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

Wounds to the abdomen, especially the stomach or the bowels, were simply hopeless—the Minié ball caused too much internal damage, and surgical skills were as yet too poorly developed, to make recovery possible. “Wounds… involving the viscera were almost uniformly fatal,” wrote one Union surgeon. “Opium was practically our only remedy and death the usual result.” He could not remember “more than one incontestable example of recovery from a gunshot wound of the stomach and not a single incontestable case of wound of the small intestines.” Consequently, the Civil War soldier became a quick study in analyzing what wounds meant. Frank Wilkeson, an artilleryman in the Army of the Potomac, observed in 1864 how swiftly a soldier knew what his end might be:

Wounded soldiers almost always tore their clothing away from their wounds, so as to see them and to judge of their character. Many of them would smile and their faces would brighten as they realized that they were not hard hit, and that they could go home for a few months. Others would give a quick glance at their wounds and then shrink back as from a blow, and turn pale, as they realized the truth that they were mortally wounded. The enlisted men were exceeding accurate judges of the probable result which would ensue from any wound they saw. They had seen hundreds of soldiers wounded, and they had noticed that certain wounds always resulted fatally. They knew when they were fatally wounded, and after the shock of discovery had passed, they generally braced themselves and died in a manly manner. It was seldom that an American or Irish volunteer flunked in the presence of death.82

Perhaps not. But a large number of Civil War soldiers certainly quailed at the prospect of combat, and they deserted the Union and Confederate armies in recordsetting droves. More than 200,000 Federal soldiers deserted during the war, nearly 12 percent of the entire total of Union enlistments, while 104,000 Confederates, as much as 16 percent of the Confederate armies, took French leave. In many cases, it was a risk-free solution. Only about 80,000 Union deserters were ever actually arrested; of the even smaller number who appeared before courts-martial, only 147 received the traditional punishment for desertion: a firing squad or the gallows.83

Others who might have lacked the will to face enemy fire were set up on their legs by the free use of alcohol. A Confederate newspaper complained that “officers with gold lace wound in astonishing involutions upon their arms” as well as “private soldiers in simple homespun… all seem to drink whisky… in quantities which would astonish the nerves of a cast-iron lamp-post, and of a quantity which would destroy the digestive organs of the ostrich.” Many of the Civil War’s legendary charges into the face of the enemy were made by soldiers who had been drugged into near insensibility by the liberal dispensing of hard liquor before battle. The 16th North Carolina went into action at Seven Pines after the company commissary “hobbled down with several canteens of ‘fire water’ and gave each of the men a dram. He knew we needed it, and the good angels only smiled.” Confederate prisoners taken by Berdan’s Sharpshooters at Malvern Hill had been “unduly excited by frequent rations of whisky… their canteens, some half full of this stimulant.” Members of Confederate general George Pickett’s staff, and even one of his brigadiers, downed a bottle of whiskey over a lunch of cold mutton just before Pickett’s famous charge at Gettysburg.84

On the other hand, officers who prodded men too hard into battle, with or without whiskey, were likely to become targets for disgruntled enlisted men, especially on a battlefield where it was difficult to establish whether an officer’s death was a normal combat fatality or a covert assassination. It was not at all unusual, wrote New Jersey private Alfred Bellard, for overbearing Yankee martinets to receive “a stray ball occasionally on the field of battle.” The major of the 33rd Virginia was described as a “tyrannical little puppy” who “would have been riddled with bullets and not yankee ones either.”85

The most obvious evasion of combat was simple, and usually temporary, flight to the rear. “The sneaks in the army are named Legion,” remarked Edward King Wightman. “When you read of the number of men engaged on our side, strike out at least one third as never having struck a blow.” Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded his fellow veterans of the 20th Massachusetts years after the war that “We have stood side by side in a line—we have charged and swept the enemy—and we have run away like rabbits—all together.” Sometimes the “sneaks” did not need to resort to the humiliation of running in order to evade battle. Any wounded comrade in a fight became an excuse for one or two others to break ranks and assist the wounded man to a field hospital, and unless a brigade or division commander was unusually diligent in posting a provost guard in the rear of his units, a wounded man’s helpers would simply remain out of sight and sound of the action for the rest of the day.

Only by 1864 were serious efforts to keep able-bodied men from leaking rearward out of a fight really working, as Frank Wilkeson discovered when he strolled too far away from his artillery unit in the Wilderness and was prodded into frontline infantry combat by a provost guard who demanded that he “show blood” before being allowed to move to the rear. Yet however easy it may be to point out the failings of the volunteer under fire, it is also true that the volunteer in the Civil War—Union or Confederate, black or white, however untrained or uncomprehending he might be of the niceties of military life—was being asked to stand up to some of the most savage combat ever met by soldiers in the nineteenth century. War would be