Originally aired on January 10, 1997 - In part 124 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson says that Civil War soldiers did more marching than fighting. Here, he describes the physical hardships caused by traveling great distances by foot.
#124 – Marches
Civil war armies moved by foot. They did far more marching than fighting. Most citizen-soldiers of that period were unaccustomed to such strenuous physical demands. Thus, the initial excitement of war soon disappeared. A Massachusetts soldier once exclaimed: “Here we are marching from one end of Virginia to another, wearing ourselves out, and yet nothing seems to be accomplished by it…This everlasting advancing and retreating I am sick of. My God! Hasten the end of this accurses war!”
On a normal army movement, the men marched four abreast because the country roads of those days did not permit a wider formation. Soldiers walked in the road if it were passable, alongside it if it were not. While the pace was at the discretion of the army commander, the usual routine was ten minutes’ rest every 60-90 minutes.
Once a day’s march got underway, the men moved at “route step” – that is, each soldier maintained his own cadence so long as he kept pace with the column. They carried muskets in whatever position was comfortable at the moment. A Day’s march usually began with much banter, conversation, and singing. An hour or so later, however, the ranks grew silent as soldiers settled into the drudgery of the movement. A large Civil War army on the advance resembled a long serpent moving slowly and silently over the undulating countryside.
Throughout the day, soldiers would march accordion-style in open land, through woods, over streams, up and down hills. “We plodded along at various rates of speed,” one artilleryman noted. “Now a walk, now a trot, then a halt, then a slow, hardly perceptible movement, then a rapid motion as if we…felt bound to make amends to someone.”
Soldiers much preferred being in the van of the march. Those in the lead used the road when it was in its best shape. They got the jump on foraging and wood-gathering when the army bivouacked for the night; and being first on picket duty, they had the luxury of uninterrupted sleep that night.
Marching soldiers struggled badly in hot weather. An Iowa sergeant described an advance this way: “A July sun shot down its burning rays; a sandy road reflected the heat; the air was filled with dust; the men were fairly broiled in the sun and buried in clouds of dust; hundreds of men fell out by the wayside in the shadow of trees and fences, fainting and exhausted from the effects of the heat.”
When there was no dust, there was mud. (In the Civil War, there always seemed to be too much or too little water.) A member of the 10th Illinois wrote of making a march in a heavy rainstorm. “At times it seemed almost as if pandemonium had let loose. Everybody and everything seemed to be out of sorts. The horses and mules were mad…the driver were mad, and the soldiers were not in the best of humor...I mean by that bad words were issued.”
Men of both North and South showed an amazing capacity for hardship on the march. Billy Yanks in the Knoxville campaign of 1863, and Johnny Rebs at Nashville a winter later, walked barefooted for miles over stone-filled and ice-covered roads. Bloodstains on the snow silently pointed the line of march.
The subject of army advances brings up one of the most classic of Civil War quotations. After an especially severe march, a Rhode Island soldier unthinkingly (we assume) wrote his wife: “I’m all right except (for) the doggorned blisters on my feet, and I hope these few lines will find you enjoying the same blessing.”