Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

The low velocity of the Minié bullet gave it a particularly noticeable humming whir, and soldiers devoted considerable time to trying to explain the sound of rifle fire in letters and diaries. “You never heard such whooping,” wrote private Bruton after Shiloh, “the bullets whistled worse & faster than pouring peas on a dry cow hide.” Another Confederate soldier at Shiloh wrote that rifle bullets sang angrily around him “worse then ever bees was when they swarm.” When a bullet struck a man, it made what Amos Currier of the 8th Iowa called “a peculiar spat.” For others, the sheer volume of unlooked-for terror and confusion in the environment of nineteenth-century battle was so vast that the provincial and localized vocabulary of most Americans was simply beggared by it. “I have not time nor disposition to attempt a description,” wrote James Madison Williams of the 21st Alabama after Shiloh. “When I go home it will take me months to describe what I saw on that terrible field.”77

The most frightening aspect of combat was the chance of being seriously or mortally wounded. Not only was the general inexperience of the volunteer officer more likely to expose a soldier to lethal amounts of fire for longer periods of time than in any other nineteenth-century war, but the soft lead Minié ball (unlike the brassjacketed bullets of later wars) mushroomed upon impact, smashing up bones and cartilage, and making dreadful exit wounds. “Often did I see a simple gunshot wound,” wrote one surgeon, “scarcely larger than the bullet which made it, become larger and larger until a hand would scarcely cover it, and extend from the skin downward into the tissues until one could put half his fist into the sloughing wound.”

Artillery rounds could deliver even more horrifying forms of death, adding to the terror of every soldier nearby, as shell splinters could slice a body into a bloody pulp. A shell plowed through Company E of the 9th Vermont during an attack on Confederate entrenchments below Richmond in 1864, and Colonel Edward H. Ripley looked over to see a favorite corporal “lying on his side and face… his buttocks clear to the thigh bones were both carried away, showing a raw mass of torn flesh with the crushed bones protruding. He was alive, conscious, and brave.” A few moments later another shell crashed near Ripley and “I was dashed in the face with a hot streaming mass of something horrible which closed my eyes, nose and mouth. I thought my head had gone certainly this time.” It hadn’t; instead, it was the “brains, skull, hair and blood” of an artilleryman who had been standing nearby. Ripley had to be cleaned off by a staff officer who “just then came up and happened to have a towel in his boot leg.”78

Nothing in Civil War field medicine was able to deal with the wounds or the trauma inflicted by the rifles and artillery of the era, and not until after the turn of the century would surgical skill and surgical instruments develop to the point where gunshot wounds to main body parts could even become routinely operable. “We had no clinical thermometers; our only means of estimating fever was by touch,” lamented one surgeon. “We had no hypodermatic syringes,” and so “the mouth and the bowel were the only avenues for the administration of remedies.” This meant that for the badly wounded soldier, the common regimental surgeon was little better than death itself.79

Wounds to the extremities could be treated only by amputation, in order to head off the onset of gangrene and blood poisoning, and at the height of any major battle, a surgeon’s field or division hospital would resemble nothing so much as a butcher’s shop on market-day—an unventilated tent or barn, with an old door set up on two barrels for an operating table, an unending line of wounded men in various degrees of shock, a pile of amputated limbs that reminded observers of a cord of wood, and a corner full of men with wounds to the abdomen or chest who had simply been set aside as surgically hopeless. Sergeant Hiram Lathe of the 9th New Hampshire lost two fingers of his right hand, but counted himself fortunate compared to what he saw in the field hospital he walked back to. The “hospital” was nothing more than “a field of I should say about fifty acres, where the surgeons were busily at work… on rudely constructed benches, on old tables, or anything that could be extemporized for an operating table.” All around him were men who were wounded

in every conceivable way, from cannon and shell wounds, and burns from exploding shells, with bowels torn out and bodies gashed and mangled from bayonet thrusts, or with heads and faces smashed almost beyond recognition by blows from a musketbreech, though by far the greater part of the wounds were made by the deadly Minie balls. … The ambulances kept coming onto the field loaded up with men, and some of them would be dead when they were taken out, but altogether there must have been several thousand of the wounded there in that field.80

If this horrified the men, it did not have much different effect on the surgeons. “I am not out of [hearing] much of the groans of the wounded from morning till night,” wrote Claiborne Walton, a surgeon with the 21st Kentucky who was clearly teetering on the mental brink in 1864.

My hands are constantly steaped in blood. I have had them in blood and water so much that the nails are soft and tender. I have amputated limbs until it almost makes my heart ache to see a poor fellow coming in the Ambulance to the Hospital. … I could tell you of many yes—of the [most] distressing cases of wounds. Such as arms shot off—legs shot off. Eyes shot out—brains shot out. Lungs shot through and in a word everything shot to pieces and totally maimed