It was their good fortune, or else their misery, to belong to a generation in which every individual would be given a chance to discover and expose his worth, down to the final ounce of strength and nerve. (164)
The first volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative takes you from the lead-up to the Civil War through Antietam and the end of 1862 in some 800 odd pages. Foote, by virtue of being a novelist rather than a historian, does an unbelievably entertaining job communicating the saga of the Civil War. On its face, 1.2 million words on the Civil War sounds boring. I anticipated a slog when I committed to reading this trilogy and was pleasantly surprised to realize it is a page turner. Foote seamlessly integrates a variety of anecdotes – the devastating, hilarious, and heroic – with a coherent narrative of the strategic and tactical developments of the Civil War. Of the limited military history I have read, Foote nails the sweet spot with respect to granularity of details (you need not be a military scholar or field grade Army officer to understand). Foote’s eloquence alone is not responsible for this masterpiece. Rather, the inherently epic quality of the Civil War is essential to the narrative. The Civil War reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
I’ve organized my thoughts on this volume into a few categories: the amateurism and incompetence on display, the hellish domestic and battlefield politics, and the bizarre actuality of military honor.
Amateurism
By amateurism, I am referring to the general unpreparedness of both sides for large scale combat. From the industrial base to the individual soldiers to the senior political and military leaders, the first few years of the war were chaotic. I’ll make this more clear with specific examples, but it is striking how poor the systems were. Still, both sides muddled through.
Much of the unpreparedness was perfectly understandable. First, the US, compared to say the British or the French, was relatively inexperienced in warfighting. The Mexican-American war was on a much smaller scale and the professional military was tiny. After secession, that small Army is bifurcated! Each sides’ officer ranks is basically composed of the West Point graduates of the last 40 or so years, many of whom came out of the woodworks of civilian life to command thousands of troops. The vast scale of the conflict in terms of both geography and the numbers of troops such scale required was a recipe for growing pains.
While a military clash over slavery had been in the air for years, the lead-up to the war was surprisingly peaceful: there was no chaotic scrambling to industrialize and prepare for a war of epic proportions. It seems odd that generals calmly resigned their Union commissions to defect to the Confederacy… did no one think to arrest them? The Southern states gradually secede and each side gradually raises its armies. Part of the failure to launch stems from the lingering sense that it will be over quickly in one decisive battle. “We’ll whip them,” is the common refrain. McClellan and Beauregard, swollen with ego, think they are the second coming of Napoleon and will win the war easily with a swift campaign. William Tecumseh Sherman, future Union war hero, was one of the few to accurately anticipate the scope of the conflict. He “informed the Secretary of War that 200,000 troops would be required to put down the rebellion in the Mississippi Valley alone. And it must have gone to convince him even further of a lack of northern awareness and determination when, under suspicion of insanity, he was removed from command of troops for this remark.” (62) While Sherman is a Cassandra for most of the war, he is spot on in the beginning.
The slow lead-up yields a predictably disastrous start for both sides. It’s a shame that Fort Sumter is the official start of the war because, with the exception of fun West Point trivia (GEN P.G.T Beauregard firing on his former instructor MAJ Anderson), the true beginning is Bull Run or Manassas. The First Battle of Bull Run sets the tone for how the war will initially be carried out, which is to say with amateurism. You have the unseriousness of a Union Army that has known no combat behaving like schoolboys during their first march to battle: “they hooted and complained and fell out from time to time for berry-picking, just as they had done on practice marches.” (71) These jolly, berry-picking men were unserious and thus woefully unprepared for the rather serious reality of Civil War combat: bold charges decimated by the bloody combination of whizzing Minie balls and artillery. Bull Run reveals the general pattern: attacks, retreats, massive confusion, and squandered victories. One side attacks and celebrates to the point of losing momentum, while the other side counterattacks and then celebrates. In both cases, the celebrations become so disorderly that they cannot continue pursuit or consolidate gains! The commanding officers are useless in the face of their soldiers, who quickly become an unruly mob of looters and degenerates at the slightest victory. Sherman, one of the more entertaining and histrionic commenters on the war, wrote:
Nobody, no man, can save the country. Our men are not good soldiers. They brag, but don’t perform, complain sadly if they don’t get everything they want, and a march of a few miles uses them up. (85)
Or consider the Confederate Army, which was attempting to sneak up on the Union lines at the Battle of Shiloh:
As they marched forward to file into line, the men began to worry about the dampness of the powder in their rifles; but instead of drawing the charges and reloading, they tested them by snapping the triggers; with the result that, within earshot of the Federal outposts, there was an intermittent banging up and down the columns, as rackety as a sizeable picket clash. Nor was that all. The returning sun having raised their spirits, the men began to tune up their rebel yells and practice marksmanship on birds and rabbits. (328)
Beyond the shortcomings of armies yet to receive their baptisms by fire, some of the amateurism stems from technological shortcomings rather than poor discipline or preparation. The top sources of confusion at the beginning of the Civil War were bad intelligence (both poor maps and poor understanding of the enemy situation) and difficulty communicating because of the limitations of couriers and telegraph lines. Bad maps and worse navigation got the better of both Union and Confederate generals. Consider the fate of Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer at the Battle of Mill Springs:
Zollicoffer lost his sense of direction in the rain. Conspicuous in a white rubber coat that made him an ideal target, he rode out between the lines, got turned around, and near-sightedly mistook a Federal colonel for one of his own officers. At this point his luck, which had been running strong, ran out. He was shouting an order when the colonel, a man who recognized an advantage when he saw one, leveled his revolver and put a bullet point-blank into Zollicoffer’s breast. (179)
Union officers were susceptible to the same goofs. After the Union retreat at the Seven Days, one general overslept and got captured: “[The Confederates] had pushed down toward the Chicahominy without encountering any live Federals except the injured and stragglers, including one of McCall’s brigade commanders, Brigadier General John F. Reynolds, who had slept too long int the woods and was captured.” (493)
While some might believe occasional confusion and chaos in combat is an irreducible quality of war, these particular examples suggest inexperience and amateurism among senior leaders as the culprit.
It’s striking to me how the awareness of the presence of a single road could be the difference maker in bringing artillery assets to bear and in multiple instances (e.g. Chancellorsville) better maps may have carried the day. Modern geospatial intelligence and surveillance assets have mostly solved this, although poor understanding of topography remains a thorn in the side of many a staff section. Intelligence failures could be decisive. The best example was the Confederate trick of bringing the same cannons within the sight of Union pickets, then returning them out of sight and bringing them up again to give the impression of a much larger unit. This simple gambit worked time and time again. McClellan, in particular, was paralyzed by routine ten-fold overestimates of Confederate strength. It’s important to know how large your enemy is, but its amusing to think it was so difficult to ascertain this information, especially when the enemy is 20 miles away out in the open!
Beyond intelligence shortcomings, communication was a challenge. I believe this was the primary reason it was so difficult to effectively wield these massive armies: without realtime communication, there was no command and control. Subordinate commanders had difficulty updating the commanding generals and vice versa. This was not exactly a surprise and contemporary operations accounted for this. Indeed the Civil War had better technology in the telegraph than any of the wars before it. Still, the slow passing of information create the kind of tantalizingly close victories. Communication issues also enabled generals’ insubordinate whims. Perhaps they were feeling angsty and wanted to leave their superiors in the dark… they could pretend as if telegraph lines were cut or they never received a message. It must have been so frustrating to not know where your people were or what they were doing! Stonewall Jackson seemed to be the worst culprit when it came to this rogueness. During the Seven Days’ Battles, he seemed to subvert Lee’s orders by being routinely tardy. Lee spends many vexed words wondering where the hell Jackson is (he is usually sleeping or eating lemons).
More dysfunction and amateurism can be found in the human resources department. To start, people were promoted accidentally, like Philip Sheridan. Moreover, the free use of the military justice system led to frequent arrests of general officers. General Halleck, who is frustrated by Grant’s lack of updates, receives the following advice from McClellan:
Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest him at once if the good of the service requires it… You are at liberty to regard this as a positive order if it will smooth your way. (317)
Surely there is a better way to sort out our differences than arresting each other! Confederate officer John Hood was arrested for insubordination and then, proven to be indispensable to his unit, was released back to his command with a major battle forthcoming.
Finally, and most jarring, is the state of medicine. The infancy of the industrial age and its technological progress lends a false confidence to the medical practitioners of the day, which leads to enlightened barbarism. Take Confederate General Joe Johnston, for example, who was wounded in the Seven Pines. His prescribed treatment? “‘Bleedings, blisterings, and depletions of the system.’ All three were stringently applied” (785) I actually thought of Gwenyth Paltrow when I read about Stonewall Jackson’s insistence that pepper “made his left leg ache.” (420) Plus ça change…
And yet, amidst all this bush league nonsense stand confident leaders convinced of their qualifications. To be clear, there are many leaders, moreso on the Union side, who are transparent about their lack of confidence (McClellan, Burnside). But there are so many who were wrong, who had good reason to lack confidence, but who persevered and made things happen. Albert Johnston, who was suffering a degraded reputation after Confederate losses at Forts Donelson and Henry, put it this way: “the test of merit in my profession is success. It is a hard rule, but I think it right.” (234) Indeed, winning is everything. I find it in part admirable and in part terrifying that generals were able to carry on after committing such costly mistakes. Grant, whose arrogance allowed the Confederates to surprise his Army at Shiloh, manages to learn from his horrific mistake, rather than shutdown. I would have been interested in hearing these generals reflect on their shortcomings and how it affected their confidence, but such nakedness does not suit the modern major general.
Politics
Clausewitz famously wrote “war is the continuation of politics with other means,” which seems obvious in the case of the Civil War! But war is not merely a continuation of politics; it seems to amplify the very worst of it. In times of war, the power to be wielded scales with the heightened stakes. War brings more catastrophes and scandals than peacetime, which opportunists try to capitalize on in order to ascend. The press is in a frenzy (Sherman later cheers the prospect of Union journalists drowning in the Missippi!) There are war profiteers who sabotage their country’s cause by “fulfilling” contracts in an unsatisfactory way. The public is intemperate and quick to turn on those in charge, or anyone who can be conceived of as an enemy. And your country’s future is dying in large numbers on the battlefield. All this is bad and makes it hard to govern during times of war. In addition to this, Lincoln (and Davis) had to deal with the generals.
Unelected, unruly military officers commanding tens of thousands of troops and adjudicating the use of deadly violence are a necessary evil in any warring nation. These powerful men often come with big egos. They have political skill, and often political ambition. They clash with their civilian commanders and disobey orders. While the professional military officers were bad enough, there were also politicians who served as unqualified generals trying to make up for military inexperience with political maneuvering, like John McClernand. Many politicians take up arms, which is funny to imagine happening today. You had people like Edward Baker, Oregon senator and colonel who was killed in action at Ball’s Bluff. “From time to time he would return from the field, appearing in full uniform on the floor of the Senate, where he would unbuckle his sword, lay it across his desktop, and launch an oratorical attack upon those of his fellow lawmakers who appeared to favor any compromise with secession.” (105) In such unstable times, Lincoln and Davis each have to put their trust in these powerful men, who most directly control the fate of the country yet have to be controlled.
General McClellan, or Little Mac, comes across really poorly in this installment. From the start, he is too concerned about the political. He doesn’t want to be undermined or challenged, and creates a boogeyman out of Lincoln. He feels persecuted by Lincoln and thinks Lincoln routinely spoils his certain Austerlitz-like victories by pulling the rug out from under him. It’s true that Lincoln is skeptical, but he has reason to be! McClellan is brilliant at organizing and training the fledgling Union Army, but he fails to seize initiative and spends most of the time stagnant. He’s a showman and makes a point of endearing himself to his troops, like asking them to light his cigars and commending them with excessive flattery. While he is a great peacetime military leader and could have created the most dazzling parade displays the world had ever seen, he does not prove his ability in combat. He consistently overestimates Confederate strength by orders of magnitude, which makes him tentative. Towards the Confederate invasion of Maryland, he seems paranoid about Lee’s superior military strategy. By the grace of God, he receives movement plans for Lee’s entire army and he is still paralyzed by fear and fails to lead a decisive victory. If Foote is to be believed, he came to the edge of victory but he and his subordinate commanders lacked the will to carry it through. McClellan demonstrates strategic prowess, but this mostly seems to be on the retreat rather than on the offensive. I grew so tired of McClellan’s bitching that I’m glad he’s finally gone. I am sympathetic to the unbelievable stress that weighs on people in positions of power during times of such peril, but this note by McClellan to Lincoln is beyond redemption:
I now know the full history of the day… I have lost this battle because my force was too small… I again repeat that I am not responsible for this, and I say it with the earnestness of a general who feels in his heart the loss of every brave men who has been needlessly sacrificed today… If at this instant, I could dispose of 10,000 fresh men, I could gain a victory tomorrow. I know that a few thousand more men would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory. As it is, the Government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result… If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army. (493)
Controlling military leaders is a problem for the South too. Many of them are divas. P.G.T Beauregard is annoying and too proud. Bragg is incompetent but difficult to get rid of. Stonewall Jackson is brilliant but nuts and… possibly addicted to lemons? One of my favorite things is reading the correspondence of senior leaders after major battles. Both armies can fight a two day battle, and both commanding generals will write their presidents about their tremendous breakthrough victories. Basically, every battle is a great win with brave fighting except instances where an army is undeniably routed, in which case the commanding general is usually fired. These officers so obsessed with their aristocratic honor do few favors to their cause with all of their histrionics. Jefferson Davis puts the frustrations of domestic politics well:
When everything is at stake and the united power of the South alone can save us, it is sad to know that men can deal in such paltry complaints and tax their ingenuity to slander because they are offended in not getting office… If we can achieve our independence, the officer seekers are welcome to the one I hold. (395)
Military Honor
To be clear, I am not a Lost Causer. Still, I was struck by the role of honor and a man’s word during the Civil War. The best example of this was the parole system. Foote kept writing about soldiers being taken captive and paroled, and I didn’t know what that meant. Instead of keeping prisoners of war, the opposing sides simply released enemy prisoners on the condition that they would not return to the fight. There was no formal enforcement mechanism; rather, a man’s honor was relied upon. At least at the beginning of the conflict, before things got especially desperate, you could simply say “tag! You’re out” and depend upon the enemy staying out of the fight until there was a formal exchange of paroled prisoners (e.g. “tag! You’re back in.”)
There was also the quaint phenomenon of riding out into the middle of a battle with a flag of truce. If they waved a stupid white flag, generals, the most valuable targets on the battlefield, could gallop out in front of enemy lines and no one would shoot them. Then, the the two sides could safely speak. This was often done to surrender or negotiate a cease-fire to bury the dead. In such ferocious fighting, the fact that they could do this is astonishing. The following story, where a Union commander asks the enemy what would be militarily wise, highlights the absurdity of honor and amateurism:
Knowing that Simon Buckner commanded a division on this side of the river, and knowing moreover that Buckner was a man of honor, he went to him undef a flag of truce and asked his advice – as one gentlemen to another. If resistance was hopeless, he said, he did not want to sacrifice his men; but neither did he want to be stampeded into surrendering because of his lack of experience in such matters. What should he do? Buckner, taken aback, declined to advise him. Wars are not fought that way, he said. He offered, however, to conduct him on a tour of the position and let him see for himself the odds against him… ‘I believe I’ll surrender,’ he said sadly. (659)
One striking example of honor is when General Albert Johnston, one of the best officers in the Confederacy, is shot during the Battle of Shiloh while he’s with the Governor of Tennessee.
[His wound] called for a knowledge of tourniquets, but the governor knew nothing of such things. The man who knew most about them, Johnston’s staff physician, had been ordered by the general to attend to a group of Federal wounded he encountered on his way to the far right. When the doctor protested, Johnston cut him off: ‘These men were our enemies a moment ago. They are our prisoners now. Take care of them.’ (340)
All this is to say the aristocratic norms of warfare are no more and these aspects are exceedingly strange to a modern reader, whose impression of the conduct of war is colored mostly by the War on Terror, Vietnam, and WWII. I would be interested to hear theories on why these norms, sticky for so many generations, disappeared. Perhaps they were incompatible with the lethality of modern weapons. It’s probably for the best, as war should not be glorified and dressing it up with fancy outfits and gentlemanly manners makes it seem almost pleasant.
As a disclaimer, there were also many instances of dishonorable behavior; this is war after all! For instance,
In reprisal for guerrilla activities, one of Mitchel’s brigade commanders, Colonel John Basil Turchin — formerly Ivan Vasilevich Turchininov, of the Imperial Russian Army — had turned the town of Athens over to his three regiments, saying, ‘I shut mine eyes for one hour’: whereupon the Illinois, Ohio and Indiana boys took it completely apart, Cossack-style, raping Negro servant girls and stuffing their pockets and haversacks with $50,000 worth of watches, plate, and jewelry. Grudgingly, Buell’s men complained that he would never turn them loose like that, despite the fact that, officially, it would apparently do his career far more good than harm. Turchin was court-martialed and dismissed for the Athens debauch, but before the summer was over he was reinstated and promoted to brigadier. (563)
Authorizing war crimes and then getting a promotion is not a virtuous incentive structure.
Conclusion
In case it isn’t clear, I thoroughly enjoyed this volume and am relieved that there are 2,000 more pages to read. Before this, I had never understood why so many middle-aged men are afflicted with a military history obsession (and the bad habit of regaling uninterested people with the things they’ve learned). But I get it now. We are one. From Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent.
Military history for some provides the opportunity to live vicariously through those who, as Foote puts it, actually got the “chance to discover and expose his worth, down to the final ounce of strength and nerve.” And, for a brief moment, to escape the “shallowness and vapidness” of their real lives with none of the mortal risk of combat.
Other Fun Tidbits
Lincoln attended “’blab’ schools, which meant that the pupils studied aloud at their desks and the master judged the extent of their concentration by the volume of their din.” (21)
Lincoln on his early difficulties with women:
Socially, however, [Lincoln] was slow in getting started. About a month after his arrival he wrote in a letter: ‘I have been spoken to by but one woman since I’ve been here, and should not have been by her, if she could have avoided it…. A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.’’ (24)
From the first Battle of Bull Run:
Prisoners came to Richmond, too, where a three-story tobacco warehouse had been hurriedly converted into a military prison. From the sidewalk, citizens tried to bribe the guards for a glimpse at a real live Yankee: especially New York Congressman Alfred Ely, who had strolled too near the scene of battle justa s the lines gave way and was discovered trying to hid behind a tree. President Davis sent him two fine white wool blanked to keep him warm in the warehouse prison, and the people in general approved of such chivalry. They felt that they could afford to be magnanimous, now that the war was won. (84)
‘Be careful, Ulyss,’ his father wrote when he heard the news of the fluke promotion; ‘you’re a general now; it’s a good job, don’t lose it.’ (197)
Don’t mess with Lincoln, you may become Minister to Russia:
Then on January 11, a Saturday — the date of the second of the three conferences with McDowell and Franklin, none of which Cameron had been urged to attend, despite his position as Secretary of War — he learned that he had been right to feel qualms. He received a brief not in which Lincoln informed him curtly, out of the blue: ‘I … propose nominating you to the Senate next Monday as Minister to Russia.’ Almost literally, he was being banished to Siberia for his sins. (243)
Lincoln could be… inconsiderate of his wife’s depression:
She had nothing, not even Lincoln: who did not help matters by leading her one day to a window and pointing to the lunatic asylum as he said, ‘Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there.’ (252)
On the tragedy of fighting on the same bloody battlefields of yesterday:
McDowell was there, at the head of his corps, and one of his soldiers wrote that he saw him weeping over the sun-bleached boens of the light-hearted berry-picking men he had led southward under the full moon of July. (265)
Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the KKK, engaged in some remarkable bravery by charging alone at an entire Union column. Predictably, he is shot but see how he escapes:
Reaching far out, he shoved the muzzle of his rifle into the colonel’s side and pulled the trigger. The force of the explosion lifted Forrest clear of the saddle, but he regained his seat and sawed the horse around. As he came out of the mass of dark blue uniforms and furious white faces, clearing a path with his saber, he reached down and grabbed one of the soldiers by the collar, swung him onto the crupper of the horse, and galloped back to safety, using the Federal as a shield against the bullets fired after him. Once he was out of range, he flung the hapless fellow off and rode on up the ridge where his men were waiting in open-mouthed amazement. (350)
Stonewall Jackson did not suffer fools:
The bands switched to polkas; the men broke ranks, clasped each other about the waist, and began to dance. Stonewall sat and watched in silence, the lemon gleaming yellow in his beard. ‘Thoughtless fellows for serious work,’ he said. (428)
Jackson, strange as can be, likes to nap during the heat of battle:
Worst of all, however, was Jackson’s reaction, which was rather as if the mainspring of some tightly wound-up mechanism had suddenly lost its resielience or run down. Formerly alert and energetic, he grew taciturn and drowsy, even sullen. Recalling his troops from exposure to danger, he lay down under a tree and went to sleep. (504)
Brotherhood on display, even in the middle of a gruesome war:
Certain regiments were left on picket duty to observe the enemy, and one among them was stationed in a clump of woods overlooking an open field, beyond which there was another clump of woods where a Federal regiment was posted. All in all, the situation indicated a sudden renewal of bloodshed. This was the Fourth of July, however, and what was more the field was full of ripe blackberries; ‘so,’ as one rebel private later remebered, ‘our boys and the Yanks made a bargain not to fire at each other, and went out in the field, leaving on man on each post with his arms, and gathered berries together and talked over the fight, traded tobacco and coffee and exchanged newspapers as peacefully and kindly as if they had not been engaged for the last seven days in butchering one another. (518)
Got a desertion problem? Try executing a few men…
Almost every day we would hear a discharge of musketry, and knew that some poor trembling wretch had bid farewell to mortal things here below,’ one solider afterwards recalled. The effectiveness of such executions was increased, Bragg believed, by lining up the condemned man’s former comrades to watch him pay for his crime. It worked; desertion decreased; but at a price.(568)
Many famous men would appear on Civil War battlefields. At Antietam alone you had “Lieutenant Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23d Ohio, fifteen years away from the Presidency, was wounded. Sergeant William McKinley, another future President from that regiment, was unhurt; the bullet that would get him was almost forty years away.” (677)
A crazy story about personality conflicts:
Nelson was overbearing, Davis touchy; the result was a personality clash, at the climax of which the former ordered the latter out of his department. Davis went, but presently returned, bringing the governor of Indiana with him. This was Oliver P. Morton, who also had a bone to pick with Nelson over his alleged mishandling of Hoosier volunteers during the fiasco staged at Richmond a month ago tomorrow. They accosted him in the lobby of the Galt House, Buell’s Louisville headquarters, just after early breakfast. In the flare-up that ensued, Davis demanded satisfaction for last week’s rudeness, and when Nelson called him an ‘insolent puppy,’ flipped a wadded calling-card in his face; whereupon Nelson laid the back of a ham-sized hand across his jaw. Davis fell back, and the burly Kentuckian turned on Morton, asking if he too had come there to insult him. Morton said he had not. Nelson started up the staircase, heading for Buell’s room on the second floor. ‘Did you hear that damned insolent scoundrel insult me, sit?’ he demanded of an acquaintance coming down. ‘I suppose he don’t know me , sir. I’ll teach him a lesson, sir.’ He went on up the stairs, then down the hall, and just as he reached the door of Buell’s room he heard someone behind him call his name. Turning he saw Davis standing at the head of the stairs with a pistol in his hand.
Davis had not come armed to the encounter, but after staggering bcak from the slap he had gone around the lobby asking bystanders for a weapon. At last he came to a certain Captain Gibson. ‘I always carry the article.’ Gibson said, producing a pistol form under his coat. Davis took it and as he started up the stairs Gibson called after him, ‘It’s a tranter trigger. Wokr light.’ So when Nelson turned from Buell’s dore and started toward him, Davis knew what to do. ‘Not another step farther!’ he cried; and then, at a range of about eight feet, shot the big man in the chest. Nelson stopped, turned toward Buell’s door but fell before he got there. ‘Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized.’… Half an hour later he was dead. (714)
A fluke promotion works out for General Sheridan:
Less than ten years out of West Point, he had received his star two weeks ago and had been a division commander just nine days, previous to which time he had been a commissary captain under Halleck for six months until by a fluke he secured a promotion to colonel and command of a Michigan cavalry regiment which he led with such dash, in pursuit of Beauregard after the Corinth evacuation, that in late July five of his superiors, including Rosecrans, recommended his promotion with the endorsement: ‘He is worth his weight in gold.’ (732)