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

the Potomac was composed of five western regiments that all retained the use of the black Hardee hat as their badge. The Irish Brigade, another Army of the Potomac unit, was composed of an odd amalgam of Irish-born New Yorkers and Protestant Pennsylvanians who carried a green flag emblazoned with a gilded harp into battle. The Philadelphia Brigade, also in the Army of the Potomac, was the only brigade in either army that took its name from its hometown.

Brigades were themselves usually organized into divisions, comprising two or three brigades, and commanded by either a senior brigadier general or a major general. Finally, the divisions were organized into corps, with both armies making up a corps from two or three divisions. The corps was the real innovation of this war for the American military, and like so much else, it was a borrowing from Napoleon Bonaparte’s determination to create a corps d’armée, an all-arms unit big enough to fight anything except the entirety of an enemy’s army but still small enough to be within the grasp of a single commander and nimble enough to march separate from the other parts of an army. Wellington had briefly adopted the corps model before Waterloo, but it never took serious hold in British military thinking, and in the Crimea, the British Army never organized itself at a higher level than the division. Napoleon III resurrected the corps d’armée in the North Italian War, and like so much else that was French, it proved irresistible to American borrowing.62

Confederate corps were generally identified by the name of their commanding general, while Union corps were assigned numbers. The corps commanders, usually senior major generals, were expected (unlike division or brigade commanders) to be able to exercise a large measure of independent judgment and initiative, and the measure of any army’s effectiveness could be reliably prophesied from the quality of its corps commanders. In Lee’s army in 1863, the corps commanders—James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson—were probably the best pair of military talents on the North American continent. The Army of the Potomac also boasted equally outstanding combat soldiers in the commanders of the 1st Corps (John F. Reynolds) and the 2nd Corps (Winfield Scott Hancock).

To the ordinary volunteer, however, the principal concern was not with generals or even weapons but with the experience of war service itself. Much as enlistment propaganda might have initially convinced the volunteer that the Rebel or the Yankee was his sworn enemy, the volunteer soon recognized that the soldier opposite him was an American like himself. No matter how much Southerners and Northerners tried to persuade themselves that they were fighting an alien from an alien culture, soldiers from both armies quickly found that both were usually Protestant in religion, democratic in politics, and fond of the same music.

So, to the despair of their commanders (who feared the leakage of important information on troop movements), they fraternized freely in the quiet periods between battles. Edward King Wightman described such a meeting near Fortress Monroe in May 1863, with a “johnny Reb” who had “laid aside his piece and crossed over in a skiff to exchange papers with our pickets.” Wightman looked over this “very lean black-eyed fellow with long straight hair” and noticed that he “was well clothed in a gray jacket and pants and so forth.” Wightman “bantered him the best I knew how, but he took it very well.” A year later, Wightman saw a more general truce break out between Confederates and Federals on the James River, who created a temporary market for swaps of goods. “One of our men, laying aside his rifle, would walk out boldly half-way to the enemy’s line, leave a little bag of coffee on a stump, and return,” while “Johnny Reb would then issue forth, take the coffee and substitute in its place a big plug of tobacco, which was speedily secured for the service of the Union.” Eventually the “ballygogging” attracted the notice of a Confederate officer, who “determined to make a demonstration.”

All at once the rebs started for cover, but not before they had called out warningly, “Take care, Yanks, we’re going to shell ye.” To this our boys replied by flopping into pits, leaving but one eye exposed and crying with equal friendship, “Lay low, Rebs!” The artillery fire opened on the right, intermingled with rapid volleys of musketry, and worked gradually around to us. In our immediate neighborhood shells were dropped in profusion, spiced with a few rifle balls; but no advance was made and no one was hit. In an hour everything was quiet again, and we all came forth whistling and laughing as before, to cook our supper. The rebs did likewise.63

Wartime fraternization had its limits, and the principal limit was race. White soldiers might profess any amount of fellow feeling, but unsleeping hostility was the rule between black Federals and white Confederates. A Confederate soldier imprisoned at Point Lookout, Maryland, wrote that the “negro troops” guarding rebel prisoners were “as mean as hell,” and Confederates captured at Cold Harbor in 1864 were taunted “revengefully” by black Union soldiers as the Confederates were marched away to a prisoner-of-war camp.64

Soldiers black and white soon learned that the real enemy in the war was not the other soldier but disease, wounds, and the fear of wounds. Disease in fact, turned out to be the real killer of the Civil War. For every soldier who died in battle, another two died of disease in camp, and overall, more than 10 percent of the Union Army and 20 percent of the Confederate Army were killed off by disease rather than by bullets. One principal cause for the ravages of disease was the nature of military camp life in the nineteenth century, which in clinical terms acted as little better than a disease funnel. Americans of the Civil War era knew little or nothing of bacteriology, and so neither the volunteer nor his officers had any idea of the communicative and infectious