This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [94]
The soldier who had fought with all the odds against him had taken hair-raising risks and had won; the soldier who had had all of the advantages had refused to risk anything and had lost; and now the last chance that this ruinous war could be a relatively short one was gone forever.
Chapter Six
TURNING POINT
1. Kill, Confiscate or Destroy
AFTER the spring of 1862 the Civil War began to dominate the men who were fighting it. They still had the option to win or to lose, but they could no longer quite be said to be in charge of it. Coming of age, the war began to impose its own conditions; finally it come to control men instead of being controlled by them.
Until that spring ended, the situation was still more or less fluid; the war might yet be disposed of in such a way that it would not become one of the great turning points in history. But after the western army had been scattered and ordered to occupy territory instead of destroying Confederate fighting power, and after the eastern army had been driven into its muggy camp of refuge at Harrison’s Landing, the situation began to harden. From now on many things would happen, not so much because anyone wanted them to happen as because the pressure of war made them inevitable.
This began to be visible that summer in the West.
Grant was holding Memphis, western Tennessee, and northern Mississippi — one division here, two divisions there, detachments spraddled out for hundreds of miles to guard bridges, railroad lines, junction towns, and river ports. Buell was marching east to take Chattanooga. He was moving along the line of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, repairing it as he went, condemned to a snail’s progress. Ahead of him he had Ormsby Mitchel’s division holding a stretch of northern Alabama.
Mitchel was a voice crying in the wilderness. He had been in Alabama since early April, when the rest of Buell’s people went down to fight at Shiloh and take part in the Corinth campaign. Mitchel had gone to Huntsville, where he seized the Memphis and Charleston machine shops, and he fanned troops out to east and west, taking special pains to take the railroad bridges over the Tennessee at Decatur and at Bridgeport. He kept pestering headquarters with urgent messages, asserting that from where he was he could see the end of the war. If Buell came over fast, he said, he could get into Chattanooga without trouble; after that he could capture Atlanta, and from Atlanta he could march all the way north to Richmond, because all of that part of the Confederacy was “comparatively unprotected and very much alarmed.”1
Mitchel may very well have been right, but he could not get anyone to listen to him — except for Halleck and Buell, both of whom were irritated. He was told to break the railroad bridge at Decatur so that Rebels could not use the Memphis and Charleston if they regained possession of it, and after that he was to sit tight and await developments. He obeyed, fuming with impatience. As a diversion he sent out a handful of men on a long-shot raid to break the railroad that led from Chattanooga down to Atlanta; the raid failed, after a spectacular locomotive chase that has provided material for novelists, dramatists, and feature writers ever since, and most of the raiders were caught and hanged as spies. But finally, after Corinth was taken, Buell was sent over toward Chattanooga, and Mitchel was sternly rebuked for having destroyed the bridge at Decatur and was told to rebuild it.2 He was also told to tighten up on discipline because his troops had been misbehaving badly.
Specifically, there was the case of the 19th Illinois and Colonel John Basil Turchin.
The 19th Illinois was a more or less typical midwestern regiment, but Turchin was neither typical nor middlewestern. He had been born in Russia forty years earlier, had been educated at the Imperial Military School in St. Petersburg, had served on the Russian general