This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [113]
Nelson had been feuding with Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, a diligent Republican and one of the party leaders whose support Lincoln was not on any account going to forfeit. Davis (whose quarrel with Nelson was relatively unimportant — one man was overbearing and the other was insubordinate, and both were hot-tempered) was one of Morton’s pets. Buell, who was outraged and was demanding justice, had just had to beat a somewhat inglorious retreat all across Tennessee; furthermore, he had had sharp arguments with Tennessee’s Union war governor, a bitter-end anti-Confederate named Andrew Johnson, who considered him unsound and probably disloyal and who had a voice that would be heard in Washington. Because of all of this, nothing ever happened to Davis. He was not even spoken to harshly; instead, he was soon restored to duty and served throughout the war, a slim, dark-bearded man with haunted eyes, looked upon by subordinates with a certain amount of awe.4
Buell’s luck was not in, this fall, and it was at its worst when he tried to find a replacement for Nelson. He picked Charles C. Gilbert, a regular army captain of the crisp, take-his-name-sergeant variety, who in some vaguely irregular way had recently become a general. Buell and Gilbert believed that he was a major general, the War Department held that he was properly only a brigadier, and the United States Senate finally decided that he was no general at all, refusing to confirm his nomination and letting him slip back to his captaincy. But in his brief career as general Gilbert commanded a third of Buell’s army, and he offered a perfect illustration of the complete inability of a certain type of regular army officer to understand or to lead volunteer troops.
The army had been pushing along hard for days and the men were dead on their feet. Near midnight one exhausted column dropped by the roadside for a short breather when Gilbert and his staff went trotting by. Gilbert saw the sleeping men and was offended that nobody bothered to call them to attention and offer a salute so he collared the first officer he saw — a sleepy captain of infantry — and angrily demanded:
“What regiment is this?”
“Tenth Indiana.”
“Damn pretty regiment. Why in hell don’t you get up and salute me when I pass?”
“Who in the hell are you?”
“Major General Gilbert, by God, sir. Give me your sword, sir, you are under arrest.”
This racket roused the regiment’s colonel, who came up to defend his captain. Gilbert turned on him furiously, saying that he should have had the regiment lining the road at present-arms when the corps commander rode by. The colonel replied with some heat: his men had been marching day and night for a week, and he “would not hold a dress parade at midnight for any damn fool living.” The 10th Indiana, retorted Gilbert, was no better than an armed mob, and he would disgrace it; he would take its colors away that the army might know its shame.
The regiment was awake and on its feet by now, and the color sergeant took a hand in this row between colonel and major general. He would kill General Gilbert, he announced loudly, if he so much as touched the regiment’s colors. There was a loud murmur of approval, and one enlisted man shouldered his way up to General Gilbert and cried: “Here, you damned son of a bitch, get out of here or you’re a dead man.” Someone fired a musket, and some other person thrust a bayonet into Gilbert’s horse, causing the poor beast to spring in the air and take off at a headlong gallop. Gilbert’s staff followed, more horses were jabbed as they went by, and as the general disappeared in the darkness, still unsaluted, the 10th Indiana called after him, in confused angry chorus, that it would happily shoot him if it ever saw him again.… It took a certain knack to handle western volunteers, and