This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [190]
There were times, indeed, when it seemed that the Union soldiers disliked each other more than they disliked the Confederates. Here at Chattanooga there were elements from three armies — Hooker’s two corps from the Army of the Potomac, Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee (when it finally arrived; the head of the column reached Brown’s Ferry on November 20), and the Army of the Cumberland; and these armies had distinct characteristics. Each was locked in by its own pride and clannish spirit, and each looked on the others as strange and rather outlandish groups. The Easterners gaped at the Westerners, especially at Sherman’s men, considered them undisciplined and abominably unmilitary in appearance, and remarked that except for the color of their uniforms they looked exactly like the Rebels. Sherman’s men, in turn, whooping and yelling as they marched through camp, slouching along with shapeless black hats jammed any which way on their heads, hooted and jeered at the men from the Army of the Potomac and made remarks about “kid gloves and paper collars” — to which the Easterners replied with disdainful comments about “backwoodsmen.”
One of Sherman’s veterans said he and his fellows had very little use for either Hooker’s or Thomas’s soldiers, and confessed that “to hear our men talk to them when passing them or their camps marching, you’d think the feeling between us and the Rebels could be no more bitter.” The Army of the Cumberland, he said, they could just endure, but the Army of the Potomac — it was too stiff, the men with their jaunty little forage caps looked too neat and tin-soldier-like, and “the 11th and 12th corps Potomac men and ours never meet without some very hard talk.” The Westerners noticed, too, that there was a great gulf between officers and enlisted man in the eastern regiments; in Sherman’s army a private was quite likely to be on a first-name basis with his company commander.11
It was the Army of the Cumberland that was unhappiest in all of this. The men still carried the memory of their defeat at Chickamauga as a stain on their record. They had been whipped in fair fight; they would not be at peace with themselves until they had made up for that whipping — and here were two other armies brought in to rescue them. The plain implication was that they could not get out of their difficulties without help, and the men bitterly resented it; nor did the remarks which Potomac and Tennessee men kept on dropping make the load any easier to bear. The Cumberlands were like a blend of the other two armies. Buell and Thomas were drillmasters as stiff as any the Easterners had seen, and men who served under them learned to button their coats, shine their boots, and say “Yessir” when addressed by higher ranks; but the men themselves were Westerners. They walked with a long stride and they were bigger physically than the men from the East, and they considered that Stone’s River and Chickamauga were fights as tough as any the other men had been through. Now here they were, squatting on the plain looking up at the infinite lines of Confederate trenches on top of the Tennessee mountains, and the authorities obviously felt that they could not fight their way out unaided. Far down underneath, their