The Song of the Rappahannock: Sketches of the Civil War

by Ira Seymour Dodd

The two incidents are indeed similar but with a profound difference of tone. The note struck by Napoleon's aide is the brilliant one of glory; that which vibrates in the Wisconsin officer's dying words is the proudly pathetic chord of home.

It was characteristic of our army,—nay, of our war and of both the contending armies,—Union and Confederate. Neither of us fought for conquest or for glory, but a heritage of clashing principles woven by no will of ours into the very beginnings of our nation's history, involving its very life, had come at last in our day to the inevitable and awful arbitrament of battle.

We who fought in that war were not professional soldiers: our gathered hosts, our regiments and companies were composed of friends and neighbours, segments of the clustering homes from which and for the sake of which we had gone forth, and we knew always that though far away we were not unwatched. In those creepy moments on the verge of battle when amid whizz of waspish bullets and angry echo of skirmish rifles the grim shadow of bloody strife rolled toward us, many a boy would hear in his soul the voice of his father's parting exhortation to play the man; many a young fellow would say to himself, as the image of the dear girl who shyly and tearfully bade him good-bye rose before him, "She shall never have reason to be ashamed of me;" and the husband, while his thoughts fly far away to the home where wife and children wait for him, would pray, "God protect them if I fall; but let me not disgrace them!"

The constant question in our hearts was, "What will the folks at home say about us?"

I have known sick men, really unfit for duty, who, when rumours of "a move" came, would keep out of the surgeon's way, and when their regiment was called into action would shoulder their rifles and drag themselves along with their comrades for fear some report that they had shirked might travel home. We fought with the feeling that we were under the straining eyes of those who loved us and had sent us forth, whose approval we valued more than life.

There was little talk about these things. We thought them in our hearts. We knew our comrades were thinking them, but only some very special or confidential occasion brought such thoughts to our lips. When "dying for home and country" is an event quite likely to happen in the way of your ordinary duty of next week or to-morrow, it becomes at once a matter too trite to be interesting as a subject of conversation, and too solemn for common talk, with men of Anglo-Saxon breed. Now this deep, widespread, though seldom-spoken sentiment explains, as nothing else can, the enormous sacrifices which were constantly and willingly made in our war,—especially when along with it due account is taken of the character of our armies. By far the largest number of enlistments were made at the age of eighteen (which often meant seventeen or even sixteen), and the average age of our men was twenty-five years. The Nation gave its best; the dew of its youth, the distilled essence of American manhood flowed into the armies of both North and South. And when we who went forth with those hosts read the statistics which show that the death-harvest of battle alone—to say nothing of the far larger reaping of disease and exhaustion—reached the awful figures of two hundred thousand, an indescribably solemn feeling comes over us: for we know well that it was not the easily spared who gave their lives; we know that the dreadful vintage of our battle-fields was rich with the blood of the young, the bright, the brave, the promising.

Military critics may show, to their own satisfaction at least, how battles might have been fought less expensively, but the significant fact remains that, with the exception of Bull Run, which after all was but a small affair between two newly gathered and as yet unorganised armies, there was never a complete rout; there was not one decisive victory on either side; there was no Waterloo, the war ended simply by the exhaustion of the South, and the long succession of battles was fought by men who did not, who would not know when they were beaten. Lee and Longstreet and Hill; Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and Meade are names that will never look contemptible among the world's military leaders, yet the men who followed even more than the generals who led, made our war what it was.

A few instances taken from the story of regiments which I happened to know may help to make this clear. These incidents are typical of the fighting and the sacrifice which was common to both armies. None of them are really exceptional unless it be that of the First Minnesota, and even that might be paralleled in sacrifice several times in both Union and Confederate armies.

The story of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg seems almost an anachronism in this nineteenth century. It carries one back to the heroic ages with a suggestion of the Iliad or of the Spartans at Thermopylæ. Its truly modern phase is the matter-of-fact manner in which our military historians pass it by with barest mention as a mere tactical incident of a wholesale battle-field, and the consequent ignorance of the American public concerning one of the most romantic incidents of our history.

Minnesota was too young in those days to have many native sons, and her generous quota of volunteers was filled with scions of that truest American Aristocracy, the Commonwealth Founders whose motto is "Westward Ho!" Out of Eastern homes, scattered all the way from Maine to Michigan, these bold spirits had come to the North Star State to carve careers for themselves, and their country's call to arms met with quick and whole-souled response. The First Minnesota regiment was fortunate in its commanders. Three colonels had risen from it to the command of brigades, two of them regular army officers under whose rigid schooling the regiment gained a high reputation for discipline and efficiency. But Colville who commanded at Gettysburg, was a typical Westerner, tall, ungainly, with strong and homely face of the Lincoln stamp. It is said that when his turn for promotion came he at first refused, thinking himself unfit; but the moment of supreme trial showed his mistaken modesty.