Alonzo Cushing’s Thumb

So, a few days ago, November 6, 2014, we had a big day for Civil War history. President Barack Obama awarded a Medal of Honor to Lieutenant Alonzo H. Cushing. If you’ve been reading my blog religiously, then you know my thoughts on this important event. For those of you who are new to it, or for those of you who are just stopping by, this is my opinion: I approve of the decision.

Unfortunately, in watching Obama’s address, I cringed at something he said. Obama said that, during the Battle of Gettysburg, Lieutenant Cushing burned his thumb to the bone while trying to plug the vent of one of his artillery pieces. This is a famous story, often repeated by historians.

What little we know about Lieutenant Cushing’s actions at Gettysburg comes from three primary accounts, all of them written years after the war, all of them written by enlisted men, and all of them written by veterans of Battery A, 4^th U.S. Artillery. These writers were Private Christopher Smith, Sergeant Frederick Fuger, and Corporal Thomas Moon. The “thumb story,” comes from Moon. Specifically, it comes from this passage: “His [Cushing’s] right thumb was burned to the bone, serving vent without a thumb-pad.”

Thomas Moon's postwar account of Cushing's injuries claimed that his right thumb was "burned to the bone." Here is the controversial passage.

What did Moon mean by this? Whenever a Civil War artillery crew loaded a new round, one man had to “thumb the vent.” This soldier—known as the “Number Three” crewman—placed his thumb atop a small vent that penetrated the breech. He did this because the manual that all Union artillerymen followed (called the Instruction for Field Artillery) required vent thumbing as a safety protocol. One soldier always had to block the vent to prevent air from reaching the gun tube. If air crept inside and burning embers were still present in the barrel, they would be kept aflame and, therefore, might ignite the next round when it got rammed into the tube. If that happened, it could potentially kill the two loaders (known as the Number One and Number Two crewmen). Essentially, this is the same principle as a chimney. If you close the flue, no air reaches the fire, and it goes out. Thus, every time artillerymen reloaded their cannon, someone always “thumbed the vent.” Safety demanded it.

An unlimbered piece of field artillery had a crew of seven. The Number 3 crewman was responsible for "thumbing the vent."

 

This cut-away shows the vent that required blockage.

 

 

However, if someone were to place his bare thumb atop a recently fired artillery tube, the super-heated iron would instantly sear his flesh. (After all, the gun had just been fired.) To prevent injury, the Number Three crewman wore a leather strap around his thumb called a “thumb stall.” Thus, he could plug the vent without burning himself.

This is a Union artilleryman's "thumb stall." This one is made of buckskin.
 

So, here is what Moon suggested. There were no enlisted men left with Battery A on July 3 who could operate as the Number Three crewman. Cushing handled that position himself. Lacking a thumb stall, he placed his bare flesh atop the vent, burning his thumb to the bone.

Baloney. There is no way that story is true. Consider these points and judge for yourself:

First, Thomas Moon’s account is full of suspicious claims. For instance, at one point, Moon claimed that he went to sleep on the night of July 3, slumbering atop Cushing’s mangled body, as if it were a mattress! Certainly, there is no way that statement is true. I’ve never slept upon a dead person, but I’d imagine that a bloody corpse cannot possibly be more comfortable than a grassy field. If Moon had been so callous as to attempt what he claimed, I’ll bet other members of the battery (and there were three who accompanied Moon to the Second Corps hospital) would not have allowed him to treat the corpse of their fallen commander in such a disrespectful way. And finally, although the time of Cushing’s burial is unknown, there is a distinct possibility that the corpse was already buried in the ground by the time night fell, and thus, Moon’s statement might not be true. This is just one doubtful piece of Moon’s narrative. A number of other equally suspect statements suggest that Moon rooted his account more in exaggeration (or fantasy) than in reality.

Second, if a Civil War artilleryman happened to be missing his thumb stall, he could always use something else in a pinch. Any strip of leather would do, and artillerymen had them in abundance. All they had to do was un-hitch their belt (or the belt of a dead or wounded soldier) and use that in place of the thumb stall. (In one account, two artillerymen who were caught in the middle of a harrowing battle simply tied a rock to the top of the tube, blocking the vent, while they loaded. They did this because all the other members of their crew had been killed or wounded.) When Cushing was serving his guns on July 3, the area around him would have been littered with debris, including hundreds of castaway leather belts. In fact, we know that Cushing wore a belt on July 3. This belt is still in existence, owned by the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg. (Interestingly enough, the belt has several dark marks on it. Is that where he pressed the belt against the vent?) If Cushing could not find anything in his immediate vicinity that might have served in place of a thumb stall, he must have been royally stupid.

Third, it is just about impossible for a person to hold his or her fingers to a hot metal object for too long. (Moon and all the historians who have repeated the “thumb story” have never been burned, apparently.) The brain contains a reflex action that prevents the hand from grasping a scorching hot article. If you’ve ever accidentally grasped a hot frying pan, you know that your brain will cause you to release it involuntarily. This is no matter of opinion; this is just simple physiology. A person might be able to condition himself or herself to endure heat—by, say, repeatedly sticking his or her hand over an open flame—but that takes practice, something that Cushing, I’m sure, did not have. In short, there’s no way that Cushing’s brain let him press down his thumb on a heated cannon vent for too long.

Some critics might say, “Well, Tim, Cushing had been severely wounded. Adrenalin had kicked in, so he couldn’t feel any pain.” All right, I’ll concede that such a circumstance might have happened. Perhaps adrenalin might have allowed him to press his bare flesh to a hot cannon barrel, but if so, he could only have done it for a short time. If he had done it long enough, his brain’s reflex function would have kicked in eventually, overturning the absence of pain. Cushing could not have left his thumb on the barrel long enough to let it burn down to the bone. That would have been impossible. Also, in a philosophical sense, if—and I stress the word, “if”—adrenalin had kicked in, why mention the thumb story at all? If Cushing felt no pain, then pressing his thumb to the vent was no big deal for him. When we consider Cushing’s heroism at Gettysburg, do we not prefer to focus on the fact that he gritted his way through the agony of several awful wounds, remaining at his post to the bitter end? Dismissing his pain by saying that he had so much adrenalin that he felt no pain at all defeats the point, I think.

So, my plea is this: Please kill off the Cushing “thumb story.” At long last, he has a Medal of Honor. Mission accomplished. We need not continue to mangle this poor officer’s body in our imaginations to prove a point. We have awarded him the highest honor we can give. Let sober history once more return to the story of Alonzo Cushing at Gettysburg.

 

Here is Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing, photographed with the 2nd Corps staff in 1862. I'm sure his right thumb was just fine on July 3, 1863.

The Language of Combat

I’m always on the lookout for vivid descriptions of Civil War combat, an experience not easily imagined. (In my opinion, the legions of yearly reenactments and badly-directed Hollywood motion pictures cannot do it justice.) For soldiers who fought in the war, the task of describing the graphic scenes they witnessed—fluid, swift-moving, jarring, dehumanizing—using only written words became an undertaking too difficult to manage. In short, words failed them. Many letter-writers came up short. They told their audience that nothing they could write could give a reasonable picture of what they had seen. Today, we live in a vastly different world, where combat can be imagined, even by those who have never experienced it. We have photographs and streaming videos of combat, all easily accessible. Even if veterans cannot give their audience an accurate description of combat, twenty-first-century technology paints a picture for us. Civil War veterans had no such advantage. They had only their language to describe the experience, and far too often, it could not rise to the occasion.

Of course, there were a few exceptions. Some writers—aging veterans, mainly—managed to summon the vernacular necessary to give readers a taste of the scenes of combat. The war had seared their souls, and after years of suppressing painful memories, they could no longer contain them. They just had to write about combat and its bone-chilling tableaus in order to come to grips with what they had seen. Corporal George Kimball was one such veteran. In 1883, he published a serial memoir in a privately-run Boston newspaper called, The Bivouac. When Kimball narrated his experiences with the 12^th Massachusetts at the Battle of Antietam, he wrote a wonderful account of the combat that occurred just south of the D. R. Miller cornfield. The following passage is a spell-binding piece from that narrative. It offers readers a taste of what it was like to experience Civil War combat as a soldier in an infantry line-of-battle:

How terrible was the shock and how our men went down! What screams and groans followed that first volley! We loaded and fired at will as rapidly as we could. Our officers cried, “Give it to them, boys!” and the men took up the cry, too. There was a pandemonium of voices, as well as a perfect roar of musketry and a storm of bullets. Shells were bursting among us, too, continually. In the wild excitement of battle, I forgot my fear and thought only of killing as many of the foe as I could. . . . My ramrod was wrenched from my grasp as I was about to return it to its socket after loading. I looked for it behind me and the lieutenant passed me another, pointing to my own, which lay bent and unfit for use across the face of a dead man. A bullet entered my knapsack just under my left arm while I was taking aim. Another passed through my haversack, which hung upon my left hip. Still another cut both strings of my canteen and that useful article joined the debris now thickly covering the ground. Having lost all natural feeling, I laughed at these mishaps as though they were huge jokes and remarked to my nearest neighbor that I supposed I should be relieved of all my trappings. A man but a few paces from me was struck squarely in the face by a solid shot. Fragments of the poor fellow’s head came crashing into my face and filled me with disgust. I grumbled about it as though it were something that might have been avoided. My supply of cartridges was exhausted and I sought for more among the cartridge boxes of the dead. Many others were doing the same and nearly everybody had had experiences similar to mine. There were but few of us left now. The enemy’s line, which had looked so magnificent when we opened fire upon it, seemed as ragged as our own. We had fulfilled General Hooker’s prediction. We had “held it.”

You’ll notice how Kimball’s narrative moved from topic to topic, without transition, mimicking the quick, unpredictable flow of battle. His description, although masterful, gives us an answer to help explain why so few veterans could adequately describe the sights and sensation of battle, even if they had participated in it to its fullest extent. Words were incapable of meeting the task. Language, by definition, is organized; battle, by nature, is not.

This illustration by Winslow Homer was originally entitled, "Infantry Rifle Drill." It gives the viewer a sense of the confusing nature of infantry combat.