At a game of bridge, a player once tried to excuse himself to his
partner for trumping his ace, “But you see,” he said, “I’m just
learning.” Said the partner, “That’s the devil of it--you’re _not_.”
Just why our country didn’t learn after three wars, two of which we
actually lost through the _absence_ of training, and one of which
we won _because_ of training, is a mystery to more than good bridge
players. Well, we didn’t learn, for right after the Mexican War,
we reduced our trained force to the size it was shortly after our
miserable War of 1812, thirty-six years before. And we made this
astounding reduction, in the face of an increase in our population
of twelve millions, and in our territory, of nearly a million square
miles. The soldier was almost immediately put up against an impossible
task. He was sprinkled about so thinly beyond the Mississippi that
often he despaired of his own existence. A paltry seven thousand
struggled against hundreds of thousands of Indians for the sake of
the settler. Besides, the western land was familiar to the savage
and strange to the soldier. The odds against this meager force were
increased when gold was discovered in California, when the forty-niner
came along. The soldier had to build forts, roads and trails--and
escort the endless caravans of wagon trains over the prairie, if the
settler was to arrive safely in our coast states. Meanwhile uprisings
of Apaches, Yumas, Navajos, Cheyenne and the deadly Sioux had to be
repulsed. Tardy increases of the trained force by Congress came far
behind the heels of the unwarranted killings. By 1861 the entire
army, trained only in small actions, numbered a little over fifteen
thousand men. And eighty-four per cent of this force was scattered
so completely and remotely from Washington, that it would have taken
months to collect them. We sat through all this, like the man watching
for weeks the flood approaching his house, and making no attempt to
remove his furniture, or get a boat. We watched the skies grow darker
and crooned, “It ain’t goin’ to rain no more.” For thirty years the
North had been trying to black the South’s industrial eye, and the
South had as vigorously defied the threats. Violent abolitionists,
cartoonists, pamphleteers and novelists had been using hot words and
making insulting gestures at each other. Yet the Yankee, doubling one
fist and opening the other, kept saying, “O, no there won’t be a war.
Brother couldn’t fight brother. Even if there is one, it can’t last.”
When South Carolina seceded four months before the conflict, and six
states followed her example, we did not wake up to the protection of
our youth. When nearly one-fourth of the army, with its proportion
of government property in Texas, was surrendered to the South, we
did nothing to overcome the loss. When we saw the South call out one
hundred thousand men for a year’s service, we sat like spectators on
the bleachers. We let the Confederates seize the arsenals in their
states and all the government property they wanted. We let them boldly
inaugurate a rival republic within our borders, elect a president and
declare their independence. Even then we made no effort to school and
train our men so that they might have some chance. General Scott early
begged Buchanan and Secretary of War Floyd to raise a small, efficient,
trained force to stem possible trouble, but these men of state merely
shrugged. Since Scott was too old to mount a horse, he was too old
to give advice. After all he was only at the top of his profession,
practically and theoretically. Our attitude was _not_ to be ready for
possible emergencies, and particularly an emergency that had been
slapping us in the face for over thirty years, but to do as wretchedly
as we could when the emergency struck us. And we surely lived up to
expectations. When the gun at Fort Sumter waked the sleeping North
into action, we were destitute of anything like a proper tool to handle
the situation. Even our new President because there were no trained
troops in the East to protect him, had to make his way in disguise to
a threatened White House; whereas President Davis, a trained, tried
and educated soldier and statesman had collected thirty-five thousand
troops, who were being trained and equipped. So when President Lincoln,
unlettered and unskilled in the art and science of war arrived in
office, he found the South had a magnificent start on him. From then
on throughout the war he had to work against horrible handicaps, even
though we had three times the man-power and many times the resources of
the Confederates. In desperation he called out seventy-five thousand
men for three months--seventy-five thousand raw men to do the work of
veterans. In response to this call, a Massachusetts regiment was mobbed
while passing through Baltimore and a Pennsylvania regiment had to turn
back because it had no arms. Meanwhile nearly three hundred southern
officers of the small, far-scattered trained army went over to the
South.
Washington and other cities were deluged with a bewildered,
undisciplined and poorly led and organized lot of fellows. Under
little restraint they wandered aimlessly about, often unfed for weeks,
quartered in muddy, filthy buildings, with ill-fitting and oftimes
insufficient clothing and with little idea of their duties, conduct or
responsibilities. The trained men were so few they couldn’t be found,
and the government, unlike the able management in the South, made no
effort to find them or use their services to the best advantage. Why,
when U. S. Grant wrote to Washington offering himself for duty, he
wasn’t even replied to. Naturally you can’t blame the rank and file, if
there was an unwarranted lot of brawls and disturbances. Idleness and
lack of discipline just means that. Public buildings were defaced. Even
the Capitol itself suffered damage and abuse from a regiment quartered
in its halls and on the very floors of the Senate and House. The farmer
colonel and the apothecary major stalked the streets in showy uniforms,
drew their pay, and didn’t go near their commands for weeks. Not all of
them. There were some very worthy ones, who strove under hindrances of
little opportunity, to bring order out of their units. But they were
the accidents in our country’s arrangements--or lack of them. In these
first few months of grand hubbub, misfit and waste, the country had
spent more money than would have supported an army of prevention during
the preceding ten years. And what needless hardship and suffering it
had brought to more than seventy-five thousand people.
But something had to be done. These three-month men would be going home
soon and we’d have to begin all over. The people of the North, having
had such a long sleep, demanded action. What matter if we did throw
our poor men into a raging torrent before we taught them how to swim.
On to Richmond! Those who had said there couldn’t be any war, were the
loudest in screaming for a fight. On to Richmond! So McDowell became
the scape-goat. He had to go. They gave him only thirty thousand men,
but that was ten times more than any active officer in the regular
army had ever had a chance to handle. They also gave him eight days
in which to transform this excursion into an army. Eight days. It was
a compliment to his magical powers. But the administration and the
country were really serious about it. So he took them out to do battle.
Fatigue, waste, meandering, sore feet, green apples, overdrinking
and all those hundreds of vices, which the recruit learns to get
over, appeared on the march--a march that allowed him to go the great
distance of fifteen miles in two days. What else could have happened
at Bull Run but what _did_ happen? Of course they’d run. It wasn’t
their fault, nor had it anything to do with their bravery. It always
will happen when untrained men meet a sudden reversal. Training and
discipline are the equivalent of confidence, and these men hadn’t been
allowed by their people to have any confidence. Some of them never
stopped fleeing till they got to New York. Had it not been that there
were a few trained regulars to stop the onrush of the Confederates,
more men would have been uselessly slaughtered. This spectacle gave us
less than _nothing_. So we proceeded to call out one _million_ men with
more pandemonium, more ill-supplied concentrations, more sufferings and
more expense.
Two weeks ago a listener to these talks, a total stranger to me, sent
me an extract from a diary of a gentleman now living, a survivor
of this war, one of those noblemen who at this period of the story
volunteered to be met with unnecessary cruelty by his country. Here is
some of the extract:
“In due time we arrived in Washington on a drizzly, sloppy evening and
were marched to and housed in some large building already occupied by
larger numbers than should have been there. We had no food, the place
was dimly lighted with smoking torches. The floor was so muddy and foul
that we could not lie down and no place for so doing being provided. We
stood and shivered and said things and wondered if all heroes lived in
such style as this.”
The diary goes on to show how this detachment wandered about
unassigned to any organization, for days without food, and living in
indescribable filth. That is a sample of what these hordes of fine
men suddenly called out, suffered. The author of this diary is now
ninety-one, one of the few left to tell the tale. Let me extend to him
the admiration and gratitude of our army for his needless and heroic
endurance and fortitude.
To go on with the story, during this haphazard condition the South
was allowed to develop itself by its comparatively efficient methods,
undisturbed by us. McClellan had now the task of building up the great
part of these heterogeneous masses into something of an organization.
The war had stopped to let us train. But had it? The terrific expense
and useless deaths went on. In this first year thousands died of
disease under new conditions of exposure and hardships. Meanwhile
McClellan had to have time for his gigantic task. The people of the
North began to be irritated. Why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t
he go on to Richmond? He had plenty of men. The Yankee brain felt
that numbers were a solution for anything. It little realized that
the officers had to be taught the technique of the march, the camp,
the battlefield, security, supply, guard, unit management, drill and
staff work. The men had to be taught all sorts of movements, the use of
their weapons, sentry duty and above all discipline. All this would
have to be done now at this late date, if the North were going to have
any success at all. So for nearly a year against the ignorant clamor
of a nation, McClellan worked in schooling, and preparing a huge army
that would not have been necessary, had Scott’s advice been heeded.
And he turned out a well-knit machine ready for action--but just a
year too late to save the great carnage. When finally a year after
the war opened, the Peninsular Campaign was begun, the administration
of novices in Washington held out troops from McClellan, heckled and
hampered him and finally stopped him when he was beginning to get
somewhere. Meanwhile the South was making consummate use of Robert E.
Lee’s brains and leadership. Then came the empty victory of Antietam,
and the defeats of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. It wasn’t until
the middle of the third year of the war that we won our first decisive
battle at Gettysburg. But why shouldn’t we at that late date? It was
no glory to us. We had the man-power and money. It’s nothing to be
particularly happy about as far as efficiency is concerned. It’s far
better for us to grieve over the losses, the extravagant, ignorant,
idle, silly, moronic losses--losses that could scarcely be attributed
to men in their senses. I cannot make invectives too strong against my
fellow Yankee, who murderously treated his fellow man by his inhuman
dullness before the war. For in this conflict we fought the bloodiest
war, man for man, in all our history, when by wisdom and foresight of
ordinary business, we could have saved ninety to ninety-eight per cent
of the deaths. By our late start, our failure to apply preventives in
time, our unreasoning obtuseness in not listening to the experts, we
had to call out nearly three million men. Of these we lost by battle
over one hundred ten thousand men. But listen to this--by death from
disease we threw away nearly a quarter of a million, and the main part
of the awful sickness was in the first part of the war and among men
utterly unfit for campaign. Among the trained men sickness was so rare
that it wasn’t often reported. Besides this mortality, of the many fine
souls and bodies of volunteers who with high motives came into the
ranks, fought and escaped death, there were thousands who went back
home stricken by the effects of the bullet, dysentery and fever for the
rest of their lives.
_VIII_