Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [703]
CARNAGE AND CLASS
Meanwhile, New York’s working classes were experiencing the world’s first modern war in all its horror. What had seemed at first a lark or a living became a ghastly death trap. Between April and November 1862—at Shiloh, Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam—tens of thousands were killed or maimed. In December came the disaster at Fredericksburg when the blundering General Ambrose Burnside led the Army of the Potomac in a suicidal charge against Confederate entrenchments. The Fifty-first New York Volunteers were ordered to advance over a narrow plain so well covered, said a southern gunner, that “a chicken could not live in that field when we open on it.”
Among the ninety-six hundred Union wounded at Fredericksburg (though luckily not among the 1,284 who died there) was Walt Whitman’s brother George. Walt hurried from Brooklyn to Virginia. On arriving, the author of Beat! Beat! Drums! had his first direct encounter with war: an immense heap of amputated arms and legs (“cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening”). Whitman would stay on for the next three years as a volunteer worker, make six hundred visits to hospitals, comfort soldiers, and record images of a war that resembled nothing so much as the cattle pens of New York City: “a great slaughter-house & the men mutually butchering each other”; a “butchers’ shambles” replete with “groans and screams” and the “odor of blood.”
As city soldiers were shot to pieces—the Irish Brigade and the Garibaldi Guard virtually ceased to exist by 1863—the bright marching songs gave way to mournful ballads. Around the campfires survivors sang sentimental songs of home: “Shall I Never See My Mother,” “It Was My Mother’s Voice,” “Mother, I’ll Come Home Tonight.” The sheet music sales of “Weeping, Sad and Lonely; or, When This Cruel War Is Over” (published in 1863 by Sawyer and Thompson of Brooklyn) reached nearly a million.
Word of the dreadful course of events quickly got back to the northern metropolis a thousand miles or more behind the lines. Newspaper reports and pictures finished off the “picnic” image of the early days of the war as the press routinely printed catalogs of death and disfiguration (“Thomas Mcguire, Co. A, leg amp”; “M. Riley, Co. C, groin”; “H. Mcilainy, Co. I, forehead, severe”). Still more direct testimony was furnished by the thousands of hobbling wounded on the city’s streets, the incessant funeral processions, and the many deserters who had fled the wanton waste of life for the anonymity of the big city, rather than return to their small hometowns, where certain arrest awaited them. The city’s hospitals, moreover, were jammed with wounded soldiers, notably Bellevue—whose Dr. Stephen Smith produced the pocket text A Handbook of Operative Surgery, which became a standby in Union field hospitals—and the special military hospital set up in Central Park at the former Mount St. Vincent, where nursing duties were given over to the Sisters of Charity.
All these sources made abundantly clear that at the front, pay was not only low but late (and arrears of up to a year were disastrous to those with families dependent on them); that soldiers were gouged by the sutlers who sold them tobacco, ink, stamps; and that nativist bigots ruled some of the camps. Army General Orders required attendance at religious services of the commander’s choice (despite Archbishop Hughes’s plea that soldiers be free to attend or not). The tendency of Republican officers to use their