"Give 'Em the Bayonet"—A Note on Civil War Mythology

"GIVE ?? THE BAYONETEA NOTE ON CIVIL WAR MYTHOLOGY John Buechler Memodrs, recollections, prints, official reports, and even modern studies of the Civil War still boast of successful bayonet charges, of long lines of close-order infantry whose gleaming blades reflect the lurid rays of a setting sun. Vivid studies of Malvern Hill and Fredericksburg and Gettysburg stir our imaginations and romantic spirits by depicting charging masses brandishing the awesome weapon. "Give 'em the bayonet " has become a Stonewall Jackson cliché, yet J. F. C. Fuller tells us the Civil War proved that the bayonet was as obsolete as the pike.1 Was the bayonet actually used as a formidable weapon? That it was employed to some advantage there is no doubt. Rev. W. Corby, chaplain of the Irish Brigade, found that it served as an excellent candelabrum for holding the burning taper while he read his daily office,2 and John Billings avowed that the bayonet was the candlestick of the rank and file.3 Father Corby also stated that the "gentle use" of a bayonet encouraged recalcitrant mules and horses to lose some of their spunk;4 and Sherman's famous "bummers" impaled their appropriated hams on these lethal weapons. In every army, in every campaign the bayonet came into play—as a skewer, tent stake, butcher knife, ad infinitum. When we come to the actual battle, to the onrushing lines of infantry, to the clash of individual men in close combat, we find that the bayonet was seldom used as a deadly weapon, and this seems to be true not only of the bayonet but of all similar instruments—crude pikes, bowie knives, and the cavalry saber. Early in the war, during the Kanawha Valley campaign, Union troops found a number of homemade bowie knives, "ferocious-looking weapJohn Buechler is at present head of the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida. A former English instructor at Marquette, he has also been affiliated with Notre Dame and Ohio State Universities. 1 J. F. C. Fuller, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship ( Bloomington , Ind., 1957), p. 47. 2W. Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life (Notre Dame, Ind., 1894), p. 167. 3 John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee (Chicago, 1887), pp. 77-78. 4 Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life, p. 33. 128 ons, made of broad files ground to a double edge, fitted with rough handles, and still bearing the cross-marking of the file on the flat sides. Such arms pointed many a sarcasm among our soldiers, who had found it hard in the latter part of our advance to get within even the longest musket-range ofthe enemy's column."5 Heros von Borcke pointed out that even the Texans and Mississippians put their bowie knives only to pacific uses. Referring to a bayonet fight supposed to have occurred during the battles on the Peninsula in 1862, he related: Many stories had been recited in camp about a tremendous bayonet-fight, hand to hand, during the battle, between our Texans and the New York Zouaves, and it was said that two of these determined antagonists had pierced each other through and through with their formidable and fatal weapons. . . . I carefully examined many of the corpses, and found only three or four with bayonet-wounds, and these had been received evidently after the bullets. These accounts of bayonet-fights are current after every general engagement, and are frequently embodied in subsequent "histories," so called; but as far as my experience goes, recalling all the battles in which I have borne a part, bayonet-fights rarely if ever occur, and exist only in the imagination.6 Although the bayonet ceased to be an effective weapon for close combat, the cult of the bayonet persisted not merely through the Civil War but even through World War I, when the machine gun had all but nullified its use, and the cult even survives down to our own times. As a weapon of shock it was outmoded in the Napoleonic Wars, but many officers on both sides during our Civil War failed to see this. They failed to see what a man with more sensitivity, like Ambrose Bierce, had...