The Blue and the Gray [antikvár]

Foreword § he American Civil War-April to April, Sumter to Appomattox, M 1861 to 1865-pervades the national conscience and excites the interest of much of the rest of the world. This is not onlv because of the carnage, though of carnage there was plenty. Of the nearly three millión men under arms in the course of the struggle, afloat and ashore, Union and Confederate, more than a millión were casualties. About half of them died of various diseases, infections, and off-the-field mishaps. The rest were killed or wounded in somé 10,000 military actions, including 76 full-scale batdes, 310 engagements, 6,337 skirmishes, and a number of more casual encounters that the troops themselves called "dust-ups" or "squabbles," any one of which could kill a man as dead as Gettysburg. The effect was devastating-particularly southward, where the state of Mississippi, in the fírst year of peace, spent a solid fifth of its meager revenues for the purchase of artificial arms and legs for its returning veterans. For all the steepness of the butcher's bili-one out of ten men of conscription age was a casualty in the North, as against one out of four white males in the South-the perverse attraction extends in other directions, similarly doleful. When Douglas Southall Freeman, the distinguished seven-volume biographer of R. E. Lee and his chief lieutenants, moved on (or, strictly speaking, back) to writing about George Washington and the Revolutionary era, he was surprised to Find not only how different that period was from the one he had spent the past twentyodd years examining, but alsó how much like our own time the late 18th century was. Religion, for example, seemed not to be a main concern of the participants in the Revolution, whereas in the later conflict, even in the midst of batde, unit commanders often called on God in their dispatches and reports. Moreover, in the Revolution the Patriots had a feeling of moving from darkness into a new dawn, while in the Civil War one side was slogging toward defeat and the Ku Klux Klan, and the other toward the assassination of its great leader ancl the triumph of the robber barons. It was, according to Dr. Freeman, as if the clear stream of American history had flowed into "a muddy, bloody laké" and then emerged clear again on the other side. I too got that impression in the course of my own twenty-year exploration of the surface and depths of that bloody laké-and something else as well, which I think accounts, at least in part, for abiding interest in that cataclysmic struggle. At "four score and seven" the nation was into its adolescence, so to speak, and this terrible four-year ordeal entered the national memory, the national conscience and unconscious, much as somé horrendous family tragedy-the violent loss of a brother or sister by fire or flood, the suicide or public disgrace of a parent-can enter the mind of somé individual at a highly impressionable age. It lurks there, waiting to be called up. At the slightest suggestion, even a passing, seemingly unconnected remark or gesture, its scar is pricked. Wanted or unwanted, there it is, insisting on being pondered. And so it is widi us as a nation, even for those whose forebears became part of the national entity after the conflict itself had ended. It was, as I have said elsewhere, "the crossroads of our being." To a considerable extent, in good ways and bad, it not only made us what we are, it alsó continues to play its part in shaping what we aie to becoine. This in itself makes that war worth all the study we can give it lest we summon back its horrors. But there are other appeals, including certain far-ranging innovations in the very tools with which the gi'isly thing was waged. In a single brief March afternoon the Confederate ironclad Virginia (ex-Metrimack) demonstrated the obsolescence of wooden navies-only to be neutralized by the U.S.S. Monitor, which showed up next morning with the patness of a plot twist out of light Fiction. Soon afterward the railway gun made its appearance, another Rebel contrivance. The telegraph gave an army commander all but instantaneous communication not only with his own dispersed elements or other armies but alsó with the capital to his rear. Railroads provided rapid allweather supply lines and made possible the sudden shift of massive reinforcements even from one theater to another, hundreds of miles apart. The observation balloon; "hasty entrenchments," fieldworks thrown up during a batüe; the bi-eech-loading repeating carbine-the üst of innovations is long. But perhaps the deadliest was the simplest, the rifle buliét-the so-called minié ball, already batde-proven in Europe-which quadrupled the 50-yard effective rangé of the old smoothbore musket. Thus modiFied, the primary infantry weapon was far ahead of the u.ctics that 12