This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [133]
The camp to which it returned was cheerless enough, even without the humiliating knowledge that one more move had ended in defeat.
The Burnside regime had never quite been able to make regimental and brigade commanders keep house properly, and the log-and-canvas shelters which the men had put up over shallow pits in the ground were little better than pigsties. The commissary had broken down; in this safe camp no more than fifty miles from Washington, men were dying of scurvy because they had nothing but salt pork and hardtack to eat. Hospital arrangements were in a complete mess — no heat in the tents, no proper food for sick men, nursing so inefficient that some patients actually froze to death in their cots. Things, in short, were in a very bad state, and army morale reflected it.
Not only were the men grumpy toward their commanders — one corps defiantly refused to raise a cheer for Burnside at a review, even though all of the officers rode up and down the line, swinging their caps and chanting: “Hip — hip — hip — —” They were casting dark looks at President Lincoln himself. The Army of the Potomac was in theory the army that contained the largest core of anti-slavery sentiment, yet with everything going wrong the men found the Emancipation Proclamation hard to swallow.
One New Englander wrote savagely in a letter to his family: “I don’t feel as much like fighting as I used to for it looks to me as if fighting for the Union and Constitution is played out and that now we are fighting for the Abolition of Slavery. Speaking of Abe, I have gone clean back on him! He may be a very good rail splitter but rather a poor President I reckon..… Let the Nigger go to hell for all of me, and if a man wants to preach abolition, emancipation or any other ism he must find somebody besides me to preach it to.” A New Yorker reflected on the abysmal failure of leadership and wrote to his mother: “Perhaps Old Abe has some funny story to tell, appropriate to the occasion.… I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”1
Many people back home were feeling the same way, and the letters the soldiers received reflected it. An Illinois officer in the Army of the Cumberland wrote that the home folks were “writing letters which would discourage the most loyal of men.” He put in most of his time, he said, “talking patriotism at the boys and doing good, round, solid cursing at the home cowardly vipers who are disgracing the genus man by their conduct.” In the big Union base at Nashville there were so many prostitutes that an Ohio soldier declared the army’s very existence was threatened; the authorities finally took a provost guard, rounded up fifteen hundred of the women, and moved them under guard all the way to Louisville, with stern orders not to come any farther south. While Rosecrans worked to reorganize his army and get it in shape for the spring campaign, he feared that he was about to be attacked: he wrote Halleck that Bragg was being reinforced and would soon take the offensive. He demanded reinforcements and complained that Rebel cavalry was constantly annoying him. Meanwhile his winter camps were wet, muddy, and uncomfortable, and there was a great deal of pneumonia.2
Grant’s Army of the Tennessee found itself strung up and down the western bank of the Mississippi for fifty miles. The river was abnormally high, much of the bottom land was under water, and only the levee itself seemed to offer camping space. Unending rains beat upon the levee, every company street was ankle-deep with black gummy mud, and there was sickness everywhere. A man in a newly arrived Indiana regiment reported that “scarcely a man had