This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [96]
The official records for this period are full of stiff orders from — of all people — William Tecumseh Sherman, who asserted passionately: “This demoralizing and disgraceful practice of pillage must cease, else the country will rise on us and justly shoot us down like dogs and wild beasts.” Even John Pope, whom the people of Virginia would soon consider the very author of lawless war, made himself highly unpopular with his volunteer troops by his efforts to restrain them. He met a party from the 27th Ohio bringing in a wagonload of fence rails for firewood, made them return the rails, and then ordered their colonel to “put these ——————— in the guard house until they could be court-martialed and shot as an example to the rest of the — — volunteer — —”7
None of this did any good (and the volunteers went unhanged) for the fact was that the army saw nothing in the least wrong in taking what it needed from the people of the South. Higher officials were infected as well as enlisted men. Stout German-born General Osterhaus furiously denounced a soldier who was brought before him for killing a cow until he learned that his own cook had the animal’s liver and was preparing it for the general’s supper. Then he changed his tune: “Ah, dot iss it, den? Vell den, you always bring me de livers and den I never know nuttin’ about de killin’ of de animals.” A Wisconsin colonel, lecturing two culprits who had been caught looting, said sternly: “Now boys, I have to punish you. I am so ordered by the General. I want you two to understand that I am not punishing you for stealing, but for getting caught at it, by God!”
An Indiana soldier said that “the generals were slow to adopt the confiscation idea” and issued all sorts of orders against foraging, but “in time the veteran learned to circumvent all such orders, and to modify the cruel penalty by a system of division with the officers in command, who allowed the boys to construe orders to suit their needs.” Highhanded foraging, he confessed, had “marvellous beauties.” Almost universally, in eastern and western armies alike, company and regimental officers did not even pretend to try to enforce orders against foraging.8
In part, this was just what was bound to happen in a civil war in nineteenth-century America. The rowdy strain was coming to the surface again; it had been called up to help create the war, and there was no way to repress it. Army life at any time lifts from men the feeling of personal responsibility for their acts; it was doing this now in a land where the strain of irresponsibility ran high at the best of times. An army of invasion composed of volunteers who considered themselves free citizens despite their uniforms and their oaths of enlistment was going to “use this country awful rough,” and that was that.
But that was not all of it. Super-patriots back home were demanding a hard war. Newspapers in Chicago and other northern cities sharply condemned the court-martial of Colonel Turchin, complaining that Buell was altogether too kind to the people of Alabama and Tennessee, who, being in a state of rebellion, needed to be punished. The soldiers sympathized with this criticism — the more so, perhaps, since at the moment the war was not being prosecuted very energetically. To protect Rebel property was beginning to look like being soft with rebellion itself; an officer too alert to prevent foraging and looting might very well be an officer secretly in sympathy with the Confederacy.