This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [134]
All sorts of wild rumors went through camp. Some men asserted that the northern states were going to call their regiments home, and it was believed that if a man ran away from the army his home-state authorities would give him protection. When the mails failed to reach the army for a time it was reported that peace had been declared and that Grant was purposely stopping letters and newspapers “for fear we could not be held in subjection if we knew the state of affairs.” There was an epidemic of desertion, and an Ohio veteran wrote: “Now the hour of darkness began.” In some regiments the sick men outnumbered the well. On top of everything else the army failed to get its paymasters around on time and the soldiers were broke.4
All of this made it look as if the bottom had fallen out of the tub, and the Union cause seemed to be dipping down toward acceptance of defeat in January and February of 1863. But if there was reason for gloom there was also, in these armies and in the country behind them, reason for quiet confidence. Under the dejection there was a certain toughness; the sulkiest of complaints could come from men who really had no idea of quitting; and soldiers and civilians alike had deep reserves of strength and hope, to be drawn on when most needed. It is not hard to find signs that the will to win was still powerful.
In Iowa an unusual job of recruiting had just been completed. Early in January this state sent to St. Louis, to go marching through the streets to the rendezvous at Benton Barracks, the 37th Iowa Volunteer Infantry, numbering 914 rank and file; a regiment like all others except for one thing — everyone from colonel to drummer boy was safely past the upper military age limit of forty-five years. (Many of the men were over sixty, some were in their seventies, and one sprightly private confessed to the age of eighty.)
This was Iowa’s famous “Graybeard Regiment,” recruited by special arrangement with the War Department as a means of showing that there were plenty of draft-proof citizens who were perfectly willing to go to war. There was a tacit understanding that the regiment would be given guard and garrison duty as much as possible, but there was nothing binding about this. The 37th was in no sense a home-guard outfit; it had enlisted for the full three years and eventually it was to campaign in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hiking in the rain and sleeping in the mud like anybody else. During its three years only scattered detachments got into actual fighting — the total casualty list was only seven — but 145 men died of disease, and 364 had to be mustered out of service for physical disability, and when the regiment at last was paid off, in May of 1865, it was revealed that more than thirteen hundred sons and grandsons of members of the regiment were in Federal military service. So old were these men, and so young their state, that not a man in the regiment could claim Iowa as his birthplace. There had been no Iowa when these Iowans were born.5
An army surgeon in a Kentucky regiment who went down the river with McClernand’s flotilla and saw Sherman’s men just after their repulse at Chickasaw Bluffs noticed no signs of depression among them. Instead, he found these soldiers “the noisiest crowd of profane-swearing, dram-drinking, card-playing, song-singing, reckless, impudent daredevils in the world.” An Illinois recruit who came to the army at this time said that the men thought more of Sherman than of any other man alive but that they never raised a cheer