History of Morgan's Cavalry. Duke Basil Wilson
were, then, facilities and means for providing them with necessaries and comforts which more latterly did not exist. Provisions were abundant everywhere, and were regularly supplied.
The railroads, which were then, all in good repair and well provided with rolling stock, afforded sure means of supplying the troops which were stationed in those parts of the country through which they ran. The numerous navigable streams also afforded facilities, and practically shortened the routes of supply.
In all cases, however, in which neither the railways nor the rivers could be used to supply them, troops were compelled to depend for subsistence, in a great measure, upon the country immediately about their cantonments, and as they exhausted the surplus provisions in different neighborhoods, they would shift their encampments. This was owing to the great lack of wheel transportation. It was very difficult to procure wagons, except by purchase or impressment from the citizens, and those so gotten were of course inferior. Much less inconvenience was subsequently experienced on this score, after they began to be manufactured in the Confederate and were captured in great numbers from the enemy. At this time, many articles such as sugar, coffee, etc., indispensable to the comfort and conducive to the health of troops in the field, were plentifully furnished – after the first year of the war they were known among us only by camp-fire traditions. The men rarely suffered, then, from the want of clothing, blankets, shoes, etc., even when the quartermasters could not furnish them, for they could obtain them from home, or purchase them, wherever they happened to be quartered, at reasonable prices. There was, perhaps, no regiment in the army which had not its full complement of tents; they were manufactured at Memphis, and other points, in numbers adequate to the wants of all the troops.
Cooking utensils, also, could be had in abundance – the marching commands suffered, not from the want of them, but from the lack of transportation for them. It is true that those which were furnished us were not of the kind and pattern which experience has prescribed as most fitting for military use, but they were capital substitutes for flat stones and forked twigs.
In the medical department there was an almost total lack of the necessary material. The supply of medicines in the South at the outbreak of the war was barely sufficient for the wants of the population at that time. Some medicines were run through the blockade from the North, in small quantities, during the spring and summer of 1861. But the supply thus obtained by no means met the demand. The volunteers collected together in camps and crowded cantonments, subjected to a sudden change of diet and mode of living, sickened in great numbers. Diseases which had never before, or but in rare instances, proven dangerous, now assumed alarming types. The systems of the patients may have been relaxed and their vitality partially impaired, during the early period of camp life, when they were just foregoing their old habits and were not yet hardened to the new, or it may be that when men are congregated in great numbers, certain diseases, by transmission from one to another, may be cultivated into extraordinary malignancy – at any rate a large proportion of the inmates of every camp sickened and many died. At Bowlinggreen in the winter of 1861 and 1862, the mortality was dreadful, measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia and diseases of the bowels, carried off a host of victims – every sickness, however, seemed fatal at that time.
There was, consequently, a great and constantly increasing need of medicines; and, perhaps, some waste of them, when they were collected in large quantities and shipped from point to point, was unavoidable. But all these problems, all the difficulties of properly supplying the army, began to be solved and modified, as the genius of adaptation and substitution was developed among the troops themselves. If a man could not get a blanket, he made an old carpet, cut to the proper size and lined on one side with a piece of strong cotton cloth, serve him instead. The soldier who lacked shoes bid defiance to the rough roads, or the weather, in a pair of ox-hide buskins, or with complicated wrappings of rags about his feet. I have known more than one orderly sergeant make out his morning report upon a shingle, and the surgeon who lacked a tourniquet used a twisted handkerchief. Of the most necessary military material, arms and ordnance stores, there was the greatest scarcity. Perhaps one half of the entire western army (of all the troops in the department) were armed (at the time that General Johnson came) with shot-guns and squirrel rifles, and the majority of the other half with scarcely as serviceable flint-lock muskets.
The troops under General Bragg at Pensacola were perhaps better armed, but the rule held good with regard to the others. A few companies composed of young men from the cities, and of rich planters, were armed with fancy guns, Maynard rifles, etc., altogether unsuitable for the armament of infantry. In September of 1861, there were probably not one thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles in the army which General Johnson was trying to concentrate in Kentucky, and it was several months later before these unequaled weapons (the right arms for soldiers who mean to fight) could be supplied in numbers at all adequate to the need of them. In the advance to Bowlinggreen, more than three hundred able-bodied men of the Second Kentucky, and an equal, if not greater number of the Third Kentucky were left in the rear because arms could not be gotten for them. In November one or two regiments of the Kentucky brigade were given the Belgian in place of the flint-lock musket, and in December flint-lock guns, altered to percussion locks, were given the other regiments of the brigade. Proper accouterments were as scarce as guns. Cartridge-boxes, knapsacks, canteens, when they could be gotten at all, were very inferior. By great industry and effort, a considerable quantity of ammunition had been prepared and worked up into cartridges, but there was such a scarcity of lead and powder in the South, and such inferior facilities for the manufacture of the latter, that apprehension was felt lest, when the supply on hand was exhausted, it could not be replaced.
There was scarcely a percussion cap to be had (in the early part of the war) in the department, with the exception of some that were manufactured by an enterprising citizen of Nashville, and zealous Confederate, Mr. S.D. Morgan, an uncle of the General. But while so few of the Confederate soldiers were efficiently armed, almost every man of them, presuming that the Yankees were to be whipped in rough and tumble style, had his bowie-knife and revolver. The Arkansas and Texas troops, especially, carried enormous knives, that might have made a Malay's blood run cold, but in the end those huge weapons did duty far oftener as cleavers than as bayonets. The organization of the troops first put in the field was, of course, to some extent, imperfect. A good deal has been said about the evils of the system of electing officers, and much just censure has been passed upon it. It has been claimed that it gives rise to a laxity of discipline, and a disposition on the part of officers, who owe their positions to the suffrages of the men they command, to wink at irregularities and pardon gross neglect of duty.
This is undoubtedly true, in a great measure, and what is stranger, but equally as true, is the fact that troops which have been longest in the service, which know best what qualities are necessary to constitute a good officer, which appreciate perfectly the necessity of having good officers, not only to their efficiency and success in the field, but to their well-being at all times – just such troops seem least able to resist the temptation of electing some good-natured fellow, whom they will never respect, and will, perhaps, grow ashamed of, rather than men who will enforce their obedience, but promote alike their efficiency and their comfort. At all times they will look to and rely upon the good officer, but when they come to elect, the love of doing as they please, unchecked by the irksome restraints of discipline, is apt to make them vote for the man who will indulge them. But I believe that all those who observed these matters carefully will agree, that there was far less of this sort of feeling among the men who volunteered at the outbreak of the war than there was later.
The officers elected by the regiments first raised were, generally, about the best men that could have been selected. The men, at that time, in good faith, chose those they believed best qualified for the duties of command, and elected individuals who had manifested, or were thought to possess, courage, energy, and good sense. Of course some mistakes were made, and experience disclosed the fact, now well-established, that many men who figured respectably in times of peace, are unfitted for military responsibility, and weaken in the ordeal of military life.
No opportunity had been afforded then, for testing and discovering those qualified for positions of trust and importance – it was all a matter of experiment. Many injudicious selections were made, but it quite as often happened that the appointing system (as it was exercised at the beginning of the war) gave incompetent officers to the