This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [118]
Although the veteran refused to carry any more equipment than he absolutely had to have, he considered it his duty to replace his used garments with any new ones that could be lifted from the recruits, and he devised ingenious ways to do this. The commonest was for the old soldier to wander into a green regiment’s camp, select an innocent-looking recruit, sit down beside him, and give him friendly advice about the evils that would befall a man who kept too much in his pack. The recruit would be impressed and before long would be opening his knapsack and pulling out spare pants, shirts, and boots whose weight (according to this expert advice) he would find oppressive. At this point the veteran would peel off his own worn clothing, put on the new, give the recruit a fatherly pat on the back, and strut off to his own regiment. If on arrival he was asked how he had got his new clothing he would grin and say: “By giving a recruit good advice.”7
There was one noteworthy thing about the new soldiers: they believed in foraging with a free and heavy hand. War propaganda had begun to take effect, and recruiting-campaign orators were no longer simply appealing to love of country and the desire for adventure; they were demanding that the South be made to sweat for the crime of secession, and recruits had been receptive. New soldiers in camp around Memphis considered themselves entitled to take anything edible: “They would slaughter a man’s hogs right before his eyes, and if he made a fuss cold steel would soon put a quietus on him.” Commanding generals tried in vain to restrain them. William T. Sherman was especially strict, breaking offending non-coms to privates and ordering men tied up by their thumbs all night long, but it did very little good. On the march in northern Mississippi, Grant’s men developed the playful habit of setting fire to dead leaves caught in the angles of rail fences; if this fired the fences and in turn set houses and barns ablaze, nobody cared. Along the line of march, any house whose occupants had fled was certain to be burned. An Ohio artilleryman remarked that “the cotton gin was then like the coal-breakers in the time of a great strike — many are burned; among soldiers and miners there is a lawless element that delights in destruction.” Gaunt, blackened chimneys stood where burned houses had been, and when soldiers saw one they would point to it and call: “Here stands another Tennessee headstone.”8
These Tennessee and Mississippi civilians were lucky in just one respect: the Federal armies which were advancing on them at least contained few Kansas troops. The Kansans, rejoicing in the nickname of “Jayhawkers,” were the most notorious freebooters and pillagers of all, and where they marched in Missouri or Arkansas they left a red scar on the land. They brought a personal venom into the war; they remembered the bitter lawlessness of the border troubles of the 1850s, they felt that they had a grudge to pay off, and anyway they tended to be a rowdy untamed crew operating under an uncommonly sketchy discipline. So notorious was their reputation that even their own army was wary of them. A Wisconsin cavalry regiment, moving east from Arkansas, told how in a camp beyond the river one of the Wisconsin troopers had died and a detail went out to the cemetery and dug a grave for him. While funeral services were being held back in the camp, the 5th Kansas found it necessary to bury one of its own men. Going to the cemetery, the Kansans