Mr Lincoln's Army (9 page)

Next afternoon there was a wild, brief, and
bloody fight near the country house of Chantilly, with a mad, gusty wind and a
driving rain, and an overpowering thunderstorm which made so much noise that
the gunfire itself could not be heard at Centreville, three miles away. Jackson
was repulsed, and Phil Kearny—galloping through the dark wood with the
lightning gleaming on the wet leaves, his sword in his hand and the bridle
reins held in his teeth—rode smack into a line of Confederate infantry and was
shot to death. The Confederates took his dead body to a farmhouse and laid it
out with decent care, and A. P. Hill came to pay his tribute to the stout
warrior his men had killed. Lee later sent the body through the lines in an ambulance
under a flag of truce, "thinking that the possession of his remains may be
a consolation to his family." The boys of Kearny's battle-torn 3rd
Michigan Regiment wept unashamedly when they heard the news.

Also killed in this fight was General Isaac
Stevens, division commander under Reno: a little swarthy man who had come out
of West Point years earlier to be an engineer officer, left the army to become
governor of Washington Territory, and was beginning to be recognized as a
soldier of more than ordinary ability and promise.

This
fight might have developed into something fairly big if it had not been for the
storm. Pope had two fresh army corps at hand-Franklin's, and Sumner's, which
had arrived this day—and an opportunity to handle Jackson's men pretty roughly
appears to have been developing. But it was just naturally too stormy to fight
that evening. Most of the men's cartridges were wet ("If your guns won't
go off, neither will the enemy's," Jackson sternly told a brigadier who
wanted to leave the line), and the rain was coming into the men's faces so hard
they couldn't see each other, and anyway, Pope had finally been persuaded that
he was licked. So the armies drew apart, and the Federals evacuated the bleak
bivouac at Centreville—leaving fires burning smokily in the rain to deceive
lurking Rebels—and moved back toward the lines around Alexandria.

This was the final, formal admission that the
campaign had ended in flat failure. The rain kept coming down, the men knew
Phil Kearny was dead, and the mood of hopeless depression deepened.

The 55th New York, just up from the
peninsula—the same whose colonel, landing at Alexandria, had heard much talk of
treason—was sent up against the tide on some obscure mission requiring its presence
at Fairfax Courthouse. The colonel left his record of what they got into on the
day of the action at Chantilly:

"Soon the road became a mud hole, in
which one could with difficulty direct his steps by the flashes of lightning.
Disorder began to affect the ranks. The soldiers advanced painfully through the
sticky earth, from which they could hardly lift their feet. The middle of the road
was soon monopolized by an interminable file of wagons, retreating toward
Alexandria. Mingled with them were batteries of artillery, which, endeavoring
to pass by the wagons, blocked the road. The orders of officers, the cries of
the teamsters, the oaths of the soldiers, were mingled with peals of thunder.
All this produced a deafening tumult, in the midst of which it was difficult to
recognize each other, and from the confusion of which we could not free ourselves
without leaving behind us a large number of stragglers."

At Fairfax Courthouse it was a great deal
worse, and there was a miserable, rain-soaked confusion: "By the light of
the fires kindled all around in the streets, in the yards, in the fields, one
could see a confused mass of wagons, ambulances, caissons, around which thousands
of men invaded the houses, filled up the barns, broke down the fences, dug up
the gardens, cooked their suppers, smoked, or slept in the rain. These men
belonged to different corps. They were neither sick nor wounded; but, favored
by the disorder inseparable from defeat, they had left their regiments at
Centreville, to mingle with the train escorts, or had come away, each by
himself, hurried on by the fear of new combats; stragglers and marauders, a contemptible
multitude, whose sole desire was to flee from danger."

Nor was this the worst. What the colonel had
run into so far was simply what might be called the advance guard of the
retreat: the walking wounded, the fainthearts, and the honestly bewildered,
pushed ahead by the army as it made its own progress to the rear. Next day the
main body began to come through. During the daytime it was fairly orderly, but
when evening came everything seemed to disintegrate.

"Those
who for eight days had done nothing but march and fight were worn out with
fatigue," the colonel noted. "Everyone knew that the enemy was no
longer at our heels. No salutary fear kept them in the ranks and many gave way
to the temptation to take a few hours rest. They lighted great fires, whose
number became greater and greater, so that at a few leagues from Alexandria the
whole country appeared to be illuminated. There was everywhere along the road
the greatest confusion. Infantry and cavalry, artillery and wagons, all hurried
on pell mell, in the midst of rallying cries of officers and calls and oaths of
the men."
³

One-armed General Howard, rejoining the
troops after recovery from his wound just in time to take part in the retreat
after Chantilly, wrote dolefully: "Who will ever forget the straggling,
the mud, the rain, the terrible panic and loss of life from random firing, and
the hopeless feeling—almost despair—of that dreadful night march!"
⁴

An Irish private, clumping through the
mud, growled an all-inclusive complaint at the hardships of army life. A
comrade scoffed at him: "You're just sore because you aren't a general and
can't ride a horse."

"No," said the Irishman stoutly.
"It's because it's meself that is obliged to associate with such fools as
yourself and Gineral Pope."

An officer of Porter's regulars noted that
"everyone you met had an unwashed, sleepy, downcast aspect, and looked as
if he would like to hide his head somewhere from all the world." At each
halt men would drop by the road and fall sound asleep, and each time it became
harder and harder to rouse the men and get them to take their places in the
ranks when the march was resumed. Some stragglers were still trying
ineffectually to find their regiments; others had given up and were slouching
along without their weapons, neither knowing nor caring where their regiments
were. Men who went into bivouac around Fairfax Station found that the fields
had turned into marshes, although the rain, fortunately, had stopped at last.
Far away to the northwest there was heard the rumble of gunfire as some
collision of outposts brought isolated batteries into action. Closer at hand
Jeb Stuart's troopers were harassing the rear guard—Banks's corps, which had been
guarding stores at Bristoe Station during the Bull Run fight and which had been
ordered to destroy locomotives and cars, burn all supplies, and come hiking
back to Alexandria. It came up to take position in rear of the army, its
spirits sagging to zero. General George H. Gordon, commanding a brigade in this
corps, noted that when supplies were issued at Fairfax on September 2, the
divisions of Hooker and Kearny together drew only 5,000 rations. Between them
they had taken more than 10,000 men into action at Bull Run and had suffered a
joint total of 1,500 casualties; fully 3,500 men, then, had gone absent without
leave—and this from two of the crack divisions of the army. Gordon also noted
an Ohio cavalry regiment numbering just under 600 men which was short 448
horses.

In
all the accounts of this retreat there is a great deal about the mud, the
hunger, and the weariness of men who had marched and fought until they were
utterly exhausted. Yet those were not in fact the really important troubles. A
few miles away to the north and west, taking a day's rest in the fields near
the Potomac before striking across the river for further adventures, was Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia. It had marched just as far and just as hard, and
had gone just as hungry, and had fought just as much. In proportion it was even
beginning to suffer as much from straggling, owing to a complex of reasons
ranging all the way from lack of shoes to inability to understand the rationale
of invasion. But this army was light-hearted and full of enthusiasm. It was
well led and knew it, and it had absorbed the notion that there were no Yankees
anywhere whom it could not whip. While Pope was sadly wiring Halleck that
"there is an intense idea among [the troops] that they must get behind the
entrenchments," and one of Colonel Haupt's aides was sending back word
that "the volunteers are much demoralized and ready to stampede,"
the Confederates were looking ahead to new campaigns with high confidence.

It
wasn't hardships that had got the Federals down, although they had had
hardships and to spare. It was what had seeped down to the men in the ranks
from the hatred, suspicion, and confusion in high places, the wastage which the
men had seen for themselves and had themselves been a part of, the heart-numbing
realization that what ought to be the Republic's finest army had been
shockingly and irretrievably mishandled. The very best that ardent young
spirits could give of bravery and endurance had been given, and it had all been
to no purpose. Porter's men, teaching the straw-feet how to fight; Gibbon's
young Westerners, proving their manhood by standing up toe to toe with their
enemies until night came down to make fighting impossible; the Pennsylvanians
and the regulars and the Germans, hanging on in the dusk around the Henry House
Hill to keep open the last line of retreat—all of these had done as well as any
soldiers could do on any field, and all of them knew that it had been futile.
They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face
with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their
generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of
courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a
fool.

And then, at the last minute of despair, the
unbelievable happened.

The head of the leading column of the retreat
was coming in on the Fairfax road, near the forts on Munson's Hill, on the
afternoon of September 2. The sun had finally come out, and the roads had dried
enough so that a long, lazy cloud of dust hung in the air above the marching
men. Pope and McDowell rode in the lead, their uniforms gray with the dust,
their beards powdered. Their mounted staff officers and orderlies followed
them, and after a brief interval came Hatch's division with an endless
shuffle-shuffle of dragging feet, each man staring dully at the back of the man
in front, nobody saying a word. Out into the road ahead, coming toward them,
rode a little knot of horsemen, trotting forward confidentiy; the man in front
rode a great black horse and had a bright yellow sash about his waist and was
erect and dapper in the saddle, and as he came up to the two generals his hand
flipped up to the visor of his cap in a salute that had all the gaiety and snap
of the youthful, confident army these men had once been and had all but
forgotten. General Hatch, looking ahead, stiffened as he saw it—there was only
one man in the army who saluted in just that way—and he cantered ahead suddenly
to see and hear for himself. He got there just in time to listen as General
McClellan told Pope and McDowell that by order of the President he was assuming
command of the troops.