Glory road, p.19
Glory Road, page 19
Next came the matter of cooking. On the march each man cooked for himself, and since the average soldier could do little more than boil coffee and frizzle a strip of bacon or salt pork, the marching ration consisted of fried pork, hardtack, and coffee. In camp things were supposed to be better. And yet, administration having been lax, and foods other than pork and hardtack and coffee having vanished en route to the regiments, in most outfits here in the camps near Falmouth marching rations were the regular diet for troops which were not marching at all. Regimental commanders now were required to see to it that the regular company cooks went to work, and if there were no company cooks they were instructed to create some, so that the soldier could get decent meals in place of the intestine-destroying stuff he cooked for himself.
It was true that most of these company cooks lacked skill. Some noticeably lacked even the desire to be skillful, since most of them were simply enlisted men detailed from the ranks to do a two-month stretch in the mess kitchen. Nevertheless, bad as they might be, it was at least possible for them to cook and serve fresh vegetables. They could use the desiccated foods to make soups and stews, and when fresh meat was issued they could do something besides fry it in pork fat. The soldier cooking for himself, blessed with no kitchen utensils except a little frying pan and a tin can in which coffee might be boiled, could do none of those things no matter what raw materials he might have.
One veteran, reminiscing years later, recalled the new order of things:
"From the commissary came less whisky for the officers and better rations, including vegetables, for the men. Hospitals were renovated, new ones built, drunken surgeons discharged, sanitary supplies furnished, and the sick no longer left to suffer and die without proper care and attention. Officers and men who from incompetence or .disability could be of no further use to the service were allowed to resign or were discharged, and those who were playing sick in the hospitals were sent to their regiments for duty."8
And so between the fresh foods and the better cooking, army surgeons presently noticed the disappearance of the cases of scurvy which had been extending the regimental sick lists. At the same time there was a sharp drop in the perennial scourge of diarrhea, together with a general decline in "all the more serious diseases to which troops in camp are liable, and especially those which depend upon neglect of sanitary precautions." In addition, the surgeon general reported to Hooker that there had been "an improvement in the health, tone, and vigor of those who are not reported sick; an improvement which figures will not exhibit but which is apparent to officers whose attention is directed to the health of the men."0
Part of this was due to better food, and another part because somebody at last made it his business to see that elementary rules of sanitation were observed in the camps. The log-and-canvas hutments in which the men lived had become little better than pigsties, especially those in which the men had raised their shelters over shallow pits dug in the earth. It appears that young men living without women have no especial desire to be clean. Under Hooker's prodding the army's surgeons caught onto that fact and took corrective action. The canvas roofs of all huts were ripped off periodically so that the sun and the clean wind could strike the interior; wherever possible, the entire hut had to be moved to new ground at the end of each week. The worst of the camps were abandoned outright and the troops moved to new camp sites. It was required that blankets and other bedding be aired daily, that hut floors be carpeted with pine boughs or other material so that men would not bed down on the bare earth, and regimental commanders were ordered to require the digging of eighteen-inch drainage ditches around each habitation. Kitchen refuse had to be buried each day, proper sinks were dug for every camp, and "the men should be required to wear their hair cut short, to bathe twice a week, and put on clean underclothing at least once a week."10
Elementary as most of the rules seem to be, the mere fact that they were now embodied in official orders indicates the extent to which they had not been observed previously. The change that took place in this army, once decent food and decent living conditions became the rule, was remarkable. The soldiers themselves testified to the great improvement by setting up wild cheers whenever they saw their handsome general sitting proudly on his big white horse as they passed by. One wrote that "General Hooker proved a veritable Santa Claus to the army under his command." Another said that "the whole army was impressed with the feeling that strength, energy, and intelligence were all working together at headquarters," and a third remarked simply that "under Hooker, we began to live."11 Writing long after the war, a Massachusetts soldier looked back ecstatically:
"Ah! the furloughs and vegetables he gave! How he did understand the road to the soldier's heart! How he made out of defeated, discouraged, and demoralized men a cheerful, plucky, and defiant army, ready to follow him everywhere!" Most of the accounts agree with another regimental scribe, who recorded that "cheerfulness, good order, and military discipline at once took the place of grumbling, depression, and want of confidence."12
There were furloughs. Thinking along non-military lines, Hooker concluded that if the men wanted more than anything else to see the folks back home the thing to do was to let them go, and there was presently a system by which one man in each company, in turn, could get a ten-day furlough. This could not take care of everybody, of course, but it took care of a" good many, and the effect was good. At the same time, it was made harder to desert. The mails down from Washington were put under control of the army provost marshal, and stern orders were issued governing express packages. No package would be received for transmission to anyone in the army unless it bore an invoice stating that it did not contain civilian clothing, the invoice to be certified by the agent who had accepted the package for shipment. From President Lincoln there came an order granting amnesty to all absentees who returned to the ranks before April. At the same time, the kind-hearted President was persuaded to relinquish his right to review all court-martial sentences, and it now became possible to shoot deserters. Picket lines around the army were tightened, parties representing themselves as telegraph-repair details had to exhibit written proof that they were telling the truth, and no wagons of any kind could go north without proper passes, while the pickets were ordered to shoot any wandering persons who failed to halt and account for themselves when challenged. Drinking in the camp was squelched (except among the officers, including especially the commanding general), and the guards on the bridges at Washington were presently confiscating five hundred dollars' worth of liquor a day. One result of this was that regimental sutlers, until the authorities caught on, did a land-office business in such canned goods as brandied peaches.13
There were also many drills—"constant and severe," as one soldier remembered them. If the men were down in the dumps, Hooker did not propose to give them leisure to sit around and brood about it, and from morning to night the drill fields rumbled with the tramp of many feet. Officers went to school evenings and next day went out to maneuver companies, regiments, brigades, and divisions in the tactics thus studied. There were reviews with the old McClellan touch, with everybody in dress uniform, brass bands blaring under the wintry sky, and Hooker looking on with visible pride. A man in the 16th Maine recalled "the evident satisfaction of Hooker and the conscious power shown on his handsome but rather too rosy face."14
It seemed that many men added that sort of qualification when they wrote an enthusiastic verdict on Hooker. He was too handsome, too roseate with good health and vigor, too confident that this army which was beginning to fit into his hand so nicely would prove an irresistible weapon. (He dismayed Abraham Lincoln once this spring by remarking jauntily that the question was not if he got to Richmond, but simply when.) The tide was visibly turning. Hooker himself had caused it to turn, perhaps he would ride the flood to fortune, yet it could hardly be quite that simple. There would always be a catch in it for this army—finest army on the planet, Hooker was calling it; he could march it clear to New Orleans if he had to, and the word would soon be "God help the Rebels."15 It had labored under glamorous McClellan, braggart Pope, and plodding Burnside, coming uniformly to ill fortune under each. Now it had a general who seemed to blend the traits of all three of these predecessors, and it might be that it would do better under him. Yet even while he aroused confidence he created a small grain of doubt. The man whose beautiful skin was a bit too rosy might also, in the end, himself be a little too good to be true.
Yet the army did revive. The rank and file took Hooker at face value, and showed it by their actions. Hooker was proudly writing after a fortnight in command that desertion had practically ceased.16 These soldiers, who were prepared to give everything, could drive no hard bargain for themselves. They wanted to be decently fed and clothed, and they wanted now and then to see some sign that the man at the top knew what he was doing. Beyond that they asked for nothing. They lived that winter in a strange vacant place in the middle of time. Behind them there were terrible names like Antietam and Fredericksburg, proudly written now on the regimental banners which sparkled like marsh-fire flames up and down the long blue columns. Ahead of them, as yet unknown, were other names equally great and terrible, and no one thought about them. The men were veterans and they would live in the immediate present, looking neither before nor after, coming once again to believe in themselves, proudly wearing the new corps badges which Hooker had cannily devised for them, parading when the President and the commanding general passed them in review—a great army with banners, marching through the mud and the dirt toward the battle smoke which veiled the stars.
There were changes at the upper level. Amid rumblings, General Franklin had departed, muttering sotto voce that he would not serve under Hooker. Gone, too, was Baldy Smith, to whom Burnside had confided the first hint of a great and amazing thing which was to happen. With Smith went Burnside's own troops, the faithful IX Corps, sent away to serve once more down the coast, or inland, or anywhere save with this luckless Army of the Potomac. Gone, too, finally, was the stout old Bull of the Woods, Major General Edwin V. Sumner, with his simple code and his unimaginative bravery and his rigid old-army loyalties. He had taken no part in all the backbiting which followed Fredericksburg, telling the congressional committee simply, "There is too much croaking in the army." In midwinter he was relieved, gone forever from the army which for better or for worse he had helped to stamp with his own imprint. He rested in the North awhile, then was ordered west to take command in Missouri and fell ill, an old man worn down by the war, his life coming to its close in a Syracuse sickroom. He lay in a stupor, and as he came out of it he seems to have thought of old battles—perhaps of Seven Pines and its reeking swamps, of the ambush by the Dunker church in the Maryland hills, or of the doomed advance toward the stone wall below Marye's Heights. He cried out suddenly: "The II Corps never lost a flag or a cannon!" His attendant came over to him, and Sumner repeated more feebly: "That is true—never lost one." He was raised in his bed, and the attendant gave him a glass of wine. He took one sip, intoned, "God save my country, the United States of America," dropped the glass, and died, an old soldier gone to join the great God of Battles.17
Hooker found new men for the vacant places, and in the process he did a strange and seemingly an uncharacteristic thing. For the all-important job of his chief of staff he asked the War Department to assign to him Brigadier General Charles P. Stone.18
Stone was a man out of the past, deeply buried in disgrace. A brigadier without a command, a soldier without a visible future, he was a ruined living symbol of the fact that the hatred which General Burnside had failed to find among the fighting men had sprouted and flourished mightily among the stout civilians who controlled the destinies of the fighting men. This hatred, mixed with fear and grown old and gray and venomous, Abraham Lincoln greatly lacked, but it seemed that nearly everyone else in Washington had a share in it, most notably the very men to whom General Hooker had made his gestures and his overtures as he scrambled toward the top of the heap. General Stone had been its first sacrificial victim.
In the fall of 1861 General Stone had commanded troops along the upper Potomac. In a misguided moment he had thrust a brigade across the river to reconnoiter near Leesburg, and the brigade had blundered into trouble at Ball's Bluff and had been butchered. Butchered among many less notable had been its commander, Colonel Edward D. Baker, the Illinois-bora Californian who had helped save Oregon for anti-slavery Republicanism and who was intimate with the leading men of the party which stood for all-out war. The war party wanted to punish someone for this disaster, and to do that job it had organized the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.
Looking into things, the committee had decided that General Stone was at fault and must be punished. It made no formal accusations and it took no direct action against him; it simply received and published accusations against, his loyalty, turning him presently into an untouchable, a man who could not be defended, so that he was removed from his command and was even imprisoned for a time, although he had never been charged with any crime. The radical Republicans who had done this had nothing in particular against General Stone. They were simply using him to perfect the new technique which they had accidentally stumbled on. As an object lesson Stone had been extremely effective.
And it was this man whom Joe Hooker was now asking the War Department to send to him to become chief of staff of the Army of the Potomac.
Nothing came of it, to be sure. Stone had to remain on the shelf until Grant came along with a prestige that could overawe even the radical Republicans, and in the end Hooker took for his chief of staff Brigadier General Dan Butterfield, a stocky little ex-militia officer from New York. And yet Hooker's act in asking for General Stone is one of the most interesting things he ever did.
It was completely out of character, or perhaps it proved that
Hooker's character was not the open-and-shut case which on the surface it appears to have been. Hooker had schemed and calculated until it had seemed that there was no conceivable thing that he would not do to make political capital with the radicals. Yet now, untested in his perilous new job, he laid schemes and calculations aside and for one brief moment stood up as a straightforward soldier who would defy politics and politicians. He never bothered to explain what made him do it, and it seems that a passion for self-analysis may have been one of the few passions he lacked. He simply did it, leaving the fact that he had done it as a testimonial to something real in his strange, complex soul. It is a point to remember, because to speak up for General Stone took moral courage, a quality which Joe Hooker is rarely accused of possessing.
One like that was enough, and Hooker was not the man to go on sailing too close to the wind. Denied General Stone, he made do with General Butterfield, a strange but politically safe little man who had an unsuspected streak of poetry under his breezy bluster and who in an unexpected way left a permanent mark on the United States Army.
Butterfield was a New York businessman when the war began, and he raised New York troops and commanded a brigade on the peninsula under McClellan. He early noticed that when his brigade bugler sounded a call (which would be picked up and repeated at once by all regimental buglers in the brigade) there was apt to be confusion, since other brigades were usually within earshot. So he invented a little recognition call—three whole notes, followed by a couple of triplets—which would precede all brigade calls, and the boys quickly fitted a chant to it: "Dan—Dan—Butterfield!" It appears that one day in the camp at Harrison's Landing, shortly after Malvern Hill, Butterfield called his bugler into his tent, whistled a little tune for him, and asked him to sound it on his bugle. Somewhat struck, for generals did not ordinarily behave so, the bugler obeyed. The result did not quite suit Butterfield, and he did a little more experimental whistling, until finally he had it the way he wanted it. The bugler wrote the call down on the back of an old envelope, and Butterfield instructed him to use the tune thereafter in place of the call prescribed by regulations for "lights out." The regulation call, said Butterfield, was not musical; he wanted one which would somehow express the idea of a darkening campground with tired men snugging down to a peaceful sleep, and he hoped his new call would do it.
So the bugler used the new call after that, and other buglers heard it and liked it and came over to copy the tune, until before long it was used all through the Army of the Potomac. Later on, when some of the troops were transferred west, the bugle call was taken up in the Western armies, and at last it became regulation and has remained regulation to this day, the drawn-out haunting call that puts the lights out for soldiers and that hangs in the still air over their graves at military funerals—"Taps."19
In addition to having an ear for music, Butterfield appears to have had a personality that fitted Hooker's. Hooker could relax when the day's work was over, and Butterfield could help him. There were army officers who felt that the atmosphere at headquarters in those days was not wholesome. Greatly admired by his troops, Hooker was at no time a favorite among his generals. His military capacity they often admitted, but they were inclined to be dubious about the man underneath the soldier, and they did not like the tales about revelry at headquarters. Looking down a lengthy Adams nose through cold Bostonian eyes, Charles Francis Adams wrote (it may be with some exaggeration) that Hooker's tent was a place to which no gentleman cared to go and to which no lady could go.20
George Gordon Meade, irascible but fair-minded, wrote that he himself liked Hooker better than most and thought him a good soldier, but he added: "I do not like his entourage." In this entourage Meade specifically. mentioned Butterfield and the new commander of the III Corps, Major General Dan Sickles. He wrote that they were cleverer than Hooker and that because they had political pull Hooker was likely to put himself under their influence. Meade would say nothing in particular against Butterfield and Sickles, but he primly told his wife that "they are not the persons I should select as my intimates."21 Lumping Hooker, Butterfield, and Sickles together, Adams declared that "all three were men of blemished character."
