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5 DAILY CAMP LIFE MORE DRILL As time passed and the war did not end as quickly as expected, the routines of camp life came to dominate much of the soldiers’ existence. Union and Confederate soldiers trained at camps closer to the front before they tasted combat and then returned to encampments after the horrors of battle had passed. In April 1862 James Williams, of the 21st Alabama and a survivor of the Battle of Shiloh, even admitted to feeling at home in such a place “when I came back from that terrible field, weary, wet, and heart-sick.”1 For many commanders, however, battle exhaustion was no excuse for relaxing discipline. Consequently, even as soldiers attempted to restore themselves, they spent much of their time dealing with the routines and monotony of military life. Lulls in fighting allowed generals to put their entire commands through the paces of various large-formation drills. Units at times engaged in various competitions, divisions participated in grand reviews, and corps even participated in mock battles. Sometimes officers sounded false alarms and watched their men scramble about striking their tents, packing their baggage, and falling into marching order as quickly as possible. Soldiers might have found such activity exciting, but in the end they spent the better part of their days performing routine drill. For officers, rounds of drills, training exercises, and parades were essential for military effectiveness and discipline. Thus conscientious officers and martinets alike drilled their men to instill that necessary discipline. But soldiers found it all very trying. Perhaps their reluctance to submit to the discipline of drill resulted from the fact that it reminded them that they were no longer free men. Throughout the war, men repeated the lesson they had first learned at the rendezvous. In March 1863 Illinois soldier John M. King judged that being a soldier was akin to being a “volunteer slave.” “In an army the private soldier loses all individuality,” King reported. Furthermore, “he is no longer a man in the light of the Republic. He has no opinion that will ever be heard, much less heeded. It is his duty to obey and never be heard.” But at least King acknowledged that all of the drill and discipline had a purpose. After all, he admitted, “war is a dreadful calamity at best, and in order to get men to be hurled up to the very cannon’s mouth at the command of one man—each man must volunteer to become a willing slave.”2 98 THE CIVIL WAR Officers in charge of black troops understood the necessity of disciplining and training former slaves, but they also recognized that they were doing more than simply making them soldiers. There were those officers who commanded their men with undisguised racism, but the best of the abolitionist officers believed they were making black men into new Americans. Ironically, even as their white counterparts complained that army life turned them into “voluntary slaves,” black soldiers worked under white officers who expected to exorcise servile traits from their men. In late 1862 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a black regiment, praised the way his men learned their drill, as his officer not only put them through the manual of arms, but also skirmishing drill and target practice. Such soldiering, Higginson believed, would give the former slaves under his command self-respect, thus forever changing their lives. “The better the soldiers they become,” he noted, “the more they are spoiled for slaves.”3 Indeed, the men understood how their performance in even mundane duties could change not only themselves, but the way people viewed them. In August 1863 Corporal James Henry Gooding of the 54th Massachusetts explained that the regiment was “bound to live down all prejudice against its color, by a determination to do well in any position it is put.”4 It was in camp through the normal military routine that companies integrated and trained new arrivals to their regiments. The recruits, conscripts, and substitutes became the students of the veterans, who frequently took advantage of their ignorance and made their lives difficult, forgetting that they, too, had once been green. The Second Massachusetts Infantry received some new men while in camp on the Chattahoochie River in Georgia; in the middle of the campaign, the officers had “to work on them the whole time,” requiring two drills a day.5 “The period of seasoning with these poor fellows was very severe,” recalled Confederate...

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