’t look exactly like them. That’s it. That’s what’s being snuffed out repeatedly.
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plenty room to build a large town….
War news: whatever else it was, it wasn’t what it claimed to be in Harper’s Weekly. Vague advisories The Yankees Are Coming or On To Richmond! The cut & paste script for each day with so much redacted no one knows anything; therefore, everyone knew the same thing. War Department-directed disinformation agents removed all the words they decide you don’t need, then dragged & dropped propaganda letter by letter into the public’s mouth, & finding it could still breathe around them, left them with the Roman Eye Balsam ads, the wedding cards for sale, & inquiries like “Do you want luxuriant whiskers or mustaches?” Eventually the war ate through the cheap paper & shortcut reality they carved in a woodcut to get the picture in the paper before the dystopian deep-fakes with the film-level CGI show up & we can get nearly any place on Earth in 20 hours or less to see for ourselves if the news is true.
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