Upon the Altar of the Nation (23 page)

In his insightful analysis of this national hymn, Edmund Wilson observes that Howe’s God was not the gentle Christ of the lilies of the field (he was “born across the sea”), but the vengeful God of the Hebrew Bible ready to wreak vengeance on His enemies. The hymn is an urgent call to arms and promises victory over the enemies of Israel.
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In the North and the South, the dramatic performing arts evidenced a predictable moral avoidance. After an exhaustive review of Civil War-era plays, Rosemary L. Cullen discovered that during the war relatively few plays dealt with the subject of war at all. The closest was the 1852 dramatic rendering of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s celebrated novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which was wildly popular on the stage during and after the war.

For the most part, however, the offerings were escapist and took on any theme but the war. As summarized by Cullen: “It became evident that audiences preferred rousing patriotic and military spectacles of a non-controversial nature to any mention of the real causes of the conflict.”
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Plays like Harry Seymour’s
The Battle of Booneville
or Charles Gayler’s
The Stars and Stripes
celebrated heroic generals and battles in a virtual sea of patriotism unconnected to the war. In the Confederacy, where paper was scarce, few plays were published. Those that found their way into print celebrated martial valor or pilloried Lincoln’s public and (supposed) private life.

Like the general public, President Lincoln was a great fan of the theater and attended Grover’s Theater and Ford’s Theater frequently. And like them, he had no interest in stage productions on the theme of the war. He preferred Shakespeare or comedy. It is perhaps ironic that before the war ended, one of his favorite actors, John Wilkes Booth, would carry the war directly into the theater to find and shoot Lincoln himself.
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The battles of 1861 proved only one thing: despite its feeble origins, this war was destined to last a long time and become far more desperate. Between July 1861, when the first Battle of Bull Run was fought, and March 1862, Union and Confederate armies grew from a combined total of roughly three hundred thousand to more than one million.
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Inevitably the collisions would turn ever more brutal.

The spring campaigns of 1862 marked the last days of the West Point Code and of its unrepentant embodiment, General McClellan. Added to the sheer growth in numbers of troops were new weapons. Armies on both sides carried rifled muskets with conical bullets designed to increase distance, accuracy, and hitting power. At the same time tactics remained depressingly traditional, with both sides stubbornly employing close-order frontal assaults on entrenched defensive positions. Such was the power of culture—even military culture—that commanders resisted change, even though “tactical offenses” rarely carried well-placed entrenchments and invariably ate up casualties by the thousands.
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Just as tactics failed to keep pace with military technology, so also did medical technology fail. Ever larger and larger armies camped in close and often unsanitary winter quarters, prisons, and hospitals. Such conditions spread diseases so viciously that they took a third more lives than the battlefields themselves. In a letter to his wife, Private William Willoughby observed: “Our Regt is perhaps as healthy as any other yet we lose a man almost every day by disease.... We had when we left hartford some 800 or 900 men on dress parade we now scarsly [sic] number 400 the rest are all either killed wounded died or sick.”
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With McClellan playing it safe in Virginia, the next significant action took place in the western theater of the war. In Tennessee, Grant’s Federal army was still celebrating capturing Forts Henry and Donelson. They were unaware that a new Confederate line was forming farther south in Corinth, Mississippi, to attack Grant’s army in force and retake Tennessee. A Confederate army of twenty-seven thousand, under the command of Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard and reinforced by fifteen thousand additional troops from Braxton Bragg’s army in Mobile, Alabama, planned to strike Grant’s army before he could be reinforced by Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was temporarily blocked by flooding rivers and by Buell’s McClellan-like caution. Widely regarded as one of the best and most intrepid commanders in the Confederate army, Johnston ordered a morning attack, hoping to catch the Yankees by surprise.

The gamble paid off, at least in the short run. Not expecting an attack, Grant had organized his army for convenience rather than a strategic defense. He would pay a stiff price. On the morning of April 6, as Yankees lingered over coffee and breakfast, rebel forces burst through the blooming peach trees at Pittsburg Landing and, to the rebels’ astonishment, caught Grant’s forces almost totally by surprise. To green troops still unaccustomed to “modern” warfare and massive assaults, the surprise unsettled the entire Union army. Grant himself was nine miles below the point of engagement and his disjointed and still untested Federal unit commanders failed to communicate and support one another, allowing the initial momentum to swing decisively in Johnston’s direction.

The most exposed northern position was near Shiloh Church, about three miles southwest of Pittsburg Landing. Here an unlikely hero saved the day for the Union. Discredited and overly timid in Kentucky, General Sherman returned to active command with a vengeance to serve under his friend Grant.
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He received the full force of Johnston’s assault but held the line for four exhausting hours, “sometimes gaining and at others losing ground.” But stand he did.

Shiloh proved to be Sherman’s redemption. Terrified troops, some of whom had just received their muskets, ran panic-stricken, unable to fight. But despite being slightly wounded himself, Sherman rallied his troops up and down the line, providing the critical assistance Grant needed to save the day and extend the fight.
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Shiloh marked the cementing of a partnership between Sherman and Grant that grew stronger with each passing battle.

That night torrential rains pounded the battlefield, compounding the suffering of ten thousand wounded soldiers lying exposed on the killing fields and awaiting the next day’s battle. Sensing blood, Grant launched a massive counterattack at 7:30 the next morning, with fresh divisions aching for payback against the unsuspecting rebels. Again the battle seesawed back and forth around a focal point several hundred yards from Shiloh Church, the two armies slugging it out at the crossroads. At one point Sherman ordered a regiment to “stand fast” even though they were out of ammunition because, as he later explained, “to retire a regiment for any cause, has a bad effect on others.”
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With Sherman at his soldiers’ backs threatening to shoot any who cut and ran, the rebel offensive bogged down. A dispirited Beauregard disengaged his losing forces and retreated unmolested to his starting point in Corinth.

 

The day belonged to Grant and Sherman, and it marked the Union’s conquest of the Tennessee River. But the real news of Shiloh was not the outcome of the battle; it was the carnage. Neither army was decisively defeated and both would live to fight another day. What changed permanently was the scale of combat. From this point on, “proportionality” mattered in command decisions. As news of Shiloh spread, readers in the North and South were staggered at the butcher’s bill. Of 42,000 Federal “effectives” (participants), 1,754 were killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing, for a total casualty list of 13,047. For the Confederate army of 40,000, 1,732 were killed, 8,012 wounded, and 950 missing, for a total of 10,694. Included among the killed was General Albert Sidney Johnston. The combined losses at Shiloh totaled 24,500 and rivaled casualties in all previous battles combined. It still stands as the costliest battle ever fought in the western theater, before or after.

Such was the devastation unleashed at Shiloh that a new industry soon proliferated by the battlefield sites—caskets. Increasingly, ads for embalmment and caskets filled the pages of the religious and secular press. One typical advertisement from John Good, Undertaker, No. 921 Spruce St., Philadelphia, notifies readers of a new “branch” office close to the Virginia battlefields:

Good repeated his advertisements in subsequent editions and was soon joined by three other undertakers receiving orders. Despite the presence of embalmers, soldiers frequently had to take the remains of their comrades into their own care. In a letter home, Yankee Private Edwin Wheelock wrote, “The bodies of the two that were killed of our company exhumed day before yesterday ... were put in boxes ready to send home. Their parents were anxious to have the bodies sent home. The bodies were packed in lar[d].”
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Embalming building and morgue near Fredericksburg, Virginia. An embalming surgeon at work on a soldier’s body. One of the grimmer aspects of the war was handling bodies of the dead hundreds of miles from home. Many dead soldiers never made it home and instead were buried on the battlefields.

Further defeats followed the Confederates in the West as General Henry Halleck’s Army of Missouri followed up on Grant’s success at Shiloh and marched on Beauregard’s shattered army in Corinth. Like McClellan, General Halleck was, in 1862, still a believer in the West Point Code. In pursuing Beauregard’s forces to Corinth, he refused to “invest” (besiege) the town, which would risk soldiers and civilians alike. Instead he allowed Beauregard an avenue of escape—an option the badly outgunned Beauregard was more than eager to take. Halleck gained control of the strategic territory he sought on the Mississippi without bloodshed.
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But strategies that sought to avoid bloodbaths if strategic gains could be had in other ways would not survive the war. In fact, neither McClellan’s nor Halleck’s strategies would gain favor with Lincoln and his newly appointed secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, or even with some of McClellan’s own soldiers. In time, Halleck would change as well.

One Northern soldier recalled that despite McClellan’s orders to avoid civilian goods, “the officers found it impractical, and next to impossible to observe ... as our soldiers could not understand how that we were ever to whip the Rebels without hurting them.”
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Increasingly the more offensive and violent tactics advocated by Clausewitz and determinedly pursued by Grant, Lee, and Jackson would characterize Civil War battles, transforming a “traditional” and limited war into a “modern” war.

At the same time that Halleck dispatched with Beauregard, Union General John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi—some twenty thousand strong and protected by Admiral Foote’s fleet of gunboats and mortar-boats—moved down the Mississippi and captured Island No. 10, again without bloodshed. Included in the fortress were five thousand prisoners and considerable artillery and ammunition. Pope was not a believer in the West Point Code and proceeded to revile the “enemy” in terms broad enough to include anyone—soldier or civilian—who got in his way. Back in Washington, Lincoln liked the reports that arrived. It also did not hurt that Pope, unlike McClellan, was a Republican.

But as gratifying as the victories on the Mississippi were, they were not the prize Lincoln most coveted. Whether or not Richmond deserved to be the obsessive strategic point of attraction it became in the North was beside the point. When not worrying excessively about the safety of Washington, Lincoln was micromanaging the war in Virginia, looking closely over his generals’ shoulders and generally not approving of what he saw. In contrast, Lincoln left his generals in the West to their own devices, and they learned how to fight a new war on its own terms. They would fare better without the president’s close oversight and, in time, bring the lessons they learned back to the East.
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Not everyone was thankful for the course of the war. Ever since Lincoln’s March 6 report to Congress proposing gradual emancipation and compensation for slave owners,
The Liberator
had issued unrelenting criticism: “His message is wholly destitute of sympathy for the enslaved, of any recognition of the injustice or wrongfulness of slavery, of all moral principle; it is based upon selfish considerations alone.”
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The Liberator
followed this up by reprinting Thomas Vickers’s April 10 sermon to Meadville Theological School on the subject of a just war: