Nothing like the books: Part 1

My nights can be entirely uneventful, as was last night, leaving me with little more than to peruse the Internet for what history has written about the "facts." There is nothing that truly covers experience, however, and it is a known fact that history is written by the victors. Had the Confederate Army won what they called the Second American Revolution, I'm quite certain the United States would be a lot smaller, and while another country, the Confederate States of America, would occupy the southern half of our current nation.

These thoughts come to me after writing about young Corporal John Packham. It often becomes difficult to think of little else beyond my mortal life when even the smallest of memories is summoned.

The 8th New York Cavalry mustered in Rochester, NY, on 23 November 1861. What made me join the cavalry? The fact that I owned a horse. It was often as simple as that. One had a better chance of landing a position in the army based upon the strangest factors. "Oh, you have a horse? Here's a spot in the cavalry. You can understand orders and relay them? Here's a few stripes for your arm; welcome to the army, sergeant." Had I been educated at a university or known someone with an ounce of political power, I might well have been made an officer. As it was, my completed education at the elementary levels and experience as a ranch hand on a horse-breeding ranch made me prime material to become a sergeant in Company M of the 8th NY.

We moved on to Washington, DC, where "Little Mac" (Major General George B. McClellan) was busy teaching the army to be an army. He was appointed to leading the army by "Uncle Abe" (Abraham Lincoln) months after the disaster that became known as Bull Run.

That fight was a fiasco. Both armies were little more than over-sized street gangs. From what details I was able to get from the papers, they came together thinking that this would be the one and only battle of the war. Hindsight being 20/20, they were all fools.

Even civilians showed a distinct lack of intelligence. Can you imagine a battlefield dotted with spectators along the perimeter? SPECTATORS! They'd come down to watch our boys whup the Rebels and put an end to the silly rebellion. Then, once we'd shown the South what we could do, everyone would return to their parlors and toast the Union victory while waiting Jefferson Davis and his misbegotten "country" to sue for peace.

Gunfire, the whizzing of a bullet as it passed your ear, and the sight of blood often has the effect of changing one's perspective rapidly. The papers held little detail of the battle itself, other than to report that the Union army was whipped. Advancement became retreat, which in turn became a rout. Rumors of "Stonewall" Jackson were beginning spread in the aftermath; a devil the South now had in its employ that would eventually bring its terrible power to bear in the Capitol.

Thus, Brigadier General Irvin McDowell slipped from favor and Little Mac replaced him.

Odd how the lowest among the rank and file learned who was in charge of the army. There were three ways of learning such vital information. The rarest of all was an official document stating the new leadership. Slightly more common was to read about it in a newspaper. But the normal way of gaining such vital news was around a campfire. "Hey! Did you hear? (Name of some person we could care less about) has been named Commander of the Army!" Is was very much like that almost a year after my unit was formed, when Sergeant Andrew Dickerson from Company H joined us for morning coffee on 7 November 1862 and told us all that Little Mac had been replaced by Major General Ambrose Burnside two days before.

This was actually good news to some of us. McClellan was very capable when it came to making green boys into army men. The grapevine also held that he was a grand planner, a schemer to an extreme. When it came to execution, however, he "couldn't confidently pee on a bush in the woods."

My education has grown since those years. Even then, however, I would ponder the great mystery, "What the hell was I doing?" It wasn't the issue of slavery. There were times when I wished I'd owned a couple of Negros so I could possibly double the work I was accomplishing on my ranch. I guess it was a part of me that bought into Lincoln's inaugural speech. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." To be perfectly honest, I don't think I fully understood what that even meant, probably because I kept trying to envision it literally. In my mind, I would see a house split down its center, then imagined both sides leaning against the other. Weren't those two sides now holding one another up? Wasn't the house divided still standing?

No. My thoughts were more along the lines that we'd fought for independence less than a century before, and our recent ancestors' blood suddenly appeared to have been shed for nothing. We were a nation still in its infancy, our freedom gained by tearing loose the umbilical and learning to stand without a parent nation holding us up. It was as though our revolution has could be summed up as a group of small countries that somehow managed to unite long enough to throw off tyrannical rule of another, and had come away to remain a nation of small countries. I could not see that as the intent of our Founding Fathers. I believe they wanted to see our independent territories united. The idea of "State's Rights" superseding that intent was, at best, vexing to me.

I could go on waxing philosophical about the origins of the United States, but after a night of staring at a computer screen, the time has come to get some rest. There's more to come, as the night of my embrace came during this tragic schism in American history.