Glory Road (41 page)

It was not going to be easy, either. Lee's men were at their peak. Chancellorsville may have been a delusive victory, yet it had seemed to confirm their jubilant feeling (and Lee's feeling, too, that strong gray man who never once let emotion run away with him) that there was no enemy anywhere whom they could not lick. Jackson was gone, but Longstreet was back, and a division commanded by one George Pickett was beginning the long hike northward to keep a certain engagement that was written, perhaps, in the Doomsday Book. Lee's army was beginning to move northward, and its men stepped off the miles as if they had heard the bell of destiny ringing for them.

In the Army of the Potomac there was no such jubilation. The army had little room for either elation or despondency any more. It had mostly a grim antic humor and a deep hard-bought toughness, and although it would unfurl the colors, strike up the band, and march in step when it passed through a town, it slouched along most of the time without parade or display, hiding whatever it most relied upon under an irreverent and derisive spirit. While it still kept to its camps around Falmouth there was an exchange of prisoners, and there were returned to the army men who had spent months in Southern prison camps, skinny, tattered men who were dirty beyond anything anyone had ever heard of. One of these rejoined his outfit, drew a neat new pile of clothing, and invited his squad to go down to the river with him and scrub the dirt off him—there was so much of it, and it had been there so long, that he was sure he could never do much with it himself. So his friends went down to the river, and everybody stripped and got into the water. The men went to work on him with soap and scrubbing brushes, while his miserable discarded rags went floating off downstream. At last one of the scrubbers wiped away a mound of lather with a sweep of his brush, peered closely at the ex-prisoner's torso, and announced flatly that something was wrong with his skin. The other men looked more closely, agreed, scrubbed some more, and discovered suddenly that the man still wore his undershirt.

The ex-prisoner expressed great pleasure and surprise at this discovery. He had thought, he said, that that undershirt had been lost six months ago, and it was a comfort to him to know that he still had it. As they peeled it off and cast it adrift he asked to be allowed to keep it for a souvenir, but the men hooted loudly and refused to hear of it. . . .
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Rumors of the Confederate movement reached camp, and Hooker sent his cavalry up the Rappahannock under orders to cross over and, if possible, see what the Rebels thought they were up to.

Pleasonton had the cavalry now—a stylish little soldier with a pert straw hat and kid gloves and a shifty eye—and he was more of a cavalryman than Stoneman had been, though he was a long way from being Phil Sheridan. His reports were better than his battles, and he gained fame that way. There were those who noticed that he was a good deal of a headquarters operator, but he had close to ten thousand mounted men at his command, and they had learned how to ride and shoot, and in spite of Chancellorsville their morale was high. Pleasonton had some good subordinates, too, most notably a brigadier named John Buford, a solid man who was hard to frighten and who was greatly admired by the men of his division. There were others: harum-scarum Judson Kilpatrick, for instance, a lanky little man with stringy side whiskers; a fantastic, mustachioed soldier of fortune, Sir Percy Wyndham from England and the Continent; and a flamboyant hell-for-leather horseman named George Armstrong Custer, who possessed the great basic virtue of liking to fight. All in all, the cavalry corps now was a different outfit from the clumsy, lumbering conglomeration which had been wearing out good horses on Virginia roads earlier in the war.
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Pleasonton got his men down to the upper fords of the Rappahannock all unnoticed, and in the mist of an early dawn on June 9 he sent them down to the river to cross with a whoop and a wild splashing gallop. They promptly crumpled up the Confederate outpost line and went careening up from the riverside toward the open fields and knolls around Brandy Station, where Stuart had just been reviewing his own cavalry.

What followed was the biggest cavalry fight of the war—a wild, confused action in which cavalry charged cavalry with sabers swinging, dust clouds rising so thickly that it was hard to tell friend from enemy, and the rule was to cut hard at the nearest face and ride on fast. For once in his life Stuart was taken by surprise. A vicious fire fight developed in the meadows near a little country church, where dismounted troopers of the 8th Illinois Cavalry fired their carbines so fast that some of the weapons burst, and a flanking column went thundering up a side road and came within an inch of capturing Fleetwood Hill, where Stuart had his headquarters tents. In the final nick of time Stuart got his squadrons back, and there were charge and countercharge all up and down the Fleetwood slopes, Confederate troopers riding through a battery of Yankee horse artillery and cutting down the gunners, and the air was full of dust and the thunder of pounding hoofs and the clang of steel and the sickening sound of head-long columns crashing bodily into one another.

By the narrowest margin Stuart's men he
ld the hill. One of Pleason
ton's columns went astray somehow and did not get into action, and scouts notified Pleasonton that gray infantry was showing itself around Brandy Station, which made him feel that there might be such a thing as going too far. In the end, the Yankee cavalry rode back to the river and went back where it came from, the corps as a whole having left approximately ten per cent of its members behind as casualties. Among these, shot dead from his saddle in the first yelling charge up from the
riverbank, was Mississippi-born
Grimes Davis, who had shown a great knack for making rowdy volunteers take regular-army discipline and like it, and who had begun to look like one of the army's most promising cavalry officers.

This fight was not without effect. The Federal cavalry had finally been beaten and had had to withdraw, but it had at last stood up to the Rebel cavalry in open combat, and the men were immensely pleased with themselves. A Confederate critic remarked ruefully of this battle that "it
made
the Federal cavalry," and a New York private said gleefully that "the Rebels were going to have a review of their cavalry on that day, but our boys reviewed them." This soldier could not understand why the Yankee troopers had been withdrawn after what he considered a winning fight, but he concluded hopefully that "the head officers knew all about it." A Massachusetts major, after admitting that "there was more fighting than generalship," added that the Rebels here "lost their prestige and never recovered it."
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That may have been overstating the case a bit, but the cavalry had reason to feel proud. By and large, the Yankee troopers were men who had come up the hard way. They had learned a good deal on the way up, much of it at the hands of their enemies. Gone were the fancy uniforms and the cumbersome equipment provided for by old-army regulations—light blue trousers, dark blue waist-length jacket with brass scales on the shoulder, the whole topped with what one man recalled as "a predacious-looking hat with yellow cord." This struck the men as overfancy, and anyhow, after an hour on the road in dry weather everybody got so dusty that nobody could tell what they were wearing, and by now most of the men had provided themselves with plain infantry pants and tunic and forage cap. They generally managed to buy or steal great piratical boots, into which they stuffed their pants legs, with a revolver tucked into the right-leg boot along with the pants.
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They were beginning to discover that the revolver was a better weapon than the traditional saber. The handgun furnished cavalry at the start of the war was just about useless—a cumbersome museum piece known as a dragoon pistol, a muzzle-loader a foot long with a ramrod swiveled on the under side of the barrel. It kicked so hard that the man using it was in nearly as much danger as the man he was shooting at, and it had such a hard trigger puU that one cavalryman insisted that if a man shot at an enemy in battle, "by the time his pistol was discharged he was liable to be shooting at the men in his own regiment." This man added that "it was never wise to choose for a mark anything smaller than a good-sized barn."
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In the course of time the army replaced these miserable weapons with up-to-date revolvers, with which the men felt much more at home than they felt with sabers. These latter were supposed to be carried at all times in scabbards which dangled from a man's waist belt, but the metal scabbard and its rings jingled and made a lot of noise, and the weapon was just a nuisance to a man on foot. So the average trooper simply lashed his scabbard firmly to the near side of the saddle, nearly parallel to the horse's body, so that his left leg was over it when he was on his horse. That way he did not have to bother with it when on foot, it stayed put and did no flopping or jangling when he was riding, and if he needed it he could draw it quickly enough. Left to himself, though, he usually preferred to use his revolver.

Most cavalrymen were notorious foragers, not to say thieves, if only because the possession of a horse enabled them to carry more booty and make a quicker getaway than were possible for a foot soldier. As a general thing they found an easy rationalization for their marauding. A slightly prejudiced Illinois trooper wrote of the luckless Virginia farmers: "These simple people seemed to think that they could send their sons into the Rebel army to destroy our country and murder our soldiers, and that we would not only protect them but spend our time in guarding their chicken roosts, pigpens, and beehives. But they soon learned that Western soldiers came for other purposes." The cavalry tradition stipulated that a good trooper was a good provider, having forage for his horse even when government issue failed and, for the matter of that, having occasionally a new horse as well. When a cavalry regiment camped in a hitherto untrodden part of the country, it invariably happened that certain of the men would show up with new horses, and if an officer made inquiries it is recorded that he generally got "an irrelevant answer." A farmer would come in, as likely as not, to make complaint and would be invited to look over the picket rope and claim his horse if he could see it. That rarely did much good. As one veteran put it: "It was odd how a little art would change a horse's appearance so that his own dam would not know him, let alone owner or breeder. . . . With a pair of scissors, a very nice imitation of a brand would be made to appear on shoulder or hip. A little hair dye would remove all white marks, and the same scissors would so change mane and tail as to make the animal unrecognizable. . . , Almost any change in appearance or gait could be produced at short notice by the cunning trooper."
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Once in a blue moon a lucky cavalry outfit could loot by official order rather than in defiance of the rules. After the Brandy Station fight the army prepared to move, and as a security measure headquarters ordered all sutlers to leave the army. Here and there a sutler would evade the order, trusting to luck that he could move along by unused side roads and keep within shopping distance of the bivouacs without drawing the attention of the provost marshal. On the move up from the river one sutler miscalculated disastrously and met a whole column of cavalry while he was plodding along a narrow lane which he had thought the army would not use. Cavalry jangled to a halt because the sutler's wagon blocked the entire lane, and in a few moments an officer of the provost guard came trotting up to see what the trouble was. He took the situation in at a glance and wasted no words on the sutler. Instead he raised his voice and called to the head of the c
olumn: "What regiment is that?"
First Massachusetts Cavalry, he was told. "Well, 1st Massachusetts Cavalry," he cried, pointing to the wagon, "go through that sutler!" The troopers came on with a whoop, and one of them asserted that in less than fifteen minutes "the contents of that wagon were distributed through the whole length of the regiment."
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Aside from lifting cavalry morale, the fight at Brandy Station had one other effect. The glimpse which had been obtained of Confederate infantry so far upstream persuaded Hooker that Lee was beginning to move around the Federal right flank, presumably by way of the Shenandoah Valley but possibly on a narrower arc, and he alerted his army for a countermove. It struck him that if Lee was moving north and west the thing for the Army of the Potomac to do was either to pitch into the Confederate rear or to march straight for Richmond, but Washington overruled him: Lee's army was his objective and the protection of Washington was his responsibUity, and he had better go where Lee went and stay between him and the capital.

This made Hooker grumpy. Herman Haupt went to him a few days after Brandy Station to ask what the next move was to be, and he found Hooker in a very bad humor. Hooker said that he had no plans: he had made various suggestions and they had been turned down; from now on he would do nothing except what he was ordered to do, and if trouble came of it, it would not be his fault. Haupt did not care a great deal for this attitude and eventually he told Halleck about it. Meanwhile Hooker unbent a bit and by mid-June orders went out to evacuate the great supply bases at Aquia Creek and Belle Plain and start the army north.
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(Haupt noted that the order to evacuate a base, with the consequent destruction of many supplies, was always welcomed by quartermaster and commissary officers, because such a move automatically settled the deficiencies in everybody's accounts.)