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8 THE AFTERMATH OF BATTLE DEFEAT Soldiers who had survived battle unscathed could not spend too much time dwelling on their good luck in the immediate aftermath of the fight. Hungry, thirsty, and tired, they had to answer to their basic needs. They also had to deal with the consequences of their work, which meant coping with defeat and retreat or accepting victory and whatever that meant for the moment. Defeated men, exhausted by their activities, drew on the last reservoirs of their strength to remove themselves from harm’s way. After some battles, men, motivated by fear of capture or the possibility of becoming one of the dead or wounded, turned the retreat into a route, as the Union forces did at the First Battle of Bull Run “without order or discipline.”1 On other occasions, commanders orchestrated orderly and skillful retrograde movements that saved their armies from further harm and for future fighting. Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg was a significant success, for example, and one Confederate veteran remembered with some pride Joseph Johnston’s retreats in the Atlanta campaign, conducted with “sagacity” that “met and foiled every effort to cut us off.”2 Then there were the “organized skedaddle[s]” that were somewhere between the two. Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine noted that in the aftermath of Chancellorsville, the men from the Army of the Potomac withdrew across the Rappahannock without “the least sign of panic or demoralization, nothing but a tired look.” Nevertheless, Mattocks could only have used organized in the most charitable sense. “Regiments returned to their old camps by the mere handfuls,” Mattocks observed, and “men were allowed to please their own fancy as to speed.”3 Defeated soldiers often harbored feelings of embarrassment and humiliation. For Mattocks, the retreat across the Rappahannock was “a fact which ought to be draped in mourning.”4 After the first Bull Run, Abner Small witnessed retreating soldiers “plodding heavily and panting,” who were clearly frustrated by their failure to defeat the rebels. The men were angry. “Every now and then,” Small noted, “some man would take his gun by the barrel and mash the stock against a tree.”5 The hardships of traveling away from a victorious enemy in bad weather and over rough ground added to the defeated army’s misery, but even as they retreated, the beaten soldiers began to ask why things turned out they way they did. In June 1862 170 THE CIVIL WAR Massachusetts lieutenant Charles Brewster complained about the “pitiable plight” of the defeated Yankees after Seven Pines, but also tried to make sense of it all. Despondent, wet, and muddy, he bemoaned the human loss in the battle, but he also suggested that the Northern defeat was not entirely due to the soldiers’ lack of courage or competence. “Oh if we could only fight these Rebels once, where we could have sight of them, we would avenge the dead of Saturday,” he lamented, “but I don’t but we have always fight them in woods and swamps.”6 Other soldiers tried to understand their defeat by looking for external factors that would absolve themselves from appearing as if they had been the cause of the loss, and bad officers frequently bore the brunt of their criticisms. After Shiloh, Confederates blamed their lack of experience and training for their defeat or found that their officers had been lacking in some way.7 Captain A. C. Hills scoffed at the notion that McClellan ’s strategic brilliance saved his army on the Virginia peninsula, pronouncing that “the unsurpassed bravery of our troops saved the army from utter annihilation.”8 Yankees who had fought at Fredericksburg correctly blamed their commander, considering it “madness and murder to continue in command one who had demonstrated his lack of ability so plainly as had General Burnside.”9 Confederates, when admitting to “reverses,” salved their bruised morale by blaming defeat not on any weakness in their ranks but on the enemy’s overwhelming resources. Arkansan Alex Spence reported to the home folks that at one point in the Atlanta campaign , in September 1864, the Yankees overpowered his brigade because of their superior numbers. “We fought about ten to our one,” he explained, and “of course were driven from our trenches.”10 Nevertheless, real defeat was not possible, at least for the soldiers from Arkansas and Texas with whom Spence fought. “They will be Killed or captured,” he confidently predicted, “but not whipped.”11 And then there were...

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