Mr Lincoln's Army (6 page)

General Pope had been having his troubles for
some time. He had not been entirely sure where his own army was, and he had not
in the least known where the enemy was, and he had been frantically trying to
use the one to find the other. For several days he had been holding the line of
the Rappahannock, guarding the fords, dueling with his artillery whenever Rebel
forces showed themselves on the far side of the river, sending his cavalry
dashing about with vast energy, and he had about concluded that a great battle
would be fought soon in the vicinity of Warrenton. It would be a desperate
encounter, because he was outnumbered, or at least believed that he was. As he
understood the top strategy in Washington, he was supposed to hold the line at
all costs until McClellan's army could join him, whereupon General Halleck
would ride down from Washington and take active command in the field of both
Pope and his troops and McClellan and his—Pope and McClellan then becoming, as
Pope believed, wing commanders under the general-in-chief.

Pope was deceived in this belief: the last
thing Halleck wanted was to command troops in the field against Robert E. Lee;
but at the moment no one but Halleck knew this. So on August 26 Pope had been
drawing his forces together near Warrenton, spattering the landscape with
galloping couriers, as he called outlying divisions to his rendezvous. From
McClellan's army, grumpily returning from the peninsula, Fitz-John Porter and
the V Corps were coming up the river from Fredericksburg, and General Ambrose
Burnside and the IX Corps had landed at Aquia Creek and presumably were making
their way to him overland, while the rest of McClellan's men were coming in via
Alexandria. A few days more and the reunion would be complete and the
responsibility would pass from his shoulders.

But
then things started to happen. First Stonewall Jackson disappeared from Pope's
front. He was detected marching off to the northwest, and it seemed likely he
was heading for his old haunts in the Shenandoah Valley, but on second thought
Pope considered a flank attack on his lines at Warrenton probable, and he sent
out new orders to hurry the concentration. Then, after dark, the telegraph wire
to Washington went dead, and it appeared that Confederate cavalry was up to its
old trick of jumping the supply lines. Joe Hooker— who had at last caught his
train and got to the front—was ordered to take his division up the railroad and
attend to it. Next day it developed that it was Jackson, not cavalry, on the
supply line, and the tired couriers galloped off with new orders: concentration
at Gainesville, now, with the cavalry under Buford swinging west through
Thoroughfare Gap to see what had become of the rest of Lee's army. Toward
evening Hooker collided with Confederate infantry at Bristoe Station and chased
it north across Broad Run after a sharp fight, and orders were changed once
more: the army will concentrate at Manassas, Jackson has delivered himself into
our hands, and if we move fast we shall "bag the whole crowd."

Pope rode in haste to Bristoe, set out next
morning for Manassas, lost Jackson's trail, and changed orders still further:
concentrate at Centreville now, Jackson is somewhere near here, if we are alert
we can destroy him. And finally, late that night, Pope got news of the fight
Gibbon and Doubleday had stumbled into near Gainesville, and the picture became
very clear to him—or so he thought. Jackson, having raided the Union supply
depot, was trying desperately to get away. King's division had intercepted his
retreat and rebuffed him (as Pope conceived), and Jackson was caught squarely
between the two wings of the Union Army and could be crushed the very next day.
Pope sat down at Centreville, to which place he had by now gyrated, sent
jubilant messages to Washington, and made ready for his apotheosis: triumph,
confusion to the enemies of the Republic, and a brilliant demonstration that
Pope had the secret of victory which McClellan lacked.

The only trouble with this picture was that
it was completely false. Jackson was not trapped and he was not trying to get
away. On the contrary, he very much wanted to stay and fight, and while Pope's
troops had been countermarching so feverishly he had found a good position near
the old Bull Run battlefield, had established himself there, and had waited to
be discovered. Pope being quite unable to find him, Jackson had moved out to
give a prod to the first Union troops that came within reach—King's division—as
a means of calling attention to his whereabouts. Jackson's primary mission was
not simply to loot and destroy Pope's base of supplies, enjoyable though that
task had been. General Lee had determined that Pope must be beaten
("suppressed" was his contemptuous word for it) before all of
McClellan's army could join him, and he had reached out with the long, muscular
arm of Stonewall Jackson to pin the Northerner down on some good fighting
ground suitably remote from the Rappahannock. Now, with Pope rushing to fall
on Jackson, Lee was coming up with all speed. Pope, who believed himself to be
casting a cunning net, was walking straight into one.

The soldiers whom General Pope was bringing
up to Bull Run were by no means happy. Knowing nothing of the high strategy involved,
they were perfectly aware that they had been marched back and forth to no good
purpose for the better part of a week, and they had been around long enough to
understand that this meant the high command was confused and jittery. They had
outmarched their supplies, in all the confusion, and most of them were hungry,
and the shuttling back and forth, uphill and down dale, had brought many to the
point of exhaustion. The cavalry was deadbeat: some detachments came in from
outpost duty on foot, leading horses that were too worn to carry weight even at
a walk. The colonel of one regiment reported that his men had not had their
coats off for three weeks, and in many squadrons there were not half a dozen
men who could get their horses up to a trot.

To make things worse, what Pope was
commanding was not an army but simply a thrown-together collection of troops.
Technically, Pope's army—named, for its brief life, the Army of Virginia—consisted
of three army corps: those of Franz Sigel, Nathaniel P. Banks, and Irvin
McDowell. Sigel's men included a large number of German regiments—immigrants,
for the most part, who had had German army training and should have been
first-rate soldiers, but who somehow seemed to lose their effectiveness under
the loose discipline of the American volunteer army. They had originally
belonged to the famous but unmilitary General John Charles Fremont, who had
ingloriously led them to failure in the mountain country to the west. Their
morale was low, and Sigel was by no means the man who could pull them together.
Banks was a political general—a distinguished Massachusetts businessman and
politician, former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a man
who, by the strange custom of that war, was "entitled" to a major
general's commission because of his importance as a political leader and a
public figure. He was a good man and devoted to the cause, but he was no
soldier; up in the valley Stonewall Jackson had routed him and run rings around
him, and the Confederates had consumed his stores so regularly that they
derisively dubbed him "Old Jack's commissary general." He had
first-rate soldiers in his command—Easterners, mostly, with a fair number of
Ohioans and a sprinkling from Indiana and Wisconsin—and they would do well if
they ever got competent leadership.

McDowell was the only real soldier in
the group, and he commanded excellent troops. King's division, now led by
Hatch and later to go to Doubleday, contained some of the best soldiers in the
army, and John Reynolds led a solid division of Pennsylvanians, who were good
men under a good general. Ricketts, commanding the third division, had been an
artillerist at the first battle of Bull Run. His division included a number of
men who had fought well under poor leaders in the valley. All in all, this army
corps was basically as good as any in either army, but it suffered from the
fact that McDowell, a good man and a capable general, was one of those soldiers
born to bad luck. Nothing ever went right for him. The aura of failure, born of
that first fight at Bull Run, trailed after him. The men disliked him
violently—even a special hat which he had devised for his summer comfort, a
cool but rather weird-looking contrivance of bamboo and cloth, they chalked up
as a point against him—and for some unaccountable reason they widely believed
that he was in cahoots with the enemy. He and McClellan disliked each other,
and McClellan blamed him for not coming down from Fredericksburg to help him
during the Seven Days' fighting, although McDowell himself had protested
against the administration strategy that had held him north of the Rappahannock
and considered that his proper place was with the army on the Chickahominy.

Pope made McDowell his first lieutenant and leaned
on him heavily, but cursed him behind his back ("God damn McDowell! He's
never where I want him!" Pope had cried on the eve of the battle), and
Pope ignored him when McDowell gave him the advice that might have saved him
from the snare Lee and Jackson were setting. A staff officer in King's division
wrote after his first meeting with him: "I liked McDowell's looks; he
seemed to me strong, self-contained, ready for responsibility and able to
sustain it. I had yet to learn how much his too frequent forgetfulness of the
courtesy due even to a common soldier was to impair his usefulness and injure
his popularity."
¹
And a young officer of engineers who dined
with McDowell late in 1861 left the following appraisal:

"He was at that time in the full flush
of mature manhood, fully six feet tall, deep chested, strong limbed, clear
eyed, and in every respect a fine and impressive soldier, but at dinner he was
such a Gargantuan feeder and so absorbed in the dishes before him that he had
but little time for conversation. While he drank neither wine nor spirits, he
gobbled the larger part of every dish within reach, and wound up with an entire
watermelon, which he said was 'monstrous fine!' . . . As we rode back to the
city in the afternoon, McPherson"—later General James B. McPherson,
commander of the Army of the Tennessee—"and I discussed him freely, and,
allowing him every professional qualification, we agreed that no officer who
was so great a gourmand as he could by any chance prove to be a great and
successful leader of men."
²

That, then, was
Pope's army; some poor soldiers and some good ones, led by two corps commanders
who ought to have been back in civilian life and a third who had neither the
luck to win victories nor the touch to make men respond to his leadership. In
addition, Pope had received two army corps from the Army of the Potomac. One
was under the command of General S. P. Heintzelman, a stout old regular with an
engaging, knobby-cheeked face surmounted by a fuzz of whiskers. He had plenty
of energy—had gone up in one of the newfangled observation balloons on the
peninsula to see for himself what the enemy was up to; was blunt in speech,
with a nasal twang to his voice, and somehow just missed being an effective
corps commander. Heintzelman brought two of the best combat divisions in the
army with him. One was Joe Hooker's: Hooker was an intemperate man, in several
senses of the word, and he never got along with any of his superior officers,
but he at least liked to fight and had driving energy. The other division was
led by Phil Kearny, who was all flame and color and ardor, with a slim, twisted
streak of genius in him.

Kearny had probably
seen more fighting than any man on the field. He had served in Mexico as a
cavalry captain; had remarked, in youthful enthusiasm, that he would give an
arm to lead a cavalry charge against the foe. He got his wish, at the exact
price offered, a few days later, leading a wild gallop with flashing sabers and
losing his left arm. He once told his servant: "Never lose an arm; it
makes it too hard to put on a glove." When General Oliver Otis Howard lost
his right arm in the fighting at Seven Pines, Kearny visited him in hospital
and said consolingly: "General, I am sorry for it, but you must not mind
it: the ladies will not think the less of you." To which sobersides Howard
returned his one recorded wisecrack: "There is one thing we can do,
General; we can buy our gloves together." Kearny smiled gaily and cried,
"Sure enough," and the two men had shaken on it with the hands they
had left.

Kearny had served in the French Army in
Algiers and northern Italy and had fought at Magenta and Solferino. A French
officer wrote that Kearny "went under fire as on parade, with a smile on
his lips." It was reported that in some battle on the peninsula a colonel
whom he ordered forward into action asked him just where he should put his men
and received the reply: "Oh, anywhere, Colonel—you'll find lovely fighting
all along the line." Winfield Scott had called him "the bravest man I
ever saw, and a perfect soldier," and nobody who had followed him would
dispute the point. He hated McClellan and he hated Pope, and he had the knack
of making his troops feel that they were the finest soldiers on the planet. He
had invented the "Kearny patch," a red lozenge of flannel which every
man in his command wore on his cap, so that the outfit became known as the
"red diamond division" and wore its badge with vast pride. When a new
regiment joined the division, the soldiers looked on it with reserve until it
had proved its bravery in combat; then, a survivor wrote, they agreed that this
new regiment "was worthy of the red diamond division." Later in the
war Kearny's device was taken up at headquarters, and a special patch was made
for each army corps. The shoulder patches worn by American soldiers in
subsequent wars were direct descendants of Phil Kearny's morale builder.
³