Day 64. May 3, 1862.
64
the stupid courage is inconceivable….
May Saturday 3 1862
Quite a fine clear sky this morning and cool and we have orders to be ready to march at 9oclock. We were all very buissy all morning packing up the medicines. The men cooking up their rations so at 10oclock we took up the line of march with the 7 & 29 Ohio Regts 7 Indiana Regts. After we had marched some 5 miles the 5th New York cavalry passed us. There was 1100 and a fine body of men. We came on towards Harrisonburg in Rockingham County Virginia. We camped 7 miles north of Harrisonburg on a farm of Mowes. We have a fine location for a camp. We are 31 miles from Staunton 110 miles from Richmond. The day was very warm and was a hard time to march as some had to carry their knapsack. The grain looks fine and hundreds of acres there is no fence
Note: 1865
The Civil War The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 718 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:
NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865
Samuel T. Foster: Diary, April 18-May 4, 1865
May 3rd
“After turning in our guns, and getting our patrols, we feel relieved. No more picket duty, no more guard duty, no more fighting, no more war. It is all over, and we are going home. HOME after an absence of four years from our families and friends.
Actually going to start home tomorrow or perhaps this morning.
Left our camp sure enough at 9 A.M. Came 10 miles, crossed the R.R. At Thomasville, and came 12 miles further towards Salisbury making 22 miles today, and all hands very tired.”
*To protect (a position, vehicle, or troops) against enemy observation or gunfire. Oxford Dictionary
Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War Jonathan W. White P. 110
“Prophecies, presentiments, and dreams of death caused soldiers to grapple with the gravity of their tenuous situations. Sometimes this manifested itself through expressions of denial. One of the most common ways that soldiers responded to a comrade who had a presentiment was to laugh at him. The boys of the Ninety-Third New York Infantry had such a reaction to David Van Buren after he reported “a dream, in which he saw himself in battle and that he was slain, being the first one to fall.” When he related his dream, “His comrades tried to divert his mind and laugh him out of it, but he could not shake off the feeling.” When the Battle of the Wilderness began, Van Buren grabbed his gun courageously and was one of the first men to fall, “thus verifying his dream.” Soldiers in the Ninety-Sixth Illinois, 140th and 147th Pennsylvania, and Twelfth Wisconsin responded similarly to comrades who had presentiments of death.
P. 110-111
In some cases, soldiers sought to encourage their comrades. One night, Pvt. Charles Walker of the Twenty-Second Massachusetts Volunteers dreamed that he “lost an arm, near the shoulder.” His comrades “tried in vain to cheer him up” but “nothing could drive away his dreadful presentiment.” According to his regimental historian, his “state of mind affected his body” and he died a few days later. In a few cases, soldiers taunted their suffering comrades. Pvt. James Sleeper of the Eleventh New Hampshire Infantry came out for roll call one morning shortly before the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 “feeling pretty low-spirited.” When asked what was the matter, he replied, “During the night I had a presentiment that I should be killed in my first battle.” Lt. Charles E. Bartlett curly replied, “I shall go through the whole war, and come out without a scratch.” The Eleventh’s regimental historian concluded, “And, strange as it may seem, both were right.” Sleeper was wounded on December 13 and died the following day. Soldiers in the Second Pennsylvania Reserves threatened to shoot a comrade who always shirked during battle because of a presentiment he’d had. When they finally forced him into a fight, “he fell dead with nine of the enemy’s balls in him.”
P. 111
Many soldiers who had prophetic dreams and presentiments began to order their worldly affairs. Officers frequently told their comrades how to dispose of their bodies once they had fallen. Prior to being killed at Gaines Mill on June 27, 1862, Capt. William Partridge of the Fifth New York Infantry saw a vision of “John Brown with outstretched arms ready to receive him.” Knowing that he would soon die, he gave directions for the disposition of his body after he was killed. Some officers expressed their desire to have their corpses sent home, while others ordered their men to bury their bodies in the field where they fell. Soldiers also often prepared packages for their loved ones, or wrote letters or instructions to be sent home upon their demise. Outside of Petersburg on March 25, 1865, Pvt. John Smith of the Tenth Vermont dreamed that he would be killed that day, and he asked a friend to send home his ring and a few other things. True enough, Smith was killed, and his friend took the ring from his finger to send home.”
Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (1898) Frank Wilkeson, A Survivor of Grant’s Last Campaign P. 48-52
“During the day we had occasionally heard the faint report of distant rifles or the heavy, muffled report of a gun, and we suspected that our cavalry was feeling of Lee’s men, who were intrenched near Mine Run, but whose pickets were all over the adjacent country. All of the enlisted men hoped that they would get through the Wilderness—a rugged, broken area of upland that extends from the Rapidan River close to Spottyslvania [sic]—without fighting. The timber is dense and scrubby, and the whole region is cut up by a labyrinth of roads which lead to clearings of charcoal pits and there end. Deep ravines, thickly clad with brush and trees, furrow the forest. The Confederates knew the region thoroughly. Many of their soldiers had worked in the region, which is a mineral one. They knew where the roads led to, where the water was, where the natural line of defence was. We knew nothing, excepting that the Army of the Potomac, under Hooker, had once encountered a direful disaster on the outskirts of this desolate region. On all sides I heard the murmur of the enlisted men as they expressed the hope that they would not have to fight in the Wilderness.
In the evening, after supper, I walked with a comrade to the spot where General Pleasanton had massed his guns and saved the army under Hooker from destruction, by checking the impetuous onslaught of Stonewall Jackson’s Virginian infantry, fresh from the pleasures of the chase of the routed Eleventh Corps. We walked to and fro over the old battle-field, looking at the bullet-scarred and canister-riven trees. The men who had fallen in that fierce fight had apparently been buried where they fell, and buried hastily. Many polished skulls lay on the ground. Leg bones, arm bones, and ribs could be found without trouble. Toes of shoes, and bits of faded, weather-worn uniforms, and occasionally a grinning, bony, fleshless face peered through the low mound that had been hastily thrown over these brave warriors. As we wandered to and fro over the battle-ground, looking at the gleaming skulls and whitish bones, and examining the exposed clothing of the dead to see if they had been Union or Confederate soldiers, many infantrymen joined us. It grew dark, and we built a fire at which to light our pipes close to where we thought Jackson’s men had formed for the charge, as the graves were thickest there, and then we talked of the battle of the preceeding year. We say on long, low mounds. The dead were all around us. Their eyeless skulls seemed to stare steadily at us. The smoke drifted to and fro among us. The trees swayed and sighed gently in the soft wind. One veteran told the story of the burning of some of the Union soldiers who were wounded during Hooker’s fight around the Wilderness, as they lay helpless in the woods. It was a ghastly and awe-inspiring tale as he vividly told it to us as we sat among the dead. This man finished his story by saying shudderingly:
“This region,” indicating the woods beyond us with a wave of his arms, “is an awful place to fight in. The utmost extent of vision is one hundred yards. Artillery cannot be used effectively. The wounded are liable to be burned to death. I am willing to take my chances of getting killed, but I dread to have a leg broken and then to be burned if we fight here. I hope we get through this chapparal without fighting,” and he took off his cap and meditatively rubbed the dust off the red clover leaf which indicated the division and corps he belonged to. As we sat silently smoking and listening to the story, an infantry soldier who had, unobserved by us, been prying into the shallow grave he sat on with his bayonet, suddenly rolled a skull on the ground before us, and said in a deep, low voice: “That is what you are all coming to, and some of you will start toward it to-morrow.” It was growing late, and this uncanny remark broke up the group, most of the men going to their regimental camps. A few of us still sat by the dying embers and smoked. As we talked we heard picket-firing, not brisk, but at short intervals the faint report of a rifle quickly answered. And we reasoned correctly that a Confederate skirmish line was in the woods, and that battle would be offered in the timber. The intelligent enlisted men of the Second Corps with whom I talked that night listened attentively to the firing, now rising, now sinking into silence, to again break out in another place. All of them said that Lee was going to face Grant in the Wilderness, and they based their opinion on the presence of a Confederate skirmish line in the woods. And all of them agreed that the advantages of position were with Lee, and that his knowledge of the region would enable him to face our greatly superior army in point of numbers, with a fair prospect of success. But every infantry soldier I talked with was resolute in his purpose to fight desperately and aid to win a victory that would end the war, if it was possible to win it.”
Conversations with Shelby Foote Edited by William C. Carter P. 29-30
(Note: from a 1966 interview)
“Carr: Sounds like two bunches of very limited people fighting a tremendously bloody war.
Foote: You don’t want to overlook something that they did have and that was tremendous courage. I’ve studied and studied hard the charge at Gettysburg, the charge at Franklin, the charge at Gaines Mill, or the Northern side charging at Fredericksburg wave after wave, and I do not know of any force on God’s earth that would have gotten me in any one of those charges. It absolutely called for you to go out there and face certain death, practically. Now I will do any kind of thing like that under the influence of elation and the adrenaline popping; it’s just inconceivable to us nowadays that men would try tactics that were fifty years behind the weapons. They thought that to mass your fire, you had to mass your men, so they suffered casualties. Some battles ran as high as 30 per cent. Now that’s just unbelievable, because 4 or 5 per cent is very heavy casualties nowadays. You go into a battle and suffer 30 per cent… at Pickett’s charge, they suffer 60 percent and it’s inconceivable to us… the stupidity of it, again. The stupid courage is inconceivable. Originally, the South had a big advantage. They were used to the castes of society and did not take it as an affront that a man had certain privileges. They didn’t think that it made him any better than they were. But those privileges came his way, and they were perfectly willing for him to have them as long as he didn’t think he was any better than they were. Not the Northern soldiers, they weren’t putting up with any privileges. A Massachusetts outfit spent its first night in the field and damn near had a revolution because the officers wanted to put their bedrolls out of the line. Well, Southerners never had that problem. It seemed to them sensible that the officers should be over here, and the men there.”
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 91-93
“What of the opposite end of the spectrum, an attraction to the excitement of battle? Many soldiers loved the exaltation of spirit, the stimulation of their senses, that battle produced. These men reveled in physical courage while ignoring moral courage altogether. No thoughts of the cause, of home, or of honor inspired them to fight, only a desire to experience all the danger that combat had to offer. They felt a passionate, yet almost clinical, response to battle.
Combat greatly sensitized the faculties of soldiers who recognized the attraction of physical courage. “My mind took note of every thing transpiring, and every incident is stamped inefficably on my memory,” noted Colonel John S. Wilcox of the battle of Corinth. He “felt inclined to laugh and see every thing in a ludicrous light.” The varied sounds that minié balls made while flying through the air fascinated him, and even the “ring of balls against my sword” seemed to be a matter of intense curiosity rather than of fright. Throughout the two days of bitter fighting, Wilcox felt no fear at all, he wrote to his wife. Indeed, his description of the battle has an air of detached observation.
Lieutenant William Wheeler of the 13th New York Battery felt the same kind of overriding joy during all three days of the battle of Gettysburg. He was under fire often and was pushed to the outer limits of physical excitement. Under so much threat of death, Wheeler felt that the “danger was so great and so constant, that it took away the sense of danger.” Instead, he felt “joyous exaltation, a perfect indifference to the circumstances,” and he believed that they were three of the most enjoyable days of his life. Wheeler reexamined these feelings several months later and concluded that they were partly the result of his job as battery commander. He had to keep all his senses at their peak in order to work his pieces to their fullest effect, and this excited his nerves and senses to an unusually elevated level. Also, he believed that much of the joy of battle resulted from the fact that he knew he was in great danger but repeatedly escaped injury. The excitement of battle lay in gambling his life in countless and repeated ways and winning every time.
The so-called “joy of battle” was more often felt by troops under special tactical conditions, such as skirmishing or taking part in a particularly dangerous assault. The more individualized and fluid nature of fighting on the skirmish line allowed the soldier more freedom of movement and personal initiative. Eager soldiers took advantage of this environment to give free rein to whatever it was in battle that excited them. Attacking a battery of artillery or a heavily fortified position also inspired in many men a more intense emotional reaction to combat. They wrote of becoming so intoxicated by the excitement that a deadly assault seemed more like a dream than a reality. Impulsive reactions, “elation that lifts men above the fear of wounds or death,” were common themes in their descriptions of battle.
Major James A. Connolly participated in one of the few successful assaults against a fortified position during the entire war. It occurred during the battle of Jonesboro, as the end of the long campaign for Atlanta. Through hard experience, the men of Sherman’s army had come to know the futility of attacking fortifications, so the tension they felt when ordered to do it once again was enormous. This time they were lucky. The Confederates had made a mistake in building an angle in this line of works the night before, and it was vulnerable. Baird’s brigade in the Army of the Cumberland hit the angle, and the Rebel line collapsed. Connolly shared the elation felt by all of Baird’s soldiers when he realized that this last battle of the Atlanta campaign had been an unqualified success. He was overcome, his hat was off his head, and he could not keep himself from crying.”
”I could have lain down on that blood stained grass, amid the dying and the dead and wept with excess of joy. I have no language to express the rapture one feels in the moment of victory, but I do know that at such a moment one feels as if the joy were worth risking a hundred lives to attain it. Men at home will read of that battle and be glad of our success, but they can never feel as we felt, standing there quivering with excitement, amid the smoke and blood, and fresh horrors and grand trophies of that battle field.’”
Note: “Many soldiers loved the exaltation….” – This idea seems like a trick answer to a wrong question, an appearance held together by its opposite. Is Hess confusing adrenaline & camaraderie with emotions like fun? “Many” seems like a lot. Obviously individual skill sharpshooters had would bring them pride, for instance, but reading this makes me wonder if the entire war could have been simply skipped, & the men played fake war games instead, an early form of Call of Duty. If you lay awake all night, for several nights in a row, frightened to death about going into battle in a day, or in a few hours, taking your odds…. if you’ll make it out alive, or get a leg amputated, or be forced to kill someone else, then you get in that battle & make it out by the skin of your bared teeth, sure, you’re going to be in shock, and very alive in all your senses; granular detail, the world, it is right now momentarily present, everything brighter & sharper than it’s ever been as a survival mechanism, all that mixed in with extreme relief then in with all the words you could have caught mid-air if they meant anything but it turns out that language has nothing to do with the physical world, not in these instances, never. It’s the aliveness after the near-miss, not the near-miss, &c.
Ephraim, for one, didn’t find battle fun. I think he was scared to death. The sole entry Ephraim wrote that can be considered ambiguous in this sense was March 18: “I ought not to have come along as I was unwell and very bad cold but I expected that we would have a fight soon or expecting to have one so I thought it best to go along for I did not like to stay back and I concluded to go I did go and hoping to see something”– he is brand new to the war, “fatigued” and “unwell,” doesn’t want to be considered a shirker, & so goes with to be part of the group of men to check out whatever action there may be. In this context, the ambiguous word “hoping” lurks at the end of this entry.
Reading this by Hess made me think of a cat my friend & I saw hit by a car decades back driving down a road near Vail. We got the cat in the car & headed wherever we took it to save it. It sat there purring the whole time as we drove along. It was soothing itself. Not having fun.
“The Civil War In-Depth” Youtube video (Minute 39.22) Shelby Foote Interview
“Foote: “I don’t know of any soldiers in the war who were any braver than those men who charged the stone wall at the foot of Marye’s Height. Fredericksburg is a hell of a time. An example of Northern courage being matched against Southern elan [inaudible] so-called A-line. Southerners should have great admiration for the Northern army the way it behaved in that the greatest perhaps of its defeats.
Question: The men in that war seem to have shown a special courage. Did those on one side fight more bravely than those on the other?
Foote: More credit for valor is given to Confederate soldiers: they’re supposed to have had more elan and dash. Actually I know of no braver** men in either army than the Union troops at Fredericksburg, which was a serious defeat. But to keep charging that wall at the foot of Marye’s Heights after all the failures there’d been– and they were all failures– is a singular instance of valor. It was different from southern elan. It was a steadiness under fire, a continuing to press the point.”
Note: Keeping your life after getting to the wall– if you even made it that far– was very much a long-shot bet.
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson S.C. Gwynne P. 501
“In front of them lay three thousand Confederates arrayed three deep in the Sunken Road behind the stone wall. Forty to fifty above them on the heights were more infantry. These two positions created, in effect, two front lines, which together brought six thousand rifles to bear simultaneously across a six-hundred-yard front….”
“What happened over the next six hours was something close to butchery, one of the war’s worst and bloodiest examples. French’s men were cut to pieces. Two of his brigades suffered 50 percent casualties within minutes. Whole regiments melted away before the unceasing rolling crash of guns and muskets and the flashes of white fire inside a wall of smoke. The Union boys never got to the wall. Most never got within a hundred yards of it. After French’s division came Hancock’s, attacking brigade by brigade just as French had, and then Howard’s, Wilcox’s, Sturgis’s, and Griffin’s, and so on, all fed by the stubborn Burnside into the killing machine at the top of the hill. The pattern of the attack would change hardly at all. There was no art to what was happening on either side: the men went up the hill, were cut down where they stood, and the survivors fell back while their comrades advanced over all that human wreckage– almost eight thousand casualties against less than a thousand for Longstreet’s men. There was no glory on Marye’s Heights either, just men killing men in a terrible and systematic way. Seven full Union divisions were sent in, one brigade at a time in fourteen different assaults against six thousand rebels.”
The Shenandoah Campaign of 1862 Edited by Gary W. Gallagher P. 53
“On May 3 Stanton ordered Banks to detach Shields’s 9,000-man division and send it to Fredericksburg, where it would join the drive on Richmond. Banks himself was to withdraw his remaining troops– two brigades of Alpheus Williams’s division– to Strasburg and await further orders.
It was at Strasburg and Front Royal that Banks would reap the fruit of his erroneous report of Jackson’s abandonment of the Shenandoah. In March, Banks had led two divisions, more than 20,000 men, into the Valley to occupy Winchester. Not eight weeks later, now in command of the entire Department of the Shenandoah, he controlled fewer than 6,500 and lacked the strength to resist Jackson with any degree of certainty should the Virginian return. As a result, the Federal War Department had created a situation that jeopardized attainment of its chief and only significant goal in the Shenandoah: defense of the B&O.”
Note: May 3, 1861
“President Lincoln calls for 42,000 three-year army volunteers and 18,000 sailors and also expands the regular army to 22,714 men. Also on this day: U.S. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott proposes an envelopment strategy for fighting the South. Ridiculed as the “Anaconda Plan” by those who believe the war will end quickly after a decisive battle, Scott’s plan will become an essential aspect of the overall strategy ultimately adopted by the Union.” (Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference)
Note: May 3, 1862
“As Union Major General George B. McClellan begins to move the massive force he has assembled on the Virginia Peninsula, the Confederate army withdraws from Yorktown, Virginia, which has been under siege for a month. After the battle of Williamsburg (May 5), clashes on the Peninsula will increase, as Union forces aim toward the Confederate capital at Richmond.” (Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference)
Note: Skipping ahead to 1865:
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg 1954 P. 727
“The North was in grief. Everywhere the eye might turn hung the signs of this grief. The sermons, editorials, talk in streets, houses, saloons, railroadcars and streetcars, the black bunting and the crape– these were attempts to say something that could not be said. Men tried to talk about it and the words failed and they came back to silence. To say nothing was best. Lincoln was dead. Was there anything more to say? A great Friend of Man had suddenly vanished. Nothing could be done about it. Silence, grief and quiet resolves, these only were left for those who admired and loved and felt themselves close to a living presence that was one of them.”
Note: February, 1861, Lincoln starts out at Springfield, Illinois to rail through 70 towns during his inaugural train trip to D.C., & miscalculates the dissent level, the factions, the blood feuds on lands, parcels, blocks, and in Congress; he says nothing. The mouth is a slit that never moves while the nation breaks in half & he is forced to change trains (death threats; it’s somewhere between a possibility and a probability until it gets past both), the route through Bellaire, Ohio to Wheeling (then) Virginia cancelled, & the train has to reroute up near Pittsburgh, then into Maryland & finally D.C. May 3, 1865, Lincoln makes it back the way he came to Springfield, dead along the same route he had had to change trains 17 times on his way to D.C. for his own protection (10k death threats; thus far, Obama is the only president to surpass that amount). Imagine all the family stories passed down from the 12 million who stand watching this train en route to Springfield as it passes through 444 communities, The Lincoln Special as it rolls West. 7 million across the country saw him lying there dead. The mourning crepe bunting black, hanging down off all foreseeable ledges, the very ledge of democracy itself.
But then, there is always this: The living never will outnumber the dead. That’s the way I think of it.
Note: In the episode “Conan Visits Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum”: “I’m standing in front of the old State House, where Lincoln used to go and, uh, stand in line at the DMV, try & get his license renewed.” In the gift shop, he spins around an Emancipation Proclamation shot glass for the camera: “one of the greatest pieces of legislation in mankind’s history & you can drink Tequila out of it.” Then he walks by the life-sized mannequins of Lincoln, Mary, & the kids all standing close together, but points to another dummy figure leaning into a pillar “behind them, hanging around in broad daylight, John Wilkes Booth, just looking like a creep. I don’t know why they didn’t catch him, he’s right there.” The finale has him picking up a DVD in the gift shop– “Lincoln’s Last Night”– “I think it’s a porno. I’ve actually seen a little of this. It’s pretty incredible. It’s very dirty.” A Lincoln look-alike then appears on-screen, simulates having sex. Imagine the confusion if someone from the 1860s could see this. So disrespectful. Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Try the veggie burger.
Note: May 3-4 the Confederates leave. May 4th into the 5th a New York regiment literally gets lost in a night storm. Seven whole mules sink from view. They were there. Then they’re gone. Just like that.
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hundreds of acres there is no fence….
Look at any map of the southern U.S. where monuments stay up. See it color-coded: where the Black population is the majority, disenfranchisement by State constitutional amendment still happens, as well as disenfranchisement by historic poll tax and other means to exclude participation in a democracy. That’s where those monuments stay up. They’re like a mass of little eggs flat on the maps in the country’s hindquarters, where the skin is the sin. Note: In 1964, the 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes in Federal elections. Virginia was a poll tax state, along with Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. With make-believe equality, a make-believe 13th Amendment entirely unenforceable, it’s not worth the paper it uses up. It’s manifestly inadequate, & taxes paralyze the law’s intent, so it’s all over. What can you do when there’s no one left to enforce the law?
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