Blood, Tears, and Glory

Thursday, December 13, 2007

ON THIS DAY: Friday, Dec. 13, 1861

Combat at last!

With snow and cold gripping western Virginia, most of the Union troops stationed in outposts throughout the area huddle in their tents, crude huts, and commandeered houses and try to amuse themselves, feeling very put out at being shunted to the sidelines of the war. In reality, not very much is going on anywhere in the war, so in western Virginia the endless games of checkers, the carving of pipes and other knickknacks, and even an occasional “stag dance” must suffice for the bored soldiers.

But not all. A 45-year-old Indiana brigadier general named Robert Huston Milroy (above, right)—a hard-nosed commander who is a bit of a loose cannon and known for declaring, “My will is absolute law”—decides he and his men have perched atop Cheat Mountain long enough and need to act like soldiers. With 1,900 men from Indiana, Ohio, and loyal western Virginia, he launches an attack at sunrise today on 1,200 Confederates perched on Alleghany Mountain (also known as Allegheny Mountain), about 20 miles away. The Confederate general is 45-year-old Edward Johnson, a Virginian who attended Kenyon College in Ohio (of all places!) before entering West Point (where he ran up scores of demerits before settling down). A genial man with a large stock of profanity, he was well-liked by his troops.

But Milroy’s attack, which takes place in bitter cold and gusty winds, is spoiled when Confederate picket guards detect his approach. Disorganization among the inexperienced Union troops makes things worse. Things get even worse than that when the Confederates open fire with their artillery; Milroy’s force had none. Finally, Milroy gives the whole thing up and retreats, licking his wounds (137 Union casualties, including 20 killed, to the Confederates' 146 casualties, including 25 killed). The Confederates do not follow, however, and historians generally regard the battle of Camp Alleghany as ending inconclusively.

BUT at least some Midwesterners were trying to carrying the war to the enemy, and in difficult circumstances. That was more than George B. McClellan was doing with his well-polished Army of the Potomac.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

ON THIS DAY: Thursday, Dec. 12, 1861

“Who’s Insane?”

Fuming over a Cincinnati newspaper story headlined “General William T. Sherman Insane,” Cump spends the day writing two letters. One is addressed to his influential father-in-law, Sen. Thomas Ewing in Washington, and is a detailed defense of his behavior.

“In these times tis hard to say who are sane and who insane,” Cump admits, but goes on to explain why he raised alarms in Kentucky and Missouri. In Kentucky, Sherman tells Ewing, “I knew of the impatience of the country for results, but to expect us…with troops many which were unarmed to assume the offensive whilst a well organized army lay at Washington was unfair,” he writes, referring to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s mostly inert Army of the Potomac. In Missouri, Cump says, he became alarmed when he found Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck’s troops poorly positioned, and so he re-positioned them.

Sherman also writes General Halleck in St. Louis to ask if the actions the Ohioan had taken in Missouri strike Halleck as “evidence of a want of mind.”

Although Sherman’s apprehensions about Kentucky will not be fulfilled, his reasoning about the state’s exposure to attack and its defensive needs seem persuasive. (And he certainly is right that McClellan’s army “lay at Washington” unused.) In a few days, Halleck--an old friend of Sherman--will reply favorably. And Cump’s wife, Ellen, and other members of his family will rally to his defense in the days to come.

>>> If Sherman’s problem is too much press attention, another Ohioan is complaining of just the opposite. Stuck in winter quarters in western Virginia and seeing no action worthy of press attention, a frustrated Capt. Tom Taylor of the 47^th Ohio writes wife Netta a letter filled with sarcasm:

We have an accomplished German artist in our regiment whom we have excused from all duty in order to embalm our…march through this state in picture. Other regiments are extolled by reporters. Our artist and his pictures will extol us in the future…when the poor newspaper is passed away…. Won’t it be glorious?

Your suggestions, comments, and questions are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author’s book, go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

ON THIS DAY: Wednesday, Dec. 11, 1861

“Sherman Insane!”

Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman has been home in Lancaster, Ohio, for a few days, recovering at his father-in-law's house (above) from the stress he had experienced in Kentucky and Missouri. Then he picks up today’s Cincinnati newspaper and reads an article that threatens to blow a hole in his recuperation. “General William T. Sherman Insane” reads the headline in the Cincinnati Commercial.

The story asserts Sherman was “stark mad” while in command of Union forces in eastern Kentucky. The paper claims he had telegraphed three times in one day asking permission to abandon Kentucky, that he had frightened leading men in Kentucky “almost out of their wits,” and that in Missouri “he was a madman.”

None of this was true. Sherman was not “insane,” although he had suffered what we would call an “emotional break,” probably the result of a high intelligence combining with a vivid imagination during stressful circumstances. Nor was his demand for a large buildup of troops unrealistic, although it was dismissed as such at the time.

A 20^th-century psychiatrist who examined the known facts termed Sherman’s distress no more than a “mild ‘anxiety state.’” Contributing to the overheated news report was the inability of journalists to understand Sherman’s idiosyncrasies or see past his hostility to members of the press.

The newspaper article—widely reprinted—“distressed [Sherman] almost to death,” one of the general’s brother’s will report. Sherman spends the rest of the day sputtering and trying to decide what to do. Soon, his family, led by wife, Ellen, will rally in his defense.

IN NEWS ELSEWHERE: Charleston, South Carolina, experiences a disastrous fire, piling more woe on the suffering caused by a Union naval blockade. The fire sweeps across 540 acres, leveling 575 homes, stores, and churches. Unionists, who consider South Carolina the cockpit of secession, are only too happy to see the Charlestonians suffer.

In Washington, however, Abraham Lincoln reiterates his original purposes in the war. He says he regards the Union as unbroken and he will restore national law over the seceded states as soon as he can. He also will protect the all citizens in those states who have not engaged in rebellion. By taking this position, Lincoln is repudiating the harsher plans of the Radical Republicans whose desire is to free the slaves and punish the South.

Monday, December 10, 2007

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, Dec. 10, 1861

“Hazen’s Humanity”

Col. William B. Hazen (right), commander of the 41^st Ohio, is widely regarded as a tough, demanding commander, one who practically ran his regiment ragged while it was in basic training and who continues to require his officers to attend class in military tactics, during which they are graded.

And yet Hazen is really a hard-nosed pragmatist, doing nothing without a reason, whether anybody else likes it or not. Having seen fighting in the Indian wars, Hazen understands the importance of good training and wants his men to be ready for battle. (Eventually, the men of the 41^st will come to understand the value of their training.) And, when Hazen sees how sick many of his men are in their new camp, Camp Wickliffe, about 30 miles from Louisville, he breaks the rules of the camp by sending the sickest men home.

As he will tell it after the war:

Our experience at Camp Wickliffe was perhaps the most dispiriting of the war. All the diseases to which new troops are most subject here afflicted us. Diarrhea, fevers, measles, and pneumonia attacked a large part of the regiment, and the fatality [rate] was very great.

“Whenever possible I sent the sick at once to their homes, and in so doing while violating the orders of the camp, I saved many lives; and now, when I go home, some one almost invariably relates how his life was saved by removal from Camp Wickliffe in the night, when no knew it.

By the end of the war, two out of every three deaths of both Union and Confederate soldiers will be from illness, not from combat. But thanks to Hazen’s hard-headed approach to managing soldiers, some lives will have been saved.

IN NEWS ELSEWHERE: On very shaky grounds indeed, the Confederate Congress today “admits” Kentucky and Missouri to the Confederacy, bringing the supposed number of Confederate states to 13—hence, the 13 stars on the Confederate flag. In fact, the Confederacy has no more than furtive, skeleton “government” in Kentucky and Missouri, which sometimes cling to bits of territory in their respective states and sometimes are forced into exile. In reality, neither Kentucky nor Missouri can ever be said to have really left the Union and, at its peak, the CSA will effectively include only 11 states.

ON THIS DAY: Monday, Dec. 9, 1861

“Turning the Bloodhounds Loose”

It is Monday in Washington, D.C., and a very good day for a certain U.S. Senator from Ohio who is so aggressive that he is called a “bloodhound” by his fellow Senators. For his bluntness, he also is known as “Bluff Ben.”

He is Benjamin Wade, from strongly abolitionist Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio, and he is ruthlessly anti-slavery and burningly ambitious. He is a “Radical Republican,” which means he wants slavery ended now and the South punished until it screams for mercy.

Wade’s eyebrows are bushy, his eyes are cold, and his mouth usually downturned. He looks like a tough customer. He is.

He also is a Radical Republican leader. Radical Republicans are zealots with one-track minds, single-issue thinkers unable or unwilling to acknowledge life’s complexities. Radical Republicans are blind to the political realities which oblige more liberally minded President Lincoln to take a go-slow approach to the emancipation of the slaves. They also seem deficient in the kind of mercy which makes Lincoln a humane man, forgiving of others, dedicated to inclusionism instead of exclusionism.

On this day, the Senate approves creation of what will become know as the Committee on the Conduct of the War (CCW), composed of both Senators and Representatives. Ben Wade will become its chairman. Created out of frustration with the Army of the Potomac’s failures and inaction, the CCW’s task will be to scrutinize every aspect of the war. In its poking and prying, harassing and scolding, it will both serve the Union cause and discredit it. Led by Wade, it will behave like a pack of bloodhounds.

Useful service will come through its civilian sharp-eyed checking on the military and the military's not-always-illustrious performance. It will uncover incompetence and corruption. To the Committee’s shame, however, it will also damage reputations unnecessarily and interfere with matters in which it had no expertise. There will be more than a whiff about it of what someday will become known as McCarthyism.

And that will be at least partly because of Bluff Ben Wade. Wade is afraid of no one and respectful of few. He has called Abraham Lincoln’s military leadership “your rosewater war” and told the President to his face that he is responsible for every military mistake the Union side has ever made, and that, as a result, he is not one mile from Hell. (Lincoln replied that Hell was indeed only one mile from the White House, meaning the distance to Wade’s Capitol Hill.)

The war will go on and after Lincoln had led the Union to victory, Wade will come within an inch to occupying the White House himself. But that’s another story, and it will come much later.

ON THIS DAY: Sunday, Dec. 8, 1861

“A Case of Murder”

Vegetating in Fayetteville, western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio makes an informal inspection of winter quarters, writes three letters, has dinner with some other officers, records the weather in his diary (“A cloudy morning…After 10 a.m. cleared up and a bright, warm day”) and watches Col. Eliakim Scammon and some other officers play whist.

In the Cairo, Illinois, headquarters of Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, however, Sunday is a day of neither relaxation nor light duty.. The commander of the District of Southeast Missouri grinds out six letters on reporting on such topics as firearms received, intelligence received, and the condition of a nearby railroad.

Perhaps the most unpleasant duty for Grant is selection of a list of officers available for the court martial of one Col. Michael K. Lawler, commander of the 18^th Illinois. Lawler has made a serious mistake. When a local civil court refused to take jurisdiction over a murder case involving two of his soldiers, an impatient Lawler simply turned the whole thing over to the angry men of the accused’s own company.

Within three days, the soldiers selected a jury of 12 men, tried the accused murderer, and hanged him. It was a kangaroo court and a hanging jury, and the whole thing smelled very bad to Grant’s superior, the fussy commander of the department of the Missouri, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck.

Now Halleck wants to try Lawler. But Lawler will beat the court martial and go on to great success in the war, eventually winning the brevet (honorary) rank of major general. And so justice, or at least the finer points of it, will give way to the pressures of war.

It was not the first time in this war nor will it be the last.

Friday, December 7, 2007

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Dec. 7, 1861

“Going to Soldier”

They came from classrooms and offices, stores and workshops, and, in Ohio, most of they came from farms. They were naive men and innocent boys, confused and shy in the hurly-burly of camp life. But they were strong and eager, calloused by the hard labor of wresting livings from the soil or a rough-and-tumble economy, and they were ready to go to war without really knowing what war was like. They wanted to be soldiers, and they thought war would be a grand adventure.

“Our ideas of war, then, were rather of a romantic order,” John A. Bering and Thomas Montgomery recalled in 1880 in their history of the 48^th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. “A skirmish, we supposed, would be a recreation, and a battle a real enjoyment....

“Some were even worried for fear the war would be over before we arrived, and peace declared before we ever fired a gun,” Bering and Montgomery explained. “But these romantic notions passed away, in the active service which soon followed.”

Like soldiers throughout history, these men of the 48^th will discover an old truth: warfare consists of long periods of tedium interrupted by moments of sheer terror or intervals of misery. The 48^th would be cursed with all three.

For the 48^th, the tedium is now. Since late summer, small groups of men have been drifting into Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati and joining the 48^th, which is slowly approaching the required size (approximately 1,000 men). Some regiments fill faster than others, and the 48^th is one of the slow ones, its men coming in dribs and drabs from throughout western Ohio. Making a lot of difference is the charisma, or lack thereof, of the regiment’s commander (in this case, Lt. Col. Peter J. Sullivan, a hot-tempered “big-city lawyer" from Cincinnati) and the skill of its recruiters—typically young men promised lieutenant’s commissions if they recruit enough men.

By early December, the 48^th still has not reached its required number, and its men are growing restless as they watch other regiments go off to war. For the 48^th, the routines remain the same week after week:

Squad, company, and battalion drill every morning and afternoon. Most of this involves learning how to march smartly in formation, moving this way and that with precision in response to shouted commands. This is needed so the men will learn to almost automatically respond to orders yelled out on a noisy, confusing battlefield, creating concentrated, simultaneous firepower with their short-range, inaccurate muskets. Very little time is spent practicing the firing of weapons. No time is spent on physical conditioning for its own sake.

Every evening, the regiment appears for “dress parade,” a formal ceremony in which the companies are drawn up in a line and inspected. The captains report on their company roll calls and important orders are read.

On Sunday mornings at 9, the companies again form on a line, the captains inspect their companies, and the first sergeants read the Articles of War, which includes, over and over, the refrain, “Any violator of said section shall suffer death, or such other punishment as by a court martial shall be inflicted.”

After Sunday inspection, the companies are dismissed until 11, when they are marched to the colonel’s quarters to hear a sermon preached by the regimental chaplain.

Guard and housekeeping duties rotate among the men, so leisure time is kept to a minimum.

And this goes on and on and on…

>>> In winter quarters at Fayetteville, western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio notes that area residents from as far as 25 miles away are coming to take loyalty oaths, but “how much is due to a returning sense of loyalty and how much to the want of coffee and salt, is more than I know.”