Mr Lincoln's Army (36 page)

He was not pure eccentricity, however, and
all that slouchiness was strictly confined to camp. In the field he was a
first-rate fighter who had commanded a brigade to the eminent satisfaction of
Phil Kearny and was now pleasing Bull Sumner, in whose corps he was. His men
liked him immensely; called him "Fighting Dick" and bragged that he
was the plainest general in the army. One private wrote that "he has good
common sense, a rare commodity apparently." The men recorded that when
they went into battle he would tell them to come on—"I won't ask you to go
anywhere I won't go myself." It was his division, incidentally, which
contained the irrepressible Barlow. Like so many of the successful generals in
that war, Richardson had resigned from the army in the 1850s; was a Detroit
businessman when war came, raised the 2nd Michigan Regiment, and won his
general's stars shortly thereafter.

There were others. Among them there was a
rising cavalry officer, Brigadier General John Buford, who had made first-rate
use of Pope's cavalry until Pope's incessant, jumpy countermarching wore out
horses and men alike. Buford was another of the plain-as-an-old-shoe soldiers;
wore corduroys tucked into cowhide boots, always had a big pipe and tobacco
pouch bulging his blouse pockets, and was beginning to show an ability to
persuade the clumsy horsemen of the Federal cavalry that they might yet face
Jeb Stuart's troopers on even terms. He had that streak of grimness the
radicals were unconsciously looking for. He once hanged a guerrilla, in a
neighborhood seething with secessionist sympathy, and left the body dangling
from the limb of a tree under a big sign: "This man to hang three days; he
who cuts him down before shall hang the remaining time." Also worth a passing
glance was the 5th New Hampshire's Colonel Cross: a tall, lean, rangy man with
reddish whiskers and a balding pate who had fought in the Mexican War and,
later, had held a commission in the Mexican Army; a man of rough and jocose
energy who had made his regiment one of the best combat units in the army and was
obviously in line for promotion.

And there were better-known men, like Meade,
with his naming temper, his sardonic smile, and his constant attention to
detail—woe to the regimental officer in his command who frittered away strength
by the unnecessary assignment of men to non-combat jobs; like Hancock, who
swore at his officers but always remembered their names and made them feel
somehow that they were intimate with him, and who had a fine fury in the hour
of action; like solid John Sedgwick, always cool and unruffled, who commanded a
division under Sumner, was known as "Uncle John" to his men, and
would one day command the army's most famous corps. They were there if one
looked for them, the kind of men who could use this army as it was meant to be
used.

But
the trouble was that the radicals had the wrong touchstone. Neither West Point
nor civilian life had failed: from both sources the driving, slashing, fighting
type of general was coming up, and in the end the war would be grim enough to
satisfy Ben Wade and his whole committee. But the men who were going to make it
grim—to drive for the enemy relentlessly, grinding up his strength in pitiless
combat and forcing victory no matter who got hurt—were not going to be the kind
of men whose political beliefs would please the Con-duct-of-the-War
inquisitors. Take the list of Union officers who were in the key positions when
the war was finally won—Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Meade: not an
abolitionist in the lot, not a man who began the war with any particular animus
against slavery.

And
it was not just by accident that these men were so long in being called to the
top spots. The radical bloc, demanding the kind of warfare which only such men
could provide, was actually making it harder for the administration to find
these men and use them: for it was providing an ideological qualification for
purely professional jobs, and instead of inquiring about men's competence it
was asking about their loyalty. The Army of Northern Virginia was able to find
its best men quickly and it was able to use them once it found them; with all
his problems, Jefferson Davis did not have to fight his war and run his country
in the midst of a witch hunt. If the dominant leaders in the Confederate
Congress—the men who had created and shaped the war party in the South—had
worked night and day to keep the army out of the hands of General Lee, on the
ground that Lee had not supported secession before Fort Sumter was fired on and
hence must be a disloyal person, the story of the war in the Virginia theater
would have been considerably different.

One
thing must be said for the radicals. They believed their own gospel, down to
the last inspired word. And during the weeks after Pope's inglorious defeat
they suffered an agonizing extreme of suspense and gloom. They had had their
way and nothing had worked out right. Pope was a hard-war man and he was also
thoroughly "loyal" by their standards; but he was used up now, no
pressure of politics could save him, and he was under orders to go back into
obscurity in the Northwest, far from the Rebel generals whose minds he could
not read. He was complaining enough about it, those days, bombarding Halleck with
angry letters, reminding Halleck that he was under certain obligations to him,
making veiled, ugly threats of political reprisal. There was some secret
between the two men, and Pope was trying to let Halleck know that he would not
be above telling it, if he had to, to re-establish himself. Whatever hold he
might have thought he held over the general-in-chief, he at last let it go
loose. But before departing he created one last, festering sore to plague the
army. He filed formal charges against several generals, including chiefly
Fitz-John Porter, alleging disobedience of orders at Bull Run and angrily
claiming that a conspiracy of generals had foully done the North out of an
overwhelming victory. With McClellan back in command, Porter had protection,
and the charges were held in abeyance; if McClellan should ever leave the army,

Porter
would be at the mercy of every force in Washington that was hunting for a
scapegoat.

The record of that first fortnight in
September makes fantastic reading, showing, as it does, enough ill will and
all-round distrust afloat in Washington to lose any war. The Union cause had
reached low-water mark for the war, and the infection in its central nervous
system had all but induced complete paralysis. Lee was invading Maryland with
an army so exhausted, ragged, and ill-equipped that by any ordinary standard it
ought to have gone back to some rest camp for a couple of months' refit. But
Lee knew what he was fighting against just then, and if his daring in
beginning an invasion with a worn-out army can be explained only by the
assumption that he held his opponents in supreme contempt, there were ample
grounds to justify such a feeling.

The
Federal mainspring had run down. That will-o'-the-wisp of the Confederacy,
foreign intervention, was on the verge of coming true. The Prime Minister of
Great Britain, having compared notes with the Foreign Secretary, was getting
ready to propose to the British Cabinet that England take the lead in inducing
a concert of powers to step in and bring the Civil War to an end—which, of
course, could only mean independence for the Confederacy. The Foreign Minister,
agreeing, added that if such a concert of powers could not be arranged, England
ought to go ahead on its own hook, granting full recognition to the South. The
two men were waiting now to see how the invasion of Maryland turned out before
taking final action.

At home the belief in victory had faded. As
fine a soldier as General John Sedgwick had given up hope and had accepted the
idea of two separate nations, North and South. On September 4 he was writing to
his sister: "I am in despair of our seeing a termination of the war until
some great change is made. On our part it has been a war of politicians; on
theirs [the Confederacy's] it has been one conducted by a despot and carried
out by able generals. I look upon a division as certain; the only question is
where the line is to run. No one would have dared to think of this a few weeks
since, but it is in the mouths of many now."
⁵

In the White House, Lincoln had finally come
to see that the war could not be carried on any longer as a simple fight to
re-establish the Union. There had to be a broader base: the fight had to be
pinned to a
cause,
something
that would change the entire emotional climate, both at home and abroad,
turning the deep vitality of the radical group into an asset rather than a
liability, making foreign intervention impossible no matter what military
setback might take place on the hills of Maryland or Pennsylvania. There was
but one step possible: the war had to become a war for human freedom, a war to
end slavery. Otherwise it was lost. So he had in his desk the draft of the
Emancipation Proclamation—that amazing document which is at once the weakest
and the strongest of all America's state papers.

But as things stood just then he could
not issue it. Seward had warned him: Put that out now, when we have been
defeated and our armies are in retreat, and it will look like a shriek of
despair—not an attempt by us to help the black race, but an appeal to the black
race to help us. We must have a victory first.

And Seward was right. The paper lay folded in
a pigeonhole. The war could not be won without it, but it could not be issued
until a victory had been won. And the rival armies now were drifting up through
Maryland, eying each other like two boxers circling in the ring, jabbing
tentatively with cavalry, looking for the opening.

It was all up to the army, then. Leadership
had failed and chances had been missed, and the climax was here; the
bewildered, homesick boys with muskets on their shoulders would finally have
to say which way American history henceforth would go. They knew none of these
things. They were quite "unindoctrinated," for none of the oratory
and the lofty war talk had prepared them for this. All they knew was that there
was going to be a big fight pretty soon, and most of the time they tried not to
think about it. They had the general they wanted, and they seemed to be back
among their own kind of folks, and maybe this time it would work out all right.

FIVE

Opportunity
Knocks Three
Times

1.
At Daybreak in the Morning

The
27th Indiana never forgot that day at Frederick. The day didn't especially
stand out at the time, except for the welcome the townspeople gave, with the
fruit and the ice water and the pretty girls waving flags; but afterward the
soldiers built it up and made many stories about it, and almost everybody
claimed to have been in on it, or to have seen it, or at least to have known
about it. It was a Big Thing, as army talk had it, and it all began right in
the middle of this Hoosier regiment.

The army got to Frederick on the twelfth of
September, the mounted patrols going into town from the east just as the last
of Wade Hampton's cavalry went out of it to the west, with a fine rackety-spat
of flying hoofs on the turnpike and stray shots from carbines nipping through
the orchards and the front-yard flower gardens. The 27th Indiana was pushed
through in a long skirmish line next morning, and when it got to an empty field
a courier rode up from the rear with orders from corps headquarters: stack arms
in the field, put pickets out, and stand by for a while. The men broke

ranks, and most of them sauntered about to
find bits of wood to boil coffee.

It was a nice morning, and it wasn't too
warm, and the men took it easy. The field had been a Rebel camping ground a few
days before, and the boys didn't especially like that. It was never too
pleasant to occupy a spot where the enemy had just camped, as departing armies
weren't too tidy about picking up the litter they had made, and the ground was
apt to be messy. Still, this was a big field, and the rest was good, and the
men drank their coffee and lit their pipes and talked about nothing much; and
two lounging non-coms suddenly became very important men. Corporal Barton W.
Mitchell of Company E lay at full length chinning with his pal, First Sergeant
John McKnight Bloss. A few feet away, half hidden in the tall, trampled grass,
was a long, bulky-looking envelope. The two men stared at it idly for a while,
lazily wondering who dropped it there and what might be in it, until at last
Mitchell's curiosity got the better of him and he rolled over, stretched out
one arm, and picked it up. It was unsealed, and it contained a long paper,
covered with writing, wrapped around three cigars.

Three
cigars were a find, any day. They appeared to be fresh, and the two soldiers
began to feel in their pockets for matches. As they did so, Mitchell's
curiosity—which, by one of the stupendous oddities of war, was that day the
Republic's greatest asset—gave him another dig, and he uncrinkled the paper
that had been folded around the cigars and took a lazy look at it. As he looked
he forgot about the matches and nudged the sergeant: hey, would you take a look
at this?