Glory Road (2 page)

True to his word, when the guests left Hooker at once wrote to Henry Wager Halleck, general-in-chief of the nation's armies. He was quite aware that as far as Halleck was concerned the word of Joe Hooker might not carry too much weight. Halleck had seen a good deal of Hooker in his pre-war California phase, when the dashing army officer had descended almost to the level of beachcomber, and Halleck definitely did not admire him. Indeed, the best surviving evidence that Halleck really did have some of the acumen he was then supposed to have may consist in the fact that from the very beginning he was firmly convinced that sooner or later the flawed character which he had observed along the Sacramento would get General Hooker into serious trouble. Hooker assumed, possibly with some justification, that it was principally Halleck who had kept him from getting command of the Army of the Potomac when McClellan was relieved.

Yet if Halleck was distrustful, he was not opposing Hooker in all things. If the battle of Antietam had had an individual hero, that hero was probably Hooker; and McClellan, either
noi:
knowing or not caring that Hooker was one of his bitterest critics, had recommended, before his own removal from command, that Major General Hooker, U. S. Volunteers, be commissioned also as Brigadier General Hooker, U. S. Army—a recommendation which the War Department had accepted and acted upon, so that by the time he returned to active duty Hooker had the new commission in his possession. This was the best possible evidence that Hooker stood well with the administration, for promotion in the regular ranks was the greatest reward the War Department could offer to a professional soldier. Every regular-army officer was at all times conscious that this war, be it nobly won or miserably lost, was in any event going to
end
someday; and when it ended all of the fine volunteer commissions, with the various perquisites and the increased pay and allowances that went with them, would at once evaporate. Upon that day a regular who had gone to bed a major general might wake up to find himself a mere captain once more, responsible only for one flea-bitten battery of artillery and possessing no more than a captain's pay and prospects. Promotion in the regular ranks represented security. No matter what happened, Hooker would be a general the rest of his life; he could retire as a general and he would infallibly be buried as a general, with a starred flag to mark his gravestone.
⁶

From a cold and calculating viewpoint, therefore, Joe Hooker had already made a success out of the war. Yet even though the army contained very few officers who were more completely capable of taking a cold and calculating view of things, Hooker was no man to be satisfied with a partial achievement. As Secretary Chase had seen, his ambition was great. Also, a good part of Joe Hooker was perfectly genuine, and a great deal of the criticism which he so freely bestowed on his superiors came simply because his professional competence was outraged by the blunders he had had to witness. He felt that he could handle things better himself, and he had reason for thinking so. If such blunders continued—and it seemed very likely that they would —it was as certain as anything could be that the high command would someday be groping desperately for a man with military abilities like those owned by General Hooker. When that day came, Hooker proposed to be standing where the high command could not help reaching him.

It was good to be shifty in a new country. The Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, with his hot little eyes, and the fire-breathing abolitionist from Michigan, Senator Zachariah Chandler, followed Secretary Chase's lead, dropping in to sound the general out and to size him up. At the same time obscurer men came in to do what General Berry had done: to seek
favors and simultaneously to ex
hibit political backing. One of these was an Indiana colonel named Solomon J. Meredith, who very much wished to be a brigadier general. He was not especially noteworthy in his own right, but he had political connections as good as the very best.

Meredith was a breezy giant of a man in his early fifties. A North Carolinian by birth, he had moved to Indiana as a young man, settling in Wayne County, near the Ohio line, and getting a firm foothold in county politics. He had a gift for it. During the next two decades, while he developed a prosperous farm, he was twice elected sheriff of his county, was sent to the state legislature for several terms, and finally won appointment as United States marshal for the district of Indiana—the kind of political plum that goes only to a man with first-rate credentials. In addition to a record of loyal service with the new Republican party, Meredith's assets included a firm personal and political friendship with one of the Midwest's most remarkable men, Oliver P. Morton, the famous war governor of Indiana.

No general who was properly mindful of his own chances for advancement was going to overlook any claims that might be supported by Governor Morton. As far as the Midwest was concerned, Morton
was
the Union cause incarnate—a man without whom (to the certain knowledge of Abraham Lincoln and others) war west of the A
lle
ghenies could not successfully be carried on. He was a man of savage driving force, and in his code the only binding rule in war was that you had to win. He struck with equal fury at those disloyal to the sacred cause and those who got across the political path of Oliver P. Morton. In sum, he was a man of influence, and if General Hooker had had any doubts about it the recent experience of Major General Don Carlos Buell might have enlightened him.

General Buell had had the command in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, charged with quieting the troubled border region while Grant, farther west and south, groped down the Mississippi Valley toward Vicksburg. Buell was a West Pointer, a close friend of McClellan, a grave and serious man of considerable ability. He had had many difficulties in recent months, one of the worst of them being a complete inability to get along with Governor Morton. Buell had many Indiana regiments in his command, and Morton, as the governor who had raised and equipped those troops, always tried to retain some control over them even after
they had gone on act
ive service far outside Indiana. General and governor had bickered about this off and on for some time.

The matter had come to a head, apparently, at the end of September, when Confederate armies led by Braxton Bragg and Kirby Smith slipped through the loose Federal cordons and came driving up through Kentucky toward the Ohio River, raising Middle Western temperatures to a high pitch, especially Governor Morton's. Morton rushed a number of green Indiana regiments to Kentucky to help meet the invasion, and they had bad luck. One Confederate invading wing caught a column of these men near the town of Richmond, southeast of Lexington, and broke it to pieces, inflicting a thousand casualties and capturing upward of four thousand men. The other invading wing seized a Union fort at Munfordville a fortnight later, capturing four Indiana regiments entire. The Confederates seemed on the verge of making a complete conquest of Kentucky, and Morton hurried there in person, bitterly blaming Buell for the disasters. At the end of September, accompanied by a Union brigadier general bearing the unlikely name of Jefferson Davis, Morton stalked into the Gait Hotel at Louisville looking for trouble.

It seemed likely that he would find it. Davis was Indiana-born and -bred, a regular-army officer who had been in the Fort Sumter garrison in the spring of 1861 and who, coming north after the fort fell, had taken leave of absence and had gone to Indiana to raise and become first colonel of the 22nd Indiana Infantry. Just now he was under a cloud. He had quarreled bitterly with Major General William Nelson, one of Buell's corps commanders, and had been sent north of the Ohio with an official rebuke spattered across his service record. As a good Hoosier, he had gone at once to Indianapolis to see Governor Morton. Morton was already denouncing Nelson, whom he held largely responsible for the defeat at Richmond, so when he went to Louisville he had Davis come along, and if an Indiana general who was rebuked could stay rebuked they would find out about it. In the hotel lobby they encountered Nelson himself.

Nelson was a huge ox of a man—three hundred muscular pounds on a frame six feet four, a man who alternately glowed with hail-fellow geniality and stormed with titanic rage. A former navy lieutenant turned soldier, he had raised and trained many Union troops in Kentucky. He had a breezy way in battle; in one fight he comforted green troops by telling them: "If they don't hit me you needn't be a bit afraid, for if they can't hit me they can't hit the side of a barn." Buell considered him one of the Union's most valuable officers.

Now he and Davis immediately began to bristle at each other. From bristling they went to snarling, passing profanities hotly, and presently it was the back of Nelson's great hand across Davis's face. Then Nelson stalked majestically away. Davis hesitated, borrowed a revolver from an aide, strode after Nelson, called to him, and when he turned around shot him dead. He then surrendered his revolver and submitted quietly enough to military arrest.

So here was a sensation and a clear case for the sternest military discipline: Buell's most trusted lieutenant shot dead (before a hotel full of witnesses) by a subordinate, in Buell's own headquarters city, on the eve of a fateful battle. And yet somehow nothing whatever came of it.

The fateful battle was fought and the Confederates retreated—not so much because of anything Buell's troops had done to them as because of the strange caution of the Rebel commander, General Bragg. Shortly thereafter Buell was relieved of his command, and the Civil War knew him no more. And Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis received not so much as a slap on the wrist for killing a major general. Instead he presently returned to duty, ultimately to advancement.
⁷

Before he was relieved from d
uty Buell requested General Hal
leck to appoint a military court to try Davis for murder. The subject was considered at Washington, and late in October Secretary of the Navy Welles noted that the case was discussed by the Cabinet. But in the end Davis was released to the civil authorities, a grand jury refused to vote an indictment, and any Union general who meditated upon the matter was bound to conclude that this Governor Morton was a man of very solid and far-reaching influence.

So when Colonel Meredith of the 19th Indiana came asking for preferment and displayed himself as an intimate friend of Governor Morton, Joe Hooker was going to listen very attentively and he was going to be obliging if he could. Meredith did want quite a lot, to be sure—a brigadier's commission, to begin with, plus command of the most famous fighting brigade in the army, General John Gibbon's magnificent Iron Brigade, of which the colonel's 19th Indiana was a part.

Command of the brigade was vacant just then, Gibbon having been promoted to divisional command. The only trouble was that Meredith was by no means the logical person to take the brigade. He had been in the brigade's first battle—at Groveton, on August 28, when the four green regiments had stood off Stonewall Jackson's entire corps and had lost 33 per cent of the numbers engaged—and had conducted himself well enough there, suffering a minor injury and rejoining his regiment on the march up through Maryland. But at Antietam, where the brigade had spearheaded Hooker's furious attack on Lee's left, Meredith had not even been present. He had reported himself unfit for duty a day or so earlier because of the hurt received at Groveton and the fatigue of the marching since and had gone off to Washington to recuperate and to angle for promotion. In the stern code of John Gibbon this was about enough to write him off the army roster, especially since the lieutenant colonel who led the regiment in Meredith's absence was killed in action. It was Gibbon's feeling that either Colonel Fairchild of the 2nd Wisconsin or Colonel Cutler of the 6th Wisconsin fully deserved promotion to brigade command and that Meredith did not deserve it at all.

General Gibbon's advice was not asked, however. Hooker took counsel, one supposes, with his own ambition and meditated on the strong long arm of the governor of Indiana, then wrote out the requested recommendation. And so Meredith, early in December, with a brigadier's star on either shoulder, took command of the Iron Brigade, while Gibbon stormed fruitlessly and wrote Hooker down as a man who "sacrificed his soldierly principles whenever such sacrifice could gain him political influence to further his own ends."
⁸

Which is as it may be; bearing in mind that everything, or nearly everything, depends on the point of view, and that the reality of the Civil War was different for different people. The war meant boom times for canny civilians, as a chaplain had noted, and it meant high danger for sacred ideals, as leading Democrats had confided to the British minister; and to a General Hooker it meant infinite alluring possibilities, with personal advancement coming surely to the man who was shifty enough to play his cards skillfully. Yet these points of view were not the only ones valid in that fall of 1862. There was also the point of view of the private soldier, whose outlook upon the war was necessarily narrow but who at least stood, as he made his own personal survey of things, a little closer to the ultimate realities of life and death.

There was the point of view, to be more specific, of this same Iron Brigade, to whose command the swanky new brigadier from Indiana was just now ascending.

The brigade had been whittled thin these last few months. In mid-August it had mustered in its four regiments close to twenty-four hundred men. Three battles and five weeks later it stood at less than a thousand, and just before Antietam, General Gibbon had appealed to the high command to give him a new regiment—a Western regiment, if possible, since the Iron Brigade men came from Wisconsin and Indiana and would get on better with men from their own part of the country. A few weeks after Antietam his request was granted, and on October 9 the brigade was drawn up on the parade ground to give formal welcome to its new comrades, the brand-new soldiers of the 24th Michigan Volunteer Infantry.