Glory Road (24 page)

The states were not what they had been. The corn belt had its troubles, with every governor sending plaintive cries to Washington asking for help. New York, which had refused to elect a fighting man, had a Copperhead for governor, a high-minded eloquent man who would stop now to reason and argue in a situation that was past reasoned argument. Horatio Seymour was an old-school Democrat, a man with a plausible smooth face fringed by under-the-chin whiskers, who dreaded the coercion of the states about as much as he dreaded disunion. He believed that hard-minded Republicans were shamefully making political capital out of a war which they had taken over for their own purposes—which, as a matter of fact, was perfectly true—and he was protesting that the only way to prevent the establishment of a despotic central government was to preserve the powers of the several states. The war, he declared, must not be turned into "a bloody, barbarous, revolutionary, and unconstitutional scheme" to destroy state sovereignty.
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Seymour stood at one of the extremes. He was an honorable extremist, driven by the cruel logic of events into speaking for forces which he would not ordinarily uphold, and behind him were men whom he himself would not endorse. Yet even loyal, all-out-war governors were complaining this winter that the government's policies were destructive. Andrew of Massachusetts, a fire-eating abolitionist who got into the war almost before Washington itself, had recently begged Lincoln to rely on nine-month militia regiments rather than on draftees, arguing that the draft would "disturb everything."
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The unhappy fact was that many governors had either lost control over their own states or had become men who did not believe in the kind of war that was now being fought. They were no longer supplying the army with adequate numbers of recruits, and since the war had become grim and unlimited, that seemed to be their principal reason for existence. The men who would come into the army willingly had just about been used up, and the men who would come in only if somebody made them come could not be brought forward in adequate numbers by mere governors. But to get on with the war now it was necessary above all else to keep the stream of recruits flowing into the army. The unsung private on the firing line might be voiceless, but unless he remained on the firing line the war was lost forever, and he was not going to remain there indefinitely unless he had company.

To keep him there and to provide him with the replacements he needed, the government had to use force. It was already using force on the states, and now it must use force on individual citizens as well. State sovereignty was dying in the smoke and dust of a dozen battles; dying with it was the old idea that the government of the United States could not reach out and tap the shoulder of the ordinary man. From now on the government must do exactly that or cease to be a government.

That was what government had come to, and that was what government now did. This same winter and spring of 1863 which saw the administration warning all army officers, via the ruined career of General Porter, that the civil government was in charge of things also saw the passage of a national conscription law.

The emphasis was on the word
national.
There was conscription already, with the states enrolling their citizens, appointing agents to harry them into camp, and making such deals as they could—at the price of fabulous bounty acts by cities, counties, and townships—to get a sufficiency of men under arms. But from now on Washington was not going to get its men from the states. It was going to reach out with its own lengthened arm and take them direct. The lists of men subject to conscription would be made up by representatives of the government at Washington and not by men named by the governors. The men who were called up would be called up by Washington. If penalties were inflicted for non-compliance, they would be inflicted by Washington, for a drafted man who evaded the call was no longer merely a citizen who had thumbed his nose at the state authorities: he was a deserter from the United States Army, and the Federal government might shoot him if it could catch him.

In the month of March, accordingly, the country went over to this new system of recruitment, which embodied, all in all, one of the most revolutionary changes ever made in the American form of government, since it permanently reduced the role of the states in the American political picture. State sovereignty, South, had fired cannon at Fort Sumter, leading to a great deal of this and that along the border. Now it was state sovereignty, North, which was coming under the guns.

Among those who immediately detected the sweeping nature of the change that was being made was New York's Governor Seymour. He protested heatedly that national conscription was unconstitutional, and he argued that the government should depend solely on the states even though the dome of heaven fell in. Ironically, there arose to his voice a splenetic echo from the heart of the deepest South, where Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia was making exactly the same kind of fight against Jefferson Davis. Brown was hotly telling Davis that "your doctrine carried out not only makes Congress supreme over the states at any time when it chooses to exercise the full measure of its power to raise armies, but it places the very existence of the state governments subject to the will of Congress."
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If the central government, cried Brown, can draft men, and if it is the central government which can specify who is to be exempt from the draft, then the central government could, if it chose, utterly destroy the state governments simply by drafting all state officials into the army. Congress, complained the governor of Georgia, was supposed to be the agent of the states. How now, if it could reach into the states and make its writ good within state territory? Were not the people thereby reduced to "a state of provincial dependence upon the central power?"

Indubitably. Yet it is recorded that while the angry plaints of Governor Brown caused Jefferson Davis to sigh wearily (and, the sighing over, to explode into icy polemics) they had no effect on Davis's program to raise the Confederate armies by conscription. Governor Seymour had no better luck in the North. The imperatives of war were at work, and there was a chill wind blowing in on theories and theorists. The New Yorkers and the Georgians who killed each other across the stone wall at Fredericksburg would have found cold comfort in the idea, but the fact was that they had left their respective governors high and dry.
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Thus while the administration moved to take the army away from the generals, it was also taking it away from the governors. The army would never again be an assemblage of troops contributed by the several states. (In 1861 Secretary Chase had protested that "he would rather have no regiments raised in Ohio than that they should not be known as Ohio regiments." He still felt that way, yet now he was one of the principal instruments of change.)
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From now on it would be a national army.

One step led to another. Decreeing that the United States Government would be responsible for its own armies henceforth, the administration also gave thought to the question of making soldiers out of Negroes. The colored man seemed in some distracting way to be what this war was, at bottom, chiefly about. By presidential declaration the war now must go on until the colored man had been given his freedom. Might the colored man not fight as a soldier in the ranks, then?

So the decree went forth for the enlistment of regiments of colored troops, the tide of events having carried everyone some distance beyond Ben Butler's tent-side pronouncement that fugitive slaves were mere contraband of war. This was at first balm and a delight to the harassed Northern governors. If colored men could be enrolled, perhaps a state's quotas could be met that way, white men being loath to come forward. Andrew of Massachusetts thought this should be tried, and he hastened to enlist a solid colored regiment, the 54th

Massachusetts. Simultaneously he sent agents all across the North to enlist other colored folk for Massachusetts regiments.

This might have been a good trick for stay-at-home Yankees, busy with the prosperity of a wartime boom that went beyond anything in anybody's earlier imagination, if it had just worked. In the very nature of things, however, it could be carried only so far before it collapsed of its own weight. There were not any prodigious numbers of able-bodied colored men in all the Northern states together. When all was said and done, the North had been inhospitable to the Negro. Some of the states which stood strongest for the war had laws forbidding settlement by Negroes, and as fantastically underprivileged folk the free Negroes tended to live under bad health conditions and so produced many young men who could not pass army physical examinations. It became clear, at last, that even if the Northern colored population furnished recruits in the same proportion as Northern whites had furnished them the army would gain only eighteen thousand new soldiers.
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What this meant was that if any appreciable number of Negroes were to come into the army they would have to come from the South. Obviously, the national government was the only agency which could recruit them. (The irrepressible Governor Andrew did try to recruit some Massachusetts soldiers from among the colored contraband in the occupied areas, but the effort fizzled.) The colored recruit, therefore, rounded up by semi-literate, hard-handed agents who moved in the train of the armies, was, above all, a recruit to a national army.
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His very presence in uniform testified to the existence of a new power in Washington.

All of these things happened, not at once and dramatically, but over a period of weeks. Their significance might or might not have been seen at the time. The atmosphere in Washington in the long winter that followed Fredericksburg seemed to be one of disintegration and despair, and it was none other than Governor Andrew who was writing that in Washington just then he found few men "of practical sagacity and victorious faith." Yet the sagacity and the faith were at work, and something was being done. The war was a long way from being won, but at last the things were being done which would make it possible for it to be won. Uncertainly and without a clear plan, Washington was removing obstacles from the army's path.

3. Soldiers' Bargain

Beyond any question, Joe Hooker was the handsomest commander the Army of the Potomac ever had. Crusty Publisher Alexander K. McClure grew fairly dreamy-eyed when he tried to describe him: "A man of unusually handsome face and elegant proportions, with a complexion as delicate and silken as a woman's." Major Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin spoke of Hooker's "Apollo-like presence," and a newspaper correspondent noted that the general had large gray-blue eyes, a rosy skin, and an abundance of blond hair, and said that he looked like an ideal soldier with his erect carriage and his square shoulders. To another correspondent Hooker looked "as rosy as the most healthy woman alive." Hooker had more than a little of the old McClellan touch, and the soldiers were always ready to cheer when they saw him, as if the tattered clouds of war's forgotten glory still trailed after him even for regiments which had gone through Antietam and Fredericksburg.
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He had won command at a bad time. The army was in disorder. A veteran in the 24th New Jersey said afterward that "at no period in its history were the troops more disheartened or less hopeful of achieving success," and a soldier in the 3rd Michigan wrote that winter that there had been many desertions and that "unless something is done to prevent it our ranks will grow pretty thin in a short while."
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This man was an admirer of Hooker, but he was not sure whether the general could do much now that supreme command had been given him, and he wrote dubiously:

"We all feel that General Hooker will be like the poor man that won the elephant at the raffle. After he got the animal he did not know what to do with him. So with fighting Joseph. He is now in command of a mighty large elephant, and it will remain to be seen if he knows what to do with him."

Hooker himself was under no illusions. He was to show, in the end, a great capacity for deceiving himself, but at the start he knew exactly where he was. As he took over the command he examined the troubles of Burnside with brutal clarity, remarking that although the army was actually on the verge of dissolution Burnside had not even suspected it, the reason being that Burnside "has no other idea of the organization and government of an army than that of arranging it in such a way that the commanding general will have nothing to do. The nearer the army reaches that point, the greater the excellence in his estimation."
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That mistake Hooker himself would not make. The peculiar flaws in his make-up were not of the kind that would handicap him at the beginning. Editor McClure remembered being told by an officer who knew Hooker in the old California days that "Hooker could play the best game of poker I ever saw until it came to the point where he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk."
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The time for going a thousand better had not yet arrived. The game was still young, and at this point the general held it firmly in his own hands and played it with great skill.

If he shared with McClellan the ability to draw cheers from tired men who had seen much of war, he also shared with that departed officer an extreme distaste for letting army administration take care of itself. Quite unexpectedly Hooker turned out to be a first-rate organizer and military housekeeper. He looked upon himself, and caused others to look upon him, as the dashing leader of troops in battle; actually, in this winter of despair, his great service to his country lay in this prosaic matter of making certain that the men got enough to eat and stayed well.