This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [117]
It was not all sweetness and light. Most of the northern soldiers had farm backgrounds, and as they went south they looked appraisingly at southern fields and farms; they remembered the infinite number of pre-war orations by southern patriots describing the “sacred soil” of Dixie, and they picked the words up and made a sneer out of them. A Pennsylvania private, moving down toward Fredericksburg with the Army of the Potomac, took a top-lofty attitude toward farming practices in the Old Dominion as his regiment came over the Potomac:
“We crossed the Long Bridge and set foot on the ‘sacred soil’; the soil may be sacred, but we sacrilegious Yankees can’t help observing that it is awfully deficient in manure.”4
There came to the armies this fall many new recruits, and the fact that they were coming in now, after the ebbing of the tide, reflected the defects in War Department planning.
Edwin M. Stanton was an energetic and competent Secretary of War, but he gave way at times to freakish impulses, and one of these had seized him in the spring of 1862: he had closed down all army recruiting stations and stopped enlistments, which was practically equivalent to announcing that the war was about over and that no more men would be needed. His timing was unfortunate, because a series of Union reverses immediately took place — heavy casualty lists East and West, defeat in the Shenandoah Valley, defeat at Richmond, Rebel armies of invasion slipping the leash and taking the initiative everywhere. More recruits were badly needed, but the high enthusiasm of early spring had cooled, and when the recruiting stations were reopened they did not do a very good business.
To get more men a publicity operation of considerable magnitude was needed, and it was promptly arranged. The governors of the northern states got together and framed a public appeal to the President, asserting — with blithe optimism — that war spirit was running high and that they would be happy to raise new levies if the President thought he needed them. Mr. Lincoln, in turn, publicly appealed to the governors to get him three hundred thousand men and to get them sooner rather than later. A big recruiting campaign was launched in July, someone wrote a patriotic song with the line, “We are coming, Father Abraham,” and with much drumbeating and oratory the men were obtained.
They spent the summer in training camps, and in the fall they began to reach the armies in the field. Their uniforms were unfaded and unwrinkled and, like all green soldiers, they were heavily loaded down with all sorts of surplus equipment. The veterans jeered at them unmercifully, calling out “Fresh fish!” whenever a new regiment showed up, and making caustic remarks about their possessions.
“Knapsacks,” wrote one veteran scornfully, “were a foot above their heads; overcoats, two suits of clothes and underwear, all kinds of trimmings, bear’s oil for the hair, gifts from loving and well-meaning friends but useless to the soldier. On the back of their knapsacks were strapped frying-pans, coffee pots and stew pans, pairs of boots hanging to the knapsacks, blankets and ponchos, making in weight one hundred pounds to the man, while the vet carried about twenty-five pounds.”
In the Army of the Potomac, old-timers hooted at the new 118th Pennsylvania, which came in equipped with oversized knapsacks, extra pants, and other incidentals, and told the recruits to throw all that stuff away (starting with the knapsacks themselves) and roll up their essentials in their blankets. A rolled blanket could be tied in a horsecollar loop and worn over the shoulder; it weighed little and there were no straps to cut a man’s collarbones on a long march. The Pennsylvanians refused to take this advice and kept their ponderous knapsacks, and a Massachusetts veteran remarked that the boys would learn: “I don’t suppose there was a spare shirt in my company.”5
Men of the 103rd Illinois, coming down to join Grant’s army, were told that they did not amount to much — they had enlisted