This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [49]
Thomas was a Virginian, forty-five years old, tall and stout and reserved in manner; he rarely laughed or raised his voice, he had a majestic full beard and a general air of kindly sternness, he moved with ponderous deliberation, and altogether he was extremely impressive in appearance. His army friends called him “Old Tom,” and his troops referred to him as “Old Slow Trot” — he had hurt his spine in a railroad accident a few months earlier, and it gave him excruciating pain when his horse moved faster than a walk. He was inclined to distrust volunteers and he was very stiff about matters of training; not for months would his men give him the affectionate title, “Pap,” by which he was to become famous.15
He had been much admired by Jefferson Davis when Davis was Secretary of War, and in 1855 when the crack 2nd Cavalry was organized with Albert Sidney Johnston as colonel and Robert E. Lee as lieutenant colonel, Thomas became one of its majors. In January 1861 he suspected that his spinal ailment might make active duty impossible, and in casting about for possible employment he wrote to the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, applying for the post of commandant of cadets there. This was remembered against him in Washington after Virginia seceded, and the War Department was inclined to doubt his loyalty. Sherman himself had vouched for him; now Thomas was under him, helping get troops ready for the serious fighting which everybody knew must begin in the spring.
It would begin, actually, long before the spring, and when it began it would be very rough. And there were, here in this Kentucy sector, these generals who had imbibed old General Smith’s doctrine: “… he must always be getting ready for it … And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he must fight!”
Chapter Four
TO MARCH TO TERRIBLE MUSIC
1. Sambo Was Not Sambo
THERE was a significance in the crossing of the Ohio River. North of the river was the familiar Middle West; beyond it there was nothing less than the South itself, mysterious, romantic, threatening, strange. The nearest Confederate armies might be scores of miles away, with no faintest intention of coming any closer. No matter: when a soldier crossed the river he felt that he was in the war.
Thousands of sunburned boys in ill-fitting blue uniforms were crossing the Ohio this fall, for Kentucky was the destined point of departure and the government was hastening to build up Union strength in the state. Nervous General Sherman had warned the Secretary of War that before they got through they would have to have two hundred thousand soldiers on this front. His panicky overestimate unsettled the authorities so much that they concluded Sherman was too flighty for his job, and he was replaced by the less emotional General Don Carlos Buell; and for a time Sherman hovered unhappily on the fringes of the war, a general without portfolio, alleged by unfriendly newspaper correspondents to be insane. But although his estimate of required strength had been rejected, the government nevertheless was getting troops into the state as fast as the training camps could send them. (By the war’s end it would turn out that Sherman’s wild appraisal was tolerably accurate, after all.)
The new arrivals were the greenest of recruits, and they came into Kentucky peering nervously about for enemies, tasting the wild excitement of the road to war, seeing a miraculous tonic quality in the sunrise and the crisp autumn wind. Even their officers felt it, even the West Pointers. Ormsby Mitchel, who had been graduated from the military academy in the same class with Robert E. Lee, had left the army to become an astronomer of note and now came to Kentucky as a grizzled brigadier bearing the nickname of “Old Stars” — even Mitchel felt it as he looked about his brigade camp at dawn and saw a haunting mist on the landscape: “Reveille is just sounding from forty drums and fifes and from twenty bugles, all over an area two miles square. It is just coming daylight, but the moon