Glory Road (36 page)

Holmes story—was the great quietude of Secretary Chase. Secretary Chase never wavered in the faith that it would be his deserved good fortune to displace Abraham Lincoln, once Lincoln's inability to fight a winning war became manifest. Here was Chancellorsville, the most inexcusable and costly of all the military defeats the Lincoln government had suffered, and yet in the reaction to it Chase saw no opening. He continued to believe that Joe Hooker should be in command of the army, and he made his attitude known, to the discomfort, said gossip, of Secretary Stanton and General Halleck, who were anxious to remove Hooker but who lacked the nerve to try it as long as the Secretary of the Treasury continued to back him.

There was a turning point in this war, and the country had passed it. It had done so undramatically and without realizing it, and the turning point itself can hardly be identified precisely even at this distance in time. It may have been the adoption of a national draft act, or the decision to recruit Negro troops, or even—so strange are the ways by which a people shows how its spirit is moving—the decision in the middle of a desperate war to build a railroad to the Pacific Coast and to create a million small farms in the Western wilderness by means of a national homestead act. Whatever it was, it had been there somewhere, invisible beneath the oratory and the headlines, the bloodshed and the suffering. Nobody had consciously made a decision about anything, yet here suddenly everybody was taking something for granted: that the war would be fought out no matter how many ups and downs it might have, that there would never be any turning back, that out of the horror of this lost battle in a forest fire there would come a renewed determination and an unutterable grim-ness. The high-water mark of the rebellion had been left behind, even though men would still have to die under a clump of trees on a heat-blistered ridge in Pennsylvania to make the fact manifest. From now on the road wound upward.

Nobody could see it at the time, least of all in the Southland. In the Army of Northern Virginia men's spirits had never been higher. Lee was reorganizing and was preparing to invade the North, mourning that Jackson was irreplaceable but sure that the superb fighting quality of his soldiers could overcome any handicap. Longstreet and his corps had returned, Longstreet confident that Lee's plan of invasion would succeed if he could just place his army on Northern soil in such a way that the Yankees would have to attack it: strange reminder of Hooker's lost faith that his position at the Chancellorsville crossroads would force the Rebels to march forth to certain destruction.

The Army of the Potomac settled back in its camps at Falmouth again. It was as if an evil fate condemned this army to be forever marching out of camp gaily and forever returning a bit later, its banners in the dust. (A solid year after this, when Grant took off for the Wilderness, veterans warned rookies not to burn the winter quarters-chances were they'd be back in them in a week or so.) The soldiers were utterly bewildered, knowing that they had lost a battle in which half of them had not fought at all, and the only thing clear was that topside had somehow got all of its arrangements most completely fouled up. As a symbol of this there was the experience of the Philadelphia Brigade, which had put in a dreary week guarding fords, hearing the sound of battle from a distance. Returning to camp with the dull realization that it had been beaten even though it had seen no enemies, the brigade found itself with a week's accumulation of orders, announcements, and what not, all of which were read off to the troops by regimental adjutants at evening parade. The first one —brigade staff had been too groggy to weed it out—was Hooker's jubilant May 1 announcement: ". . . the enemy must either in-gloriously fly or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground. . . ."
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There were recriminations, especially in the XI Corps, which discovered that the rest of the army and most of the country believed that the battle had been lost because of the cowardice of Dutchmen. Howard remarked in general orders to the corps that he could not "fail to notice a feeling of depression on the part of a portion of this corps." He added, perhaps unnecessarily: "Some obloquy has been cast upon us." Carl Schurz reported that the men had had about all they could take, and he appealed vainly to the War Department for justice: "We have been overwhelmed by the army and the press with abuse and insult beyond measure. We have borne as much as human nature can endure."
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The corps believed that a great deal of this was directly inspired from army headquarters, and General Schimmelfennig angrily complained that "the most infamous falsehoods" had been given to newspaper correspondents by members of Hooker's own staff. There was so much of this that German-Americans in New York City held a mass meeting to try to clear the corps' name. Among the speakers was General Meagher, who testified that his Irish Brigade had been guarding roads to the rear during the battle and that of the many stragglers he intercepted only a very few spoke with a German accent.
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The complaints made by Howard's corps, however, were as nothing compared with the backbiting that went on at the top levels of army command. Most of the corps commanders had had their doubts about Hooker from the beginning, and as they looked back on the fumbled battle their doubts became nagging certainties. Couch tried to get the others to join him in asking the President to remove Hooker from his command. Slocum sided with him and went to see Meade about it, and Meade, who was no part of a plotter, replied that he would join in no round robin, although if the President asked him for his opinion he would cheerfully give it. Members of the heavy-handed Committee on the Conduct of the War came down to ask questions and express opinions, and the administration did not help matters much by taking clumsy soundings to see if there was a general present who would care to take Hooker's place. Nobody seemed to want the spot, but word of the overtures got around.

Sedgwick and Hooker had an angry argument about the way Sedgwick had handled his part of the battle, and Hooker and Meade quarreled over whether Meade had voted in favor of retreating. General Gibbon wrote that Hooker was looking for a scapegoat. Hooker's own opinion may have been reflected in the comment of his chief engineer, Brigadier General G. K. Warren, who wrote home that "our great weakness, in my opinion, is the incompetency of many of our corps commanders." Couch finally notified the President that he would not serve under Hooker any longer and asked to be relieved of his command. His request was granted and he went north to command home-guard levies in Pennsylvania, and command of the II Corps went to Hancock. Hancock himself, famous throughout the army for his vigorous cursing, had found himself shocked at Hooker's boast that God Almighty could not keep him from beating the Rebels, and he piously wrote to his wife that "success cannot come to us through such profanity."
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One would suppose that the army was in a bad way. It had had a humiliating defeat which seemed all the worse because of the high hopes that had preceded it. The men had thought they were really going to win this one, and one soldier asserted that "in no other battle of the East did the Union troops have so much confidence in their leader or so strong a hope of winning a complete and decisive victory."
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The letdown had been sharp, casualties had been heavy, more than twenty thousand of the short-term troops had been paid off and had gone home, one full army corps was suffering from a slow burn because everybody considered it a set of cowards, and the principal generals were visibly and violently at odds with their commander. It seemed likely that all of the old cliques and officer-corps antagonisms would begin making mischief once again, and army morale might have been thought ruined beyond repair.

Yet actually the army was not in a bad way at all. It was not in the least demoralized, and if it was downhearted, the mood did not persist for long. A brigade historian wrote that the men were "puzzled to know how they had been defeated without fighting a decisive battle," but there was nothing remotely like the sullen discouragement that had followed Fredericksburg. Old-timers might have longed for a return of McGellan, in the mood of a middle-aged man yearning for the golden time of his early youth—a surgeon in the 20th Massachusetts noted that "the whole army cries for 'Little Mac'" —yet there was no particular loss of regard for Joe Hooker. It is possible that some of the blame for defeat which the men might have directed at Hooker was diverted in such a way that it came down on the ill-starred members of the
XI Corps instead. General Schim
melfennig probably knew what he was talking about when he accused Hooker's staff of planting stories with the press. But the point is that the self-confidence which the army had reacquired during the winter was not diminished.
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Indeed, in a remarkably short time the army settled back into its old routine. There were drills and inspections and reviews—the weather was getting hot now, and by special dispensation drills and fatigues were held to a minimum around the middle of the day—and one morn
ing Birney's division of the III
Corps was paraded to witness a fancy ceremony. Birney had devised a new decoration called the Kearny Medal, a bronze Maltese cross to be given to enlisted men for valor, and this day the division stood at attention while the medal was pinned on the blouse of little Annie Etheridge, who had served hot coffee and cheered gunners under fire at Chancellorsville. On this same day the Iron Brigade also was paraded, and its 24th Michigan proudly came up to the line wearing for the first time the distinctive black hats which the brigade had made so famous, black hats turned up at one side, with a jaunty feather sticking out above the curled brim.
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Along the banks of the Rappahannock the Yankee pickets were carrying on trade and exchanging half-amiable insults with the Confederates across the water. The 46th New York, sending a little sailboat across, freighted it with a letter inviting the Rebels to come over for a visit in the evening. The letter closed with the words: "In the hope that Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln will give us peace, we send our respects." One day a Confederate picket yelled across to a group of Federals: "Say, you Yanks, why didn't you shoot General Hill? He stood right here half an hour ago." The Federals replied that they were sorry to have missed a chance; they had seen him but supposed he was simply an officer of the guard and not worth shooting. One Confederate, asking loudly, "Where's Joe Hooker now?" was tartly informed: "He's gone to Stonewall Jackson's funeral."
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It was noticed that where New England troops had camped any stream or brook was sure to be improved by little dams and sluices, with water wheels made out of shingles and old fruit cans spinning merrily in the sunlight. A Maine regiment which was sent off on picket duty left little signs by its camp asking people not to disturb these grownups' toys because the owners would be back before long, and a colonel of regulars looked wonderingly at the display by a brook in a New Hampshire camp and meditated aloud that only mechanically minded Yankees would behave so.
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Four days after the battle the colonel of the 7th Wisconsin sent a note to his adjutant:

"There is a large crowd of soldiers in the grove below, engaged in the interesting game called chuck-a-luck. My chaplain is running his church on the other side of me, but chuck-a-luck has the largest crowd. I think this unfair, as the church runs only once a week but the game goes on daily. I suggest that one or the other of the parties be dispersed."
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Clearly enough, this was the climate of March and April all over again, and except for the new graves and the charred bodies in the Wilderness, and the thousands of maimed men in the hospitals, it was nearly as though Chancellorsville had not been fought. The battle had been almost totally devoid of results. The army had been defeated once more, but now, for the first time, the defeat did not seem to count.

A good deal has been said and written about the army's retreat to Falmouth in the rain after Hooker brought it back to the north side of the river. That retreat had in truth been a dreary affair, and the occasion is not referred to fondly in any memoirs or regimental histories. Yet there had been a different tone to it from that of the bleak marches that had followed earlier defeats. This time, as the tired men came back into camp, the early arrivals turned out to line the roads and watch the rest come in, and the watchers and the marchers called out derisive greetings to each other: "Here's another played-out set" . . . "Go lay down in the mud" . . . "Turn out the provost guard and pick up those stragglers" . . . "There comes the home guard" . . . "Go boil your shirt."
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That kind of interchange can mask practically any emotional state imaginable except a state of dejection and despair. It was as a staff officer remarked: "The Army of the Potomac was no band of schoolgirls. . . . With the elation of victory or the depression of defeat, amidst the hardest toils of the campaign, under unwelcome leadership, at all times and under all circumstances, they were a reliable army still."
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The army had come of age. It was a professional army now in all but name. It was built around the volunteers of 1861, who had come in singing songs and dreaming dreams, and the songs had come down to camp doggerel and the dreams had been knocked out and the men were old soldiers now, proud with the pride of soldiers, able to do their jobs no matter who led them or how he did it. It was observed that now and then the waiting ranks would set up a cheer for some particular regiment or brigade. The cheers might simply be in welcome to old friends who had not been seen for some time, but more often they were the soldiers' spontaneous tribute to troops which they recognized as good fighting men. On this return from Chancellorsville Berdan's sharpshooters, who tended to be a rather hard-bitten lot, set up a mighty shout when the Iron Brigade came marching in. As it happened, the Iron Brigade had not been in action at Chancellorsville, while Berdan's men had been pretty thoroughly shot up, but something about the bearing of the Western soldiers made the sharpshooters toss their caps and yell—the Army of the Potomac, giving and receiving the only accolade it would ever know or care for. Long after the war one of Berdan's officers wistfully remembered the sight of "that famed body of troops marching up that long muddy hill, unmindful of the pouring rain but full of life and spirit, with steady step, filling the entire roadway, their big black hats and feathers conspicuous." To remember it, he said, filled him with "the pride of looking upon a model American volunteer."
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