This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [135]
For the Westerners did not often cheer their generals. In the Army of the Potomac it was different. During the McClellan regime, staff officers would ride ahead of the commanding general when he was about to make an appearance, and would see to it that a cheer was raised; a cheer was accepted as part of the routine, and for the most part the men offered it willingly enough. Officers sometimes went to great lengths in this business. When the Irish Brigade was paraded to get its first look at its new division commander, General Israel B. Richardson (who was to be killed at Antietam), a member of Richardson’s staff galloped over to the brigade just before the general arrived and made a speech about Richardson’s many virtues.
“And what do you think of the brave old fellow?” he demanded. “He has sent to this camp three barrels of whiskey, a barrel for each regiment, to treat the boys of the brigade, and we ought to give him a thundering cheer when he comes along.”
Naturally the Irishmen gave Richardson a tumultuous reception — not knowing that the staff officer had unblushingly lied to them and that no whiskey had been sent.7
The Easterners took their cue from McClellan, who liked cheering; the Westerners may have taken theirs from Grant, who didn’t care. An officer remembered seeing Grant one night while the army was crossing a bayou on a pontooon bridge during a forced march; he was in the saddle, solid, erect, and brown, keeping the traffic moving with repeated orders: “Push right along, men — close up fast and hurry over.” The men all turned to look at him, made note that the commanding general was in their midst, but said never a word. Looking back on it afterward, the officer mused: “Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar by theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.”8
The Westerners would go where the generals told them to go, and within reasonable limits they would do what the generals told them to do, but they insisted on being unmilitary about it. But when the Potomac soldiers flatly refused to cheer Burnside, it was a sign that they had written him off.
At Murfreesboro the time of sickness and depression did not last long. Rosecrans got his supply lines working in spite of the Rebel raiders and saw to it that there was plenty to eat. The men cut cedar boughs to shade and protect their tents, camps were made clean and were kept well policed, and before long an Ohio private was confessing that “we may be said to have enjoyed all the comforts which can fall to a soldier’s lot.” The army had been badly mangled at Stone’s River; Rosecrans was going to let it get plenty of rest before it began a new campaign. He carried this prescription so far, indeed, that by spring both Halleck and Grant were complaining that his army was not pulling its weight.
Rosecrans himself had put in some of his spare time examining statistics, as a result of which he told his troops that they were going to have to brush up on their marksmanship. In the Stone’s River fight, he said, a comparison of Federal ammunition expenditures with Confederate casualties showed that it had taken 145 rounds of musketry to hit one Rebel and that a Yankee cannon had to be fired twenty-seven times to inflict a single casualty.9
A resident of Tennessee who had seen a good deal of both Union and Confederate armies wrote out a comparison of his own, basing much of it on what he saw in Rosecrans’s camps.
The Federal soldiers, he said, managed their camps better than the Confederates. Even if they were to be in a place only a few days, men would scurry around to build little beds — usually by driving forked sticks into the ground and laying saplings or planks across them — and they would build little shelters for their cooking stoves. Confederates seldom bothered