Hardtack and coffee

by John Davis Billings

ACT II.

The view which the average soldier took was, as already intimated, in harmony with the international law quoted. This view was, in substance, that the people of the South were in a state of rebellion against the government, notwithstanding that they had been duly warned to desist from war and return to their allegiance: that they had therefore forfeited all claim to whatever property the soldier chose to appropriate; that this was one of the risks they assumed when they raised the banner of secession; that for this, and perhaps other reasons, they should be treated just as a foreign nation waging war against the United States, all of which may seem plausible at first view, and indeed it may be said just here that if the soldiers had always despoiled the enemy to supply their own pressing personal needs, or if they had always taken or destroyed only those things which could be of service to the enemy in the prosecution of the war, the arguments against foraging would be considerably weakened; but the authority to forage carried with it also the exercise of the office of judge and jury, from whom there was no appeal. If the owner of a lot of corn or poultry was to protest against losing it, on the ground that he was a Unionist, unless the proof was at hand, he would lose his case—that is, his corn and chickens. However sincere he may have been, it was not possible for him to establish his Union sentiments at short notice. Indeed, so many who really were “secesh” claimed to be good Union men, it came latterly to be assumed that the victim was playing a false rôle on all such occasions, and so the soldiers went straight for the plunder, heeding no remonstrances. Without doubt, hundreds of Union men throughout the South suffered losses in this way, which, if their loyalty could have been clearly shown, they would have been spared.

A good deal of the foraging, while unauthorized and forbidden by commanding officers, was often connived at by them, and they were frequently sharers in the spoils; but I was about to say that it was not always of the most judicious kind. No one, better than the old soldiers, knows how destitute many, if not most, of the houses along the line of march were of provisions, clothing, and domestic animals, after the first few months of the war. I will amend that statement. There was one class who knew better than the soldiers,—the tenants of those houses knew that destitution better—sometimes feigned it, may be, but as a rule it was the ugly and distressing reality. I am dealing now with the Army of the Potomac, which travelled the same roads year after year, either before or behind the Rebel Army of Northern Virginia. In or near the routes of these bodies little was attempted by the people in the way of crop-raising, for their products were sure to feed one or the other of the two armies as they tramped up and down the state, so that destitution in some of the wayside cabins and farm-houses was often quite marked. No one with a heart less hard than flint could deprive such families of their last cow, shote, or ear of corn. Yet there were many unauthorized foragers who would not hesitate a moment to seize and carry off the last visible mouthful of food. So it has seemed to me that the cup of Rebellion was made unnecessarily bitter from the fact that such appeals too often fell on deaf ears. Granting it to be true that the Rebels had forfeited all right to whatever property their antagonists saw fit to appropriate, yet in the absence of those Rebels their families ought not to suffer want and distress; the innocent should not suffer for the guilty, and when nothing was known against them they should not have been deprived of their last morsel. But there were exceptions. There were some families who gave information to the Rebel army or detachments of it, by which fragments of ours were killed or captured, and when this was known the members of that family were likely sooner or later to suffer for it, as would naturally be expected.

Some of these families were so destitute that they were at times driven to appeal to the nearest army headquarters for rations to relieve their sufferings. To do this it was often necessary for them to walk many miles. Horses they had not. They could not keep them, for if the Union cavalry did not “borrow,” the Rebel cavalry would impress them; so that they were not only without a beast of burden for farm work, but had none to use as a means of transportation. Now and then a sore-backed, emaciated, and generally used-up horse or mule, which had been abandoned and left in the track of the army to die, was taken charge of, when the coast was clear, and nursed back into vitality enough to stand on at least three of his legs, when, by means of bits of tattered rope, twisted corn-husks, and odds and ends of leather which had seen better days, the sorry-looking brute, still bearing the brand U. S. or C. S. on his rump, partly concealed perhaps by his rusty outfit, was tackled into a nondescript vehicle, possibly the skeleton remains of what had been, in years gone by, the elegant and stylish family carriage, but fully as often into a two-wheeled cart, which now answered all the purposes of the family in its altered circumstances. One would hardly expect to find in such a brute a Goldsmith Maid or a Jay Eye See in locomotion, and so as a matter of fact such a beast was urged on from behind by lusty thwacks from a cudgel, propelling the family at a headlong walk—headlong, because he was likely to go headlong at any moment, from lack of strength, over the rough Virginia roads.

GOING TO ARMY HEADQUARTERS.

When such a brute got to be pretty lively once more, unless he was concealed, he would soon fall into service again in one of the armies, and possibly another gasping skeleton left in his place; but later in the war all animals abandoned by the Union army were shot if any life remained in them, so that even this resource was to that extent cut off from the inhabitants, and the family cow, while she was spared, was fitted out for such service.

But the soldiers did not always content themselves with taking eatables and forage. Destruction of the most wanton and inexcusable character was sometimes indulged in. It is charged upon them when the army entered Fredericksburg, in 1862, that they took especial delight in bayonetting mirrors, smashing piano-keys with musket-butts, pitching crockery out of windows, and destroying other such inoffensive material, which could be of no possible service to either party. If they had been imbibing commissary whiskey, they were all the more unreasonable and outrageous in their destruction. Whenever a man was detected in the enactment of such disgraceful and unsoldierly conduct, he was put under arrest, and sentenced by court-martial. But this class of men was an insignificantly small fraction of an army, although seeming very numerous to their victims.

A regularly authorized body of foragers, in charge of a commissioned officer, never gave way to excesses like those I have mentioned. Their task was usually well defined. It was to go out with wagons in quest of the contents of smoke-houses or barns or corn-barns; and if a flock of fowls or a few swine chanced to be a part of the live-stock of the farms visited, the worse for the live-stock and Secessia, and the better for the Union army. The usual plunder secured by regular foraging parties was hams, bacon sides, flour, sweet potatoes, corn-meal, corn on the cob, and sometimes corn-shooks as they were called, that is, corn-leaves stripped from the stalks, dried and bundled, for winter fodder. The neat cattle in the South get the most of their living in the winter by browsing, there being but little hay cured.

In traversing fresh territory, the army came upon extensive quantities of corn in corn-ricks. At Wilcox’s Landing, on the James River, where we crossed in June, 1864, the Rebel Wilcox, who had a splendid farm on the left bank of the river, had hundreds of bushels of corn, I should judge, which the forage trains took aboard before they crossed over; and on the south side of the James, east from Petersburg, where Northern troops had never before penetrated, many such stores of corn were appropriated to feed the thousands of loyal quadrupeds belonging to Uncle Sam.