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

There were, at times, exceptions to this diet. In the Union army’s permanent camps, the soldier’s ration was usually expanded to add vegetables and fresh meat. If possible, the armies would drive their own beef herds along with them on the march to provide more fresh beef. A correspondent marching with William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 noticed that

every corps has with it its own droves of beeves, which are kept in good condition by foraging, and which have a way of absorbing all that are found by the roadside, so that the men have little to complain of in this particular. All along the lines of battle, when the armies were confronting each other, a few rods in the rear, were little pens of cattle from which the men in the trenches were well reinforced with smoking steaks, added to their coffee and pilot bread; while two or three miles in the rear could be seen large droves, under guard, serenely grazing in the pastures—forming the best possible reserve forces upon which the army could fall back.72

And there were always boxes and packages from home with varieties of good things that the government had no interest in issuing. But even with these additions, the average soldier’s diet did little except further reduce his resistance to infection and exhaustion, and wreak immeasurable havoc with his digestive system.

As for the Confederate armies, the food was not only bad but sometimes nonexistent. The impact of the blockade and the breakdown of the Confederacy’s internal transportation system meant that its volunteers frequently went hungry on campaign, and it could be said without the guilt of exaggeration that through most of the Civil War, the average Confederate soldier lived on raw courage and endurance more than on food and drink. George Asbury Bruton wrote to his brother and sister in 1864, “Our rations is small. We get ¼ pound of bacon per day and 1 pound of corn meal. Sometimes we get a little rice & sometimes we get a spoon full of soap to wash our hands.” Seven months later, Bruton lectured his brother James for not appreciating “home as you ought.” At home, “you have good clothes to put on and good socks to put on before you put on your clothes & best of all a good hot breakfast with plenty of ham & eggs, potatoes, & butter & milk.” Unlike his brother James, George Bruton and the 19th Louisiana were living on “a little piece of half-cooked beef about as big as my 3 fingers for a days ration & 4 doggers of corne bread about the size of a grand mother biscuit. …” In addition to poor rations, there were “thousands without a blanket & more bairfotted & all without socks.” Every stop on the march, wrote one amazed surgeon, was the signal for “every corn field and orchard within two or three miles” to be “completely stripped.”73 Mary Bedinger Mitchell, a Virginia woman, watched in disbelief as Lee’s army passed by her house in September 1862 on its way to Antietam:

When I say that they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes. All day they crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: “I’ve been a-marchin’ an’ a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin to eat ’cept green apples an’ green cawn, an’ I wish you’d please to gimme a bite to eat.”… I know nothing of numbers, nor what was or was not engaged in any battle, but I saw the troops march past us every summer for four years, and I know something of the appearance of a marching army, both Union and Southern. There are always stragglers, of course, but never… were want and exhaustion more visibly put before my eyes, and that they could march or fight at all seemed incredible.74

The most fearsome thing the volunteer faced, however, was actual combat. The Civil War battlefield presented the volunteer with a frightening variety of sensations, the first of which was the sheer unfamiliarity of the ground he was fighting on. Soldiers’ accounts of Civil War battle are notorious for their uncertain geographical references. Robert Lewis Dabney’s memoir of his commander “Stonewall” Jackson is peppered with bland descriptions of terrain—“alternate woods and fields,” “abrupt little ravines,” “a wide expanse of fertile meadows”—which betrayed how unfamiliar Dabney was with the Shenandoah Valley territory he was fighting over. The colonel of the 19th Virginia described the lay of the land at Gaines Mill on June 26 in terms so vague they could have been applied to almost any ten acres on the North American continent: “Passing through woods we soon reached a large, open, undulating field, with heavy timber on all sides, where we were formed in line of battle and awaited a few minutes the approach of the enemy, which was momentarily expected, as they were exactly in our front.” The Army of the Potomac’s chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, admitted that even on campaign, “maps, wherever possible, must be obtained from citizens,” since no comprehensive topographical survey of the United States existed.75

The noises of the battlefield were even more disorienting, since the concussive impact of artillery and massed rifle fire created an amphitheater of noise unlike anything within the experience of any nineteenth-century American. One Union general tried to re-create the sonic environment of a battlefield by inviting his daughter to imagine, “in fancy, the crashing roll of 30000 muskets mingled with the thunder of over a hundred pieces of artillery; the sharp bursting of shells and the peculiar whizzing sound of its dismembered pieces, traveling with a shriek in all directions; the crash and thud of round shot through trees and buildings and into earth or through columns of human bodies;… the uproar of thousands of voices in cheers, yells, and imprecations… riderless horses rushing wildly about; now and then blowing up of a caisson and human frames thrown