The infantry had no spare wheels or forage racks, but it had its little ways. Commonest punishment was the "buck and gag." The erring soldier was made to sit on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands clasped over his shins. After his wrists were bound together a heavy stick was thrust under his knees and over his arms, and a gag was tied in his mouth. He was then left to sit there for some hours, suffering no extreme of pain but utterly helpless and voiceless, enduring cramps, thirst, and the jibes of unfeeling soldiers. It was also found effective to tie a man by his thumbs to the branch of a tree, pulling him just high enough so that he could keep his thumbs from being torn out of joint only by standing on tiptoe.

In a way there was nothing new about all of this. Brutal punishments had always been on tap, but hitherto they had hardly amounted to more than the army's backhanded way of cuffing the ne'er-do-wells and misfits who had found their way into the ranks. Now the harshness was becoming central. An important number of soldiers responded to that sort of language, and therefore it was being addressed to all of the soldiers. There was a new tone to the army. The old spirit had been diluted and the old ways had changed. The veterans drew closer together, seeming almost to be aliens in the army which they themselves had created.

And the great danger now was that the veterans might presently get out of the army altogether and leave everything to the newcomers. Under the law they might do this, and nobody could stop them, and if that happened the war was lost forever, because conscripts and bounty men could not make Robert E. Lee's incomparable soldiers even pause to take a deep breath.

Federal regiments in the Civil War enlisted, usually, for three years. There had been a number of nine-month regiments, earlier, and some had come in to do a two-year hitch, but the three-year enlistment was the rule. Now the time was running out. The old 1861 regiments had just about finished their terms. In May and June and July and August they would come to the end of their enlistments, and under the law there was no way to compel their members to remain in service if they did not choose to remain.

Fighting was expected to begin in April or May. The prospect, therefore, was that just as the campaign got well under way the army would begin to fall apart. The army authorities could see this coming but there was nothing on earth they could do to keep it from happening except go to the veterans —hat in hand, so to speak—and beg them to re-enlist.

The big thing was to get them to re-enlist as regiments, and inducements were offered. If three fourths of the men in any regiment would re-enlist, the regiment could go home as a unit for a thirty-day furlough, and when it got back to camp it would keep its organization, its regimental number, its flag, and so on. In addition, the veterans would be cut in on some of this bounty money. Adding state and Federal bounties together, the average soldier who signed on for a second enlistment would get about $700, on which he might have quite a time for himself during that month's furlough. So the authorities put on a big campaign, and the old regiments were called together and cajoled and orated to, and the men observed that on such occasions a good deal of whisky seemed to be available for the thirsty.

Now the high command was talking to men who had had it.

The record of these three-year regiments contained the whole story of the war in the East, down to date—Bull Run and the Seven Days, Antietam and Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, plus the mean little skirmishes and minor battles in between, the hard marches in dust or mud, the dreary months in unsavory camps. Whatever there could possibly be in war to make a man say, "Never again!" these soldiers knew about it. There were in the North thousands upon thousands of young men who had had no part in the war, and the veterans knew all about them and knew that if they themselves re-enlisted these men would remain civilians, with every night in bed and nobody shooting at them. They knew, too, that the thousands of recruits who were coming in now were corrupting the army and giving it little of value. When the fighting began again the load would have to be carried by the old-timers, the men who had survived many terrible battles and whose numbers, by the mere law of averages, must be about due to come up. The veteran who was asked to re-enlist had a good many things to think about. A man in the 3rd Michigan wrote.

"After serving three years for our country cannot we go home, satisfied that we have done our share toward putting down the rebellion, and let those who stayed at home come and give their time as long; the country is as dear to them as us"

A man in the 25th Massachusetts noted that few of his comrades were signing up, and he spelled out his own feeling:

"I shall not re-enlist, and my reasons are, first, I have no desire to monopolize all the patriotism there is, but am willing to give others a chance. My second reason is that after I have served three years my duty to my country has been performed and my next duty is at home with my family."

A member of the 13th Massachusetts noted that his regiment "listened with respectful attention" while officers urged re-enlistment and extolled the valor of old soldiers, but he added: "It was very sweet to hear all this, but the 13th was not easily moved by this kind of talk. The boys knew too well what sacrifices they had made, and longed to get home again and, if possible, resume the places they had left." In the end the 13th refused to re-enlist, except for a handful who signed up for places in another regiment.²⁵

Altogether, there are few facts in American history more remarkable than the fact that so many of these veterans did finally re-enlist—probably slightly more than half of the total number whose terms were expiring. The proffered bounty seems to have had little influence on them. The furlough was much better bait. To men who had not seen their homes for more than two and one half years, a solid month of freedom seemed like an age. A member of the 5th Maine said that it actually seemed as if the war might somehow end before the furloughs would expire, and he wrote of the men who re-enlisted: "What tempted these men? Bounty? No. The opportunity to go home." ²⁶

It was not hardship that held men back. The 100th Pennsylvania had been marooned in eastern Tennessee for months, cut off from supplies and subsisting on two ears of corn per day per man, but when the question of re-enlistment came up only 27 out of the 393 present for duty refused to sign. In the 6th Wisconsin, which had done as much costly fighting as any regiment in the army, it was noted that the combat men were re-enlisting almost to a man; it was the cooks, hostlers, clerks, teamsters, and others on non-combat duty who were holding back. And the dominant motive, finally, seems to have been a simple desire to see the job through. The government in its wisdom might be doing everything possible to show the men that patriotism was for fools; in the end, the veterans simply refused to believe it. A solid nucleus did sign the papers, pledging that the army would go on, and by the end of March Meade was able to tell the War Department that 26,767 veterans had re-enlisted.²⁷

The men signed up without illusions. A company in the 19th Massachusetts was called together to talk things over. The regiment had left most of its men on various battlefields, in hospitals, and in Southern prison camps, and this company now mustered just thirteen men and one wounded officer. These considered the matter, and one man finally said: "They use a man here just the same as they do a turkey at a shooting match, fire at it all day and if they don't kill it raffle it off in the evening; so with us, if they can’t kill you in three years they want you for three more—but I will stay." And a comrade spoke up: "Well, if new men won't finish the job, old men must, and as long as Uncle Sam wants a man, here is Ben Falls’

The regiment's historian, recording this remark, pointed out that Ben Falls was killed two months later in battle at Spotsylvania Court House.²⁸

3, From a Mountain Top

On the tenth day of March, 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant came down to meet General Meade and to have a look at the Army of the Potomac.

They made an occasion of it, and when Grant reached headquarters they turned out the guard. The guard included a Zouave outfit, 114th Pennsylvania, which had seen much hard fighting before the luck of the draw pulled it out of combat ranks and assigned it to headquarters, and it was natty with baggy red pants, white leggings, short blue jackets, and oriental-looking turbans. With the guard came the headquarters band, also of the 114th Pennsylvania; a melodious group, distinguished from most of the other army bands by the fact that all of the players were always sober when time came to make music. It had learned to play the kind of music Meade liked—something soft and sweet, usually—and it tootled away vigorously today, quite unaware that the lieutenant general was completely tone-deaf, disliked all music rather intensely, and could not for the life of him tell one tune from another.¹

The meeting between Grant and Meade was brief. Meade suggested that it might suit the new general in chief if the commander of the Army of the Potomac quietly retired, and Grant quickly rejected the offer—and wrote that he was favorably impressed by the way it was made. Mostly, the two men seem to have spent their time sizing each other up, and each man liked what he saw. They would appear to have made an odd picture, standing together. Grant was five feet eight, stooped, unmilitary in his gait, with creased horizontal wrinkles across his brow giving him a faintly harassed look, and for once he was togged out in dress uniform, black sugar-loaf hat set squarely on his head, sash about his waist, straight sword of a general officer belted at his side. Meade was taller, skinny, and bearing something of a patrician air, harsh lines cutting down from the corners of his nose. He spoke of the army as "My people," and he wore a felt hat with peaked crown and turned-down brim which gave him a Tyrolean appearance.² They had their talk, and then the Zouaves presented arms and the band played ruffles and flourishes, and Grant went away. He came back, a little more than a fortnight later, and from that moment on, in spite of fact and logic, the army was known as "Grant's army."

Grant made his headquarters in a plain brick house near Culpeper Court House, with tents for his staff pitched in the yard, and he got down to work. He was commander of all of the armies of the United States—counting everything, he had twenty-one army corps and eighteen military departments under him, for a total of 533,000 soldiers—and he had a diversity of jobs to do, from winning the war down to keeping the politicians from running the Army of the Potomac, and he had very little time for small talk.³

Ulysses S. Grant was a natural—an unmistakable rural Middle Westerner, bearing somehow the air of the little farm and the empty dusty road and the small-town harness shop, plunked down here in an army predominantly officered by polished Easterners. He was slouchy, round-shouldered, a red bristly beard cropped short on his weathered face, with a look about the eyes as of a man who had come way up from very far down; his one visible talent seemingly the ability to ride any horse anywhere under any conditions. These days, mostly, he rode a big bay horse named Cincinnati, and when he went out to look at the troops he set a pace no staff officer could match, slanting easily forward as if he and the horse had been made in one piece, and his following was generally trailed out behind him for a hundred yards, scabbards banging against the sides of lathered horses, the less military officers frantically grabbing hats and saddle leather as they tried to keep up.

Somewhere within the general in chief there hid the proud, shy little West Point graduate who put on the best uniform a brevet second lieutenant of infantry could wear when he went home to Ohio on furlough after graduation, and who got laughed at for a dude by livery-stable toughs, and who forever after preferred to wear the plain uniform of a private soldier, with officer's insignia stitched to the shoulders. He had three stars to put there now—more than any American soldier had worn except George Washington and Winfield Scott—and he had little eccentricities. He breakfasted frequently on a cup of coffee and a cucumber sliced in vinegar, and if he ate meat it had to be cooked black, almost to a crisp: this author of much bloodshed detested the sight of blood, and was made queasy by the sight of red meat. When he prepared for his day's rounds he accepted from his servant two dozen cigars, which were stowed away in various pockets, and he carried a flint and steel lighter with a long wick, modern style, so that he could get a light in a high wind.

He received many letters asking for his autograph, but, he admitted, "I don't get as many as I did when I answered them." He was not without a quiet sense of humor; writing his memoirs, he told about the backwoods schools he went to as a boy, saying that he was taught so many times that "a noun is the name of a thing" that he finally came to believe it. As a man he was talkative but as a general he was close-mouthed. When the crack VI Corps was paraded for him and officers asked him if he ever saw anything to equal it (hoping that he might confess that the Army of the Potomac was better drilled than Western troops, which was indeed the case) he remarked only that General So-and-so rode a very fine horse; the general in question, a brigade commander, having recently invested $500 in a fancy new saddle of which he was very proud.⁴

Nobody knew quite what to make of him, and judgments were tentative. One of Meade's staff officers commented that Grant's habitual expression was that of a man who had made up his mind to drive his head through a stone wall, and Uncle John Sedgwick, canniest and most deeply loved of all the army's higher officers, wrote to his sister that he had been "most agreeably disappointed" both with the general's looks and with his obvious common sense. (As it happened, "common sense" was the expression most often used when men tried to say why they liked Sedgwick so much.) Sedgwick was a little bit skeptical. He said that even though Grant impressed him well, it was doubtful whether he could really do much more with the army than his predecessors had done, since "the truth is we are on the wrong road to take Richmond." ⁵ Having unburdened himself, Sedgwick retired to his tent to resume one of his everlasting games of solitaire, leaving further comment to other ranks.

Other ranks had their own ideas, which did not always approach reverence. A squadron of cavalry went trotting by one day while Grant sat his horse, smoking, and one trooper sniffed the breeze and said that he knew the general was a good man because he smoked such elegant cigars. Two privates in the 5th Wisconsin saw Grant ride past them, and studied him in silence. Presently one asked the inevitable question: "Well, what do you think?" The other took in the watchful eyes and the hard straight mouth under the stubbly beard, and replied: "He looks as if he meant it." Then, reflecting on the problems which politics could create for a general, he added: "But I'm afraid he's too near Washington." The first soldier said that they would see for themselves before long, and remarked contemplatively: "He's a little un."

One man said that while the soldiers often saw Grant he was always riding so fast that they could not get a good look at him, and another commented: "After the debonair McClellan, the cocky Burnside, rosy Joe Hooker and the dyspeptic Meade, the calm and unpretentious Grant was not exciting anyway." He felt that the most anyone really saw was "a quiet solidity."

If the general had solidity he would need it, because he was under great pressure. Hopes and fears centered on him, not to mention jealousies. The country at large believed that he was the man who at last was going to win the war, possibly very quickly. The day when men easily expected miracles and hoped to find another Napoleon under the newest general's black campaign hat had died out long ago, but if miracles were out of order ruthless determination perhaps would do, and that much seemed to be visible.

Over in the Army of Northern Virginia, James Longstreet was quietly warning people not to underestimate this new Yankee commander: "That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war." ⁷ Nobody in the North heard the remark, but the quality which had called it forth had not gone unnoticed. Here was the man who looked as if he would ram his way through a brick wall, and since other tactics had not worked perhaps that was the thing to try. At Fort Donelson and at Vicksburg he had swallowed two Confederate armies whole, and at Chattanooga he had driven a third army in headlong retreat from what had been thought to be an impregnable stronghold, and all anyone could think of was the hard blow that ended matters. Men seemed ready to call Grant the hammerer before he even began to hammer.

Yet if there were many who uncritically expected much, there were some who had corrosive doubts. Congress had passed an act creating the rank of lieutenant general, knowing that if the act became law no one but Grant would be named, knowing that in passing the act it was doing only what the situation and the country demanded. Yet Congress had had one worry all the while it was acting—a worry expressed in the simple, vulgar question: If we turn the country's armies over to this man, will he stay sober?

The question was never debated publicly and never forgotten in private. Never before had there been anything quite like this uneasy concern that the nation's survival might hang on one man's willingness to refrain from drinking too much. Along with the legend of victory, there had arisen about Grant this legend of drunkenness—bad days in California, forced resignation from the army, hardscrabble period in Missouri and Illinois, surprise at Shiloh. All of these were items in the legend, and men who knew nothing whatever about it had at least heard of President Lincoln's offhand crack that he would like to buy for his other generals some of Grant's own brand of whisky. Men looked at Grant and saw what they had been led to see. Some saw quiet determination, and others, like Richard Henry Dana, saw "the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink," and considered that there was an air of seediness and half pay about the fellow.

The question had finally been resolved in Grant's favor, of course, but not without much soul searching on the part of those who had to resolve it. And as a hedge against a chancy future, Congress had created for the lieutenant general the post of chief of staff, and into this post there had come the thin, impassioned, consumptive little lawyer from Illinois, John A. Rawlins.

Rawlins knew no more about military matters than any other lawyer, except for what had rubbed off on him through three years with Grant, but that did not matter. He ran Grant's staff capably enough, although high policy sometimes got away from him and he was hesitant about asserting himself where officers of the Regular Army were concerned, but what was really important about him was the fact that he had a mother hen complex. He was devoted to the Union with a passion that was burning the life out of him, but he was even more devoted to U. S. Grant, and his great, self-chosen mission in life was to guard the general's honor, well-being, and sobriety. In elevating Grant the government had in effect elevated Rawlins as well. Unformulated but taken for granted was the idea that he was the man who would save the man who would save the country.⁸

There was a good deal of needless worry in all of this. Grant was no drunkard. He was simply a man infinitely more complex than most people could realize. Under the hard, ruthless man of war—the remorseless soldier who hammered and hammered until men foolishly believed him raw strength incarnate—there was quite another person: the West Point cadet who hated military life and used to hope against unavailing hope that Congress would presently abolish the military academy and so release him from an army career; the young officer who longed to get away from camp and parade ground and live quietly as a teacher of mathematics; a man apparently beset by infinite loneliness, with a profound need for the warm, healing, understanding intimacy that can overleap shyness. Greatly fortunate, he found this intimacy with his wife, whom he still loved as a young man loves his first sweetheart, and when he was long away from her he seems to have been a little less than whole. On the eve of every great battle, after he became a famous general, with the orders all written and everything taped for the next day's violence, and the unquiet troops drifting off into a last sleep, he would go to his tent and unburden himself in a long, brooding letter to this woman who still spoke of him, quaintly, as "Mister Grant."

So it could happen badly with him, when he was alone and cut off and the evils of life came down about him. Marooned in California, far from his family, tormented by money problems, bored by the pointless routine of a stagnant army post under a dull and unimaginative colonel, he could turn to drink for escape. He could do the same thing back in Missouri as a civilian, working hard for a meager living, all the luck breaking badly, drifting into failure at forty, Sam Grant the ne'er-do-well. Deep in Tennessee, likewise, sidetracked by a jealous and petty-minded superior, the awful stain of Shiloh lying ineradicable on his mind, his career apparently ready to end just as it was being reborn, the story could be the same. There was a flame in him, and there were times when he could not keep the winds from the outer dark from blowing in on him and making it flicker. But it never did go out.

In any case, the Army of the Potomac was hardly in a position to look down its nose on officers who drank. It had an abundance of them, and they had been seen in every level from army commander down to junior lieutenant. There had been times when the sleep of enlisted men had been broken by the raucous noises coming from the tents of drunken officers. There had been one notable occasion this past winter when a famous corps commander got drunk, walked full-tilt into a tree in front of his tent, and was with difficulty restrained from court-martialing the officer of the guard on charges of felonious assault. A little Quaker nurse in a II Corps hospital, commenting on the fact that both a corps and a division commander had been drunk during a recent battle, wrote bitterly: "I don't care what anyone says, war is humbug. It is just put out to see how much suffering the privates can bear, I guess." Perfectly in character was the tale told of a major who commanded an artillery brigade, a heavy drinker despite the fact that he came from prohibitionist Maine. This man had a birthday coming up and he wanted to celebrate, and he called in his commissary officer and asked how much whisky they had in stock. The officer said there might be as much as two gallons, and the major was indignant.

'Two gallons!" he repeated. "What is two gallons of whisky among one man?" ⁰

To do the army justice, it did not worry about Grant's drinking. A general who never got drunk was a rarity—so much so that his sobriety was always mentioned in his biography, as a sign that he stood above the common run. What troubled the officer corps—and, to an extent, the enlisted man as well—was the fact that Grant came from the West. The West seemed to be a side show where a general could win a reputation without really amounting to much. (After all, there had been John Pope.) Federal troops in the West were thought to be an undisciplined rabble. Also—which was what really mattered—they had never been up against the first team. They had never had to face Robert E. Lee.

Lee was the one soldier in whom most of the higher officers of the Army of the Potomac had complete, undiluted confidence. Among the many achievements of that remarkable man, nothing is much more striking than his ability to dominate the minds of the men who were fighting against him. These men could look back on several years of warfare, and what they saw always seemed about the same—the Army of the Potomac marching south to begin an offensive, well-equipped and full of confidence, and, within days or weeks, fighting doggedly and without too much confidence to escape annihilation. Twice the army had won a defensive battle, letting its enemies go away unmolested afterward, but when it took the offensive it invariably lost the initiative. Its own plans never seemed to matter, because sooner or later both armies moved by Lee's plans. Grant was untried. His record probably meant nothing. Just wait until he tried tangling with Lee!

As it happened, this attitude worked both ways; if soldiers in the East had a low opinion of soldiers in the West, the Westerners returned the feeling with interest. A Federal general in one of the Western armies, reading the sad news from Chancellorsville the preceding spring, had remarked that "we do not build largely on the Eastern army," and continued; "When we hear, therefore, that the Eastern army is going to fight, we make our minds up that it is going to be defeated, and when the result is announced we feel sad enough but not disappointed." Westerners believed that the Army of the Potomac had never been made to fight all out and that when all was said and done there was something mysteriously wrong with it. The Westerners had had no Antietam or Gettysburg, but they had had a Shiloh and a Stone's River, and they felt that they had seen the Confederates at their toughest. When the IX Corps was sent to Tennessee in the fall of 1863, Western troops greeted the boys with the jeering question: "All quiet along the Potomac?" and announced caustically: "Well show you how to fight." ¹¹

So there were mutual doubts, and the effect was unfortunate. The officers of this army not only viewed Grant's advent with strong skepticism; in many cases this skepticism verged on outright hostility, so that it was ready to burst out with a bitter, triumphant "I told you so!" if the new general should run into trouble. Grant's presence here was an implied criticism of the army's prior leadership and strategy. Through him, the administration was striking its final blow at the whole complex of emotions and relationships which had come down from McClellan—and McClellan remained, next to Lee, the man in whom most of the veteran officers still had implicit confidence.

Ohio and Pennsylvania soldiers, huddling together on a picket post, talked it over:

'Who's this Grant that's made a lieutenant general?"

"He's the hero of Vicksburg."

"Well, Vicksburg wasn't much of a fight. The Rebels were out of rations and they had to surrender or starve. They had nothing but dead mules and dogs to eat, as I understand."

The men nodded, and one said that Grant could never have penned up any of Lee's generals that way. Longstreet or Jeb Stuart "would have broken out some way and foraged around for supplies." ¹³

An impressionable newspaper correspondent might describe Grant as "all-absorbed, all-observant, silent, inscrutable," a man who "controls and moves armies as he does his horse," but the enlisted man wanted more evidence. He liked the fact that Grant went about without fuss and ceremony, and he was ready to admit that "a more hopeful spirit prevailed," but for the most part he went along with the company officer who said that only time would tell whether this new general's first name was really Ulysses or Useless.¹⁴

Yet there was a change, and before long the men felt it. There was a perceptible tightening up, as if someone who meant business had his hands on the reins now. Orders went forth to corps and division commanders to make a radical cut in the number of men who were borne on the returns as "on special, extra, or daily duty," and attention was called to the discrepancies between the numbers reported "present for duty" and those listed as "present for duty, equipped." In brigades and divisions the inspectors general became busy, and where equipment had been lacking it suddenly materialized. Long trains of freight cars came clanking in at Brandy Station, to unload food and forage, uniforms and blankets, and shelter tents and munitions. Men found that they were working harder now than in the past. Subtly but unmistakably, an air of competence and preparation was manifest.

Cavalry found that a new day had dawned. The Pleasontons and Kilpatricks were gone, and at the top there was another Westerner—a tough little man named Phil Sheridan, bandy-legged and wiry, with a black bullet head and a hard eye, wearing by custom a mud-spotted uniform, flourishing in one fist a flat black hat which, when he put it on, seemed to be at least two sizes too small for him. Like Grant, he rode a great black horse when he made his rounds and he rode it at a pounding gallop, and it was remarked that he "rolled and bounced upon the back of his steed much as an old salt does when walking up the aisle of a church after a four years* cruise at sea."

Cavalry's camps were better policed, the endless picket details were reduced, and it appeared that Sheridan was going to insist on using his corps as a compact fighting unit. When Sheridan was taken to the White House to meet the President, Lincoln quoted the familiar army jest—"Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?"—and it was obvious that Sheridan was not amused. Meeting a friend at Willard's a little bit later, Sheridan said: "I'm going to take the cavalry away from the bobtailed brigadier generals. They must do without their escorts. I intend to make the cavalry an arm of the service."

One trooper complained that people now were checking up on all routine jobs, so that a man grooming his horse had to put in a full sixty minutes at its "There is an officer watching you all the time, and if you stop he yells out, 'Keep to work9 there!"' With all of this came businesslike new weapons? seven-shot Spencer magazine carbines, made regulation equipment by a recently revived Cavalry Bureau.¹⁵

Artillerists were put through endless maneuvers, wheeling back and forth in the dust and mud to become letter-perfect in such intricacies as "changing front to the right on the first section," and banging away in constant target practice. Batteries were taught to come galloping up to a line, halt and unlimber, completely disassemble their pieces until wheels, guns, gun carriages, and limber chests lay separate on the ground, then at a word of command reassemble the whole business and go galloping away again. One gunner declared that a good gun crew could perform the whole maneuver in several seconds less than one minute, and another grumbled that all of this "was of as much practical use to us as if we had been assiduously drilled to walk on stilts"; and whether it was useful or otherwise the drill was repeated over and over and the gun crews got toughened up for the approaching campaign.¹⁶

None of this, naturally, missed the infantry. There were unending drills, and much target practice. The army command had caught on to the notorious fact that some soldiers simply did not know how to shoot. On every battlefield, ordnance officers had collected hundreds of discarded muskets containing anywhere from two to a dozen unexploded cartridges. In the heat of battle men failed to notice that they had not pulled trigger, and reloaded weapons which had not been fired; or, indeed, they were so untaught that they did not even know enough to cap their pieces and so pulled trigger to no effect, failing to realize in all the battle racket that they had not actually fired. A circular from headquarters decreed that every man in the army should be made to load and fire his weapon under supervision of an officer, since "it is believed there are men in this army who have been in numerous actions without ever firing their guns." ¹⁷

The bark of the drill sergeant echoed across the hard-trodden parade grounds where new levies were being put into shape. (In the Irish Brigade, an irate non-com was heard shouting: "Kape your heels together, Tim Mullaney in the rear rank, and don't be standing wid wan fut in Bull Run and" the other in the Sixth Ward!") Transportation was cut down, one wagon to a brigade was the rule now—and many wagon drivers came back to the ranks and shouldered muskets. One of these passed a wagon train one day and heard a mule braying. Fixing his eye on the beast, the man retorted: "You needn't laugh at me—you may be in the ranks yourself before Grant gets through with the army." All in all, it was as a New England soldier wrote: "We all felt at last that the boss had arrived."¹⁸

There were many reviews: no McClellan touch now, with pomp and flourish, but a businesslike marshaling of troops to be seen by the general in chief, who rode by always at a gallop, sometimes on Cincinnati, sometimes on a little black pacer named Jeff Davis, and who for all his speed always seemed able to look each man in the ranks squarely in the eye. The general did not appear to care whether anyone cheered or not. The Iron Brigade was drawn up one day in line of massed battalions, a cold drizzle coming down, and as Grant came along the line regiment after regiment gave him a cheer. Grant was preoccupied, studying the faces of the hard fighters in this famous brigade, and he neglected to give the customary wave of the hat in response, and so the colonel of the 6th Wisconsin at the far end of the line told his men not to cheer but simply to give the formal salute. They obeyed, and as Grant came along he noticed the omission and slowed to a walk. The colors were dipped, and Grant took off his hat and bowed. The Wisconsin boys were pleased, and after the parade broke up they said that "Grant wants soldiers, not yaup-ers."¹®

What the soldiers liked most of all was the far-reaching hand with which Grant hauled men out of the safe dugouts in Washington and brought them into the army.

The Washington fortifications had been manned for two years with what were known as heavy artillery regiments-oversized regiments mustering around 1,800 men apiece, trained both to act as infantry, with muskets, and to man heavy guns in the forts—and these regiments never had any trouble keeping their ranks filled, because men could enlist in them in full confidence that they would have to fight very little and march not at all. They led what the Army of the Potomac considered an excessively soft life, with permanent barracks, no trouble about rations, and every night in bed.

Their possessions were many, because infantry commands leaving Washington for the front always discarded (or could be quietly despoiled of) much property, and so the "heavies" had extra blankets, stoves, civilian-type bedsteads, and good table equipment. Their hospitals boasted white sheets and pillowcases, and some regiments even maintained regimental libraries. Certain regiments actually kept pigs, feeding them on swill from the company kitchens and dining frequently on fresh pork. One outfit of mechanically minded Yankees set up a little machine shop, and before inspection they would take their muskets in and have the barrels turned in lathes to take on a dazzling gleam and polish, with machine-driven buffers to put a glossy sheen on the stocks. These men had been enjoying a very comfortable war, and the combat troops had been resenting it (and envying them) for a long time.

Now, without warning, these huge regiments left their happy homes, marched down to the Rapidan, and began to pitch their shelter tents in the mud just like everybody else, and the infantry was jubilant. Veterans would line the roads, whooping with delight, calling out all manner of greetings-asking the new regiments why they had not brought their fortifications along, referring to them derisively as "heavy infantry," inquiring when their guns would arrive, and offering instruction about various aspects of the soldier's life. These heavy artillery regiments were many times as large as the veteran infantry outfits—the colonel of the 12th Massachusetts was protesting just now that his regiment could muster only 207 enlisted men for duty—and the veterans would make heavy-handed remarks on the fact; when a new regiment came in they would ask what division this was.²⁰

Certain cavalry commands met a similar fate, and got just as much sympathy. Some of these had been in camp at Washington for a refit, waiting with perfect resignation for the slow processes of government to provide them with remounts. These abruptly found themselves deprived of sabers, of carbines, and of all hope of new horses, given infantry muskets instead, and sent down to the Rapidan on foot. A Connecticut heavy artillery regiment, meeting such a command of dismounted Maryland cavalry, asked incautiously: "Where are your horses?" A Marylander replied sourly: "Gone to fetch your heavy guns." The Official Records contain a plaintive and quite useless protest by an outraged colonel, who recited that he led a spanking new regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry into Washington that spring—1,200 men, well mounted, disciplined, drilled, and equipped—only to be ordered to turn in his horses and weapons, draw muskets, and consider his command infantry thenceforward.²¹

All of this pleased the infantry greatly, cavalry in general not being too popular with foot soldiers, and there was admiration for the general who had brought it all to pass. With this admiration came a dawning respect for his power. Pulling the heavy artillery and the dismounted cavalry down to the Rapidan meant that Washington was being left almost defenseless. In earlier times, White House and War Department had insisted on keeping 40,000 men or more within the Washington lines, even though no enemies ever came within miles of them. If this new general could override that insistence he must have prodigious strength. Apparently he could have things just about the way he wanted them, and the army would move with greater power. At the very least, it seemed that the country's strength was going to be used. When he rode the lines, a soldier wrote that the men would 'look with awe at Grant's silent figure." ²²

Not all of the changes were popular. One which was bitterly resented by thousands of the best soldiers in the army was a shake-up which consolidated the five infantry corps into three. Actually, this was none of Grant's doing, Meade having put at in the works before Grant took over, but it was announced while all the other changes were taking place and it was generally accepted as part of Grant's program. Meade seems to have made the move partly because he felt that the army would work better with fewer and larger units, and partly because there were not as many as five qualified corps commanders in the army anyway. The consolidation enabled him to shelve several generals who had been withering on the vine—the best of them, probably, crusty and slow-moving George Sykes, famous because of the work his Regulars had done in the early days.

What made this shake-up unpopular with so many men was the fact that the I Corps and the III Corps ceased to exist, their brigades being distributed among the three corps which survived. These two corps had been famous and their men had been cocky, wearing their corps badges with vast pride, and they were brought almost to the verge of mutiny by the change. (One army historian, writing more than twenty years later, asserted that "the wound has never yet wholly healed in the heart of many a brave and patriotic soldier.")²³ The two organizations had been wrecked at Gettysburg and it had never been possible, somehow, to repair the damage and bring them up to proper strength. Yet the consolidation was unfortunate. Heretofore, each corps had had its own individuality and its own tradition, and these had done much for morale. Just as the three which remained were striving to digest the miscellaneous lot of new recruits which were coming in, they were given the unhappy brigades and divisions from the two corps which had been abolished. The result was that nobody quite felt that his old outfit was what it used to be. There was also the possibility that the great increase in the size of each corps would put a new strain on the corps commanders.

In the midst of all of this reshuffling the army almost lost John Sedgwick. Sedgwick had never felt it necessary to assure Washington that he hated Democrats and loved emancipation, nor had he ever concealed his admiration for McClellan, and these things had made him suspect with Secretary Stanton. Early this winter Sedgwick had bluntly told the War Department that Butler's poorly handled attempt to capture Richmond had done the Union cause more harm than good, and since Butler was a pet of the radical Republicans—a standing test of the other generals' allegiance to the cause, so to speak—this was remembered where it would hurt. In February Sedgwick wrote to his sister that the army grapevine was predicting a reorganization "to get rid of some obnoxious generals," and he admitted that he himself might be on this list. It would not bother him much, he said, if this turned out to be true: "I feel that I have done my part of field duty. . » «, I could even leave altogether without many regrets."

So when Meade began to make changes Stanton told him that it would be well to find some other place for Sedgwick, and after some argument back and forth it had finally been agreed to put Sedgwick in command up in the Shenandoah Valley. It would have been an odd sort of demotion, for the valley command was destined to be very important, but it was all upset at the last minute when Mr. Lincoln unexpectedly gave the job to Franz Sigel, and in the end Sedgwick remained in command of the VI Corps.²⁴

With the men of this corps he was very popular. One day in this winter of 1864 Wheaton's brigade of the VI Corps came in to camp after several months of detached service in western Virginia. The brigade detrained in a miserable cold rain, and since all of the good camp sites had been taken it appeared that they would have to pitch their tents in a muddy field, with no shelter from the elements and the nearest source of wood for campfires several miles away. There was a fine grove near by, to be sure, but some brigadier and his entourage had long since pre-empted it. While the men stood disconsolate in the wet, a burly horseman in a muddy cavalry overcoat came splashing up—Sedgwick. He took in the situation at once, rode over to the little grove, told the brigadier and his henchmen to pack up at once and move to some other place, and ordered Wheaton to have his brigade take over the vacated camp site.²⁵

Winfield Scott Hancock led the II Corps. He had been badly wounded at Gettysburg and the wound still bothered him, but he came back at the end of the winter with all of his old gusto and the men were glad to see him. He was a vivid, hearty sort of man—his chief of staff, with strong understatement, remarked that he was "absolutely devoid of asceticism" —and it was believed that he could conduct a long march with less straggling and more professional competence than any other officer in the army. He differed from most Regular Army officers (including Meade himself) in that he liked volunteer soldiers and did his best to make them feel that they were as good as Regulars, and his army corps repaid him for that attitude.²⁶ The corps badge was a trefoil, and when the men went into action they had a way of yelling: "Clubs are trumps!"

To the V Corps, in place of the departed Sykes, came one of the most baffling figures in the army—Major General Gouvereur Kemble Warren.