Glory Road (4 page)

But there was beginning to be more to it than that. The army had grown lawless, although it had not been lawless earlier. It had marched the length of the Virginia peninsula the preceding spring, it had spent many weeks in front of Richmond, it had maneuvered for a time near this same Fredericksburg, and there had been a long hike up to western Maryland. In all of it the foraging, pillaging, and wrecking which took place had been of minor consequence. But during the last few weeks the soldiers seemed to be turning into unabashed thieves. What had been done before had been furtive, a matter of individual soldiers sneaking away from their commands, grabbing what they wanted, and then running for cover. Now it was being done quite openly, with soldiers sweeping up chickens, hogs, cattle, sheep, and everything else that they could carry off. Some of the men, it is recorded, had learned how to steal beehives without being hurt. Houses were invaded and ransacked, fruit cellars and corncribs were despoiled, and the disorderly skein of stragglers that raveled out around the army knew very few restraints when desirable rebel property was encountered.

Indeed, the job could not be blamed entirely on stragglers. If much foraging was done in defiance of officers, much or! it also was done with their hearty encouragement. Some men of the 6th Wisconsin complained to their colonel that they were short of rations. The colonel pointed to a clump of farmhouses on a hill and said: "I'm going to take a short nap. Don't let me see or hear of your foraging on this march. I think I see a smokehouse near that white residence." The 5th New Hampshire raided a well-stocked hen house and its Colonel Cross scolded the men sharply—because they let one hen escape. Later, after a sheepfold had been raided, when General Hancock wanted to search the camp of the 5th for traces of stolen sheep, Cross stalled him off until his men were able
t
o plant the bloody pelts in the adjacent camp of the 7th New York. That evening Cross enjoyed roast mutton with the rest of the regiment
²

A Pennsylvania recruit in General Andrew Humphreys's division recalled that as many as two hundred men from one regiment in his division were arrested on the march with stolen goods in their possession. Yet they were not punished, aside from being confined overnight, and the stolen property was not confiscated. This soldier wrote that the men were convinced that "it was their bounden duty to forage upon all inhabitants of the enemy's country."
³

Other explanation there was none. And yet this was a curious business. These outbreaks were not coming from rookies or from third-rate troops. There were no better regiments in the army than the 6th Wisconsin and the 5th New Hampshire, and there were no better colonels than theirs. Humphreys's division, commanded by one of the best men in the army, belonged to the V Corps, where regular-army discipline prevailed. If these men were suddenly getting the notion that it was right to spoil the Egyptians, the army was changing and the change deserved study.

But the high command had more pressing things to think about.

The high command just then was Major General Ambrose E. Burn-side, to whom the administration seemed to have given the Army of the Potomac in a mood of sheer desperation. In some ways Burnside was about as incompetent a general as Abraham Lincoln ever commissioned, and he comes down in history looking stiff and stuffy with frock coat and incredible whiskers, a man who moved from disaster to disaster with an uncomprehending and wholly unimaginative dignity. Yet there must once have been a warm, rather lively human being somewhere back of the major general's trappings. Burnside was gay and frisky as a West Point cadet, and when he was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1847 and was sent off to Mexico he gambled away his passage money on an Ohio River steamer and had to borrow from a Louisville merchant in order to make the trip. Later, in Mexico City, he played cards so enthusiastically and unskillfully that his pay was in hock for six months in advance, and he would have had to resign in disgrace if a senior officer had not loaned him enough to pay up. He fought Apaches in New Mexico after the war, acquiring a wound and some modest distinction. Transferred east, he wooed a Kentucky belle and took her to the altar, only to be flabbergasted when she returned a firm "No!" to the officiating minister's climactic question. (The same girl later became engaged to an Ohio lawyer, who apparently had heard about Burnside's experience. When the wedding date arrived this man displayed to her a revolver and a marriage license, telling her that it had to be one or the other and she could take her pick. This time she went through with the ceremony.)
⁴

In 1852 Burnside invented a breech-loading rifle, resigned from the army to build a factory and manufacture it, and went broke when he lost a War Department contract which had seemed to be certain. George B. McClellan, then vice-president of the Illinois Central Railroad, bailed him out by giving him a job in the railroad's land office, and when the outbreak of the war called him back into military service Burnside had become treasurer of the road.

It must be admitted that the tradition of failure thus seems to have been fairly well established before he ever became a general; yet it also seems that the man who put that record together was at least not a stodgy person. Something essential in his make-up must have got bleached out in the long years since he got into the history books. He was never anything resembling a great general, yet he apparently was an interesting sort of human being.

The soldiers themselves, in this fall of 1862, were beginning to warm up to him. For the most part they were taking their cue from the IX Corps, which had invaded the Carolina islands with him earlier that year and which felt that "Old Burny" was as good as the best. The DC Corps recalled that under Burnside in Carolina the rations had always been good. The general had forever been poking his nose into the mess shacks, sampling the food, checking on the supplies issued by the commissary. A veteran in the 48th Pennsylvania, applauding him for that remembered care, wrote sententiously that "the nearest way to a soldier's heart lays right through his haversack," and a V Corps private agreed that the men were always willing to cheer when they saw Burnside's "manly countenance, bald head, and unmistakable whiskers."
⁵

With his new duties as army commander, Burnside was spending no time looking into company kitchens or harassing the commissaries. This was a little oversight for which he was to pay a high price a bit later, and in its small way it illustrated his whole problem. He needed to be a good strategist and an able tactician, to be sure-after all, he had to lead his troops into action against Robert E. Lee —and yet in some ways it was almost more important for the commander of the Army of the Potomac at that time to be a good housekeeper. This army lived and moved under the weight of a peculiar curse. So many incompetents wore shoulder straps, and there was so much lost motion between orders and their execution, that unless the commanding general did spend part of his time looking into the matter of his soldiers' rations, those rations were going to deteriorate very swiftly.
⁶

As with rations, so with weightier things. As a sample, there was the relationship between pontoon boats and high strategy.

The high strategy by which Burnside was moving in mid-November of 1862 was not too bad. Burnside had inherited the army in the general vicinity of Warrenton, with an advance in progress down the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railway. To continue that advance as McClellan had begun it struck Burnside as unwise. The farther the army got, the more it would expose its communications. To General John Pope, some three months earlier, Lee and Stonewall Jackson had demonstrated the evil things that could befall Yankee supply lines that were rashly exposed in that part of the country, and the lesson had not been forgotten.

So Burnside had decided to swing the whole army ove
r to tide
water. There would be wide rivers to cross that way, but the lines of supply would be short and pestilent Rebel raiders could not easily get at them. He would have his advance guard wade the Rappahannock at the fords a little way upstream from Fredericksburg to drive off the Confederate outposts. Then he would lay pontoon bridges at Fredericksburg and cross the rest of the army and the supply trains before Lee's army could reach the vicinity to contest the crossing. He must have, he calculated, twelve days' rations in the wagons, together with a big drove of beef cattle, and Colonel Haupt was assembling workers and material to rebuild the railroad bridge once the town had been secured. All of this done, the army would move southward, and somewhere below the Rappahannock it would meet and fight the Army of Northern Virginia.

On November 12, a few days after he had taken command, Burnside submitted this plan to higher authority. General Halleck was not in favor of it. He was rarely in favor of any plan devised by a subordinate, and he knew perfectly how to qualify any approval he did express so that if disaster came his own record would contain no stain. President Lincoln, who was beginning to catch onto this trait of the general-in-chief, examined Burnside's proposal for himself and on November 14 he telegraphed his approval, remarking that the plan would succeed if Burnside moved fast—otherwise not. On the next day Burnside put the army in motion.

By the morning of November 17 Burnside's advance reached the

Rappahannock River fords, and Yankee patrols went prowling down to the bank to exchange gibes with the Confederate sentries across the river. The advance was styled the Right Grand Division and constituted a third of the army, the II Corps under Darius N. Couch and the IX Corps under Orlando Willcox. Commander of the whole was Major General Edwin V. Sumner—Bull Sumner of the white whiskers and the tremendous parade-ground voice, the ramrod-backed old regular who had been commissioned a second lieutenant away back in 1819 and who, in more than forty years of service, had become the very embodiment of the code by which the old-time professional soldier lived. The code wa
s simple. One automatically gave
complete loyalty to all persons in superior authority, one obeyed all lawful orders without question, and one never, under any circumstances, was afraid of anything. Made incarnate in the person of an aging major general, the code had its limitations. It did not necessarily produce a man fitted to command a third of an invading army. It did, however, produce a man you could count on, and if the old man's virtues were limited, they were solid. Worse men have worn a major general's stars.

Sumner got his two corps up to the river, and the rest of the army went into bivouac not far behind him, within easy marching distance of the Fredericksburg crossing where the pontoon bridges were to be made. So far the movement had been remarkably deft and speedy— a point that is often overlooked when the dreary mistakes of the Fredericksburg campaign are recounted. Across the river Lee had hardly more than a corporal's guard—a couple of batteries of field artillery, a skimpy regiment of cavalry, and a few hundred infantrymen. Far upstream Jeb Stuart was scouting to learn whether the Yankees had in fact left Warrenton. A division from James Longstreet's corps, plus the army artillery reserve, was under orders to march from Culpeper to Fredericksburg, but it would not show up for several days. Jackson and his half of the army had not yet left the Shenandoah Valley. The way was open. Sumner's men could wade the river, the rest of the army could cross the river on the pontoon bridges at Fredericksburg, ample supplies could be carried across in the wagons, and Lee's army would find itself neatly outflanked.

Thus it was not at all a bad program which Burnside had mapped out. Its execution, however, depended on the immediate appearance, on the Yankee side of the river opposite Fredericksburg, of several dozens of the clumsy wooden scows with which the army built its pontoon bridges. And these scows were not there, nor did it appear that they were anywhere else where a harassed army commander could quickly get hold of them. In the entire military hierarchy, from general-in-chief down to humblest private, nobody seemed to know exactly where these scows were, except for a weary regiment of volunteer engineer troops, and these lads—wrestling personally with the ungainly things scores of miles from the spot where Burnside's army was waiting—had no idea that anybody in particular wanted them or that there was any especial hurry about anything.

No pontoons, no bridges; no bridges, no crossing of the river. The equation, to Burnside, seemed complete. A gambler might have felt otherwise, might have sent Sumner and his advance guard across at once, trusting that the old man could hold his position and feed his men until the missing pontoons did show up. But it would have taken a gambler to order it. It was beginning to rain. A late November rain is apt to be a long one, and the Rappahannock is quite capable of rising six feet in twenty-four hours when the rain comes down. If Sumner's forty thousand crossed and the Rappahannock did rise, the fords would cease to be fords, Sumner could neither be supplied, reinforced, nor withdrawn, and Lee might well find himself in position to destroy a solid third of the Union Army. It seemed to Burnside that, having moved his army here in lawful expectation of pontoons, he could do nothing now but sit down by the waters as hopefully as might be and wait for them.
⁷

In which posture, then, he paused by the river, not looking his best but definitely more sinned against than sinning. He waited because other men had failed and because he himself, decent, amiable man, could not conjure up the storm that would blow slackness and incompetence out of the channels of command. The general waited and the army waited, and on the opposite shore the Army of Northern Virginia began to assemble in all of its strength, and it waited likewise. What could once have been done with ease became presently a matter of great danger and difficulty. The overdue pontoon train which was the cause of all of this delay moved down from the upper Potomac like a bewildered snail, the men who were directly responsible for it doing their best but making little progress.

These bridge tenders belonged to the 50th New York Engineers, one of the few volunteer sapper regiments in the army. The 50th New York had had the boats, balks, planks, wagons, and other equipment some fifty miles northwest of Washington, and just now it was this regiment's singular fate to epitomize the way in which things went wrong in this army.