This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [119]
Armies are strange human societies — rootless, wholly self-contained, creating derisive legends and folk tales as they tramp along toward death and destiny. These soldiers liked to tell tales about themselves; tales like the one about the teamster in the Indiana regiment who was the champion sprinter in his brigade. He was so prodigious a runner, indeed, that he beat every other runner in camp and finally, inspired by his speed, ran all the way out of the army, was listed as a deserter, and was never seen again at all. They cherished the memory of the Irish private’s wife, in an Illinois regiment. By some superhuman effort this woman managed to get all the way from Chicago down to Nashville to visit her husband, and by some even more unimaginable effort she had brought with her a five-gallon keg of whiskey for his refreshment. But when she reached camp she found that he had basely deserled both the army and herself — whereupon, undaunted, she erected a tent, peddled the whiskey to her absconding husband’s comrades at fifty cents a drink, and so raised a stake for her future support.
There was a tale about an Iowa cavalry regiment that had a very fat trooper who was unhorsed one day in a clash with rebel cavalry and who, his own regiment riding off in rout, sought to escape capture by crawling under a small culvert. This bridge was treacherous — two limber stringers, with crosswise planking, spanning a very shallow ditch. It sagged when it bore a load, and the fat cavalryman became stuck, face down, under the middle of it as the Rebel troopers went over it at a pounding gallop … and the Iowan got the father and mother of all spankings, so that he was totally unable (after he had been extricated) to sit in a saddle for months to come.10
There was also a Kentucky regiment which swore that one of its members owned a lifetime furlough signed by General George H. Thomas himself. This soldier, it was said, quite early in the war had been notified that his wife was dying, and he obtained from the general a pass permitting him to go home and to stay there until after her death. Most considerately the lady had then recovered, and it seemed likely that she would survive for at least fifty years more; and her husband, who cherished her, stayed at home with her, except that now and then he would go back to camp for a friendly chat with his comrades.…11
Increasingly the men ran into the problem of slavery, and as they did they began to encounter an arrogance in the southern attitude toward slavery that increased their own antagonism. Slavery seemed to be central. It was the one sensitive, untouchable nerve-ending, and to press upon it brought anguished cries of outrage that could be evoked in no other way.
A Union general in Kentucky wrote reflectively that he had recently called off an advertised property sale in a county-seat town on the ground that since half of the residents were excluded from the town as pro-secessionists the sale could not be fair. Nobody complained in the least, he said, at the prohibition that was put on sales of land and livestock, but the fact that slave auctions were also barred drew furious protests. “A single Negro,” wrote the general, “is sufficient to demand the attention of the Governor.” The peculiar institution’s chief peculiarity, it began to appear, was the fact that it was wrapped in a special kind of inviolability. It could not simply be left alone, it had to be given favored treatment; its claims were positive and not negative.
The Union soldiers which this general commanded (he wrote) were new men from the Northwest, recruited that summer. When fugitive slaves came into camp these boys would shelter them; yet there were not really very many cases of this