This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [248]
2. The Fire and the Night
On March 22 the youthful General Wilson, commanding twelve thousand and five hundred cavalrymen armed with repeating carbines, crossed the Tennessee River and moved down toward the heart of Alabama. To oppose him the Confederacy had nothing except Bedford Forrest — who, as a matter of fact, was quite a lot — and perhaps half as many troopers as Wilson was leading; troopers much less well equipped, driving east from Mississippi well aware that they were riding off on a forlorn hope. General Wilson was heading for Selma, a munitions center of considerable importance — just about the last one, aside from Richmond, which the Confederacy still possessed — and he moved with full confidence that he had the strength to go wherever he might be told to go.
His men were similarly confident. A young Iowa trooper in the command, who had been feeling poorly all winter, wrote that this expedition was good for him: “Nothing could be better for restoring my health than a campaign like this — the smoky dark pine woods and the color it adds with the splendid exercise of riding thirty miles or more a day will give health when all else fails. I am perfectly contented for the first time, and enjoy it fine.”1
This feeling of power, of having an irresistible energy that would quickly overcome all obstacles, was felt in all the Union armies. A New Englander in Meade’s army noted that increasing numbers of deserters from Lee’s troops were coming through the lines every night, and remarked that his comrades discussed this matter just as fishermen back home, in the spring, would discuss the way the fish were running in the rivers; sitting around the campfire in the evening, the men would talk things over and predict that “there will be a good run of Johnnies.”2 In the upper Shenandoah, Sheridan was crunching in on Waynesboro, where the pathetic remnant of Jubal Early’s army held a cheerless winter camp; Sheridan’s tough troopers would attack it, scatter it for keeps, and then move east to join Grant’s army in front of Richmond, leaving behind them a valley that had been gutted as thoroughly as any place Sherman’s army had visited. Down by the Gulf coast, General Edward R. S. Canby was leading a Union army in to besiege and capture Mobile. Mobile was no longer a real seaport, what with Union warships anchored in the bay, but it was fortified and it held Confederate troops; Canby would take it, and there would be one less Confederate flag on the map.
Behind the lines, men looked ahead to the end of the war and reflected on what the war had meant, reaching various conclusions. At City Point, the vast Union base supporting the siege of Petersburg, a Massachusetts agent for the Christian Commission looked on the military cemetery that had sprung into being there, and he could think only of the deaths that had come to so many thousands of young men, Union and Confederate alike.… “I though of the many homes made desolate by this war. All the way from the left, beyond Petersburg, to the right of Richmond, all through the Shenandoah Valley, on the banks of the Rappahannock, at Fredericksburg, in the Wilderness, our brave boys are sleeping, making it in truth one vast burial place. Here one grave, there another, ten, one hundred, one thousand, and more.… Truly all through coming time must the soil of Virginia be sacred, because moistened by the blood of so many heroes.” In Washington, General Jacob Cox stopped off to meet with friends on his way to join Schofield in North