Day 63. May 2, 1862.
63
40,000 men had left the line….
May Friday 2. 1862.
Quite a fine morning but cloudy. Cleard off about 8 oclock. The sun came out and the ground soon dryed off. We had to put up our Hospital Tent. It was quite a job. We got our medicines gathered up and opened out. We have a delightful camp and near Smiths Creek. I have saw some of as good land as I ever saw. The day is fine. I don’t know how long we may stay here and we have nothing but crackers to eat today. The following companys here came on Co. A. B. C. E. G. K. This was a very warm day. We got our Hospital tent fix up very well and a fine location for a camp which was Camp Shobure
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 25-26
“Duty and honor were closely linked to concepts of masculinity in Victorian America. Boyhood was a time of preparation for the tests and responsibilities of manhood. And there would be no sterner test than war. It quite literally separated men from boys. The letters and diaries of Union and Confederate volunteers alike– those in their thirties as well as those in their teens– are full of references to the need to prove one’s self a man: “I determined to stand up to duty and preserve my manhood and honor let come what may” (20th Illinois). “I would be less than a man if in any way I fell short of the discharge of duty at my country’s call” (8th Missouri Confederate). “I really feel inwardly that I want to go and do my part- as a Man” (16th Pennsylvania Cavalry). Anyone who stays home “is no part of a man” (4th North Carolina) “It ought to be a consolation to know that you have a Husband that is man enough to fight for his Country” (62nd Pennsylvania). “I have acted the part of a man” (3rd Virginia Cavalry). Anyone who cannot stand the hardships and dangers “had better pack his knapsack and gow home to his mother” (2nd Michigan, killed at Williamsburg).
P. 79
In Civil War argot, one of the favorite devices of men who wanted to skulk out of combat was to “play off”– to feign sickness– when their real ailment was “cannon fever.” Letters from fighting soldiers are full of contempt for men in their companies who were “taken very suddenly ill” when action portended. A captain in the 63th Ohio wrote in his diary after a fight that “the usual number of cowards got sick and asked to be excused.” A private in a Kentucky Confederate regiment damned the “infurnel cowards” in his company who “reported Sick when the fight was expected.” But he was proud that all of his messmates “walk out like men” to meet the enemy. A soldier in the 38th Tennessee told his wife after Shiloh that “some of our Company disgraced themselves by falling back, pretending to be very lame. I would have gone in if I had to have gone in on one leg.”
To avoid the taint of cowardice, many genuinely sick soldiers did go into battle on one leg, so to speak. A corporal in the 24th Michigan wrote in his diary during the battle of Fredericksburg: “Feel quite sick. If it were not for being called a Sneak and a coward I would not be in the ranks today.” A sergeant in the 155th Pennsylvania disobeyed the surgeon’s order sending him to the hospital during the Bristoe campaign because “there are so many get off by pretending to be sick that a man is always looked upon with suspicion if he goes to a hospital, especially if there is a fight expected soon.”
P. 81
Some studies of combat motivation have found that the felt need of a soldier to prove himself in the eyes of his comrades is strongest in his first battle or two. After that the veteran believes he has done enough to demonstrate his courage, and subsequently his fear of death or a crippling wound sometimes overmasters his fear of showing fear. One study finds the same to be true for the Civil War, in which the seemingly endless carnage by 1863 supposedly eroded the Victorian notions of manhood, courage, and honor that soldiers had carried into the army.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 129
“By early 1863, deliberate self-mutilation became common enough to stop the Union from granting discharges. At the same time, sympathy among civilians for men resisting service actually began to increase as casualties ballooned and injustices in the recruiting system became apparent. In some communities, potential draftees might blow their trigger finger off without facing ostracism.
P. 119
Astounding numbers left the ranks during heavy campaigning. After Fredericksburg, the woods filled with Union stragglers; a little later, during the infamous Mud March, a contemporary estimate put the AWOL at 3,000 officers and 82,000 other ranks. On the Rebel side, Lee blamed straggling for the curtailment of his 1862 Maryland campaign, telling Charles Squires, commanding the Washington Artillery: “The infantry, sir, are straggling, they are straggling,” adding, “Captain, our men are acting badly.” The government in Richmond calculated 40,000 men had left the line. Lee again charged that absenteeism thwarted his Pennsylvania offensive, asserting, “The number of desertions from the army is so great and still continues to such an extent that unless some cessation of them can be caused I fear success in the field will be severely endangered.” In the Union camp, provost marshal General Patrick opined that, unless Meade “does something to keep better discipline in his command, there will be few troops to put into action.” He complained that “the whole country is full of stragglers.’”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 117
“One of the most notorious instances of troops degenerating into an hysterical mob took place at Shiloh where a spirited early morning Rebel attack caught Union troops still in camp and unawares. As Northern soldiers fled their tents, retreat became rout, terror infecting a large portion of the army. A demoralized crowd of thousands huddled on the riverbank, struggling to get on the steamers trying to land fresh troops. On one boat, Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce,* 9th Indiana, noted that “this abominable mob had to be kept off her with bayonets.” Northern war correspondent Henry Villard counted “an immense panic-stricken, uncontrollable mob” of some 7,000 to 10,000 men, including field officers, “all apparently bereft of soldierly spirit.” Mass despair gripped them, stealing their will to fight. General Grant believed the refugees “would have been shot where they lay, without resistance, before they would have taken muskets and marched to the front to protect them.’”
Note: Yes, that Ambrose Bierce. See May 27 here for his story “The Crime at Pickett’s Mill.”
Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 248
THE BATTLE OF SHILOH
Ulysses S. Grant, General, U.S.A.
“On one occasion during the day, I rode back as far as the river and met General Buell, who had just arrived; I do not remember the hour, but at that time there probably were as many as four or five thousand stragglers lying under cover of the river-bluff, panic-stricken, most of whom would have been shot where they lay, without resistance, before they would have taken muskets and marched to the front to protect themselves. This meeting between General Buell and myself was on the dispatch-boat used to run between the landing and Savannah. It was brief, and related specifically to his getting his troops over the river. As we left the boat together, Buell’s attention was attracted by the men lying under cover of the bank. I saw him berating them and trying to shame them into joining their regiments. He even threatened them with shells from the gun-boats nearby. But it was all to no effect. Most of these men afterward proved themselves as gallant as any of those who saved the battle from which they had deserted. I have no doubt that this sight impressed General Buell with the idea that a line of retreat would be a good thing just then. If he had come in by the front instead of through the stragglers in the rear, he would have thought and felt differently. Could he have come through the Confederate rear, he would have witnessed there a scene similar to that at our own. The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front. Later in the war, while occupying the country between the Tennessee and the Mississippi, I learned that the panic in the Confederate lines had not differed much from that within our own. Some of the country people estimated the stragglers from Johnston’s army as high as twenty thousand. Of course, this was an exaggeration.”
Terrible Swift Sword Bruce Catton P. 15-19 (selections)
“Whatever finally determined the outcome of the battle of Shiloh, the end did not come because either army took fright and ran away or got weary and dogged it.
So the Federal front was sketchy, and it remained so even when the troops in the rear were moved forward, because as they moved up the men in front were being pushed back, and there never was a really connected front. There were many battles but no one line of battle; Shiloh was a grab bag full of separate combats in which divisions, brigades, and even regiments fought on their own, each one joined by fragments of other commands that had fallen apart in the shock of action, most of them fighting with their flanks in the air, knowing nothing of any battle except the fragment which possessed them—great waves of sound beating on them, smoke streaking the fields and making blinding clouds under the trees, advance and retreat taking place because sometimes because someone had ordered it and sometimes on the impulse of the untaught soldiers who were doing the fighting.
Many of them, naturally, cut and ran for it without delay. Part of Sherman’s division simply disappeared, and by noon there were thousands of Union fugitives glued to the ground on the river bank at Pittsburg Landing, men so overwhelmed by terror that no conceivable effort could get them back into action: Grant estimated later that at no time during the day were more than 25,000 Federals actually fighting. Many Confederates were beguiled by the fact that the camps they captured had abundant food lying ready to hand, the breakfasts which the Yankees had not time to eat; hungry soldiers paused to fill their bellies and drifted out of any man’s control. A nephew of Varina Davis, an officer in a Mississippi regiment, told about finding a crowd of 300 men or more lounging about in the rear. These men explained that “we are all smashed,” although they had lost no more than three or four killed and two dozen wounded, and he wrote angrily: “These are the kind of troops of which you read gallant deeds and reckless conduct, they lose half a dozen, retire in time to save their haversacks and are puffed accordingly.”
Yet the stragglers and the incontinent foragers and the faint-hearts were, incredibly enough, in the minority. Sherman’s division broke, retreated, and reformed its fragments with McClernand’s men, but the records showed that it had 1900 casualties, which proves that it did a good deal of fighting. If many Confederates left the ranks to sack the Yankee camps, more of them stopped only long enough to pick up modern muskets to replace their own antiquated weapons; the rear was disorder raised to the nth power, but on the firing line everything was strictly business, and men who were frightened almost out of their wits managed to keep on fighting. Wholly characteristic was the breathless comment in one Confederate’s letter: “It was an awful thing to hear no intermission in firing and hear the clatter of small arms and the whizing minny balls and rifle shot and the sing of grape shot the hum of canon balls and the roaring of the bomb shell and explosion of the same seaming to be a thousand every minute… O God forever keep me out of such another fight. I was not scared I was just in danger.”
All morning the Federals were pushed back. Johnston’s plan was working… except that there was one hard core of Federal resistance, Prentiss’s men and some of W.H.L. Wallace’s, who took their stand at last in an old country lane that ran along the crest of an almost imperceptible little rise in the ground, with briar patches and underbrush all along the front; the famous “sunken road” of postwar memories, although in actual fact it was not sunken at all and was held, apparently, just because it was a handy place to form a line and because the men who formed the line did not want to go back any farther. Grant rode up once and told Prentiss to hold the line at all hazards, and, after Grant left, the lawyer-soldier and his men obeyed orders literally. This place and the ground in front became known as the hornet’s nest; the men beat off repeated Confederate assaults, and hugged the earth grimly when Rebel artillerists put many guns in line and pounded the lane and the trees around it and everything to the sides and in the rear… and the Federals stayed and shot the next Confederate attack to bits, and noon passed and the afternoon grew long and the sun dipped down toward the smoky skyline, and but for the stand that was made here General Johnston might have driven Grant’s army into the river or into Owl Creek swamp or straight into perdition itself and the victory he wanted so desperately would have been won.
Johnston himself had been up in front all day, riding from this place to that, keeping the attack moving; and at last he came up near a peach orchard, a little to the east of the hornet’s nest, and tried to get a new assault organized. The air was full of bullets, and one bullet ripped away the sole of one of his boots: he waggled his foot, laughed, told an aide that this had come pretty close but that he was unhurt; then a bullet struck him in the leg, cutting an artery, and he reeled in the saddle, growing faint from loss of blood before he knew that he had been hit. He was laid on the ground, somebody went to find a surgeon, nobody thought of applying a tourniquet… and then, apparently in no panic, speaking no word, he looked up at the sky and died.
It was a dreadful night. Toward midnight there was a hard thunderstorm, with a downpour to soak the soldiers who slept among so many dead and wounded. Sudden flashes of lightning illuminated hideous scenes—dead men everywhere, pools and creeks given a ghastly tint by the blood of wounded men who had crawled down to drink and had died with their faces in the water, brambly fields carpeted with torn bodies, helpless wounded men lying in the downpour chanting weak calls for help: the memory of it leading one Confederate to write: “O it was too shocking too horribel. God Grant that I may never be the partaker in such scenes again… when released from this I shall ever be an advocate of peace.”
But things are seldom all of one pattern. There are men who ate well and slept well that night. After all, the Federal camps were there to be looted, and many of the tired Confederates feasted and told one another that there would be nothing to do tomorrow but bury the dead and finish raking in the Yankee supplies; no doubt the enemy had all gone across the river. A Tennessee soldier recalled that “our mess had that night all the tea, coffee, sugar, cheese, hardtack and bacon they could want,” and remembered that wine and liquor were found among the surgeon’s stores; in the morning one stout foot soldier tried to go into battle with a huge cheese impaled on his bayonet. Some men became so interested in the spoils that they forgot about the unfinished battle, and one Confederate officer wrote bitterly that if the high command had had the sense to burn all of the captured stores that night the army might have won the fight next day. All through the Federal camps, he said, Confederate soldiers were picking up valuables, and by midnight “half of our army was straggling back to Corinth loaded down with belts, sashes, swords, officers’ uniforms, Yankee letters, daguerreotypes of Yankee sweethearts, likenesses of Grant, Buell, Smith, Prentiss, McClellan, Lincoln, etc., some on Yankee mules and horses, some on foot, some on the ground prostrate with Cincinnati whiskey.” General Bragg told his wife that Shiloh was lost because of lack of discipline and lack of good officers, concluding savagely: “Universal suffrage, furloughs & whiskey have ruined us.”
That looting, straggling, and lack of discipline harmed the army is beyond question, but the plain fact is that regardless of these things the army had had it. That it had done as much as it had done was one of the marvels of the war; to do anything more was wholly out of the question. Grant’s army had been shaken to its shoetops but it had never quite been broken; Grant himself had never had any notion of retreating, even when things were at their worst; Lew Wallace’s division reached him not long after dark, and during the night 20,000 of Buell’s soldiers came across the river—and when the morning of April 7 came there was nothing Beauregard could do but get his men back to Corinth as best he could.
He did not do this at once. The fighting began all over again soon after sunrise, and for most of the morning it was a hard, stubborn battle, the Federals attacking now, the Confederates disputing every inch of the ground. Not until after noon did Beauregard accept the inevitable and order a retreat, and when his army withdrew the Federals made no more than a gesture of pursuit. Grant’s army had been fought out. Buell’s troops were fresh enough, but Buell was only partly under Grant’s orders, the relationship between the two generals was exceedingly delicate, and each man apparently felt that it would be just as well to let the soldiers catch their breath and think about going after this Confederate army at some later date.
It is clear enough now that a hard, vigorous pursuit might have destroyed Beauregard’s army. But the controlling fact undoubtedly was that this battle had brought utter exhaustion to the victor as well as to the defeated. The Unionists had lost upwards of 13,000 men, the Confederates more than 10,000, and the figures call for a little reflection. The armies that met on April 6 were larger than the armies that met at Bull Run, but—it can stand one more repetition– they were hardly in the slightest degree better trained or organized. They had fought three times as long as the Bull Run armies had fought, and had suffered approximately five times the losses, and although there had been no heavy straggling on both sides there had been no actual rout. If in the end they drifted apart, it is no wonder. In all American history, no more amazing battle was ever fought than this one.
Nor have many battles been more decisive, in their effect on the course of a war. Shiloh represented a supreme effort on the part of the Confederacy to turn the tables, to recoup what had been lost along the Tennessee-Kentucky line, to win a new chance to wage war wets of the Appalachians on an equal footing. It failed. After this, the Southern nation could do no more than fight an uphill fight to save part of the Mississippi Valley—the great valley of American empire without which the war could not be won.”
Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 262
SURPRISE AND WITHDRAWAL AT SHILOH.
S.H. Lockett, Colonel, C.S.A.
“I witnessed the various bloody and unsuccessful attacks on the “Hornets Nest.” During one of the dreadful repulses of our forces, General Bragg directed me to ride forward to the central regiment of a brigade of troops that was recoiling across an open field, to take its colors and carry them forward. “The flag must not go back again,” he said. Obeying the order, I dashed through the line of battle, seized the colors from the color-bearer, and said to him, “General Bragg says these colors must not go to the rear.” While I was talking to him the color-sergeant was shot down. A moment or two afterward I was almost alone on horseback in the open field between the two lines of battle. An officer came up to me with a bullet-hole in each cheek, the blood streaming from his mouth, and asked, “What are you doing with my colors, sir?” “I am obeying General Bragg’s orders, sir, to hold them where they are,” was my reply. “Let me have them,” he said. “If any man but my color-bearer carries these colors, I am the man. Tell General Bragg I will see that these colors are in the right place. But he must attack this position in flank; we can never carry it alone from the front.” It was Colonel H.W. Allen, afterward Governor Allen of Louisiana. I returned, miraculously preserved, to General Bragg, and reported Colonel Allen’s words. I then carried an order to the same troops, giving the order, I think, to General Gibson, to fall back to the fence in the rear and reorganize. This was done, and then General Bragg dispatched me to the right, and Colonel Frank Gardner (afterward Major-General) to the left, to inform the brigade and division commanders on either side that a combined movement would be made on the front and flanks of that position. The movements were made, and Prentiss was captured.”
Note: Jackson is shot tonight in 1863; hangs on until May 10th. He was 39, & dies at Guinea Station, Virginia. Last words: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” which is maybe the most well-known line out of the war. See May 10th for accounts of his shooting and death, & how the men who shot him reacted….
Note: The Battle of Chancellorsville, April 30-May 6, 1863: the moon, a year from tonight, will be so luminous as to be mentioned in battle reports. Whitman notes it 5 times in his poem A Night Battle: “at times the moon shining out full and clear/ while over all the clear, large moon comes out at times softly/ the radiance of the moon/ those shadowy-tangles, flashing-moonbeam’d woods/ and still again the moonlight pouring silvery soft its radiant patches over all/.” Whitman was not present at any battle in this, or any other, war.
Quoting astronomer Don Olson and researcher Laurie Jasinski from Texas State University in a study that appears in Sky & Telescope Magazine (2013) CBS 6 staff wtvr.com/2013/05/01/full-moon-civil-war-death
“If Jackson’s reconnaissance party was riding in bright moonlight, then his own men should have recognized them as they returned from the Union’s side, but Olson and Jasinski said they did not– for good reason. “The 18th North Carolina was looking to the southeast, directly toward the rising moon,” they said. It stood at “25 degrees above the horizon” at the time, just at the wrong angle. The bright moon would’ve silhouetted Jackson and his officers, completely obscuring their identities. Our astronomical analysis partially absolves the 18th North Carolina from blame for the wounding of Jackson,” Olson says.”
Note: The Chancellorsville shot— https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:4b29gk537—is the one by Mathew Brady with the crazy light streaks hovering over the wall by the Confederate dead that no one can determine what are, even now. It’s now commonly reported that camera equipment fails in this area. In 1863, today opens the Chancellorsville Campaign. Some think it’s Lee’s greatest victory. Hooker turns Lee’s left flank which might trap his army against Rappahannock river. According to battlefields.org, just 103 photographs were taken of dead soldiers during the war.
Note: See Earl J. Hess, pages 161-165 in Lens Of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War (edited by J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher) for a lengthy discussion about the streaks.
P. 161
“The scene depicts the area just behind the stone retaining wall that shouldered the eastern side of a road running along the foot of Marye’s Heights west of Fredericksburg, Virginia. This area had already seen a great battle only four and a half months before this photograph was exposed. On December 13, 1862, Confederate soldiers crouching behind the wall had shot down thousands of attacking Union troops. The Federal effort in the battle of Fredericksburg had produced thirteen thousand casualties and no results remotely worth the human cost.
P. 164-165
There is much more than four bodies lying in the ditch.
Clearly discernible upon enlargement is a cartridge box. A bayonet is stuck into the ground next to the second body (the one that probably is a Confederate soldier). It is not attached to a musket. There are many blankets and a bayonet scabbard. And there are the rifle muskets lying across the ditch.
Much material also lies between the ditch and the stone wall. Before noticing it, we should consider the wall itself. It was made of fairly large stones, neatly fitted together, even though a few of the stones have fallen down. After all, Federals in effect sclaed the wall or jumped over it during their assault. Note also the wall would go up to about a man’s waist, providing a good shelter for troops to repel an assault upon the foot of Marye’s Heights. Russell’s view looks south; there is a two-story house in the distance, outside the wall.
Among the items lying near the wall, there is a knapsack, blankets, canteens. One can see what appears to be a large book or newspaper, though it may be a white cotton haversack. The inevitable rifle-muskets, carefully stacked to lean against the stones, are there too.
This photograph has always impressed me. Not only does it reveal a great deal about combat, but it has two fascinating features that provoke a different kind of examination. There are two unexplained streaks of brilliant light in the view. One appears vertically in the left foreground. In fact, it crosses the leg of the first body, the one with the bloody face and the upward stare. The other is less obviously visible, but upon enlargement you can see that it is a complex bit of light in the midground of the image and centered against the stone wall. This second image has a long horizontal line, and five shorter lines emanating from the center of that horizontal line.
How does one explain these two instances of brilliant light? If you want to think technically, you can dismiss them as the sun glinting off the burnished steel of the many muskets that lay about. But I have never seen lights like these in other Civil War battlefield photographs, no matter how many muskets lay about.
If we forget the technical and consider the sublime, we can recall the long tradition of belief in spirit photographs that has been part of the history of photography ever since the technology was invented nearly two hundred years ago. The idea is that the souls of the departed can manifest in photographs as points or streaks of light, and sometimes with lights appearing as shapes roughly resembling human form. In addition, the trauma of World War I produced a good deal of speculation on the particular aspects of battlefield death. The idea here is that, dying violently, the souls of departed soldiers often linger at the scene in a confused state before moving on. The twentieth century is filled with literature on this subject.
Both lights in Russell’s photograph are intense. The vertical streak in the foreground has its lower end close to a musket, but near the musket the light is less intense, which would be unlikely if it was glinting from the gun itself. The more elaborate one in the midground has no connection to any musket, and it shoots off in different directions. The lights do not appear to have been superimposed by the photographer as an afterthought., and they do not seem to be clearly caused by something that is material within the view of Russell’s camera. If one saw this sort of phenomenon in many other Civil War photographs, it would be easy enough to dismiss it as possibly caused by the camera lens. But these emanations of light remain an intriguing source of thought and wonder to me.”
Note: 11/15-12/21/64, 60,000 Northerners rage 285 miles on the March to the Sea. 100 million (1.4 billion in 2010) in damage in the Atlanta area. Took the South over a century to overcome this march. Southerners were resentful of Yankees for decades. And… obviously still. Who’s to blame them? Many of Sherman’s Atlanta troops were teenagers. They were just punks, teenage punks for the most part. How does someone’s life turn out after they have full license to act like that? When the Saints Go Marching In?
Note: Rebels did go marching in in Chambersburg, PA. in part as retaliation for the burning of the Shenandoah Valley.
Also note, note: Some people are too far gone. The distance from the head to the heart is 18 inches. It’s just too far.
I have saw some of as good land as I ever saw….
Some things are handed down face-to-face, other things given forth in a Will, but some say the most important are passed on by blood. The good land lays like a blood sample, like fresh soil on a grave, waiting.
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