Recollections of the Civil War / With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties

by Charles A. Dana

The reply which the Senator made to this remark can not be printed here, but it did not affect the judgment or the action of the President.

The men were retained for a long time afterward. The fraud was fully investigated, and future swindles of the kind were rendered impossible. If Watson could have had his way, the guilty parties—and there were some whose names never got to the public—would have been tried by military commission and sternly dealt with. But my own reflections upon the subject led me to the conclusion that the moderation of the President was wiser than the unrelenting justice of the Assistant Secretary would have been.

Not a little of my time at the department was taken up with people who had missions of some kind within the lines of the army. I remember one of these particularly, because it brought me a characteristic letter from General Sherman. There was much suffering among the loyal citizens and the Quakers of East Tennessee in the winter of 1863-'64, and many relief committees came to us seeking transportation and safe conduct for themselves and their supplies into that country. Some of these were granted, to the annoyance of General Sherman, then in command of the Military Division of the Mississippi. The reasons for his objections he gave in this letter to me:

Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi,

Nashville, Tenn., April 21, 1864.

C. A. Dana, Esq., Ass't Sec. of War, Washington.

My dear Friend: It may be parliamentary, but is not military, for me to write you; but I feel assured anything I may write will only have the force of a casual conversation, such as we have indulged in by the camp fire or as we jogged along by the road. The text of my letter is one you gave a Philadelphia gentleman who is going up to East Tennessee to hunt up his brother Quakers and administer the bounties of his own and his fellow-citizens' charity. Now who would stand in the way of one so kindly and charitably disposed? Surely not I. But other questions present themselves. We have been working hard with tens of thousands of men, and at a cost of millions of dollars, to make railroads to carry to the line of the Tennessee enough provisions and material of war to enable us to push in our physical force to the next stop in the war. I have found on personal inspection that hitherto the railroads have barely been able to feed our men, that mules have died by the thousand, that arms and ammunition had [have] laid in the depot for two weeks for want of cars, that no accumulation at all of clothing and stores had been or could be moved at Chattanooga, and that it took four sets of cars and locomotives to accommodate the passes given by military commanders; that gradually the wants of citizens and charities were actually consuming the real resources of a road designed exclusively for army purposes. You have been on the spot and can understand my argument. At least one hundred citizens daily presented good claims to go forward—women to attend sick children, parents in search of the bodies of some slain in battle, sanitary committees sent by States and corporations to look after the personal wants of their constituents, ministers and friends to minister to the Christian wants of their flocks; men who had fled, anxious to go back to look after lost families, etc.; and, more still, the tons of goods which they all bore on their merciful errands. None but such as you, who have been present and seen the tens, hundreds, and thousands of such cases, can measure them in the aggregate and segregate the exceptions.

I had no time to hesitate, for but a short month was left me to prepare, and I must be ready to put in motion near one hundred thousand men to move when naught remains to save life. I figured up the mathematics, and saw that I must have daily one hundred and forty-five car loads of essentials for thirty days to enable me to fill the requirement. Only seventy-five daily was all the roads were doing. Now I have got it up to one hundred and thirty-five. Troops march, cattle go by the road, sanitary and sutler's stores limited, and all is done that human energy can accomplish. Yet come these pressing claims of charity, by men and women who can not grasp the great problem. My usual answer is, "Show me that your presence at the front is more valuable than two hundred pounds of powder, bread, or oats"; and it is generally conclusive. I have given Mr. Savery a pass on your letter, and it takes two hundred pounds of bread from our soldiers, or the same of oats from our patient mules; but I could not promise to feed the suffering Quakers at the expense of our army. I have ordered all who can not provide food at the front to be allowed transportation back in our empty cars; but I can not undertake to transport the food needed by the worthy East Tennesseeans or any of them. In peace there is a beautiful harmony in all the departments of life—they all fit together like the Chinese puzzle; but in war all is ajar. Nothing fits, and it is the struggle between the stronger and weaker; and the latter, however it may appeal to the better feelings of our nature, must kick the beam. To make war we must and will harden our hearts.

Therefore, when preachers clamor and the sanitaries wail, don't join in, but know that war, like the thunderbolt, follows its laws, and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous, and charitable stand in its path.