Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

forage cap was an ungainly bag with pasteboard top and leather visor; the blouse was the only part which seemed decent; while the overcoat made me feel like a little nubbin of corn in a large preponderance of husk.”24

The Confederate dress regulations adopted in September 1861 specified a uniform of similar design, but adopted cadet gray as the official uniform color, largely since many state militia units were already clothed in gray uniforms of their own design and purchase. As the blockade progressively cramped Confederate supplies, Confederate uniforms became shabbier and more improvised; by the end of the war, some Confederate soldiers were dressed in old farm clothes and captured Federal uniforms. What was worse, supplies of chemical dye had become so scarce that Southerners were forced to resort to common vegetable dyes to color what uniforms they could make, and so produced frock coats and trousers not in gray but in a brownish, mousy color nicknamed “butternut.” “Dirt and tatters seemed to be the rule in their clothing,” thought a Union prisoner captured by Stonewall Jackson’s men, “from their rusty slough hats, sandy beards, sallow skins, butternut coats, and pantaloons down to their mud-stained shoes.”25

If the “camp of rendezvous” was too small, then the next stop for a newly organized regiment would be a larger “camp of instruction,” where the volunteer was supposed to learn the basics of drill and discipline. At the beginning of the war, the “camp of instruction” frequently turned into a local entertainment. “Crowds of ladies and gentlemen repair every afternoon to the ‘Camp of Instruction’ of the Virginia Volunteers, at the Hermitage Fair Grounds,” reported one Richmond newspaper. “The proficiency of the Lexington Cadets… is something wonderful to behold, and worth going a long distance to see.” Henry Handerson joined the Stafford Guards on June 17, 1861, near Alexandria, Louisiana; he spent ten days putting his affairs in order, then joined his company on board a river steamer that brought them to “Camp Moore, the camp of instruction,” sixty miles north of New Orleans. “Here we were fairly initiated into the mysteries and miseries of a soldier’s life, though the miseries of this camp were bliss itself when compared with the more serious discomforts of our later experience.” Handerson and Stafford Guards were then united with several other companies to form the 9th Louisiana, under the command of Richard Taylor, the son of former president Zachary Taylor.26

Unfortunately, since the United States had fought its last major war more than thirteen years before in Mexico and had kept up only the tiniest regular army since then, most young Americans of military age had never in their lives encountered the reality of military life, and knew next to nothing of military drill and discipline. Everything had to be taught from the very beginning, including something as simple as how to stand at attention. Moreover, few of the volunteers seemed inclined to take drill, discipline, or the military itself with the spit-and-polish seriousness it demanded. The volunteer never ceased to think of himself as an independent American and experienced a good deal of confusion and irritation at being made to obey orders he could see no sense in. Charles S. Wainwright, a Federal artillery officer, was exasperated by “how little snap” the first volunteers he met in 1861 “have generally.” Michigan lieutenant Charles Haydon was annoyed to find that “many of the men seem to think they should never be spoken to unless the remarks are prefaced by some words of deferential politeness. Will the gentlemen who compose the first platoon have the kindness to march forward, or will they please to halt, &c. is abt. what some of them seem to expect.”27

Discipline in the Confederate armies was, if anything, even worse. As Robert E. Lee ruefully admitted, “Our people are so little liable to control that it is difficult to get them to follow any course not in accordance with their inclination.” He acknowledged to the Prussian army observer Justus Scheibert that Confederate soldiers were second to none to terms of bravery, but “give me also Prussian discipline and Prussian forms, and you would see quite different results!” One major difficulty in imposing discipline on Southern soldiers was that the discipline, regimentation and authoritarianism of camp life was very nearly identical to that of the plantation, and Southern whites resented and resisted efforts to impose on them what looked for all the world like the discipline they imposed at home on black slaves. One Georgia private insisted that “I love my country as well as any one but I don’t believe in the plan of making myself a slave. …” When he wrote home, he did not hesitate to compare military life with plantation slavery: “A private soldier is nothing more than a slave and is often treated worse. I have during the past six months gone through more hardships than anyone of ours or Grandma’s negroes; their life is a luxury to what mine is sometimes.”28

This situation was all the more galling to nonslaveholding whites, who had grudgingly supported the slave system precisely because black slavery was the one social fact which gave them any sense of equality with white planters. Military life forced slaveholders and nonslaveholders into a relationship of class and command that denied race-based equality among whites. Frank Robinson, a Louisiana soldier, complained that “the life of a common soldier… is a great deal worse than that of a common field hand. … Those commissioned officers… are just like the owners of slaves on plantations, they have nothing to do but strut about, dress fine, and enjoy themselves.”29

In many cases, the discipline problem lay not so much with the volunteer soldier as with the volunteer system itself, since volunteer regiments were usually allowed to elect their own officers from among themselves, officers who might be popular as good fellows but who knew neither how to give orders and get them obeyed nor even what kind of orders to give. “In the sense