The Best Specimen of a Tyrant: The Ambitious Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand and the Wisconsin Insane Hospital

9. “Friends and Enemies” [Includes Image Plates]

N I N E Friends and Enemies When Union forces moved unopposed into Baton Rouge in the spring of 1862, Port Hudson would have fallen into their hands just as easily had they sensed its strategic value. Just twenty-five miles upriver, Port Hudson was an undefended trading center where rail ;and river commerce converged, a town of warehouses, saloons, and hotels for commercial travelers. But a year later, guns installed on its heights overlooking the river effectively confined Farragut’s fleet to the lower Mississippi, and Port Hudson had become a thorn in the Union’s side. As they climbed the wooded base of those bluffs, Nathaniel Banks’s thirty thousand soldiers gazed up at a veritable citadel bristling with cannon and rifle barrels and protected by a manmade thicket of uprooted trees and other debris upon which crawling attackers could easily be picked off—those who had made it across the killing zone of wasteland between the edge of the woods and the heights. Under fire from the Union fleet and batteries of field artillery, Banks’s divisions emerged from the tree line and advanced on the entrenchments in ambitious but poorly coordinated attacks that foreshadowed the western front of a later war: storms of artillery fire that dim the sun but fail to destroy a dug-in enemy; elaborately planned assaults that spasm into ruin almost immediately, some ragged lines of soldiers climbing into smoky oblivion, others cowering in the dirt. The first grand attack was launched in late May. Many of those soldiers ended up on bloody tables before Dr. Van 114฀฀•฀฀The Best Specimen of a Tyrant Norstrand and his fellow surgeons to be picked clean of worms and maggots, chloroformed, probed, sawed, ligatured, elixired, and all too often boxed up, hoisted onto Dutch John’s wagon, and carted to the dead house. Especially hard-hit were those leaders—regimental commanders ,companycommanders,andothers—whodaredtaketheirchances up front with their men. In the early hours of May 28, Sidney Bean started a letter home from the battlefield: “[As] we were crawling over and under the felled trees and through the branches, some of my best men fell. Captain Herron had his leg knocked off. Lieutenant Pierce was shot in the arm. Lieutenant Crittenden was hit in the breast. Our whole loss was about seventy killed and wounded, and three hundred was all I took on the field.” Sheltering under the crest of a hill, his men took advantage of a clear field of fire to pick off rebels who had crawled atop a parapet to cheer their own artillery. “The number of their killed and wounded must have been great before they abandoned their guns,” Bean wrote.The carnage was, in the words of Halbert Paine, “a dreadful spectacle, so ludicrous that our boys could not restrain their laughter. So does war petrify our hearts.”1 Bean’s letter was found in a satchel beside his body. Private Knute Nelson wrote that his “much beloved colonel” was shot dead crawling from company to company giving orders. Van Norstrand heard that he had been shot out of a tree while spotting enemy fire. One thing was beyond dispute. Sidney Bean was up front with his soldiers when a sharpshooter’s bullet tore a hole through his right lung.Two years earlier he had been a silly kid who could not hold his wine. Now Van Norstrand referred to him as “Little Napoleon.”2 The second major assault, on June 14, was even more costly to the Fourth Wisconsin—47 dead, 74 wounded, and 25 taken prisoner when they fought their way over the rebel parapet only to discover that the eastern outfits that were to accompany them had refused to go forward—“a wholly unexpected defection,” Banks wrote Halleck, by “nine-months’ men, who do not consider themselves bound to any perilous service.”* Halbert Paine was charging uphill with his division when a minie ball shattered his knee.3 A storming party of riflemen and grenadiers were to keep the rebels hunkering under cover while following ranks dumped hard-packed bags of cotton into ditches, creating walkways over which massed infantry would cross into rebel lines. The initial phase apparently went according to plan, but the nine-month regiments —the bulk of the force—balked when Paine went down. “It is impossible to overrate the courage and endurance which Gen. Paine showed,” wrote a correspondent from...