This Hallowed Ground (73 page)

In due time the armies reached Washington and went into camp. They gave the authorities a certain amount of trouble. To the very end the Potomac soldiers were trimmer, neater, better dressed, and better drilled; Sherman’s men had never been very distinguished for any of these virtues, and after their long winter campaign they tended now to be even more ragged and informal than ever. When men from one army met men from the other it usually took little more than a sidelong glance to touch off a fight. In addition, the Army of the Tennessee was bitter about the treatment the government had given Sherman, and in Washington saloons Sherman’s officers had a way of jumping on top of bars and calling for three groans for Secretary Stanton. With the ice thus broken, it would be only a question of time before some Westerner would remark that the Easterners were paper-collar soldiers who had never been anywhere or licked anybody. The riot would begin immediately afterward. Eventually Grant had to put the two armies in camps on opposite sides of the Potomac River. It was noted that farmers whose lands were near Sherman’s camping grounds began to complain that their chickens were not safe.

These Federal volunteer armies had existed for four years. For many thousands of young men, army life embraced all that they had ever seen of manhood. Now — suddenly, although there had been much forewarning — there came to all of these the realization that this tremendous experience was over. Never again would they rise to bugle call or drumbeat, make slogging marches in dust or mud, sleep tentless in the rain, or nerve themselves for the racking shock of battle; nor would they ever again go rioting across whole states with a torch for every empty house and a loaded wagon to carry away hams and turkeys and hives full of stolen honey for a campfire feast in the cool evening. They would be cut off, now and forever, from everything they had become used to; the most profound experience life could bring had come to them almost before
boyhood had ended, and now it was all over and they would go back to farm or village or city, back to the quiet, uneventful round of prosaic tasks and small pleasures that are the lot of stay-at-home civilians.

They had hated the war and the army and they had wanted passionately to be rid of both forever; yet now they began to see that the war and the army had brought them one thing that might be hard to find back home — comradeship, the sharing of great things by men set apart from society’s ordinary routine. They had grown used to it. They wanted to go home, they were delighted that they would presently take off their uniforms forever, and yet …

In Nashville, Pap Thomas held a farewell review for the stout old Army of the Cumberland, and as the men prepared to disband they found themselves feeling lost, almost sad.

“None of us,” wrote a survivor, “were fond of war; but there had grown up between the boys an attachment for each other they never had nor ever will have for any other body of men.” An Iowa cavalryman, awaiting the muster-out ceremony he had so long wanted, wrote moodily in his diary: “I do feel so idle and lost to all business that I wonder what will become of me. Can I ever be contented again?
Can I work?
Ah! How doubtful — it’s raining tonight.”
⁶

In Washington the great reviews were held as scheduled, toward the end of May. Thousands of men tramped down Pennsylvania Avenue, battle flags fluttering in the spring wind for the last time, field artillery trundling heavily along with unshotted guns, and great multitudes lined the streets and cheered until they could cheer no more as the banners went by inscribed with the terrible names — Bull Run, Antietam, Vicksburg, Atlanta — and President Johnson took the salute in his box by the White House. It was noticed that Sherman’s army unaccountably managed to spruce up and march as if parade-ground maneuvers were its favorite diversion. Sherman had apologized to Meade in advance for the poor showing he expected his boys to make; when he looked back, leading the parade, and saw his regiments faultlessly aligned, keeping step and going along like so many Grenadier Guards, he confessed that he knew the happiest moment of his life.

And finally the parades were over and the men waited in their camps for the papers that would send them home and transform them into civilians again.

 … There was a quiet, cloudless May evening in Washington, with no touch of breeze stirring. In the camp of the V Corps of the Army of the Potomac men lounged in front of their tents, feeling the familiar monotony of camp life for the last time. Here and there impromptu male quartets were singing. On some impulse a few soldiers got out candles, stuck them in the muzzles of their muskets, lighted them, and began to march
down a company street; in the windless twilight the moving flames hardly so much as flickered.

Other soldiers saw, liked the looks of it, got out their own candles, and joined in the parade, until presently the whole camp was astir. Privates were appointed temporary lieutenants, captains, and colonels; whole regiments began to form, spur-of-the-moment brigadiers were commissioned, bands turned out to make music — and by the time full darkness had come the whole army corps was on the parade ground, swinging in and out, nothing visible but thousands upon thousands of candle flames.

Watching from a distance, a reporter for the New York
Herald
thought the sight beautiful beyond description. No torchlight procession Broadway ever saw, he said, could compare with it. Here there seemed to be infinite room; this army corps had the night itself for its drill field, and as the little lights moved in and out it was “as though the gaslights of a great city had suddenly become animated and had taken to dancing.” The parade went on and on; the dancing flames narrowed into endless moving columns, broke out into broad wheeling lines, swung back into columns again, fanned out across the darkness with music floating down the still air.
⁷

As they paraded the men began to cheer. They had marched many weary miles in the last four years, into battle and out of battle, through forests and across rivers, uphill and downhill and over the fields, moving always because they had to go where they were told to go. Now they were marching just for the fun of it. It was the last march of all and, when the candles burned out, the night would swallow soldiers and music and the great army itself; but while the candles still burned, the men cheered.

The night would swallow everything — the war and its echoes, the graves that had been dug and the tears that had been shed because of them, the hatreds that had been raised, the wrongs that had been endured and the inexpressible hopes that had been kindled — and in the end the last little flame would flicker out, leaving no more than a wisp of gray smoke to curl away unseen. The night would take all of this, as it had already taken so many men and so many ideals — Lincoln and McPherson, old Stonewall and Pat Cleburne, the chance for a peace made in friendship and understanding, the hour of vision that saw fair dealing for men just released from bondage. But for the moment the lights still twinkled, infinitely fragile, flames that bent to the weight of their own advance, as insubstantial as the dream of a better world in the hearts of men; and they moved to the far-off sound of music and laughter. The final end would not be darkness. Somewhere, far beyond the night, there would be a brighter and a stronger light.

¹
The Crime against Kansas: Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner in the Senate of the United States, 19th and 20th May, 1856;
Boston, Cleveland and New York, 1856;
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850
, by James Ford Rhodes, Vol. II, pp. 132-33;
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
, by Carl Sandburg, Vol. I, p. 103.

²
Life of Charles Sumner
, by Walter G. Shotwell, pp. 217, 241; Rhodes, op. cit., pp. 135-36.

³
The Crime against Kansas
.

⁴
John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After
, by Oswald Garrison Villard (cited hereafter as Villard), p. 93.

⁵
Rhodes, op. cit., pp. 155-57; Villard, op. cit. 142-45.

⁶
Rhodes, op. cit., pp. 158-60;
A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans
, by William E. Connelley, Vol. I, pp. 551-52;
Bleeding Kansas
, by. Alice Nichols, pp. 105-9.

⁷
Alleged Assault upon Senator Sumner; report of the Select Committee appointed under the resolution of the House, passed on the 23rd day of May, 1856;
Shotwell, op. cit., pp. 331-32.

⁸
For the conflicting testimony about the seriousness of Sumner’s injuries, see the report of the House Committee, cited above. A grave view of the after effect of the blows is taken in the Shotwell biography of Sumner, p. 342. Brooks’s cane appears to have been a hollow affair made of gutta-percha, easily broken. That Sumner was considered, by himself and his doctors, to have been seriously injured is clearly evident in the letters he wrote and received throughout the summer of 1856. (Manuscript collection owned by Mrs. Mary Reeve of Clearfield, Pennsylvania.)

⁹
Villard, op. cit., pp. 85, 93, 153.

¹⁰
Rhodes, op. cit., p. 162; Villard, op. cit., pp. 153-54.

¹¹
This account of the Pottawatomie murders follows Villard, op. cit., p. 155 et seq.

¹
A fascinating description of the Lake Superior-St. Mary’s River country before the building of the Soo Canal is to be found in
The Long Ships Passing: The Story of the Great Lakes
, by Walter Havighurst, pp. 43-44, 72, 200. See also
Michigan:
A
Guide to the Wolverine State
, p. 124.

²
History of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal
, by Dwight H. Kelton, pp. 6-15;
Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State
, p. 345;
Cleveland, the Making of a City
, by William Ganson Rose, pp. 222-24, 236, 274; Havighurst, op. cit., pp. 230-31.

³
Main Line of Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central
, by Carlton J. Corliss, pp. 63-65, 76, 82, 84; Havighurst, op. cit., p. 83, pp. 128-29.

⁴
Life in the Middle West
, by James S. Clark, pp. 10-15, 25. This artless book contains a singularly ingratiating account of life on the Ohio frontier.

⁵
Ibid., p. 35.

⁶
Democracy in the Middle West
, by Jeannette P. Nichols and James G. Randall, p. 31. For a good summary of the change that came over the Middle West in the pre-war decade, see
The Growth of the American Republic
, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, Vol. I, p. 618.

¹
In a speech made at Peoria, Ill., on Oct. 16, 1854. See
The Living Lincoln
, edited by Paul Augle and Earl Schenck Miers, pp. 161–73.

²
Capt. James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” from
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
, Vol. I, pp. 20-31. (This work is cited hereafter as
B. & L.)
In the same Volume, see also Gen. Abner Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 40-47; in addition, Maj. Anderson’s message to Adj. Gen. Samuel Cooper,
Official Records
, Vol. I, pp. 2, 3.

³
Scott’s letters are in the
Official Records
, Vol. I, pp. 112, 114.

⁴
Official Records
, Vol. I, p. 195.

⁵
Ibid., pp. 196-98.

⁶
Ibid., pp. 211, 245, 248, 285;
B. &
L., Vol. I, pp. 65-66.

⁷
Ibid., pp. 74-76.

¹
B. &
L., Vol. I, p. 85.

²
Sandburg, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 211-14. For an appraisal of Douglas’s influence in Illinois, see
The Borderland in the Civil War
, by Edward Conrad Smith, p. 179.

³
The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891
, edited by Rachel Sherman Thorndike; p. 110;
The Blue and the Gray
, edited by Henry Steele Commager, pp. 40, 43;
The Rebellion Record
, edited by Frank Moore, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 45;
B. & L.
, Vol. I, p. 84.

⁴
War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Michigan, Military Order of the Loyal Leaxon of the United States
, Vol. I, pp. 8-11.

⁵
Rebellion Record
, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 86-87.

⁶
A History of the Sixth Iowa Infantry
, by Henry H. Wright, p. 11;
The Story of a Cavalry Regiment: The Career of the Fourth Iowa Veteran Volunteers
, by William Forse Scott, pp. 1-3.

⁷
Army Life of an Illinois Soldier: Letters and Diary of the Late Charles Wills
, compiled and published by his sister, p. 8;
History of the Sixth Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry
, by C. C. Briant, pp. 4-5;
The History of the 9th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
, by Daniel George MacNamara, p. 11;
Rebellion Record
, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 45; A
Narrative of the Formation and Services of the Eleventh Massachusetts Volunteers
, by Gustavus B. Hutchinson, p. 11.

⁸
Drum Taps in Dixie: Memories of a Drummer Boy, 1861-1865
, by Delavan S. Miller, p. 30;
Civil War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Massachusetts, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States
, Vol. II, p. 448;
Story of the Service of Company E and of the 12th Wisconsin Regiment
, written by One of the Boys, pp. 44-46.