DURING THE BRIEF PERIOD THAT THE 39TH INDIANA recruits were pacing around Indianapolis in September 1863, marching in regimental drills and preparing to ship out, Tolbert’s brother Mathew was shot and captured at the battle of Chickamauga. The 22nd Indiana Infantry, in which his brothers Silas and Daniel fought, arrived on the battlefield a few hours before the end, after Mathew was gone. Tolbert now had two very personal disastrous models in which he could imagine himself, both of which involved people he knew well and identified with who had been targeted in different ways.
By the time he and Maddox caught up with the 39th Indiana in October, Chickamauga was already legendary, and once again, though they were soldiers, they had to settle for hearing about it after the fact. They would have little to add when the other soldiers sat around the campfire commiserating about the momentous charge across the Widow Glenn’s farm. The most Tolbert could have contributed was, My brother Mathew got captured there. Perhaps it seemed they had missed the big scene.
Soldiers on the cusp of combat naturally try to imagine what it will be like, though no one knows how they will react to a full-blown mortal assault until it unfolds. A new recruit’s self-image relies a lot on conjecture—on stories he has heard from other soldiers and on his own behavior in stressful situations in the past. Tolbert left no record of how he imagined war to be, or how he felt he had measured up, and as a result a great many of the contours of his life have been lost. But the path he followed is well documented, whether in his own record or in the accounts of others, and for the cast of thousands with whom he shared a succession of dramatic scenes, Chickamauga was pivotal. There were lessons to be learned.
In addition to Tolbert’s brothers, most of the soldiers whose sagas overlapped with his fought at Chickamauga: Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Harrison, who would earn accolades for his command of the 39th Indiana (soon to be reorganized as the 8th Indiana Cavalry); the fearless Lieutenant Colonel Fielder Jones, who would later lead the 8th under Harrison; Perry Summerville, also a cavalryman from Indiana, and George Robinson, a cavalryman from Michigan, both of whom would end up in the same Confederate prison and aboard the same doomed boat; and J. Walter Elliott, whose hapless tale would intersect with his near the end. For those who were there, Chickamauga would have been enough of a war story for a lifetime. Yet, for many of them, it was only the prelude.
Chickamauga, fought just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was not the kind of warfare most of the soldiers envisioned. The battle, which swept back and forth across a patchwork of cornfields and woods near West Chickamauga Creek on September 19 and 20, 1863, was more a series of brutal, chaotic charges and counter-charges than a conventional engagement. At times it devolved into what amounted to armed mob violence, with troops appearing out of the blue and disappearing almost as suddenly into a dense pall of smoke. Soldiers are often thought to put their emotions aside, but combat is about surrendering to one of the most powerful emotions there is—instinctive aggression. Because of the terrain at Chickamauga, the number of troops involved, and the range of weapons, that aggression was channeled in a thousand different directions at once. The 39th would never see anything on its scale again. Over the two-day period, about 125,000 soldiers were involved. But the battle’s irregularity foreshadowed the skirmishes and guerilla attacks that they—including Tolbert and Maddox—would come to know well as the Union Army pushed deeper into Georgia.
No one had it easy at Chickamauga, even those who received what might have seemed comparatively safe assignments, such as George Robinson, the Michigan soldier who was detailed to guard a cavalry supply train. There was no safe place at Chickamauga—no backstage. The fighting was all over the map, and everywhere intense. Colonel John Wilder, who commanded a brigade of mounted Union troops alongside the 39th Indiana on the Widow Glenn’s farm, recalled that when he came upon a group of Confederate soldiers trapped under his men’s fire in a ravine just east of the widow’s house, “It seemed a pity to kill men so. They fell in heaps, and I had it in my heart to order the firing to cease, to end the awful sight.” Noting the defining anarchy of the battle, Wilder later wrote, “All this talk about generalship displayed on either side is sheer nonsense. There was no generalship in it. It was a soldier’s fight purely, wherein the only question involved was the question of endurance. The two armies came together like two wild beasts, and each fought as long as it could stand up in a knock-down and drag-out encounter. If there had been any high order of generalship displayed, the disasters of both armies might have been less.”
For someone like Tolbert or Maddox, hearing of the battle from afar, it would have been hard to know how to prepare for what was to come. Almost as soon as the fighting began, droves of men went tumbling to the ground across the uneven terrain, killed instantly or twisting in agony amid the wildly stamping hooves and boots. A soldier such as Mathew Tolbert, who was wounded on the battlefield, was horribly exposed. Every bullet that pocked the ground nearby or screamed past overhead presented a new terror, and if a downed man managed to avoid being run over by a horse, he was likely to be shot again or, as happened in Mathew’s case, captured. Everywhere blood flowered on dusty clothes. Bullets and canister shot penetrated arms, legs, trunks, mouths, eyes, and groins, spewing tiny geysers. Men disintegrated before the relentless cannon fire. Death was everywhere; if a man was lucky it only tapped him on the shoulder to say Hey, but everyone got noticed sooner or later. Not that the killing was easy. A soldier who kills, at close range, another man bent on killing him initially feels euphoria, then guilt. Sometimes he vomits.
Across the interconnected battlefields, the fighting grew so fierce that at times the soldiers found their guns too hot to hold, and they had to cast them aside and grab one that had been discarded on the ground or from the arms of a dead man, and begin shooting again. But as long as a man continued to breathe and move and shoot, he had hope that he would survive. That was the nature of war.
For the 39th Indiana, it was all about the Widow Glenn’s farm, which was to be their ultimate proving ground during the war. Eliza Glenn earned her sobriquet after her husband, a Rebel soldier, was killed, leaving her alone with two young children, and unexpectedly found herself in the middle of the first day of conflict inside her crude log cabin. Union General William Rosecrans chose the cabin for his field headquarters, had a temporary telegraph line run to it, and spread out his maps on her parlor table. The maps turned out to be unreliable, and Rosecrans had difficulty ascertaining the patterns of the distant fighting. The terrain along west Chickamauga Creek was broken into hills and bottoms—some open, some wooded—and the noise seemed to be coming from every direction. The Widow Glenn, trapped in her house with an enemy general, decided to help him monitor the fighting by ear. Perhaps she, too, wanted only to keep the assault at bay. As Shelby Foote noted in his seminal trilogy The Civil War, “She would make a guess, when a gun was heard, that it was ‘nigh out about Reed’s Bridge,’ or ‘about a mile fornenst John Kelly’s house,’ and he would try to match this information with the place names on his map.” Soon the roaring extended across the entire front, and, Foote wrote, “A reporter thought he had never witnessed ‘anything so ridiculous as this scene’ between Old Rosy and the widow.” After the Rebels broke through the Union lines, the widow was removed to a safer location.
At one point during the first day of fighting, Mathew Tolbert’s 39th Indiana was cut off from the main army, along with the 2nd Indiana Cavalry, in which Perry Summerville fought, and was not reunited with the main army until sunset, at Crawfish Springs, where the 38th continued to fight well into the night. The flashing volleys of guns and cannons created what one soldier described as “a display of fireworks that one does not like to see more than once in a lifetime.” By then the fields and forests were a wreckage of splintered farm buildings and trees, as if a tornado had passed through, and littered with wounded and dying men.
The temperature fell rapidly after dark, and few of the soldiers had blankets or water. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Harrison, commanding the 39th, instructed his troops to gather all the canteens they could find, which turned out to be about a thousand, and deliver water to the men languishing on the field. Soldiers from both sides, as well as local civilians, roamed the dismal scene by the light of lanterns, trying to tend to the injured and the dead. A group including Confederate soldier Sam Watkins encountered a party of women probing the darkness for their men, the hems of their dresses no doubt stained with dirt and blood. When one of the women located her husband cold on the ground, Watkins watched her fall to her knees, cradle his face in her hands, and cry out. He helped her carry the body away, staggering past bodies with grotesquely cocked arms and legs, and men who moaned and begged for water.
Through the night the men of the 39th busied themselves building breastworks for the fight they knew would resume the next day, a Sunday, or if not then, the day after. There was talk that the generals might avoid fighting on the Sabbath, but it was impossible to tell, and they had to be ready. It was too cold, and most of the men were too jumpy to sleep anyway, so they labored on their trenches and breastworks, bolstering them with whatever materials they could find—logs, sections of rail fences, rocks. There was only so much anyone could do to prepare, but if you were smart you did what you could, made sure your weapons were in order and, as the actual moment of the battle approached, tended to last-minute details, such as relieving yourself, because no one wanted to need to pee during a fight. In the final moments before a battle, men prayed or sang favorite songs. Sometimes they recalled the death of a friend, to stoke the desire for revenge. Maybe they tried to purge their minds of disturbing images, like the sunburned face of a Rebel who had pointed his gun at them the day before but for some reason did not fire, whose upper lip curled back menacingly and whose knife-edged features and angular jaw brought to mind the head of a poisonous snake. It was crucial to find the right place to be when the moment came, to ignore the tightness in your chest, your racing heart and quivering knees, the lump in your throat, the dry mouth, the nervous belching. Most of all, you had to forget the worrisome thoughts the veterans were always planting in the less experienced soldiers’ minds. No one ever forgot the first time they watched someone die, they said, though the shock was muted somewhat by repetition, which was a good thing because otherwise no one would continue to fight.
Even the experienced soldiers were out of their element during a battle on the scale of Chickamauga. Over time a soldier might learn to decipher patterns, to speculate on the basis of past experience about how the fight would unfold, and to consider whom he could count on. But there was no way to fully understand or to plan for barely controlled chaos. The soldiers’ clear narrative arcs, their judgments of others, their understanding of all the variables that came into play, would be created afterward. At the time there were only the simultaneous battles within and without: The physical conflict with the enemy and the interplay of emotions and reason that governed survival on the fly. Inevitably, some details could never be reconciled. Maybe a soldier fired at a Rebel kid in a floppy hat with holes in his pants, and the bullet hit him and he fell over in the weeds and no one saw him, and he lay kicking but not dying, so that whenever the soldier stole a glance the kid was always still there, writhing, unnoticed, and for the long half-second he glanced, he could already imagine the impact of the bullet he left himself open to—exploding his head like a gourd that someone had balanced on a fence rail. Maybe a soldier accidentally shot one of his own men and no one else knew, and he never told. Some episodes would never fit into a veteran’s life afterward, but a soldier did what he had to do to survive. Whether he succeeded, and whether he crossed an unacceptable line, he had to move on. The challenge was far from over.
In the heat of battle there was often too much happening for soldiers to feel rationale fear, but they almost always felt it beforehand. One soldier wrote that “it is the belief of nine out of ten who go into battle that that is their last. I have never gone into battle that I did not expect to be killed.” A soldier might convince himself and everyone else that he was brave, then run like a hen caught in the open by a pack of dogs, then become brave again as he crouched alone in the thundering trees. Each variable contained infinite sub-variables. None of it made sense except in hindsight.
At first light on the second day of Chickamauga, fog settled over the bottomlands, and there was talk that if the generals were willing to fight on a Sunday, they would not do so when no one could see. But the fog burned off, and the Sabbath was more or less forgotten. The first shot pierced the air on the Widow Glenn’s farm at about 11 a.m., and soon hundreds of screaming Rebels poured from the brambles at the foot of the long sloping field, heads down so that the tops of their hats showed, unleashing a fusillade of gunfire that, along with the Yankees’ replies, shrouded the scene with smoke. The Widow Glenn’s house was hit by an exploding shell and burst into flames.
From his position near the burning house, Colonel Harrison watched the renewed contest unfold. Men swept through the shadowy forests into the open sun, guns and sabers glinting, shouting and raising clouds of dust, while canister shot and cannonballs and bullets tore through the air with whistles and screams. Harrison believed his position was strong. He commanded the field of fire. He could cover a retreat if necessary. His men seemed to be performing well, though it soon became evident that they were engaged in a terrible sideshow to an even worse fight taking place to the north, near the Snodgrass cabin. Harrison did not know precisely what was happening there, but for that matter it was unclear from moment to moment what was going down on the Widow Glenn’s farm. There was just the blinding smoke and deafening noise, men shouting wordlessly, faces streaming with muddy sweat and blood. The fight whirled first one way and then the other, growing in size, contracting and then spreading out again. Through his field glasses Harrison watched for outcroppings of strength and weakness, and for feints, trying to read ahead. It was like a fast and violent game of chess. Men ran headlong into the check, dropped back, and then delivered crowning blows. Here and there the injured could be seen crawling away. They seemed to be generally attracted to a distant stock pond, where they crowded the water’s edge, vying for space with lost and riddled horses.
It seemed impossible that men could charge through the melee and not get hit by something; yet, most of the bullets spent themselves ineffectively. By some estimates, nine out of ten bullets fired during an average Civil War battle failed to find their mark, and many more were dropped in the excitement of loading on the run. Some men never fired their guns at all but only ran with them, more or less as menacing props. But there were more than enough bullets to go around, and each one that was dropped held the potential to get the fumbling shooter killed, leaving open the window just long enough for someone else’s bullet to reach him. It was no easy matter to load a gun under such conditions, often while running, with shaking hands, as thousands of men fired at you. It was a maddeningly painstaking process: Tear open the cartridge with your teeth, empty the gunpowder into the barrel, tamp the minié ball into the barrel with your thumb, pull out the ramrod to push the bullet home, cock the hammer, insert a percussion cap over the nipple, and finally pull the trigger. Eventually the loading became second nature, even mindless, but it was still slow, and it was done with the knowledge that at that moment someone might be taking careful aim at you. The men of the 39th were fortunate to have repeating Spencer rifles, which could fire up to seven bullets in a row before the magazine needed reloading, and turned out to be a stunning advantage. The guns were an excellent investment that some soldiers had made with their own money before they were standard issue in the Union Army. But even the Spencers had to be loaded again and again, and there was little consolation in knowing that the Rebels had to reload, too. When a bullet hit a man, every soldier within earshot recognized the awful thud.
To Colonel Harrison, watching from his hill, it appeared that the Rebels were losing ground. The noise of the battle seemed to be inching incrementally back toward the line of trees. Then he watched in dismay as the blue-coated troops on his left began to waver, and the shape of the battle again changed. Suddenly the Union line was breached. His men could not see what was happening; they were aware only of the ebb and flow, of the sharp rattle of musketry, rifle and cannon fire fading away or growing more distinct, increasing in volume. A distant cheer might be the only indication of victory or loss. But Harrison could see that his troops, together with Wilder’s horsemen on his right, were about to be cut off from the main army again. In a matter of moments they ceased to be part of an organized force. Using the buglers, flag signals, and shouts carried through the noise, he directed his troops to begin pulling back, and soon a courier arrived with orders for a retreat toward the long escarpment of Lookout Mountain, and from there back to Chattanooga. The fighting began to fragment. The firing grew sporadic and scattered. The 39th withdrew past the burning embers of the Widow Glenn’s house, fighting backward, into the trees.
By then the situation was similarly dire near the Snodgrass cabin. Rosecrans, whose reputation would never fully recover, reportedly turned to his staff and said in a surprisingly calm voice, “If you care to live any longer, get away from here.” Union General Charles Anderson Dana, a former journalist who would later be assistant secretary of war, said he knew his line was in trouble when he saw Rosecrans crossing himself.
As the Union troops retreated a Confederate general noted the grandeur of the scene, with flags waving and weaponry flickering in the sun, but Watkins, the Rebel soldier, found the aftermath bleak. “Men were lying where they fell, shot in every conceivable part of the body,” he later wrote. “Some with their entrails torn out and still hanging to them and piled up on the ground beside them, and they still alive. Some with their under jaw torn off, and hanging by a fragment of skin to their cheeks, with their tongues lolling from their mouths, and they trying to talk…And then to see all those dead, wounded and dying horses, their heads and tails drooping, and they seemed to be so intelligent as if they comprehended everything.”
At the end of the two-day fight, more than three thousand Union and Confederate troops were dead and more than thirty thousand had been wounded or captured, including Mathew Tolbert, whose whereabouts was now unknown.
It would be said that the 39th had kept the Rebels engaged long enough to enable the rest of the Union Army to form a new line of defense and eventually to make an orderly retreat. The Confederate Army, meanwhile, missed a chance to fully rout its retreating enemy, meaning its strategic victory was nil. Still, everyone on the Union side knew the day had been lost.
The 39th was among the last to leave the field. They were at the end of a long retreating column, along a road crowded with stragglers, weary disoriented troops, and horses and mules pulling gun caissons, wagons, and ambulances. Perry Summerville’s 2nd Indiana Cavalry, which was not far ahead, had been worn down before the fighting at Chickamauga even began, after reconnoitering through northern Alabama and Georgia for two weeks, destroying Confederate salt works, capturing stragglers and Rebel pickets, and driving away or running from enemy cavalry.
The Rebel cavalry sporadically assailed the retreating column most of the way, but by nightfall the Union Army arrived at its stronghold in Chattanooga. From there, Summerville and the rest of the 2nd continued north toward Bridgeport, Tennessee, where they would spend the next few weeks chasing Confederate guerillas and ferrying supplies across the river. By then, the battle was on its way into history, and when Tolbert and Maddox finally arrived in Nashville, the only record of Mathew’s whereabouts was a dispatch noting that he had been wounded and was in the hands of the enemy. Prison camps were squalid, dangerous, disease-ridden places, particularly in the South, and Andersonville, the nearest in Georgia, was by far the worst. But Tolbert likely had more than just his brother’s capture to worry about. He had a lot to learn, and he had to learn it on the run. More than sixty different bugle calls directed the choreography of military life, and a mistake in understanding could be fatal. Added to that, the 39th was about to be reconfigured as the 8th Indiana Cavalry, and Tolbert, who had experience plowing behind a horse, would have to learn quickly how to shoot, and avoid being shot, from the back of one.
THERE IS A REASON WHY recollections of dangerous episodes tend to be more vivid. The same part of the brain that prompts sudden emotional reactions initiates the storage of memory, so memories that illustrate the greatest threat naturally tend to receive highest priority. But because the nervous system becomes extremely selective under emotional stress, and the brain later analyzes and even updates memories with new information, how an event is recalled can be as unpredictable as the event itself. That is why the men of the 2nd Indiana could be frequently cited for gallantry on the battlefield but at other times be said to be ill disciplined, thieving, rude to other soldiers and civilians, and gutless during a fight. The truth may be immediate and undeniable, but the record evolves over time.
All the conflicting forces that war brought to bear—the weather, the individual soldiers’ moods, the acumen of the generals, and the lay of the land—were subject to continual change. In camp, on the battlefield, and on the march, everyone triangulated to determine the character of those they fought alongside, and a significant failure of courage or strength would likely follow a man all the way through. The ability to gauge the impact of such behavior might be difficult when the threat was actually unfolding, but everyone wanted to be remembered as the guy others could count on, like the sergeant in the 2nd Indiana who braved enemy fire to retrieve a dying comrade deserted by the retreating infantry. No one wanted to be remembered as the guy who got someone killed.
There was always posturing in the aftermath of a crucial encounter, and J. Walter Elliott seemed particularly concerned with framing his experiences, sometimes even as they unfolded. He suffered three almost embarrassingly minor war wounds, none of which qualified as a red badge of courage. He missed the battle of Perryville because of a spider bite, got shot in the tip of his ring finger the day before Chickamauga, and was lightly grazed in the shoulder by a bullet during the actual battle. Yet, he incorporated those awkward episodes into a plausibly valiant identity by playing up both the best and the worst. There is no evidence that he actually lied, but he made the truth work for him.
To some extent everyone was intent on composing what Stephen Crane, in his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, described as the song of their life. The stories the soldiers had been told by others and would later tell themselves were part of an evolving survival equation, illustrating what worked and what did not, who could be counted on in times of danger, and how their actions might be viewed in hindsight.
After Chickamauga, the slightly wounded Elliott was directed to a military hospital in Nashville, but he chose instead to remain at large in the city until it was besieged. This would be an important detail in his accounts. A new front was taking shape along Missionary Ridge, just east of town, and he wanted to be there. The battle would restore the Union Army’s position in the region, and it would give those involved stories that they could be proud to tell. With the help of reinforcements, the Yankees routed the Rebels at Missionary Ridge, opening the way for a drive into Georgia, and after a year of relentless cavalry raids, foraging expeditions, and ambushes, General Sherman would embark upon his infamous March to the Sea. For Elliott, Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville, it would also usher in a series of personally fateful events.
From all appearances, Elliott tried to do what was right as a soldier, even considering his doctor’s excuse at Perryville, which might have been justified. But after undergoing a mortal threat, a person has a tendency to accommodate, rationalize, and lay or deflect blame. A soldier who misses a fight because of a spider bite can be seen as a dangerous variable, and Elliott was intent on creating a narrative in which his perception of honor and presence of mind were on full display.
Elliott was physically a dark presence, with black hair, beard, and eyes and a dusky complexion. He had grown up in Hanover, Indiana, not far from where the Tolberts and the Maddoxes farmed, in a locally prominent family who had donated land for both a school and the Lancaster Church, New Style, which they had helped found. An uncle was involved in the Underground Railroad. Before the war, Elliott worked as a school teacher in Lafayette, Indiana, where he married and fathered a child. His wife died a year later, and he left their daughter in the care of his own mother when he enlisted in the 10th Indiana in 1861. No doubt his abandonment of the child—he never actually retrieved her—was the subject of some careful spin-doctoring, too, but whatever license Elliott took with the facts, his penchant for calm calculation undoubtedly helped him survive.
As Laurence Gonzales wrote in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, “Only 10 to 20 percent of people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They are the ones who can perceive their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action, all of which are key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.” Survival involves more than being smart or brave. Body and brain chemistry play a major role and can transform a previously brave man into a liability or a weak one into a hero. Disaster can befall anyone, and sometimes how a person reacts is inconsequential, because forces are utterly beyond their control. But at other times those reactions influence what happens next, and who survives. It is important to respond decisively and sensibly to actual circumstances rather than cling to an imagined model of what those circumstances should be—or worse, to panic. Elliott, Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville proved lucky (though they might have disagreed with that assessment at certain junctures) and never made decisions or reacted in such a way that got them killed. That was the unifying theme of both their most dramatic experiences and their lives afterward.
Survival decisions are made, more or less, in two parts of the brain: The amygdala and the neocortex. The amygdala is a comparatively primitive part of the brain and acts as the watchdog. The neocortex is responsible for conscious decisions and analytical thought. As Gonzales wrote, perceptions about the environment first reach the amygdala, which screens input for signs of danger but is not particularly bright—it is like a barking dog whose response to a threat is “better safe than sorry.” If the amygdala detects danger, it initiates a series of emergency reactions even as the neocortex and the rest of the brain attempt to comprehend what is going on. The amygdala (there are two, one for each hemisphere of the brain) can initiate a rush of adrenaline, causing an increase in heart rate and associated flushing and panting, even if the neocortex subsequently determines that the threat is inconsequential. During what is now often called the fight-or-flight response, the nervous system fires more energetically, the blood’s composition is altered so that it can coagulate more rapidly, muscles involuntarily contract, and digestion stops, all of which increase readiness for sudden action. When the neocortex starts talking, it is usually trying to slow things down. Survivors who recall hearing a voice inside them telling them what to do, or even a voice from beyond, may be experiencing the struggle of the neocortex to rein in responses triggered by the amygdala. Gonzales described emotion—the primary currency of the amygdala—as like a race horse quivering at the gate, and reason—which originates in the neocortex—like the jockey.
All this mental sorting takes place quickly, often in milliseconds; but because the outcome may be irreversible, it is extremely important to strike a balance, to know when to draw from your own experience—your own model of the world—and when to abandon it in favor of a new perspective. Conflicting responses from the amygdala and the neocortex may be nature’s way of hedging its bets, but they can result in the kind of disastrous confusion that beset Summerville’s 2nd cavalry during a patrol in rural Tennessee, when they were part of a larger force that encountered Rebels under Brigadier General John Morgan and simultaneously was attacked from the rear by the notoriously effective cavalry of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. As Union General R.W. Johnson later reported, the encounter went south very fast. “Soon some horses were wounded, riders killed, and confusion began to appear,” he wrote. “Regimental and company organizations were lost, and without any apparent cause at least half of my command precipitately fled, throwing away their arms, &c. Many of the men, after getting a thousand yards from the enemy, wildly discharged their revolvers in the air.” Without warning, previously brave soldiers had panicked. Their neocortexes had lost control. Unable to rally his troops, Johnson was forced to order a retreat. “I regret to report that the conduct of the officers and men as a general thing was shameful in the lowest degree,” he wrote.
Lieutenant Colonel Edward McCook, who was in command of the nearby 2nd Indiana, lamented the loss of nerve that prompted the retreat, and noted that the men of the 5th Kentucky, in particular, had fled like “a drove of stampeded buffaloes…There appeared to be a question of rivalry between officers and men for which should outvie in the disgrace of their cowardly scamper.”
A panicked amygdala can prompt good or bad decisions as a result of the same stimuli, and sometimes the results are not evident until later, such as when the soldiers compared notes around the campfire or mentally revised their personal narratives. Survival almost always involves a series of crucial choices that are influenced by luck and the ongoing dialogue between animal instincts and reason. A mindless rush of adrenaline, force-fed to the body’s potent army of emotions, can save a person’s life or cause a fatal overreaction. In this case, after the high-tailing Kentuckians passed through McCook’s ranks, he managed to restore order among his own men, who waited until the enemy was within twenty-five yards and then “opened a volley which broke the rebel line and threw them back in confusion some 500 yards. In the meantime General Johnson’s whole command, save the Second Indiana, had left and taken up a hurried retreat.” At this point, McCook wrote, “General Johnson rode up to me and asked what he should do. I replied that no officer could command those damned cowards, pointing toward the Fifth Kentucky retreating.”
Johnson’s neocortex then made its own bad call. He told McCook he wished to surrender and asked to borrow a white handkerchief—a request McCook refused in disgust. McCook and his men found it necessary to retreat toward Nashville along a road littered with discarded rifles, pistols, sabers, saddlebags, canteens, curry-combs, brushes, and hats, all abandoned, as he put it, “in helter-skelter style.”
If the 5th Kentucky’s aim had been to stay alive at all costs, the argument could be made that they had succeeded. But in a time of war, staying alive usually means disabling or killing the enemy. In that regard they had failed miserably, and it would not be forgotten.
Fear that he might run was Henry Fleming’s abiding fear in The Red Badge of Courage. Though Fleming was said to be a fictional composite of numerous veterans whom Crane—who never went to war himself—interviewed, his characterization was clearly on target, based on the book’s popular reception by veterans. Fleming yearned for courage and grace, for himself and from others, which was crucial both during the conflict and afterward.
Armies are a diverse farrago of men with different backgrounds and motivations. But on the whole, soldiers tend to be young, volatile, and impressionable, and—at least in the beginning—are not likely to have ever experienced being shot at by anyone else. Under the circumstances, it is natural to feel that every gun in the opposing army is aimed specifically at you, and during the Civil War, new recruits such as Tolbert and Maddox soon found that their fellow soldiers brought to the battlefield a multitude of potentially lethal subtexts: Cowardice, vindictiveness, and all sorts of ulterior motives. Among the more common threats within their own ranks were men known as bounty jumpers, who joined the army only for the monetary reward, then bolted at the first opportunity. Bounty jumpers might leave their comrades in the lurch and so could be as menacing to the whole as enemy soldiers who donned blue uniforms to blend in until they could escape with horses and guns. There were also soldiers who bore grudges against comrades or officers, or who sought to discredit their peers to curry favor with their superiors. There were tricksters, frequently veteran soldiers who knowingly gave bad advice to green soldiers for sport. One soldier recalled a new recruit being encouraged to climb a tree in a hilltop orchard to pick high-hanging fruit, which attracted the attention of an unseen enemy battery on an opposing ridge. The unwitting recruit was startled by the sudden crash of shells through the branches, dropped from the tree, and scurried for cover, enabling others to gather the newly fallen fruit. Sometimes another soldier’s bad judgment or simple mistake rippled through the lines, with disastrous consequences. In extreme cases, a perpetrator was drummed out of camp, or even shot.
Most Union soldiers were laborers—farmers, like Tolbert and Maddox, or industrial workers, with only a small percentage in commercial or professional pursuits. Within those categories were thieves, child molesters, religious zealots, patriots, tagalongs, leaders, overall good guys, and countless others whose personal integrity had not been tested or proved, and whose personalities were exaggerated by the stress of military life. Helping a wounded comrade to the rear was a popular way to avoid fighting, and desertion was a common problem on both sides. Some soldiers fled because they were scared, sick of war, never intended to fight, or had pressing concerns back home. The listing was occasionally in error, as occurred when a soldier was unaccounted for after being captured, killed, wounded, or cut off from the army.
As Dave Grossman wrote in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, many Civil War soldiers—the vast majority, by some estimates—never fired their guns. During the unimaginable intensity of battle, preconceptions about long lines of men firing in orderly formation quickly evaporated, “And in the midst of the confusion, the smoke, the thunder of the firing, and the screams of the wounded, soldiers would revert from cogs in a machine to individuals doing what comes naturally to them,” Grossman observed. Some loaded guns for others; others tended to the wounded, shouted orders, or wandered off in the smoke to find a convenient hiding place. A New York private wrote in a letter, “When you read of the number of men engaged on our side, strike out at least one third as never having struck a blow.”
Even the behavior of those who fought was frequently erratic and wild. A person might lose all fear, all sense of time and place and self-consciousness as cognitive thought was interrupted by responses from another comparatively primitive part of the brain, the hippocampus. The brain’s neocortex, the seat of language and reason, is where active memory operates. The amygdala, keyed into the nervous system, is the source of emotional responses, and it is where related memories are processed and consolidated. The hippocampus is where the information is put into context and, in many cases, stored. The three work in concert to determine how a person reacts to events and later reconstructs them, and they influence how he will react in the future. When a person faces a survival threat, the result can be a perfect aria or a discordant and dangerous racket.
In his book Surviving the Extremes, Kenneth Kamler, a physician with extensive experience treating people in survival situations, wrote, “The hippocampus flips some switches off, maintaining circuits essential to life, such as breathing and heartbeat, but shutting down stimuli to the higher centers that are less important for immediate survival. With incoming signals blocked, the frontal cortex receives no stimulation and loses its awareness of the individual self.” A person in such a state may experience tunnel vision and lose track of time. The world may seem to move in slow motion, not unlike the way climactic battle scenes are depicted in movies, and the person may have an out-of-body experience triggered by fear, low oxygen or blood sugar, or fatigue.
“In a battlefield environment, if a person does not simply turn tail and run, the highly developed frontal lobes of the brain—the seats of judgment, thought, and will—command the body to embrace hostility, suppressing the survival instinct and protecting itself from the results as best it can,” Grossman wrote. “This is otherwise known as discipline, and it is the only way a person can be made to wage offensive war, to seek out a threat to [his] own life. Once a person enters this realm, he becomes—at the behest of the part of his brain that normally subdues such tendencies—animalistic and aggressive.”
A Massachusetts lieutenant wrote in a letter to his mother of one battle, “during that terrible 4 or 5 hours that we were there I had not a thought of fear or anything like fear, on the contrary I wanted to rush them hand to hand…and yet will you believe it? all day before the battle I dreaded it.” Likewise a Texas artillery-man referred to “that wild hallucination which none but those in the brunt of battle can feel.” An Iowa sergeant wrote similarly of “a strange unaccountable lack of feeling with me…Out of battle and in a battle, I find myself two different beings.” Reconciling the two selves was crucial both to survival and to framing personal experiences afterward. Typically, the stress of battle increased with each engagement. Soldiers were bolstered by the hope of reaching the end, by a sense of honor, by peer pressure, by discipline, or by coercion. After the fighting ended, they often collapsed or became ill.
Some soldiers experienced battle fatigue and were plagued by nightmares, regardless of their ability to overcome their natural revulsion to killing. Others developed callous disregard. One Indiana soldier, William Blufton Miller, wrote that after overwhelming a Rebel force, “We captured about a hundred prisoners and killed about thirty of them. It was fun for us to see them Skip out. I seen one old Reb lying along the road (quite an old man) that had been a Saber stroke across his back and was not dead yet but mortally wounded and under other circumstances his grey hairs would have appealed to my heart for simpathy but we are not here to Simpathize and our orders is not let them cross the River.” Otherwise sensible men tortured and killed captive enemies, mistreated women and children, and tore though private homes, smashing mirrors, pianos, and china, and rending someone’s precious jacquard. Such behavior not only stoked desire for revenge but often disturbed fellow soldiers. A person who breaks free of his moral constraints poses a potential danger to everyone.
Soldiers naturally sought out others with whom they had an affinity. Perhaps they exchanged small photographs of each other and shared blankets and treats from home. But sometimes what a soldier expected from others turned out to be dead wrong, and it was never more obvious than when they were put to the test on the tattered, bloody fringes of morality. As Indiana soldier Jacob Bartmess wrote in a letter to his wife, it was not always enough to be on the same side. “I always was in favor of the administration and the war, and am yet, but there is a great evil right at the heart of the whole thing,” he wrote. “That evil is, the war is carried on and led, principally by wicked and God dareing men.”
THERE ARE FEW RELIABLE BYWORDS of war. It can be hell, as Sherman famously said, but it can also be boring, exciting, liberating, inspiring, and at times fun. In the downtime of the Civil War, there were snowball fights, sing-alongs, cannonball-bowling matches, stag dances, gambling tournaments, and what might be described as freestyle arts and crafts. On the basis of evidence unearthed by modern relic hunters, more than a few soldiers whiled away the quiet hours whittling lead bullets into frivolous items such as tiny penises.
A soldier’s behavior during war is an extreme extension of his civilian life, and while the war stories most of them like to tell typically involve violence and deprivation, most of the tests are far less dramatic. John Maddox learned right away that serious danger could develop inside his own body and that, moreover, there was never a good time to drop your pants in the presence of your enemies. This was not a matter of mooning a distant column or debasing a conquered foe, both of which have occurred in other conflicts, but of enduring a sad pageantry of pit stops brought on by chronic diarrhea.
Of the more than six hundred thousand men who died during the Civil War, the majority succumbed to intestinal disorders brought on by bad water, rank food, and poor medical attention. The war was thoroughly toxic, and the stress it placed on the soldiers’ bodies could quickly transform an ordinary bug into a fatal coup de grace. To make matters worse, “the troubles,” as they were sometimes called, presented an inauspicious way to die, whether on the march, in camp, in a hospital, or on a suddenly, exponentially more complicated battlefield. Death by diarrhea would not likely be memorialized in heroic terms back home. There would be no news item in the Courier paying tribute to valiant digestive casualties among the ranks of the local boys.
For soldiers cut loose behind enemy lines, as Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville were in the fall of 1863, even a minor case of diarrhea could be deadly. Some men wasted away; others were shot by snipers while squatting behind bullet-riddled trees. There were few options other than letting the sickness run its course, even if it meant the death of the host. The most common remedy was quinine, “whether for stomach or bowels, headache or toothache, for a cough or for lameness, rheumatism or fever and ague,” as Union veteran John Billings noted in his book Hardtack & Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life. Quinine, a bitter drug obtained from the bark of a tropical tree, was considered the cure-all; unfortunately it did not cure all. Although personal hygiene might play a role in determining whether a soldier got sick, in many cases luck played a greater role in influencing his survival than all the other variables over which he had a measure of control, including physical fitness and mental outlook.
In established camps, there was a special bugle call each day summoning ill soldiers, and while some men jumped at the chance to escape duty, true sickness was serious business. To make matters worse, even a relatively mild case of diarrhea was a source of quiet shame because it prevented soldiers from pulling their weight. They fouled their uniforms, made messes all over camp, fell behind on marches, and were frequently troubled by related hemorrhoids. Michigan soldier John Clark Ely wrote in his journal of his fear that the fort in which he was camped would be attacked while he was incapacitated by diarrhea, and of his sadness at not being able to uphold his duties. “Not feeling better yet,” he wrote in one entry, “do wish I could feel well and get over this constant run of the sh-ts.”
Maddox got caught in the intestinal crossfire in October while on a series of reconnaissance missions in northern Alabama. Though he had been in the army only a few weeks, it would have been obvious that the list of potential killers was long. The microcosm of camp was as hot as any battlefield, with weakened soldiers playing host to a raucous swap meet of excited and deadly pathogens. The soldiers’ only hope was that a bout would last a few days and be gone, though the troubles had a way of coming back.
Diarrhea is caused by a variety of opportunistic microbes, most of which thrive where people are crowded together in unsanitary conditions. Civil War camps had no conventional bathrooms or access to clean water and nutritious food was limited. As the men shod their horses, wrote letters home, played cards, or flicked lice from their clothes, legions of germs, bacteria, and viruses met, coupled, feasted, and fought inside their digestive tracts. Perhaps the men joked about it at first, but as the sufferer took on a dangerous pallor and began having trouble walking, the laughter died away.
The troubles got comparatively little play in the written record, aside from official tallies of casualties, in which diarrhea was sometimes identified as dysentery. Even in private diaries it was rarely discussed in any detail. What was there to say? I’m tired of watching my life dribble away into the stinking leaves. A soldier might record in his journal the number of times he was stricken that day, as a way of charting the progress of the malady, but more often he simply noted that he was “still sick.” Even today, nearly a century and a half later, when Civil War reenactors stage cinematic mock battles and encampments, diarrhea is not a prominent feature of the historical play. The reenactments lack the awful details of rotting horse carcasses, camps ringed by cesspools, fistfights, and other troubling facts of life for men who endured being crowded together in a succession of rank and hostile environments for months at a time. There are no piles of amputated arms and legs outside the faux surgeons’ tents, no disturbing stains on the seats of the soldiers’ pants, no reenactors salving saddle sores or high-stepping to the woods. Somewhere, out of sight, there is toilet paper.
Civil War soldiers were accustomed to many privations that people today would consider intolerable, but faced with the prospects of thousands of men exchanging parasites, germs, and diseases, the army had to institute at least rudimentary sanitation measures to keep its soldiers functional. At the start of the war, the camps tended to be reasonably clean. Tents were pitched in orderly lines, with designated latrines drained by hand-dug ditches. There were regimental guidelines for just about everything. Each man carried half a tent—a rectangle of white cotton canvas to which his mate adjoined a complementary piece to assemble a shared shelter. The day began with a bugle call summoning them to reveille, or roll call, though typically the men were still pulling on their boots and stuffing in their shirt tails as they fell in line. After roll call there was a mass exodus to the latrines, which were not pleasant places but were at least situated and engineered logically.
In long-term camps, the soldiers sometimes built small log huts to replace their tents, complete with stick-and-mud chimneys, and arranged their possessions inside just so, perhaps with a candle mounted on the butt-end of a bayonet stuck in the ground by which to read and write letters. This was all done with the knowledge that their lodgings were temporary. As John Billings observed, “It was aggravating after several days of exhausting labor, of cutting and carting and digging…to have boot-and-saddle call blown, summoning the company away, never to return to that camp, but to go elsewhere and repeat their building operations.” During the long marches, when skirmishes and chance encounters with the Rebels were common, camps were established hurriedly wherever the men found themselves, and they were likely to be struck with equal haste. Formerly essential items were often left behind, and there was no time to dig even crude latrines. A soldier might “wash” his knife and fork by running them into and out of the dirt a few times. Clothes went unchanged for months at a time, seldom washed because there was neither the time nor the means. Opportunities for thorough bathing likewise became increasingly few and far between. The result was that even short-term camps quickly grew foul, and as the war intensified, order became harder to maintain, never more so than on extended marches and raids.
Army life is notorious for its rampant testosterone, which during the Civil War occasionally led to fights and attracted camp followers, who brought their own ingredients to the already volatile epidemiological mix. By bringing together men and sometimes women from different backgrounds and regions in the crowded, generally unsanitary environment of camp, the war helped spread disease and enabled the formation of explosive new combinations of the sort that nature seems to love. The mix of stress, squalor, and occasional violence both contributed to and exacerbated the problem. Maybe a soldier was playing cards, or riding with the column through unfamiliar terrain, or on solitary picket duty when he suddenly felt the stabbing pain in his gut and thought, Not now. This is not a good time. In fact, there was never a good time, though some times were worse than others, such as when a soldier was stuck in the saddle on a long foray through hostile territory.
Maddox got sick while the 39th Indiana was camped at a temporary fort near Stevenson, Alabama, a small rail crossing on the Tennessee River. The 39th was then mounted infantry—basically foot soldiers who traveled on horses—and the men spent most of their time roving the countryside in the vicinity of Chattanooga, guarding railroads and river crossings. Sometimes they chased the Rebels; sometimes the Rebels chased them. The fighting was sporadic, unpredictable, and amorphous, shifting randomly back and forth through forests and fields. The men camped in remote bivouacs and subsisted mostly on stale hardtack, beans laced with weevils, and salt pork and beef that were tough as leather yet laden with parasites and germs. One night Colonel Harrison observed long lines of lights among the distant trees, from the fires and lamps of an army camp. He heard the movements of horses and artillery but could not tell if the lurking figures were enemies or friends. It would not have been a good time to wander off into the trees alone.
In late September and early October, the 39th was dispatched on a manhunt through east Tennessee in pursuit of the Confederate guerilla Champ Ferguson, whose men were reviled by Union troops as ruthless cut-throat raiders. Ferguson and his men had allegedly murdered a group of black Union troops and their white officers as they were recuperating in a military hospital, and they ceased the slaughter only after a band of Cherokee Indians and highland vigilantes arrived to drive them away. Bizarre rumors circulated around Ferguson—that he decapitated prisoners and rolled their heads down hillsides as a joke, that he killed elderly, bedridden men. If Harrison’s men encountered him he was to be executed on the spot. A soldier would want to be in fighting trim when he went after a man like Champ Ferguson. In the end, the manhunt turned out to be a wild goose chase. The 39th roamed a network of inscrutable switchback roads, past hardscrabble farms, through the deceptively beautiful mountains, without ever finding Ferguson or his men. Eventually the 39th was summoned back to Nashville to receive its new designation as the 8th Cavalry and to take on two companies of new recruits. From there they headed south, past Chattanooga, deeper into enemy territory.
Harrison set up his first field headquarters in a tavern at a place called Poe’s Crossroads, where he awaited further orders. While there, his men contended with bands of Rebels who stole horses, menaced the guards posted at the all-important river crossings, and destroyed railroads that provided the Union lines of supply. Harrison’s troops were hungry and in many cases sick, and he was reluctant to press farther until he had been issued more rations and replenished his lost wagons, horses, and mules. It took tons of food to support seven hundred fifty men and horses and more than a hundred mules, and the logistics of transporting even minimal supplies, including medicine, were complex. Often there was not enough loot to sustain them in the countryside. In one report Harrison lamented, “We are now 50 miles from rations and 25 miles from forage. We cannot ration our men and forage ore’ horses with the transportation on hand. The discrepancy is becoming serious.”
The day after Harrison filed his dispatch, he was ordered to a ferry crossing on the Tennessee River known, coincidentally, as Harrison’s Landing, where his men lingered in nervous ignorance, interrogating any civilians who came their way, sinking all the boats they could not use, and wondering what would happen next. The region was conflicted about the war, and that resulted in frequent guerilla and revenge attacks. At Rankin’s Ferry a young black boy was caught transporting Rebel mail and arrested as a spy. At Harrison’s Landing a local white woman arrived in camp to provide information about the movements of Confederate troops. The soldiers were fearful of being overpowered, and it was often difficult to tell who was on their side.
The 39th had been in the vicinity of Harrison’s Landing the previous summer, before Maddox and Tolbert arrived, doing much the same thing, though the circumstances were serene by comparison. John Barrett, a soldier with the 39th who was present during the previous picket, wrote to his brother to say the Rebels were camped directly across the river and that he and a few fellow Union soldiers had gone bathing there one evening and conversed with one of them as he sat on the opposite bank. At night the bands of the two armies battled it out in song, and at one point four Illinois soldiers surreptitiously crossed the river and allowed themselves to be captured and released on parole, which meant that according to the rules of war they were prohibited from fighting until they had been officially exchanged. “They were tired of the service,” Barrett observed.
By the fall of 1863, however, encounters between the opposing armies were uniformly hostile, and when Harrison’s men were sent to guard the river crossing at Stevenson, their base was a rudimentary fort—a ring of earthworks on a hill within firing range of the local supply depots, warehouses, and the two railroads that intersected in the small town. The site of the fort would one day become a popular spot for mountain bikers, then a police shooting range, and eventually a city park, but in October 1863 it was a lonely, dangerous outpost, and it was where the war got inside Maddox for the first time.
As a boy Maddox had suffered through typhoid fever, which was arguably a greater threat than diarrhea, but he was now far from adequate medical care, in a hostile land. He had no choice but to tough it out. When the troops were ordered back to Nashville, he was admitted to a military hospital, and his diarrhea eventually ran its course. But as often happened, his recovery was more of a remission. The troubles would haunt him not only during the rest of the war but off and on for the rest of his life.