Glory Road (26 page)

Hooker found new men for the vacant places, and in the process he did a strange and seemingly an uncharacteristic thing. For the all-important job of his chief of staff he asked the War Department to assign to him Brigadier General Charles P. Stone.
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Stone was a man out of the past, deeply buried in disgrace. A brigadier without a command, a soldier without a visible future, he was a ruined living symbol of the fact that the hatred which General
Burnside had failed to find among the fighting men had sprouted and flourished mightily among the stout civilians who controlled the destinies of the fighting men. This hatred, mixed with fear and grown old and gray and venomous, Abraham Lincoln greatly lacked, but it seemed that nearly everyone else in Washington had a share in it, most notably the very men to whom General Hooker had made his gestures and his overtures as he scrambled toward the top of the heap. General Stone had been its first sacrificial victim.

In the fall of 1861 General Stone had commanded troops along the upper Potomac. In a misguided moment he had thrust a brigade across the river to reconnoiter near Leesburg, and the brigade had blundered into trouble at Ball's Bluff and had been butchered. Butchered among many less notable had been its commander, Colonel Edward D. Baker, the Illinois-bora Californian who had helped save Oregon for anti-slavery Republicanism and who was intimate with the leading men of the party which stood for all-out war. The war party wanted to punish someone for this disaster, and to do that job it had organized the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Looking into things, the committee had decided that General Stone was at fault and must be punished. It made no formal accusations and it took no direct action against him; it simply received and published accusations against, his loyalty, turning him presently into an untouchable, a man who could not be defended, so that he was removed from his command and was even imprisoned for a time, although he had never been charged with any crime. The radical Republicans who had done this had nothing in particular against General Stone. They were simply using him to perfect the new technique which they had accidentally stumbled on. As an object lesson Stone had been extremely effective.

And it was this man whom Joe Hooker was now asking the War Department to send to him to become chief of staff of the Army of the Potomac.

Nothing came of it, to be sure. Stone had to remain on the shelf until Grant came along with a prestige that could overawe even the radical Republicans, and in the end Hooker took for his chief of staff Brigadier General Dan Butterfield, a stocky little ex-militia officer from New York. And yet Hooker's act in asking for General Stone is one of the most interesting things he ever did.

It was completely out of character, or perhaps it proved that

Hooker's character was not the open-and-shut case which on the surface it appears to have been. Hooker had schemed and calculated until it had seemed that there was no conceivable thing that he would not do to make political capital with the radicals. Yet now, untested in his perilous new job, he laid schemes and calculations aside and for one brief moment stood up as a straightforward soldier who would defy politics and politicians. He never bothered to explain what made him do it, and it seems that a passion for self-analysis may have been one of the few passions he lacked. He simply did it, leaving the fact that he had done it as a testimonial to something real in his strange, complex soul. It is a point to remember, because to speak up for General Stone took moral courage, a quality which Joe Hooker is rarely accused of possessing.

One like that was enough, and Hooker was not the man to go on sailing too close to the wind. Denied General Stone, he made do with General Butterfield, a
strange but politically safe litt
le man who had an unsuspected streak of poetry under his breezy bluster and who in an unexpected way left a permanent mark on the United States Army.

Butterfield was a New York businessman when the war began, and he raised New York troops and commanded a brigade on the peninsula under McClellan. He early noticed that when his brigade bugler sounded a call (which would be picked up and repeated at once by all regimental buglers in the brigade) there was apt to be confusion, since other brigades were usually within earshot. So he invented a little recognition call—three whole notes, followed by a couple of triplets—which would precede all brigade calls, and the boys quickly fitted a chant to it: "Dan—Dan—Butterfield!" It appears that one day in the camp at Harrison's Landing, shortly after Malvern Hill, Butterfield called his bugler into his tent, whistled a little tune for him, and asked him to sound it on his bugle. Somewhat struck, for generals did not ordinarily behave so, the bugler obeyed. The result did not quite suit Butterfield, and he did a little more experimental whistling, until finally he had it the way he wanted it. The bugler wrote the call down on the back of an old envelope, and Butterfield instructed him to use the tune thereafter in place of the call prescribed by regulations for "lights out." The regulation call, said Butterfield, was not musical; he wanted one which would somehow express the idea of a darkening campground with tired men snugging down to a peaceful sleep, and he hoped his new call would do it.

So the bugler used the new call after that, and other buglers heard it and liked it and came over to copy the tune, until before long it was used all through the Army of the Potomac. Later on, when some of the troops were transferred west, the bugle call was taken up in the Western armies, and at last it became regulation and has remained regulation to this day, the drawn-out haunting call that puts the lights out for soldiers and that hangs in the still air over their graves at military funerals—"Taps."
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In addition to having an ear for music, Butterfield appears to have had a personality that fitted Hooker's. Hooker could relax when the day's work was over, and Butterfield could help him. There were army officers who felt that the atmosphere at headquarters in those days was not wholesome. Greatly admired by his troops, Hooker was at no time a favorite among his generals. His military capacity they often admitted, but they were inclined to be dubious about the man underneath the soldier, and they did not like the tales about revelry at headquarters. Looking down a lengthy Adams nose through cold Bostonian eyes, Charles Francis Adams wrote (it may be with some exaggeration) that Hooker's tent was a place to which no gentleman cared to go and to which no lady could go.
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George Gordon Meade, irascible but fair-minded, wrote that he himself liked Hooker better than most and thought him a good soldier, but he added: "I do not like his entourage." In this entourage Meade specifically. mentioned Butterfield and the new commander of the III Corps, Major General Dan Sickles. He wrote that they were cleverer than Hooker and that because they had political pull Hooker was likely to put himself under their influence. Meade would say nothing in particular against Butterfield and Sickles, but he primly told his wife that "they are not the persons I should select as my intimates."
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Lumping Hooker, Butterfield, and Sickles together, Adams declared that "all three were men of blemished character."

Of the three, Sickles was the most obvious target. He wore notoriety like a cloak, so that if it never quite seemed becoming it at least looked natural on him. In an army so many of whose general officers have come to seem stuffed and posed, undistinguishable from one another in the shadowy portrait gallery of the half forgotten, Sickles remains a recognizable individual. Whether he was drinking, fighting, wenching or plotting, he was always operating with the throttle wide open. He might have had more faults than virtues, but everything about him was perfectly genuine.

Sickles came out of Tammany Hall. He was in his middle thirties when the war started, and even at that age he had already first conceived and then been obliged to discard a planned career of extraordinarily lofty proportions, for in the beginning he had told himself that he would become nothing less than President of the United States. He had lived too hard for that, had lived, loved, killed, and been cast into outer darkness by his fellow men, and the war offered him a chance to come back up the ladder a bit. He saw himself now as a military hero, and as a corps commander he could be on the way toward making his vision real. It would depend partly on the throw of the dice and partly on the valor of the men whom he was leading. Luck was with him on this second point, for his corps was made up chiefly of the divisions formerly led by Phil Kearny and Joe Hooker, and they were as good as the best.

Sickles had served in the New York State Assembly, had been corporation counsel in Manhattan, and when James Buchanan went to London as United States Minister, in the high and far-off times when the conflict between North and South looked like something that would wither and die of its own accord, Sickles went along as first secretary of legation. In London he had been somewhat gay, and he appears to have been one of the juniors who cooked up the once-famous Ostend Manifesto, which sought to commit the United States to the threat to seize Cuba by force if Spain, "actuated by stubborn pride and a false sense of honor," should refuse to get rid of the island by forced sale. Returning to America, Sickles had been a state senator and then member of Congress, a valiant states'-rights Democrat, a prosperous lawyer on the side, a militia officer and a student of the military arts, a fixer who knew all of the tricks of Tammany at its crookedest but who seems not to have taken graft himself. He had his sights fixed on the presidency, and he was making about as much progress in that direction as a Tammany man can.

And then he killed Philip Barton Key.

Son of the man who wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner," Key was a dabbler in politics, captain of a crack militia company, a drifter and a man about town, known for a time as "the handsomest man in all Washington society." He handled certain legal business for Sickles, and Sickles in turn helped to persuade President Buchanan to reappoint Key as United States attorney when his term expired. Key became friendly with Mrs. Sickles, had assignations with her in a shabby flat on Vermont Avenue in Washington, and one day was shot dead by Sickles on the sidewalk bordering Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Having killed him, Sickles walked down the street and surrendered his revolver and his person to Attorney General Black.

His trial was a circus. It belonged in the 1920s, in the era of sob sisters and flashlight bulbs. Edwin M. Stanton was one of defense counsel, and he and the other lawyers pulled out all of the stops. They raised—it appears to have been for the first time—the plea that Sickles was not guilty because of temporary insanity brought on by the shock of discovering that his wife had been untrue to him with his best friend. Like the plea, the verdict set an immutable precedent. Sickles was triumphantly acquitted.

So far, so good. The unwritten law ran strongly in predominantly Southern-chivalry Washington of the 1850s, and it was hard to think the worse of a man who killed by it. But Sickles then put himself beyond the pale by the simple act of forgiving his wife and restoring her to his bosom. It may be that after his own fashion he loved her.
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This was a shocker. Washington was scandalized to the eyebrows and remarked that Sickles's care
er was ruined. Mary Boykin Ches
nut, the South Carolina diarist, sat in the House gallery one day and saw Sickles deliberately and totally ostracized. He was sitting all alone, like Catiline, every other member careful not to come near him—"left to himself as if he had the smallpox." His offense, Mrs. Chesnut conceded (demonstrating that the aristocracy of Charleston could be quite as censorious as that of Boston), was not that he had killed his friend but that he had condoned his wife's profligacy. Sickles wrote a defiant open letter to the press, remarking: "I am not aware of any statute or code of morals which makes it infamous to forgive a woman," but it did no good. Mrs. Sickles lived for eight years, an infinitely lonely little woman in a huge house that no one would enter. When she died after the war four major generals were among her pallbearers.
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When the war started Sickles resigned from Congress and went back to New York to raise troops. He got a commission from the governor to raise eight companies of volunteers and succeeded in getting this expanded into authorization to raise an entire brigade of five regiments. He raised it, saw it dubbed the Excelsior Brigade-New York regiments numbered 70 to 74, inclusive—and financed its camp for some time out of his own purse, while state and Federal authorities argued over the validity of his commission. At one time he rented a circus tent from P. T. Barnum to house several hundred of his recruits. At another, with a dozen companies or more quartered in a bare hall on lower Broadway, he contracted with a cheap bathhouse to give fourteen hundred men a shave and a shower bath at ten cents apiece. He got his brigade regularized at last, served with it under Hooker on the peninsula, and was promoted to divisional command just before Fredericksburg.

Now he was one of the intimates of the commanding general, and there were those who felt that no good would come of it. Yet if Hooker's tent that winter was not a place in which an Adams could feel at ease, a great deal of very hard work was done there and the army benefited by it.