Part 5

To go on with the story, during this haphazard condition the South was allowed to develop itself by its comparatively efficient methods, undisturbed by us. McClellan had now the task of building up the great part of these heterogeneous masses into something of an organization. The war had stopped to let us train. But had it? The terrific expense and useless deaths went on. In this first year thousands died of disease under new conditions of exposure and hardships. Meanwhile McClellan had to have time for his gigantic task. The people of the North began to be irritated. Why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t he go on to Richmond? He had plenty of men. The Yankee brain felt that numbers were a solution for anything. It little realized that the officers had to be taught the technique of the march, the camp, the battlefield, security, supply, guard, unit management, drill and staff work. The men had to be taught all sorts of movements, the use of their weapons, sentry duty and above all discipline. All this would have to be done now at this late date, if the North were going to have any success at all. So for nearly a year against the ignorant clamor of a nation, McClellan worked in schooling, and preparing a huge army that would not have been necessary, had Scott’s advice been heeded. And he turned out a well-knit machine ready for action--but just a year too late to save the great carnage. When finally a year after the war opened, the Peninsular Campaign was begun, the administration of novices in Washington held out troops from McClellan, heckled and hampered him and finally stopped him when he was beginning to get somewhere. Meanwhile the South was making consummate use of Robert E. Lee’s brains and leadership. Then came the empty victory of Antietam, and the defeats of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. It wasn’t until the middle of the third year of the war that we won our first decisive battle at Gettysburg. But why shouldn’t we at that late date? It was no glory to us. We had the man-power and money. It’s nothing to be particularly happy about as far as efficiency is concerned. It’s far better for us to grieve over the losses, the extravagant, ignorant, idle, silly, moronic losses--losses that could scarcely be attributed to men in their senses. I cannot make invectives too strong against my fellow Yankee, who murderously treated his fellow man by his inhuman dullness before the war. For in this conflict we fought the bloodiest war, man for man, in all our history, when by wisdom and foresight of ordinary business, we could have saved ninety to ninety-eight per cent of the deaths. By our late start, our failure to apply preventives in time, our unreasoning obtuseness in not listening to the experts, we had to call out nearly three million men. Of these we lost by battle over one hundred ten thousand men. But listen to this--by death from disease we threw away nearly a quarter of a million, and the main part of the awful sickness was in the first part of the war and among men utterly unfit for campaign. Among the trained men sickness was so rare that it wasn’t often reported. Besides this mortality, of the many fine souls and bodies of volunteers who with high motives came into the ranks, fought and escaped death, there were thousands who went back home stricken by the effects of the bullet, dysentery and fever for the rest of their lives.

_VIII_

MORE SCRAMBLE

Over my bed in college hung a drawing made by a member of the Class of 1837. (Not a classmate of mine.) It showed a college youth of the time, quite wabbly from too great association with John Barleycorn. He was pointing his brace of pistols at a monkey perched on the foot of his bed. Underneath the picture were the words: “If you’re a _monkey_, you’re in a devilish fix. If you’re _not_ a monkey, _I’m_ in a devilish fix.” Just whether or not it was a real monkey I never knew, but there was no mistaking the fix. The more closely we study the Civil War, the more we find that we were in a _terrible_ fix. And the more we get away from it, the more we hate to look the fix in the face, especially because the fix was our own fault. Today the World War is so close to us that it screens the errors and calamities of our Civil War. We forget too often that in the early sixties we endured the most awful catastrophe this country has ever seen--a thing far more bloody man for man than what we went through in the World War. But maybe it’s a healthy thing to look at our Civil fix now, as the doctor studies past epidemics in order to prevent future horrors to mankind. A picture of the year before that war is full of so many fixes--so many pieces of indulgence in artificial stimulation and neglect that they’d fill a book. But here are two. In 1860 just before we were rushed into the struggle, a bill was introduced into Congress to abolish the Navy, on the ground that we’d never have any more war. Fortunately it failed of passage. But the only legislation for the army that year was the appointment of a committee to look into West Point and an authorization to increase the sugar and coffee ration of the soldier. And all this, while the tension between the North and South was about to snap. A school and a drink, while blood and flame were in sight. And there was no fire department to quench the raging blaze. A hose in Oregon, a nozzle in Florida, horses in Arizona and an engine nowhere! And suddenly Sumter’s guns cracked out and set the nation on fire. We began to seethe and mill around. The President was caught in the furor and had to exercise his war powers. Later when Congress met, it made the entire set-up for the war in less than four weeks. Less than four weeks! Why you couldn’t do that with a new factory, much less a police department. And here we were with a massive business undertaking that meant life and death to the whole country. Of course, the legislation teemed with mistakes, which we paid for extravagantly and are still paying for. The men called out weren’t soldiers any more than they could be lawyers, managers and operators without practice and education.

The thirty thousand collected for Bull Run were, in the mind of the North, going to march right through to New Orleans. And people came out from nearby towns to watch, from a very safe distance, the battle--congressmen in carriages, women in barouches, sutlers in wagons and reporters in tree-tops. They would behold this battle that was going to bag these rebels and drive them into the Gulf of Mexico. The spectators having comfortable and uncomfortable seats, the engagement after some delay started. Tyler was slow in getting into position and Hunter’s brigade rested for refreshments by the waters of Bull Run a bit too long. After a time the Southern masked batteries began to have their telling effect. Lines were formed slowly and badly under fire. Many did not know the use of their muskets. Those in the rear were almost as deadly to friend as foe. Too many officers were killed or wounded in trying to get their men forward. The green troops finally mistook a regiment of Confederates for their own and received a murderous fire. Then the rout began. One regiment fled and then another. The untrained men stampeded across the field toward Washington. The eager observers scaled down the trees faster than they had climbed them. Barouches, carriages and wagons wheeled about and clattered away with much dust, turmoil and crowding. A vehicle overturned and blocked the main road, adding to the panic. The retreating recruits in their excitement fired mostly into the air, fortunately for those about them. Some officers sought to rally their men, here and there, but in vain. The majority rushed across fields, over lanes and pushed through jammed roads in their hurry to get away. And thus the first northern force evaporated.

Haste, haste everywhere. Haste in forming a force--haste in legislation--haste in getting away. Men who would otherwise have been staunch and vigorous--men who were naturally brave--were hurried into a life-and-death-position they had no chance to fill. The size of the two forces had been about equal, but the South had had the advantage of six months’ training, whereas the North had used mostly eight-day wonders. And this decided jump of the Confederacy on us--their planning--their foresight--their business arrangements had meant the turn of the tide against the Union.

And it was so all through 1861. We had five other battles in that year, all of which we lost in the same way and for the same cause, except one. Drainesville--have you ever heard of it? That was all we had to show for the whole year’s effort--a tiny battle having no influence on cutting the war shorter. And in that time we had killed and wounded three thousand three hundred seventy-one men and spent four hundred nineteen million dollars--all to no purpose--sheer waste. In fact worse than waste, because the setbacks had paralyzed our efforts. Then came the mismanagement of the second and part of the third year of the war. While the Union was organizing as a loose Confederacy, the Confederacy was organizing as a close Union. The southern government keenly abandoned states’ rights for their army shortly after they had begun to fight for states’ rights as a national policy. The northern government inanely took up states’ rights for their army immediately after they had begun to fight against states’ rights as a national possibility. Both were inconsistent, but the South was inconsistent wisely. It did away with voluntary enlistments and the power of independent states to appoint officers and to offer whole units--and vested the control in its President. It made a unified army. It then enacted the first proper draft law in any English-speaking country--a thing which was afterwards the greatest single stroke of efficiency for America in the World War. On the other hand, the Union persisted in lopsided volunteering and gave away to the governors absolute authority to create organizations and appoint the officers over them. And Mr. Lincoln had to receive these irregular lots and do the best he could with them. He was powerless at the head of this great organization to have control over the selection of his employees. And the way they were selected didn’t help much either. Political favorites, farmers, clerks, ward bosses and men about town, were given command of regiments and battalions, when they knew nothing about the technique, tactics or art of their undertaking--nothing about the real business of their jobs. Professional qualifications had little to do with their selection. Influence, popularity, deference, obligation and even pity put them in their positions. Why, one officer was elected a captain of a company because he had the most children and needed the money. Others were made colonels or majors for just as sensible reasons, while three hundred and eight trained officers were overlooked and kept in small positions throughout the war. Would we put plumbers or carpenters over our sick in the hospital? We did worse. We put them over well men, fine bodies, whose lives depended upon knowledge and experience against the awful things they had to face. For the camp and bivouac are even more deadly than the battlefield under untrained leaders. In more ways than one our hurried management caused the lengthening of the horror into four long years of unnecessary slaughter.

At the top, the North had a President and Secretary of War, distinguished members of the bar, but utterly unfamiliar with the technique and art of ending a war as quickly as possible. The country’s policies had placed them in this unfair position. There was no active general-in-chief of the armies. The Secretary of the Treasury was given the task of making an organization plan. Other members of the cabinet and bureau chiefs were given similar military problems. A group called the Second Aulic Council debated, fussed and mostly collapsed into grand meddling. It was the old story of a large cumbersome committee getting nowhere--a committee that rarely understood the vital needs of the occasion. So it was not surprising that the most ineffective soldier with military education was finally chosen as General-in-Chief, General Halleck. And he added to the confusion. Generals in the field didn’t know where they stood. They were promised troops that never arrived and shorn of troops they had with them. Their plans, by mail, telegraph or personal travel had to be approved in Washington before they could proceed. Often the opportunity passed before the veto or approval arrived. During his campaigns, McClellan received hundreds of telegrams, letters and courier packets a week, counseling one thing and then another--and often contradictory. He could not change his base, make a new plan, operate in a new place or go enthusiastically forward without first having his proposals crunch through the slow grinding mill of Washington. Commanders grew to be more fearful of the District of Columbia than the enemy. For it’s hard to fight to your back and front at the same time. And your back happens to give you more creeps.

In a little over two years the main army of the East had in succession as commanders McDowell, McClellan, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade. In the whirlpool of mismanagement, heads fell fast. And subordinate generals notoriously feared most being placed in command of the Army of the Potomac. Certainly the whole fault couldn’t lie with six different commanders. With the same system--or lack of it--sixteen would probably have failed. Certainly _one_ could have been wisely selected who could have gone on, if properly backed up. The answer lies in the Confederacy. There, a single trained and experienced man picked a trained commander and placed him over better trained and organized troops than the North had. He was held on whether he won or lost and became more capable as he proceeded. This sample of management and organization, always a few steps ahead of the North is why the South held off the Union against odds of three to one for four staggering years. That is what was done while the Yankee was paying millions in bounties for recruits, uselessly wasting his men, undergoing draft riots and enduring one of the ablest _mis_managements our country has seen. The lack of any action before the war--any wakefulness from our deep sleep--any use of ordinary sense plunged us into the waste of wastes and told the world ever since that we were the incompetent of incompetents. And for all this the North paid nearly ten billion dollars. And how we spent lives. Why, we were in such a rush at the beginning that we sent in three hundred thousand men without even examining them physically. Think of what that meant in mortality. We fed our manhood like babes into the burning cauldron of Moloch, all because we sat and waited with no idea of a preventive in those years and months before the war. Experts, foreign and domestic, agree that if we had had a trained force in the East in December 1860, of not more than twenty-five thousand, the war could not have lasted over three months, with a maximum of a thousand casualties. As it was in the North alone we threw away three hundred sixty thousand lives. With the South counted we filled prodigally way over a half million graves. No, we don’t care to snuff things out at the source. We prefer to dam them at the mouth. We do that with crime. Why not do it with war?

_IX_

FIDDLING

Do you remember the pillow shams of the gay nineties? For those of you who don’t, I’ll tell you that they were clean, ruffled upright coverings for pillows in the daytime. When they were laid aside at night, they revealed too often a certain amount of real estate underneath. What a cleanly view for the daily visitor and what an unpleasant surprise for the nightly sleeper. I remember such a set of shams. On the left one were embroidered in pink the words: “I slept and dreamed that life was beauty.” On the right one in blue: “I woke and found that life was duty.”

Now that we’ve laid aside the shams of our school histories and looked upon the tragically soiled linen of the Civil War, we find even cleaner shams laid over the period _right after_ that war. You know as we scratch our head and try to look wise when our young son attacks us with a question about his history lesson, we see, among the cobwebs those days of ’65, ’66 and ’67 as a time of sleeping beauty. The tired, worn soldiers of the war, in our misty memory, are beating their swords into pruning hooks and all that sort of thing. Are we wrong? Yes, we are. Life was anything but beauty for our country then. They were days of frightful, alarming duty. For we were even in a worse fix than when Sumter’s guns tumbled us helter-skelter into catastrophe. On all sides were threatenings of big wars and slaughter. On the north the Fenians were trying to carry on strife against Great Britain from within our borders, and the Alabama claims were adding to the fuel. The South, smarting under revengeful reconstruction laws, was angered to a pitch of frenzy. In Mexico, Napoleon the third had set up an empire, placing the Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. The thousands of irreconcilables of the former Confederacy could there find a foothold to work against us. And in the West, a half million Indians, unrestrained during the Civil War, were overrunning half our territory, and sprinkling the soil with death and massacre. In the midst of all this trouble, Abraham Lincoln was shot down in cold blood. We had gone from a sizzling frying pan into a surrounding fire.

The situation in Mexico was so perilous that Sheridan was torn away before the Grand Review in Washington, and sent immediately south. When he arrived near the Rio Grande, the republican force in Mexico was weak, worn and scattered. But it wasn’t hopeless long. For Sheridan had something--we had something we’d never before had--a decent sized, trained force. Even if it had been expensively trained under the bullet, it was trained and well-trained. Sheridan just sat down in Texas with almost three corps, and peered threateningly into Mexico. Maximilian knew there wasn’t anything he had which could overcome such a force. Little by little under the American display of strength, the republicans gained power. In a year and a half the Empire fell, without a single American gun being fired and with no bloodshed for us. We had gained our ends by merely a show of force. Here is something for our histories to brag about. Why do they cover it over with a sham? You remember experts said that if we had had twenty-five thousand trained men in 1860, the Civil War could not have lasted more than three months. Well that statement, however careful, is at best theory, but taken with the example of Sheridan’s force, it becomes a fact. And there are other examples in our history where a sufficiently trained force prevented bloodshed. The only reason we haven’t had more examples is because we haven’t had more force.

But we had a force this once, and one part of it had as difficult a task as ever fell to the lot of soldiers. Nineteen thousand of them were scattered in one hundred thirty-four places in the South to enforce stringent, cruel laws for a conquered people. The ire of the North had vented itself in insulting control. No one who had given aid to the Confederacy was allowed to hold office. The northern carpetbagger swaggered in to lord over poverty-stricken communities. This exhibition of revenge leads one to believe the statement of the clergymen that peace treaties, peace reactions and peace societies are our most fruitful causes of war.

But there was one saving grace--and that lay in the treatment of the southern people by the soldier. You know it’s a funny thing about fighters. After the fight is over, they seldom hold grudges. We can all call up many instances where they were outstandingly friendly with the former opponents. The Union soldier in the South was no exception. He saw too clearly the injustice to these stricken people and sympathized with them. He leagued up with the former Confederate soldiers in efforts to help. He often got around the laws and sometimes overrode them. His reports to Washington had much to do with rescinding cruel legislation. So helpful was his attitude that a southern city afterwards erected a monument to a Union general. The soldier’s understanding sympathy was the big factor in overcoming riots, disorders and slaughter.

Similarly trained troops took their places along the northern border, and beyond a little wire cutting, overcame the disturbances from the Fenians. And as these fearful threats to the north, east and south of us were slowly calmed, we began to be over-confident and stupid again. We failed to see that our unusual strength had been the reason for coming through these calamities unscathed. In our customary way we descended into weakness. And how we were going to pay in human life for this let-down!

At first we pared the Army down to thirty-eight thousand. The day before General Grant took the oath of office as President, we again reduced it, against his urgent recommendation, by twenty regiments. By 1876 it was a scant twenty-five thousand soldiers, at which figure it remained up until the time of the Spanish-American War--during almost a quarter of a century. Thus we stagnated while our population was increasing, savages were roaming over half our territory and we had acquired Alaska. There was a war party who wanted to keep peace and a peace party who let us fall into war. Naturally you’d know which party would win in the United States. A paltry seventeen thousand soldiers were strewn around the west in little groups. Their task was to control hundreds of thousands of Indians in protection of the advancing settlers. It was the dark age for the soldier. Impossible was his struggle to be everywhere at once and to do the government’s bidding against odds of twenty-four to one. In return the government often armed the Indian with fine repeating rifles and always gave the soldier a single-loader.

Then came the tragedies that follow in the wake of helplessness. In our history books, we have placed an embroidered, starched sham over them, but underneath none the less lie very dirty pillows. Massacres of our settlers and soldiers were too frequent. The Indian was one of the shrewdest warriors of all time to sense the size and strength of his opponents. Weakness to him meant a call for scalps. At Fort Phil Kearney in Nebraska the officers and men were engaged in building their own barracks and quarters (if they were going to have a roof to cover them) and the work was going along quite smoothly, when one morning two thousand Indians swooped down on the small garrison of two hundred fifty and killed and mutilated one hundred seventy-four of them. In Kansas when eighty-four settlers were slain or captured by a band of Cheyennes, Major Forsyth with fifty scouts tried to trail the Indian desperadoes. When he came upon them he was trapped, had to fight for his life, lost half of his command, (among whom was the nephew of Henry Ward Beecher,) and barely escaped with the remnants of his force.