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

easy, Holmes wrote before Antietam, if one could “after a comfortable breakfast… come down the steps of one’s home, putting on one’s gloves and smoking a cigar, to get on a horse and charge a battery up Beacon Street.” The reality, however, was that the soldier faced “a night on the ground in the rain and your bowels out of order and then after no particular breakfast to wade a stream and attack an enemy.”86 If Holmes and his companions sometimes ran “like rabbits,” they had more than enough incentive.

What, then, accounts for the “will to combat” among the green volunteers at a place such as Shiloh, where individual groups of raw soldiers continued to fight on and on despite the dissolution of all direction from above? There were some soldiers who found that they were enthralled by war and the exhilaration of combat. “I love war,” wrote Philip Kearny, one of the most combative of the Army of the Potomac’s division commanders. “It brings me indescribable pleasure, like that of having a woman.” For more than a few, combat was simply a risk to be exchanged for the chance to loot. One officer of the famed Louisiana Tiger battalion was shocked after First Bull Run to find “30 or 40” of his men “marching up with new uniforms on, gold rings on their fingers, and their pockets filled with watches and money that they had stolen.” Henry Blake of the 11th Massachusetts was disgusted by the legion of “army thieves” who “plundered the slain” or “grasped with their remorseless hands the valuables, clothing, and rations of the unwary, wounded soldiers.”

For others, a willing entrance into battle was due to the bravery and example of a regimental or company leader; sometimes it was the powerful incentive of following the colors forward. At other times a strange, hysterical killer instinct took over and banished any consideration of personal safety. Frank Holsinger admitted that in combat, “you yell, you swing your cap, you load and fire as long as the battle goes your way. … It is a supreme minute to you; you are in ecstasies.” Colonel Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin spoke of seeing men at Antietam “loading and firing with demoniacal fury and shouting and laughing hysterically,” while David Thompson wrote of the “mental strain” of combat in which “the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.” Michael Hanifen of the 1st New Jersey Artillery, remembered that “it is a terrible sight to see a line of men, two deep, coming up within 300 or 400 yards of you, with bayonets flashing and waving their colors, and you know that every shot you fire into them sends some one to eternity, but still you are prompted by a devilish desire to kill all you can.”87

For Amos Judson, the shrewd observer of the 83rd Pennsylvania, the ultimate answer to the murderous question of courage in battle lay hidden within each soldier. “In my opinion, what is called courage is very much a matter of pride or principle with others, and a compound of both with all men.” Sometimes it was a result of fear, sometimes a result of being fed sufficiently, and sometimes it was really no more than “a proper sense of duty on the field of battle, and you will consequently find men of the most quiet and apparently timid dispositions at home, to be the most resolute and reliable men in action.”88 The only thing, said Judson, which he had never seen in the war was “any manifestations of absolute fear of trepidation or trembling during a fight, or during even the anticipation of one.” Judson was, of course, telling less then he knew. It might have been more accurate to say that the only shame which the American volunteer of 1861 to 1865 had to endure was that his enemy was another American.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MANUFACTURE OF WAR

As the thin winter sunlight faded over the outer sand islands of the Cape Fear River, an iron-hulled side-wheel steamer slowly slipped away from the dark protection of the inlet. The steamer nudged cautiously down into the ship channel that broadened toward the Atlantic Ocean, her captain anxiously scanning the dark horizon of the moonlit ocean.

Beyond the bar, the masts of ships poked up in the silvery light. These ships wanted nothing so much as to run down the slender steamer, her master, and her crew and put them under lock and key for as long as the law of the sea would allow. For the steamer’s name was Cecile, and she was the property of John Fraser & Company, who had fitted her out on behalf of the Confederate States of America to run war supplies through the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Southern ports and rivers. Her captain was Lieutenant John Newland Maffitt, a forty-two-year-old North Carolinian and former U.S. Navy officer whose fifteen years of duty with the United States Coastal Survey had made him the master of virtually every shoal, sandbar, and inlet on the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines of North America. On board the Cecile were 700 fat bales of Southern cotton that would buy the Confederacy rifles, shoes, clothing, and food for its armies. Maffitt and the Cecile were vital strands in the Confederacy’s lifeline to the outside world, and so the Federal navy hung close to the mouth of the Cape Fear River, hoping to choke Maffitt and his ship and the future of the Confederacy all at once.

The moon sank, and Maffitt urged the Cecile over the bar and out to sea, counting on the inky darkness to cloak her stealthy passage through the net of the Federal blockade. Every light had been extinguished, and every command was whispered; even the steamer’s upper works, formerly white, had been repainted in drab or dark colors. But Maffitt could not disguise the splashing of the steamer’s side-wheel paddles, and as he crept past the Federal ships, a large gas-fired spotlight shot a