Army on the march in Shenandoah Valley.
Harper's Weekly
“Most of our marches were on graveled turnpike roads, which were very severe on the barefooted men and cut up their feet horribly. When the poor fellows could get rags they would tie them around their feet for protection. I have seen the men rob the dead of their shoes and clothing, but I cannot blame a man for doing a thing which is almost necessary in order to preserve his own life.”
–Confederate surgeon Spencer Glasgow Welch, in a letter to his wife, September 24, 1862
Footsore campfire and battlefield
Campfire and Battlefield (1896)
“It is said that men have slept as they marched. I have marched till it seemed as if it was no longer by will power but by a sort of dazed mechanism.”
–C.W. Bardeen, 1st Massachusetts Infantry, in his diary, February 16, 1863
“[W]e were on the backward march to old camps under cover of one of the severest snow storms of the winter. The men flung themselves into line, dancing the ‘snow reel’—laughing at distance and fatigue, or the unreasonableness of a return to camps through such snow—9 inches—and over such new made earth.”
–A Confederate soldier, from a winter camp near Richmond, in a letter to the Atlanta Southern Confederacy, March 27, 1863
Civil War soldiers marching through Tennessee.
Campfire and Battlefield (1896)
“My gait was somewhat like that of a lame duck, but I waddled along at first as fast as the remainder of our crew….”
–Justus M. Silliman, 17th Connecticut Infantry, on the impact a recent long march had on him, in a letter to his mother, December 31, 1862
Samuel Watkins
Wikimedia
“I cannot remember of ever experiencing a harder or more fatiguing march. It seemed that mountain was piled upon mountain. No sooner would we arrive at a place that seemed to be the top than another view of a higher, and yet higher mountain would rise before us. From the foot to the top of the mountain the soldiers lined the road, broken down and exhausted.”
–Sam Watkins (above), 1st Tennessee Infantry, on an early war movement over the Allegheny Mountains, in his memoir of the war
Sources
A New Canaan Private in the Civil War (1984); A Confederate Surgeon’s Letters to His Wife (1911); A Little Fifer’s War Diary (1910); William B. Styple, ed., Writing & Fighting from the Army of Northern Virginia (2003); Co. Aytch (1882).
Great article!
I know both sides had it hard, but I think of Sherman’s western army walking, marching, from Chattanooga to the parade in Washington D.C. via Atlanta and Savannah and fighting most of the way.