Civil War soldiers’ writing can be judged by any number of criteria. Accuracy and factual detail (content); intelligence and articulateness (style); entertainment and quotability (reader response) are just three of them.
Sometimes I think that if the act of Civil War soldiering often centered on the simple performance of duty, the mere endurance of the dreary and undramatic, then a memoir relating these aspects of soldiering with clarity and detail can make for first-rate literature. That’s why I’ve chosen to write about Rice C. Bull’s memoir of service in the 123rd New York.
Bull was twenty years old, living on a New York farm, when the 123rd was being raised in his area in August 1862. He volunteered and followed his unit through travel and training. The regiment, brigaded with men from Pennsylvania and Connecticut in the XII Corps, did not join the Army of the Potomac until after Fredericksburg. Bull saw the elephant at Chancellorsville, where he was wounded and captured (paroled ten days later).
He sent letters home to his family and kept a diary. From them, and his indelible recollections, in 1913 Bull composed a memoir. Descendants bequeathed the text to the Rensselaer County Historical Society of Troy, New York. K. Jack Bauer, a professor in Troy, learned of the Bull text and saw to its publication in 1977 as Soldiering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull (San Rafael CA: Presidio Press).
It’s still a treasure. Billed by Bauer as a diary, it’s not quite that, but a reminiscence closely based on a diary. Nevertheless, Bull’s text reads as one, written with almost daily entries and in an absorbing narrative style.
The author’s reflections on Civil War soldiering came down to such random accounts of how tents worked in rainstorms. “When the weather was dry and warm our tents were comfortable sleeping quarters,” he wrote, “but in wet, cold times they were anything but satisfactory. They would shed rain when it came gently but if the storm was heavy the rain would come through, at first like damp mist and when the cloth was well soaked would run through in big drops like a leaking roof.”
So much for shelter. Then there was “army food,” which Bull at first found “almost unbearable,” especially the tasteless, tough hardtack. It took a while before he and his comrades “reached the point where we could appreciate and eat the ‘stuff’ as the boys called it.” Two months into army service, Bull recorded, “I had not yet reached the soldierly perfection when two or three pieces of hardtack and coffee could be made to satisfy my hunger.”
A poignant passage relates the time after Chancellorsville when, shot in the jaw and in the side, Bull fell prisoner to the Rebels. “All the Johnnies [Bull’s usual term for the enemy] treated us with kindness and with consideration for our feelings,” he conceded, even though they could not treat their prisoners’ injuries. The wounded Federals were moved to a common area, where they endured the stench from dead horses all around. “There was no food, no nursing, and no medicine,” he remembered. Left out in the open for days, men died from fever, hunger and exposure. Many, too weak to move, lay in their own filth. Finally, some Federal surgeons arrived to conduct their amputations. On May 12, Bull and his comrades were paroled and returned to Union hospital care.
Sent home for two months, then to a convalescent camp (“dirty and lousy beyond belief”), Bull, at last, returned to service and was probably then promoted to sergeant, although Bauer is blank on this point. By this time he had missed Gettysburg, and the XII Corps had been sent west. On garrison duty in Bridgeport, Alabama, Bull also missed the fighting at Missionary Ridge.
At the start of the Atlanta Campaign, the 123rd New York was with Joe Hooker’s XX Corps. Bull rejoined it at Resaca, May 15, 1864, just in time, his comrades joshed, “for the fun that was coming.”
Bull’s narrative of his service in the campaign and in the Federal occupation of Atlanta, May 13-November 15, runs about 30% of his entire memoir. This alone makes Soldiering one of the most reliable and informative sources for those of us who write about the war in Georgia.
Editor Bauer does not add much; his explanatory notes are infrequent and brief. When Bull relates the attack of Stewart’s Confederate division on the second day of Resaca, Bauer adds not a word. And he is not free from error. Sherman did not lose 6,800 men at Resaca. He identifies (and indexes) the battle in which Bull’s regiment fought on May 25 as that of Dallas; it is New Hope Church. Bull got it right, terming the action at New Hope “the Hell Hole.”
Because it draws on his wartime diary, Bull’s reminiscence is unusually dependable as to fact. “On May 25th the weather changed,” he writes, “and I find recorded in my diary that for twenty-one days it stormed every day.” Instead of describing military movements during this time, the author usually keeps his focus on “soldiering.” Example: “One of the hardest conditions we had to face in the service, when in the field, was the lack of opportunity to keep clean.” The men’s heavy woolen clothing took much time to dry; Bull states that they needed a full day to do their laundry, and such days were rare during an active campaign. On the other hand, preparing food could be a speedy exercise. By this time, the veterans had become efficient cooks: “It was the work of only a few minutes to make our fire and boil our coffee and fry our pork.”
From time to time the New Yorker offers up tactical pearls. On the afternoon of May 19, as Federals pressed up toward the Rebels’ line near Cassville, Northern skirmishers encountered musketry from sharpshooters posted in the town’s buildings. I’ve re-checked Castel and McMurry: this is the first time I’ve seen this. Bull’s account of the action at Kolb’s Farm, June 22, near Kennesaw Mountain, is notably detailed, running for six pages. The 123rd was one of two Federal skirmisher regiments which made initial contact with Hood’s troops before they launched their assault on Hooker’s lines.
Readers of this column may recall my recounting an incident related by John Hennessy in Return to Bull Run (1993), how at Second Manassas West Virginia Capt. David Gibson foretold his death in battle. We see the same strange incident in Soldiering. On May 25 a friend, Jim Cummings, approached Bull and confided that he would not survive the next battle. Bull, of course, tried to reassure him, saying, “we all had such ‘warnings’ at times but they never came true.”
This one did. That night, after the fighting at New Hope had ended, Bull’s regiment was lying prone in the front lines when it started raining. Skirmishing continued in the darkness, yet at one point Cummings stood up. “Jim,” Bull called out, “why do you stand and expose yourself?” “I don’t think there is any more danger in standing here than lying in the mud,” Cummings answered; “I have had enough of that.” A minute later Jim Cummings was shot in the head. He died later that night.
After Johnston’s army retreated across the Chattahoochee, Sherman’s forces closed in on Atlanta. On the morning of July 20, Thomas’ Army of the Cumberland crossed Peachtree Creek. Bull states that his superiors did not expect the Rebels to attack that day: “no orders were given to put our Brigade in position to defend itself in case of attack.” This is one of the clearest confirmations of the Federals’ lack of preparation for the surprise assault Gen. John B. Hood was to launch at Peachtree Creek. When the Johnnies attacked, Bull was in the thick of the fight, firing seventy rounds in the three-hour engagement. Union artillery helped repel the enemy assault; its gunfire was so loud, Bull remembered, that his comrades’ hearing did not return for several days.
During Sherman’s semi-siege of Atlanta, Bull’s regiment was positioned in the XX Corps lines north of the city. He could plainly see the Confederate fort ahead, astride the Peachtree Road (now the site of the Fox Theatre downtown). Sherman did not order his troops to attack such strong positions, but from time to time both sides sallied against each other’s works. Bull describes one such sortie, July 27 when the 13th New Jersey stormed across no man’s land to take out some Rebel sharpshooters perched in a building. “The pickets were soon driven back, and the sharpshooters with them, two of the houses were burned, and the ridge cleared with the capture of thirty-three Johnnies,” Bull declared, affirming that “while it was a small affair it was exciting while it lasted.”
When Sherman determined to break his semi-siege of Atlanta by marching most of his troops around toward Jonesboro, the XX Corps did not participate. It withdrew to the Chattahoochee bridges, dug in and waited till Sherman’s column broke the Macon & Western Railroad below Atlanta on August 31.
After Hood’s army had abandoned the city the next day, XX Corps troops occupied it on September 2. Bull gives the two-and-a-half month Federal occupation just a few pages before turning his attention to the “March to the Sea,” which began November 15, 1864. His account of the event is just as spritely and engaging as his of the Atlanta Campaign, but I’ve run out of space. Maybe I’ll pick
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up in another column and finish the story, which Bull carries all the way to the Grand Review of Union troops in Washington, May 24, 1865.
Writing in Civil War Times Illustrated, April 1978, Robert D. Hoffsommer trilled, “Sergeant Rice Bull…wrote a memoir that constitutes the most engrossing narrative of a soldier’s Civil War service that this reviewer has read in many a moon.” Think about that, and about how dull many Civil War memoirs can be, and you’ll realize why Rice C. Bull’s Soldiering remains such a treasure.
Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News.
His new book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, has just been published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series.
The companion volume, carrying the Atlanta Campaign to the city’s surrender on September 2, 1864, will be published later this year.
Exhibits
Through 2016, Pennsylvania. Vice & Virtue “Tell Mother I’ve Been Good: Vice & Virtue in the Civil War” exhibit at National Civil War Museum, Harrisburg. Stories, images, artifacts about moral challenges faced by servicemen. Info: www.nationalcivilwarmuseum.org Through 2016, Virginia. Union Aid Groups “Union Aid Organizations during the Petersburg Campaign” at Grant’s Headquarters at City Point in Hopewell. Photos, original and reproduction artifacts, documents highlighting U.S. Sanitary Commission & Christian Commission, Northern state relief agents’ work during May 1864-spring 1865 Petersburg Campaign. For information, www.nps.gov/pete Events
Aug. 25, Georgia. Founder’s Day Fort Pulaski National Monument will celebrate the 100th birthday of the National Park Service with a special day of events from 9-7. Special Sept. 10, Virginia.
Lecture Series “Research in Dry Ice Cleaning: a new way to conserve metal” with USS Monitor Project Conservation Staff, Civil War Lecture Series at The Mariners’ Museum & Park, Newport News, 2:30. For information, 757- 596-2222; MarinersMuseum.org