Mr Lincoln's Army (5 page)

The road led straight ahead, like a white
dusty arrow, and General Gibbon trotted on in advance to the top of a little
rise, where he pulled up to see if he could see anything of the leading
brigade. It had vanished, and Gibbon glanced off to the west, to the left of
the road. The ground was more or less open there, and it rose in a long, gentle
slope; and as Gibbon looked he saw several slim columns of horse—roving
cavalry, most likely, he told himself—come trotting out of a grove on the
hillside, half a mile away. He was just beginning to speculate whether this
cavalry was Federal or Confederate when all the little columns swerved
simultaneously, presenting their flanks. At sight of this familiar maneuver
something clicked in the mind of this young general who had always been a
gunner: that wasn't cavalry at all, it was field artillery going into battery!

Gibbon sent an aide galloping back to the
rear of the column to bring up the brigade artillery—Battery B, 4th U.S., the
one Gibbon himself had commanded before he became a brigadier of infantry.

The
aide had hardly started when six shells came screaming over the road, to burst
in the woods off to the right. The colonels of the four infantry regiments,
without waiting for orders, swung their men into line facing to the west and
got them off the road and had them lie down under cover of a low bank. Battery
B came clattering madly up the pike in a cloud of dust, while another salvo
from the hostile battery crashed into the treetops. As he cantered into a field
west of the road to post the guns Gibbon noticed with approval that his
soldiers, although they had been taken completely by surprise, did not seem to
be nervous. Perhaps half a dozen men, out of more than eighteen hundred
present, had scurried hastily off into the woods when the first shells came
over, but they were coming back now with shamefaced grins to rejoin their
comrades. Battery B came up, the men tore down a rail fence to make a gateway,
and the guns went lumbering into the field beside Gibbon, swinging around and
unlimbering with the sure precision of the regulars. In a moment counterbattery
fire had been opened.

Up
to this point nothing had been seen of the enemy but his six guns. The natural
supposition was that they were horse artillery attached to Jeb Stuart's
cavalry, engaged in cavalry's favorite practice of harassing infantry on the
march. The logical thing to do was to shake a line of infantry out to chase the
guns away, and this—after a quick study of the ground in front—Gibbon proceeded
to do. The 2nd Wisconsin and 19th Indiana moved forward from behind the
protecting bank, broke through a little belt of bushes and scrub trees, and
started out across the field to make the Rebel battery cease and desist. The
whole thing was done with earnest care, just as it had been done on the drill
ground so many times: colonel and lieutenant colonel of each regiment full of
business, carefully sighting the lines of direction, sending guides forward,
fussing mightily about alignment, trying their level best to do it all
regular-army style—doing it just a little self-consciously, one gathers,
because General Gibbon came riding over from the guns to watch, and the
general was a regular, and this was the first time under fire. The lines were
formed presently and the men went forward, a fringe of skirmishers in advance,
and they came to the top of a low ridge. The Confederate artillery suddenly
ceased firing, and a line of gray-clad skirmishers rose from the grass in front
of the guns and began a pop-pop of small-arms fire.

Then,
from the woods beyond, a great mass of Confederate infantry emerged, coming
down the slope to give the Westerners their first trial by combat, red battle
flags with the starred blue cross snapping in the evening breeze—Stonewall Jackson's
men, whose measured conviction it was that they could whip any number of
Yankees at any time and place, and whose record gave them tolerably good reason
for the belief.

And a long, tearing crackle of musketry broke
over the shadowed field, and the Wisconsin and Indiana boys learned what it was
like to fight. Gibbon, who had thought he was quelling impudent horse
artillery, went spurring back to bring up his other two regiments, couriers
galloped down the road to ask for help from the other brigades, and presently
the 6th Wisconsin came up to take position at the right of the line. Many years
later its colonel recalled with pride the military precision with which his
regiment deployed for action under fire. Gibbon threw the 7th Wisconsin in
where the 2nd was fighting, and the battle was on.

It
was a strange battle—a straightaway,- slam-bang, stand-up fight with no
subtleties and no maneuvering, no advancing and no retreating. Some of the
Confederates found cover around a little farmhouse, and the 6th Wisconsin got
some protection because the ground sagged in an almost imperceptible little
hollow right where it was posted, so that most of the bullets that came its way
went overhead. But for the most part the men did not seek cover—did not even
lie down on the ground, which was the way many fire fights took place in those
days, but simply stood facing each other in even, orderly ranks, as if they
were on parade awaiting inspection, and volleyed away at the murderous range of
less than one hundred yards.

On the right, Battery B fired rapidly and
accurately, and some other brigade had brought another battery into action off
on the left, and before long General Doubleday sent up the 56th Pennsylvania
and the 76th New York—virgin regiments, like those of Gibbon—to join in the
fight; and this amazing combat of two dress-parade battle lines at point-blank
range sent its echoes resounding across the Manassas plain, while a dense cloud
of acrid smoke went rolling up the evening sky. Years later General Gibbon remarked
that he heard, that evening, the heaviest musket fire he heard during the
entire war.

The
fight lasted for an hour and a half. When it ended both sides were exactly
where they were when it began, except that a Confederate brigade which tried a
flanking movement around the Federal right had got tangled up in a ravine full
of underbrush, in the smoky dusk, and couldn't find its way out, while the 19th
Indiana had been edged off to the left rear to cope with what looked like a
flank attack from that direction. Gibbon was proud of the way his Hoosiers managed
this maneuver while under fire. Toward evening, with the Confederate
fieldpieces out of action, Stuart's incredible artillerist, John Pelham,
brought a section of guns up to within seventy paces of Gibbon's line and
opened fire, without any visible effect whatever except to add to the total of
killed and maimed.

Night came at last, mercifully, and put
an end to it, the rival battle lines slowly drew apart, and, as General Gibbon
wrote, "everything except the groans of the wounded quieted down."
The Black Hat boys could call themselves veterans now; they had had their
baptism of fire—baptism by total immersion, one might say. The 2nd Wisconsin—which,
over the length of the war, was to win the terrible distinction of having a
higher percentage of its total enrollment killed in action than any other
regiment in the United States Army—had taken 500 men into this fight and left
298 of them dead or wounded on the field; it got a leg on the record that
evening. The 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana had lost nearly as heavily. The
6th Wisconsin had been lucky by comparison, losing 72 men out of 504 engaged. A
regimental historian wrote later that to the end of the war this brigade was
always ready for action, "but we were never again eager."

All in all, more than a third of the Federal
soldiers who went into action that evening had been shot. Over on the
Confederate side, though the Federals didn't know it at the time, the story was
about the same. The famous Stonewall brigade had lost 33 per cent of its
numbers, the 21st Georgia had lost 173 out of 242 in action, and two division
commanders had gone down, one of them the famous General Dick Ewell. Next
morning one of Jeb Stuart's staff officers came out to take a casual look at
the scene of action. "The lines were well marked by the dark rows of
bodies stretched out on the broom-sedge field, lying just where they had
fallen, with their heels on a well-defined line," he wrote. "The
bodies lay in so straight a line that they looked like troops lying down to
rest. On each front the edge was sharply defined, while towards the rear it was
less so. Showing how men had staggered backward after receiving their death
blow."
⁵

The Federals drew a line of battle in the
woods next to the turnpike, sent out parties to bring in as many of the
wounded as possible, established crude field hospitals under the trees, and in
general tried to catch their breath. A staff officer, coming up the pike from
the rear, found a campfire blazing in the road, with the generals grouped
around it, staff officers seated outside the inner circle, orderlies holding
the reins of saddled horses still farther out, the firelight gleaming on tanned
faces, a ribbon of wood smoke climbing up out of the glow to disappear in the
arching branches above. The brigadiers were assembled and the division
commander, General King, who had been taken ill that afternoon and had had to
seek shelter back at Gainesville and so had not been present during the fight,
came up to join them, weak and pale. His division was part of McDowell's corps,
but nobody could find McDowell, who had ridden off in mid-afternoon to seek
General John Pope in the vicinity of Manassas and who, it developed later, had
got completely lost in the woods and found neither Pope nor anyone else until
the next day. Since neither King nor McDowell had been around while the
fighting was going on, the battle had really been fought under nobody's
direction—except Gibbon's, and he was responsible only for his own brigade. Now
that the generals were in council nobody knew quite what to do, for King's
original orders were to march to Centreville, and it was painfully obvious that
before he could do that he would have to drive Stonewall Jackson out of the
way, which was clearly too much of a task for any single division.

In the end it was agreed that the command had
better withdraw in the direction of Manassas Junction, which lay several miles
to the east, and it was so ordered. Sometime after midnight the tired troops
withdrew and tramped silently off down a country road in the blackness, all
the gay banter of their earlier marches quite forgotten; and in a cloudy dawn
they dropped down in a field near Manassas to get a little sleep, while the
staff hurried off to try to find Pope, McDowell, or somebody who could tell
them what the brigade was supposed to do next.

The soldiers didn't get much sleep. Orders
came in presently: Fitz-John Porter and his V Corps from the Army of the
Potomac were coming up and would be backtracking along the road toward Gainesville,
and King's division—now commanded by General John Hatch, for King's illness had
put him out—would go with them. So the men drew up in marching order by the
roadside, and pretty soon the head of Porter's corps came along, marching with
an indefinable swagger even in the informal route step of the cross-country
hike, and the young Westerners cheered mightily in boyish hero worship—this was
the Army of the Potomac, these were veterans of the fabulous fighting around
Richmond, McClellan's men were joining Pope's, and everything would be all
right now.

Porter's men received the cheers with high
disdain. They included a solid division of regulars, plus some volunteer
regiments which had acquired much esprit de corps, which means that they looked
down on practically all soldiers who did not belong to their own outfit. They
had taken the worst the Confederates had to give at Gaines's Mill, and at
Malvern Hill they had seen the furious Southern assault waves break up in a
swirling foam of bloody repulse on the hard rock of massed artillery and rifle
fire, and their immeasurable contempt for John Pope was quite broad enough to
include all of his troops. They called out loftily: "Get out of the way,
straw-feet—we're going to go up to show you how to fight."
("Straw-foot" was the Civil War term for rookie. The idea was that
some of the new recruits were of such fantastic greenness that they did not
know the left foot from the right and hence could not be taught to keep time
properly or to step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. The drill
sergeants, in desperation, had finally realized that these green country lads
did at least know hay from straw and so had tied wisps of hay to the left foot
and straw to the right foot and marched them off to the chant of
"Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot." Hence: straw-foot—
rookie, especially a dumb rookie.) Gibbon's boys were hurt—after last evening
they felt entitled to join any brotherhood whose entry fee was courage under
fire—and they yelled back: "Wait until you've been where we've
been—that'll take some of the slack out of your pantaloons"; but they
still admired those hard veterans and were glad to be with them. After a while
they swung into column and followed the V Corps along the road, heading back
toward what they had just marched away from—perfectly ready to fight again, but
not hankering for it any longer.

3.
You Must Never Be Frightened

If any of Gibbon's boys had had the
speculative bent to sit down and figure out just what their prodigious valor
had bought for the Union cause, a most dismaying fact would have come to light.
The chief result of that desperate fight in the meadow was that the befuddlement
of General John Pope became complete instead of only partial.