Day 65. May 4, 1862.
65
to wear a big badge today….
May Sunday 4 1862
Quite cool this morning. We found ourselves in camp. The day was fine. The Regiments pitched tents today as we may stay here for some time. The bridges are all burnt on this pike accept one. Nothing new at this time. No preaching today our Chaplin at home
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War Tony Horwitz P. 154
“Reminded that I was yet another consumer of his scarce time, I moved to the topic I’d most wanted to ask Foote about. I’d enjoyed his novel Shiloh, and also read about his frequent visits to the battlefield, a place he evidently regarded with mystic awe. Shiloh lay several hours’ drive east of Memphis. I wanted to know what Foote found so special about Shiloh, and what I might look for during my own visit there.
“For me, something emanates from that ground,” he said, “the way memory sometimes leaps up at you unexpectedly.” His great-grandfather fought at Shiloh. And it was a landscape Foote had traveled over many times in his literary imagination. “If you’ve drawn a picture or written about a particular historical incident in a particular place, the place belongs to you in a sense. I feel that way about Shiloh, a sense of proprietorship.”
Foote had visited Shiloh over twenty times, and once escorted Faulkner there (stopping en route to find a bootlegger so the bibulous writer could down a Sunday morning whiskey.) Foote always tried to visit on the anniversary of battle, if possible at dawn when the battle started, and then follow the fighting through the day. This allowed him to reconstruct the battle and appreciate how everything from the foliage to the angle of sunlight influenced the outcome. “If the light and the leaves and the weather are right,” he said, “I swear I can see and hear soldiers coming through the trees.’”
Note: Nice.
“Shelby Foote Indepth 3 hour Interview” video on YouTube (minute 1:47.00):
“As for the preservation of battlefields, I can’t begin to tell you how important I think that is, when you know what happened on that ground and you go stand there, uh, something comes out of that ground, I, it’s hard to explain how it comes about, but there’s something that comes out of that ground almost. I have stood in what was called Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania at dawn, and uh, I’ll swear I was in the middle of the Battle of Spotsylvania. Uh, it’s a, it’s a very strange thing. It’s a mystical thing, I can’t explain it, but it’s very important that that ground be preserved because of this thing that I think almost anybody can feel. You need to know at least a little bit about what went on there, and the more you know, the more real it gets. But uh, you can really feel you have been somewhere where something happened when you, when you go to those fields.”
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 573
“This charge at Marye’s Heights: “….attacks as courageous and hopeless as anything in the war. Wave after wave of blue soldiers poured out of the town toward Marye’s Heights. Channeled by ravines, a marsh, and a drainage ditch toward a sunken road fronted by a half-mile long stone fence, each one leaving hundreds of dead and dying men as it receded. Behind the fence stood four ranks of Georgians and North Carolinians loading and shooting so fast that their firing achieved the effect of machine guns. Still the Yankees surged forward through the short but endless December afternoon, fourteen brigades in all. “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor,” wrote a newspaper reporter, “or generals to manifest less judgment.”
When the early twilight finally turned to darkness the Union army had suffered one of its worst defeats of the war. Nearly 13,000 Federals were casualties– about the same number as at Antietam***– most of them in front of the stone wall at the base of Marye’s Heights.
Here lay “one without a head, there one without legs, yonder a head and legs without a trunk… with fragments of shell sticking in oozing brain, with bullet holes all over the puffed limbs.” This terrible cost with nothing accomplished created a morale crisis in the army and on the homefront. Soldiers wrote home that “my loyalty is growing weak…. I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us…. All think Virginia is not worth such a loss of life…. Why not confess we are worsted, and come to an agreement?” The people “have borne, silently and grimly, imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, loss of friends,” declared the normally staunch Harper’s Weekly, “but they cannot be expected to suffer that such massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated.’”
Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson 1998 Edited by Gregory Acken P. 123
Note: Donaldson (1840-1928) was in the 71st PA Vols., then the PA. 118th Vols. (the Corn Exchange Reg’t.). He had a Confederate soldier brother in the 22 VA. & was afraid he might run into him in battle. A prisoner in Richmond, his brother secured his release to wander the city limits, & he would visit the same church services where Jeff Davis appeared & worshipped. Excerpt of letter home to his brother dated 9/23/62:
September 18th. We were moved to the left towards the bridge crossing Antietam Creek, for the possession of which Genl. Burnside had made so desperate a fight the day before. It was a horrifying sight that met us all along the route, especially in a cornfield through which we passed. Here our people had been subjected to a dreadful fire and the ground was thickly strewn with mangled bodies. The sight being new to our men, there was extreme silence in consequence among them as they contemplated this evidence and realized what war really was. So on down the slope to the bridge the dead lay everywhere, and vast quantities of muskets, cartridge boxes and debris encumbered the ground. Dismembered arms and legs lay about in surprising numbers, and at a little level space just before crossing the bridge, I halted at a spot where some poor fellow had had his leg torn off above the knee. It was lying there with shoe and stocking on the foot, the bloody and raged end of the thigh showing the terrible force of the missile. Vast quantities of fore arms and hands lay near, a little old frame shanty near by having evidently served as a hastily improvised field hospital for the desperately wounded. The ground was much torn up and furrowed by the shells, and the old stone bridge was literally covered with bullet marks. There were a good many dead Confederates lying around both on this and the other side of the bridge.
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 106
“A woman returning to Manassas after the August 1862 fighting confronted acres of debris and bodies in a ditch hastily covered over: “their hands and feet were visible from many. And one poor fellow lay unburied, just as he had fallen with his horse across him, and both skeletons.” The stench from unsealed pits lingered for whole seasons. One hired hand on a Sharpsburg farm remembered with horror the pall hanging over the countryside. “We couldn’t eat a good meal and we had to shut the house up as tight as we could of a night to keep out that odor.’”
Note: They’d toss ’em in the hole then run in the opposite direction because the body would rupture. 6 feet is the minimum depth at which a decomposing corpse will not attract predators.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 820-821 (1865)
“Desertions from Lee’s army, especially in North Carolina troops, rose to disastrous levels. “Hundreds of men are deserting nightly,” reported Lee in February. In a single month the army lost 8 percent of its strength by desertion. Most of these men went home to protect and sustain their families, some went over to the enemy, where they knew they could find food and shelter. A Massachusetts soldier on the Petersburg line wrote to his parents: “The boys will look around in the evening and guess that there will be a good run of Johhnies.” Confederate officers recognized that “the depressed and destitute conditions of the soldiers’ families was one of the prime causes of desertion,” but that “the chief and prevailing reason was a conviction among them that our cause was hopeless and that further sacrifices were useless.” Whatever the reasons for this “epidemic” of desertions, wrote Lee, “unless it can be changed, [it] will bring us calamity.’”
The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat Gary W. Gallagher P. 195
“In footnote 41, referring to reenlistment resolutions, Gallagher notes that J. Tracy Power observes in “From the Wilderness to Appomattox” that, as during the previous spring, some units exhibited more enthusiasm than others. Confederate deserters told Federals the meetings that spawned the resolutions were “presided over by the colonels of regiments”; the men feared speaking their true mind at these gatherings, “and the consequence is that it is taken for granted and declared by the officers that they are in favor of fighting it out…’”
Note: Forward to 1864:
Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (book, 1898) Frank Wilkeson, A Survivor of Grant’s Last Campaign P. 35
“At dawn on May 4, 1864, General Grant’s last campaign opened. The enlisted men of the battery I served with ate breakfast and struck their camp at Brandy Station before sunrise. It was a beautiful morning, cool and pleasant. The sun arose above an oak forest that stood to the east of us, and its rays caused thousands of distant rifle barrels and steel bayonets to glisten as fire points. In all directions troops were falling into line. The air resounded with the strains of martial music. Standards were unfurled and floated lazily in the light wind. Regiments fell into line on the plain before us. We could see officers sitting on their horses before them, as though making brief speeches to their soldiers, and then the banners would wave, and the lines face to the right into column of fours and march off; and then the sound of exultant cheering would float to us. Short trains of white-capped and dust-raising waggons rolled across the plain.”
This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War Bruce Catton P. 322
“The Wilderness itself was no place for a battle. Even the best of its roads were no better than enclosed lanes; its long stretches of forest were full of spiky little saplings and heavy underbrush, there were few clearings, and the whole country was crisscrossed with meaningless little streams that created ravines or dank fragments of bogland.”
A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 55-56
“It was the fourth of May, and beyond the dark river there was a forest with the shadow of death under its low branches, and the dogwood blossoms were floating in the air like lost flecks of sunlight, as if life was as important as death; and for the Army of the Potomac this was the last bright morning, with youth and strength and hope ranked under starred flags, bugle calls riding down the wind, and invisible doors swinging open on the other shore. The regiments fell into line, and great white-topped wagons creaked along the roads, and the spring sunlight glinted off the polished muskets and the brass of the guns, and the young men came down to the valley while the bands played. A German regiment was singing “John Brown’s Body.”
Beside the roads the violets were in bloom and the bush honeysuckle was out, and the day and the year had a fragile light that the endless columns would soon trample to fragments. The last campaign had begun, and a staff officer sat on a bank overlooking the Rapidan and had a curious thought: how odd it would be if every man who was to die in the days just ahead had to wear a big badge today, so that a man watching by the river could identify all of those who were never coming back!
The men of this army left books and letters behind them, and in these there is a remarkable testimony that the men who marched away from winter quarters that morning took a last look back and saw a golden haze, which, even at the moment of looking, they knew they would never see again. They tell how the birds were singing, and how the warm scented air came rolling up the river valley, and how they noticed things like wildflowers and the young green leaves, and they speak of the moving pageant which they saw and of which they themselves were part. “Everything,” wrote a youth from Maine, “was bright and blowing.” It would never be like this again, and young men who were to live on to a great age, drowsing out the lives of old soldiers in a land that would honor them and then tolerate them and finally forget them, would look back on this one morning and see in it something that came from beyond the rim of the world.
Cavalry took the lead, moving down through the busy camps to the historic Rapidan crossings, Germanna and Ely’s fords. Foot soldiers watched them go, and called out, in what they conceived to be the idiom of their Southern foes: “Hey there! Where be you-all going?” Jauntily, the troopers called back that they were on their way to Richmond. But although the army felt that this campaign was going to be better than previous ones it still was skeptical, and cavalry needed to be put in its place anyway, so the infantry cried out: “Bob Lee will drive you-all back just as he has done before.”
The troopers pushed on and crossed the river, and they left the sunlight behind and went up the winding roads that led into the Wilderness.
P. 56-57
This was a mean gloomy woodland, a dozen miles wide by half as deep, lying silent and forbidding along the southern bank of the river. Its virgin timber had been cut down years ago, mostly to provide fuel for small iron-smelting furnaces in the neighborhood, and a tangled second growth had sprung up—stunted pines, innumerable small saplings, dense underbrush, here and there a larger tree, vines and creepers trailing every which way through dead scrub pines with interlaced spiky branches; there were very few places in which a man could see as far as twenty yards. The soil was poor, and there were hardly any farms or clearings, and the land under the trees was like a choppy sea, broken by ridges and hillocks and irregular knolls.
There were dark little streams that never saw the sun, and these had cut shallow ravines, some of which had very steep banks. These water courses wandered and twisted and turned on themselves, soaking the low ground into bush-covered swamps, and the thickets covered their banks. Once in a great while there would be a house—paintless, sometimes made of hewn logs, looking gaunt and forsaken like the forest itself, with a hopeless corn patch and weedy pasture around it—and there were a few aimless lanes, hardly more than tracks in the jungle, which did not seem to go anywhere in particular.
It was the last place on earth for armies to fight, and the entire Army of the Potomac was marching straight into it.”
A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 79-83
“And there was a moment, just here by the Tapp farmstead, with dawn coming up through the smoke and the Northern advance breaking out of the trees, when the authentic end of the war itself could be glimpsed beyond the ragged clearing. If Hancock’s men could go storming on for another half mile, Lee’s army would be broken and it would all be over. It may be that the Army of the Potomac never came nearer to it than this—neither above the Antietam, nor at Gettysburg, nor anywhere else—and final victory was just half an hour away. But the magical half hour flickered and was lost forever, and if any Northern soldier saw victory here he saw no more than a moving shadow distorted by the battle smoke.
Confederate artillery was massed in the open ground, and the guns fired before the last fugitive Rebels had time to get out of the way, and for a moment the pursuing Federals were knocked back into the woods. Then west of the clearing there rose the high, quavering scream of the Rebel yell, and Longstreet’s men—here at last!—came running in, gripping their rifles in their tanned fists. Lee was in their midst, swinging his hat and trying to lead them until they made him go back (for they knew that the Confederacy could live no longer than that man lived) and there was a staggering shock as the Northern and Southern assault waves dashed together. Above and below the Plank Road, far off into the dark murky wood, the fighting swelled and rolled as more of Lee’s last—minute reserves came running into action, and the counterattack broke the force of the Federal charge.
But the charge was still on. Back by the Brock Road Hancock was still driving reinforcements forward. Almost half of the army was under his command this morning, and he proposed to use every man who had been given him. Wadsworth’s men struggled out of the jungle at least and the Plank Road lay across their way, and they surged forward in a great crowd, yelling mightily. They got into the path of Getty’s division, which was driving west along the road, and there was a heavy traffic jam, two divisions all intermingled, men swearing, officers thwacking about with swords, and the disordered mob sagged off toward the south; and Lee’s guns in the Tapp farm clearing caught the right flank of Wadsworth’s uneven line and blasted it with fearful effect. Wadsworth was galloping desperately up and down the Plank Road, his old Revolutionary War saber in his hand, trying once again to get his line wheeled around so that it could face the firing instead of getting it all in the flank. Back to the right and rear the leading division of Burnside’s corps was at last creeping down through the woods, and far to the north by the Orange Turnpike Warren’s and Sedgwick’s soldiers opened a hot fire on Ewell’s men, to keep the Confederates from sending help from their left to their right.
The focus of it all was the narrow Plank Road and the deadly woods on both sides of it. Never before had the Army of the Potomac thrown so many men into one assault as were thrown in here. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were moving up in one stupendous charge, and most of them were battle-trained veterans. Yet what they had learned in other battles seemed to be of little use here, and in a strange, desperate fight, without color and without drama. The whole thing was invisible. It was smothered down out of sight in five miles of smoking wilderness, and even men who were in the storm center of it saw no more than fragmentary pictures—little groups of men moving in and out of a spooky, reddish luminous haze, with rifles flashing indistinctly in the gloom, the everlasting trees and brush always in the way, the weight of the smoke tamping down everything except the evil flames that sprang up wherever men fought.
In other battles these soldiers had known the fearful pageantry of war. There was none of that here, for this was the battle no man saw. There was only the changing twilight and the heavy second growth and the enemies who could rarely be seen but who were always firing. There was no ore war in the grand style, with things in it to hearten a man even as they killed him. This was all cramped and close and ugly, like a duel fought with knives in a cellar far underground.
Up from the forest came a tumult such as none of the army’s battles had made before. It had a higher pitch, because so little artillery was used, but more rifles were being fired than ever before and they were being fired more rapidly and continuously, and the noise was unbroken,* maddening, beyond all description. A man in the VI Corps called it “the most terrific musketry firing ever heard on the American continent,” and a New Yorker said that from the rear it sounded like “the wailing of a tempest or the roaring of the ocean in a storm.” Groping for the right superlative, another soldier wrote that “the loudest and longest peals of thunder were no more to be compared to it in depth or volume than the rippling of a trout brook to the roaring of Niagara.” Far back by Wilderness Tavern Meade’s chief of staff tilted a professional ear and commented that the uproar “approached the sublime.”
Always the little flames sprang up, as the blast from rifle muzzles hot the dried leaves and the brittle pine twigs, and the fear of these flames haunted every soldier. Often, when they were hit, men cried at once for help—anything was better than to lie in a firetrap and wait for the flames. It may be that the heavy blanket of stifling smoke that drifted on ahead of these fires was a mercy, for there were men who believed that it often suffocated the wounded, quickly strangling the life out of them before the fire could torture them to death.
Behind the lines, far to the rear where the smoke-fog and the noise came rolling down the wind, there was a constant movement of walking wounded looking for field hospitals. Some came alone, using muskets as canes or crutches. Others came in little groups, supporting each other, the halt leading the maimed and the blind. All of them were bloody. Cavalry patrols ranged all approaches to the rear areas and when a straggler appeared their curt demand was: “show blood!” The man who could not do it was arrested as a runaway.
The wounded came back with tight, bloodless lips, and in most cases their clothing was disarranged. Unless he was totally disabled, the wounded man’s first act, usually, was to tear his clothing open and look at his wound, to see whether it was going to be mortal. The examination over, some men would look relieved, confident that they had little to worry about. Others would turn pale and stare blankly at nothing, convinced that they could not recover. These men had seen many gunshot wounds, and they were pretty fair diagnosticians.
On this day the wounded brought discouraging tales back to the dressing stations. They said the fighting was not going well, and one man remarked glumly that “the Confederates are shooting to kill, this time.” Hospitals were alive with rumors of disaster: the right wing had crumbled, Lee had seized the Rapidan crossings, the army would soon find itself surrounded. The adolescent drummer boys had been pressed into service, along the firing lines, as stretcher-bearers. Properly, this was not drummer boys’ work, but as one man said, “It was the Wilderness, under Grant,” where “even boys counted.”
Along the Plank Road there was complete pandemonium. The narrow lane was choked with moving men—regiments and bits of regiments trying to re-form, hundreds of Confederate prisoners who had been disarmed and told to hike to the rear and who were trying hard to get back out of range, stretcher-bearers and walking wounded moving along with the same idea in mind, dazed stragglers and lost men hunting in vain for their regiments or for some quiet place to hide or for a safe road to the back country. There was such a tangle in every great battle, of course, and during every attack there were places just behind the front where it looked as if the army were coming apart. Yet the confusion in the Wilderness this morning was something special. The commanders behind the lines—Grant, smoking and whittling and noting all the dispatches, Meade near him talking busily with staff officers, Hancock at the crossroads ordering men forward—they had no conception of what was really going on up in front. They could not have. The battle was out of their control, fighting itself, a great curtain of distance and forest and choking smoke cutting them off from contact and knowledge. Things were going wrong, and they could not know about it—nor, if they did know, could they do anything about it.
In this forest it was almost as bad to win as to lose. Either way, a battle line was certain to get thrown into hopeless disorder. Along five miles of fighting front there was hardly one brigadier who could really control his own line, because there was hardly one brigadier who could put his hand on more than a fraction of his own command. The lines had been jumbled as they had never been jumbled before. Divisions and brigades were all divided. Along the zone of the heaviest firing there was not a single regiment which had on either flank a regiment which so much as belonged to its own army corps.
Commands were broken into moving fragments which floated blindly about trying to reassemble without the faintest idea where their comrades might be. Reinforcements lost their way as they tried to go forward and made the trouble worse, so that instead of adding weight to the attack they crippled it. In one place, men would be standing ten ranks deep, and a few hundred yards to right or left there would be a complete gap in the line, with nobody at all to hold the ground and only the bushes and the blinding haze to keep the Confederates from seeing what an opening lay in front of them. Brigades got in behind one another and shot blindly into the ranks of their own friends.
One of Hancock’s best brigadiers was ordered to move up the road and support Getty’s division, but before he could get started Getty’s division had been crowded over to some other part of the battlefield, so that the support troops moving in without skirmishers ran head on into a Southern battle line, which opened a deadly fire before the Federals realized that they were anywhere near the enemy. The brigadier did not know whether he was within half a mile of the place where he was supposed to be—nor did he know what he was supposed to do, now that he was wherever he was, except fight, which he could not help doing with Rebels all around him. Long after the war he wrote that he still did not know what had been expected of him. What he had actually done was to get several hundred of his men shot to no purpose at all, and it seemed improbable that that was quite what Hancock had wanted.
P. 86-87
For a while there was a lull. The Confederates were as much disorganized by their victory as the Federals had been by their own a little earlier. In the confusion Longstreet was shot by his own men, and he was carried to the rear coughing blood, out of action for months to come, and it was going to take an hour or more to get his brigades unscrambled so that the advance could be resumed. So Hancock was given precious time to organize his defenses along the Brock Road, and when the Rebel attack was at least renewed the men were ready for it.
Not too ready, possibly: the men had fallen behind the log barricade willingly enough, yet it was noticed that in some places they simply cowered close to the earth, pointed their muskets up toward the treetops, and maintained a fire that could hurt no one except birds. Yet by this time the forest fire was just about taking charge, anyway. The Rebel battle line that charged up to the Brock Road came splashing through little pools of fire, and here and there the log breastworks themselves caught fire and blazed up hotly, so that neither side could hold possession, and attackers and defenders stood a dozen yards apart and fought each other through a sheet of flame. In some places cannon had been put into line, their muzzles protruding out over the logs, and the gunners tried to work these in spite of the fire. Some of these men were horribly wounded when cartridges were exploded at the gun’s muzzles.”
(Note: The below passage refers to Ephraim’s 110th General Carroll. For more on Carroll, see notes for May 24, June 8 & 9 .)
“In a few places the Rebels came through the line. But there were reserves to deal with them—Samuel Carroll’s brigade, which had driven Jubal Early’s men out of the guns on Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg, on the night of the second day’s battle there—and these men rammed the attackers back. The Southerners finally retreated out of sight through the burning woods, and all that had been accomplished—about all that was possible, under the circumstances—was to increase the casualty lists on both sides.
Grant had spent most of his time on the knoll over by the Turnpike, and there had not been much that he or anyone else could do to control this insane battle that slipped out of sight every time the fighting lines went into action. Yet somehow he had created a new atmosphere around headquarters, and around noon he sent word to Hancock to put on a new offensive, early in the evening, with the same men who had been driven back in the morning. The Rebel assault on the Brock Road had of course canceled this plan, but if anyone cared to make note of it, there it was—the commanding general’s only reaction to news of a reverse had been to call for another attack.”
Note: The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 159 “Continuous Hammering and Mere Attrition.” Brooks D. Simpson
“Field returns suggested on May 4, 1864, Grant has just under 120,000 men of all arms ready to move and that Lee could muster some 75,000 men to oppose him.”
Note: Bones burning take on blue-black burn marks, a smell that has been likened to Cool Ranch Doritos.
Note: 1865:
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 718-719 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
May 4th
“Came to Salisbury today– traveled 20 miles. The Confederate Army will go to pieces here. The South Carolina and Georgia Alabama and Missippi troops will march on foot directly home. The Tennessee Arkansas and Texas troops will turn west from here and cross over the Blue Ridge into East Tennessee, and there take the R.R. For Chattanooga and to Nashville where we will take a steamboat for N.O. provided the Yanks will give us transportation.
We are getting accostomed to the new order of things, but there is considerable speculation as to what will be done with us.
Some think that all the officers will be courtmartialed. Some think they will be banished out of the country.
Nearly every one deplores the death of Lincoln and believes that he would have been the best man for us now.
That things would have been different if he had lived. Some go so far as to say that perhaps we were wrong, and that the negroes ought to have been freed at the start off. While others are still not whiped and evince a determination to fight it out some way, or leave the country, rather than go back into the Union, and be ruled by them; and have to be grounded to death by being robbed of all our negroes, and lands and other property– not allowed to Vote nor hold office any more.
We do not suppose, nor expect to be allowed to vote any more, as long as we live. We also expect that all the lands in the Confederacy, will be taken away from the white people to pay their war expenses then given in small 160 acre lots to the negroes.”
Note: The Wilderness is 2,774 acres of partially dense forest and is now part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (the 2nd largest military park in the world). Recently, a proposed Walmart there was cancelled on ground that saw 17, 500 Union casualties alone in 48 hours as men tried to reach Richmond at last. Roughly 5K dead. Neither side could claim victory. 101, 895 Union versus 61, 025 Confederate.
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bridges are all burnt on this pike….
We sit 160 years later as if we can write our way out of bodies set on fire in an open grave. The Wilderness. What can be seen of it in the dark can’t be seen in the day. How the light hits a page now, trick light as if every word is the shadow of its opposite. Some tilled up Earth. For every one word that shows, there’s always more unwritten.
Right now it has come to this: Grant sits down to see what to do next, sobbing, with the wet dog shakes while McClellan parks at Yorktown a whole eerie month, does nothing, balls to the wall as if in the light & air of an airport lounge. He disregards common sense then proceeds to do nothing. We’d need a dramaturg to translate the conception of the McClellan character, motivations, his main action, why a line was or was not cut from the script, we shall soon be at them, and I am sure of the result, his almost heroically bad statement that may last up until the next statement where he will backtrack this statement which backtracks a former statement, like he’s been acting out a caricature of himself holding off, wondering how much longer until he can hit the singularity. Waits on a change in atmospheric pressure. You have to get the stars right, you know? Choplogic. Shine on you crazy diamond. You can speculate till pigs fly, but had he won the presidency in ’64 we’d still be at war. In three years 10k Southerners put down guns in Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas when General Taylor surrenders. Meantime, right now, it is but a moment before they gather across a dark wood to mow each other down. The Wilderness.
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