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5. “A Severe Punishment of a Deluded and Spiteful People”
- University of Iowa Press
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F I V E A Severe Punishment of a Deluded and Spiteful People Shortly after the war a young officer traveling upriver from New Orleans described the view from his deck chair: “Eastward there is naught to span the horizon but one far-reaching level of swamp or trembling prairie. Westward, two miles back from the river-bank, bold barriers of forest, dense, dark, and impenetrable, shut off the view. In front lies the eddying, swirling, boiling bosom of the Mississippi —the winding highway to the North.”1 General Williams’s soldiers contemplated that view often during a spring and summer of constant movement up and down the river. Soon they were begrimed by soot from bonfires made of railroad ties, by swamp mud, mosquito splatter, and the silt of accumulated sweat. They scouted, foraged, tore up miles of railroad track, and once again sickened in the below-decks purgatory of ironclad river steamers poised for the long-anticipated move against Vicksburg. A Wisconsin boy had vowed to “steal all I can lay my hands to” if he ever got to New Orleans.2 Chances are he did pretty well, if not there then at Baton Rouge or any number of river hamlets and plantations the regiment was destined to strip clean over the years to come. Sometimes that was their mission. Sometimes they were desperate for fresh meat, or they needed farm animals to pull their wagons, and sometimes they could not bring themselves to leave behind books and candlesticks and things of beauty and wonder they had never seen before. Often, what they could not carry they 66•The Best Specimen of a Tyrant trashed or burned. The Fourth Wisconsin and Sixth Michigan in particular gained a reputation for pillage and plunder: “These regiments,” Williams wrote, “appear to be wholly destitute of moral sense [believing] that pillaging [is] not only right in itself but a soldierly accomplishment.”3 The hostility between Williams and his volunteers—in particular their senior officers—only worsened. “Our volunteer system is radically bad,” he believed, poisoned by the political ambitions of the officers and the brutishness of the men. As an old professional he held that “the only relation between the private and the officer [should be] a purely official relation, which exacts discipline and compels instruction without fear, favor or affection.”4 But to volunteer officers like Paine, Bean, and Van Norstrand, Williams epitomized the dark side of the professional army—the spiteful martinet who inflicted needless suffering on his soldiers. Only Boardman, still yearning for an appointment to the regular army and ever sensitive to any sign of slight or favor, had anything good to say about Williams. He speculated that Paine was jealous of him because “I have been favored by the General and Paine is too small minded to be generous.”5 Over the following three years soldiers of the Fourth Wisconsin would be sent on expeditions as far north as Vicksburg, as far west as Texas. They took part in one decisive campaign, many lesser battles and running skirmishes, and periodic guerrilla roundups, but they would spend most of their days policing, scouting, foraging, plundering , sickening, and dying along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. General Williams communicated through his adjutant, a young captain named Wickham Hoffman. Hoffman was a busy man. He might show up a half dozen times before noon to revise an order, recruit men for details, or pass along still another petulant query or edict from his boss. These were not urgent tactical communications but irksome recalibrations of the brigade machinery by its peevish master mechanic. Prepare your regiment to disembark. The general wishes to know why your soldiers remain on board against his orders. Suspend disembarking until further orders. The general [44.201.24.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:10 GMT) wishes to know why some of your soldiers remain on the levee and others on the boat. Paine and his officers referred to this unfortunate messenger as “Miss Nancy,” and their blood boiled whenever “Miss Nancy Hoffman” came strutting their way.6 “It is a peculiarity of the General never to let us know how he wants a thing done until after we have done it,” Paine wrote. “This secures to him a chance for a wider range of pretexts for cursing us for not doing the thing in the way he wished.”7 Van Norstrand often accompanied the troops into the field, on one occasion “in water...