Terrible Swift Sword (58 page)

For a few hours it looked as if General
McClellan might spoil everything. On August 5 he sent an infantry division forward
to occupy Malvern Hill, a move which might easily be the first phase of a
massive advance on Richmond. Lee ordered out the troops and came down to give
battle if necessary, but he soon concluded that McClellan was just reconnoitering
and he calmly wrote to Jackson, "I have no idea that he will advance on
Richmond now." Jackson's own move, he added, looked sound, and he hoped
Jackson could attack Pope before long.
¹³
Lee's estimate of
McClellan's intentions was correct. After spending twenty-four hours surveying
the scene from Malvern Hill, the Federal column called in its skirmishers and
went back to Harrison's Landing.

Having
learned that Pope had posted two undersized divisions near the town of
Culpeper, Jackson marched north to pounce on this force before it could be
strengthened or withdrawn. He encountered it on August 9, drawn up along
a
little stream near a
hill known as Cedar Mountain, and perhaps it was reminiscent of the great days
in the Shenandoah Valley because these 8000 Federals were commanded by the
General Banks who had played such a large and unhappy role in the Valley
campaign. Banks had been beaten there, and now he must be beaten here; Jackson
immediately ordered an attack.

He
was just a little too immediate about it, as a matter of fact, because he
attacked before half of his men were in position, and Banks's soldiers put up
a stiff fight. They killed Brigadier General Charles S. Winder, who commanded
what was formerly Jackson's own division, caught his men off balance, and drove
the first Confederate assault back in disorder, routing the famous Stonewall
Brigade which had won General Jackson a nickname at Bull Run. But Jackson
rallied his men, brought up A. P. Hill's division, and late in the day launched
an overpowering assault that swept the field. Once again, Banks had to retreat;
Jackson followed him a short distance, found that Pope with most of his army
was not far away, and then withdrew behind the Rapidan. The battle meant
nothing in particular, except that it raised Confederate morale and further
depressed the Yankees; but it did give clear notice that a large part of Lee's
army was a long way from Richmond, and that a curious reversal of roles had
taken place. Until this moment the focal point for all of the military activity
in Virginia had been the city of Richmond; now it was the army of John Pope.
¹⁴
Lee was on the offensive.

Cedar Mountain was fought on August 9.
On August 13 Lee sent James Longstreet and 25,000 men away from Richmond to
Gordonsville, and two days later he departed for Gordonsville himself. He was
leaving fewer than 25,000 men to protect the capital—infallible sign that he
expected no trouble from General McClellan—and he was taking all the rest of
his army, between 50,000 and 55,000 men, up to the Rapidan River. He had called
his army the Army of Northern Virginia, and he was going to get it back to
northern Virginia no matter what. The Federals could perhaps stop him, but time
was running out on them; they had been prodigal of it all year, and they had
used up their surplus; now they must act with speed. Specifically, they could
keep Lee from doing what he intended to do—smash Pope and carry the war up to
the Maryland border—only if the Army of the Potomac moved faster than it had
ever moved before.

There is a might-have-been here. The
operation against Pope—the strategic combination which transferred the war from
the suburbs of Richmond to the environs of Washington —could have been broken
up late in July by a vigorous advance by the Army of the Potomac. No such
advance was made or seriously contemplated. On July 26, long after Jackson had
been detached, McClellan told Halleck that reinforcements were "pouring
into Richmond" and suggested that he should have Burnside's and Hunter's
men plus 20,000 fresh troops from the west so that he could renew his campaign.
Two days later he reported that this story about Confederate reinforcements had
been confirmed. Lee's plans would never be interrupted by a general whose grip
on reality was that infirm, and when McClellan finally realized what was happening
and (on August 12) asked permission to advance on Richmond it was too late.
¹⁵
His own orders to come north were more than
a
week
old; Washington had made up its mind. He might, just conceivably, have marched
toward Richmond without orders, and Mr. Lincoln almost certainly would have
upheld him, but he did not do it and it is almost impossible to imagine him
acting so. The only thing to do now was to get the Army of the Potomac up to
join hands with Pope for a new campaign.

The movement was made reluctantly. Eleven
days passed between the receipt of orders and the beginning of their execution.
To an extent this is understandable. To organize the withdrawal of
a
large
army was an intricate business, and it took time to line up the transports, to
schedule the embarkation of the various units and to arrange for debarkation
along the upper Potomac. But under this there was the undeniable fact that the
army command did not for one moment want to do what it was being forced to do,
and it was moving with leaden feet, muttering furiously as it did so. The
atmosphere around the headquarters tents was murky, with bitter resentment
moving through sulkiness toward outright defiance. General Burnside visited
Harrison's Landing while Halleck was there and Quartermaster General Montgomery
Meigs remembered that the staff officers who sat around a campfire outside the
tent where Halleck and McClellan conferred said openly that the army ought to
march on Washington "to clear out those fellows"—an echo, although
Meigs did not know it,
of
the
dark thought McClellan had toyed with in a recent letter. Burnside, honest and
uncomplicated, listened to this for a while and then got to his feet and said:
"I don't know what you fellows call this talk, but I call it flat treason,
by God!"
¹⁶

Staff talk, to be sure, is often frothy;
but it does reflect a state of mind. Army headquarters was haunted by a
brooding suspicion that disaster might even be a good thing. If Pope's army
came to grief, would not the policy of the Army of the Potomac (overruled by
the malevolent incompetents in Washington) somehow be vindicated? Alexander
Webb,
a
young staff officer, expressed this feeling
bluntly in a letter written the day the first units of the army left for the
north: "I have one hope left; when that ass Pope shall have lost his army,
and when Washington shall again be menaced (say in six days from this time)
then and only then will they find out that our little General is not in his
right place and then they will call loudly for his aid." "

McClellan himself never put it quite that
way, but he came fairly close to it. At the end of July he had expressed his
gloom in a letter to Barlow: "If this army is retired from here I abandon
all hope—our cause will be lost." Three weeks later, just before he
himself left the peninsula, he was able to see good fortune for himself in
disaster for another, and he wrote to Mrs. McClellan: "I believe I have
triumphed!! Just received a telegram from Halleck stating that Pope and
Burnside are very hard pressed."
¹⁸

5.
The Pressures of War

The letter from Lord Palmerston struck
Charles Francis Adams as both irregular and ominous. It was irregular because
the Prime Minister did not usually communicate directly with the representative
of any foreign power; when he had anything to say to such a person he spoke
through the Foreign Minister, Lord Russell. In addition, the letter was
ill-tempered and unfriendly. Both in what it said and in the fact that it had
been written at all it seemed to indicate that Her Majesty's government was
looking for trouble, and when he finished reading it Mr. Adams tossed it across
the table to his son and asked: "Does Palmerston want a quarrel?"

Dated
June 11 and marked "confidential," the letter read as follows:

"I cannot
refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not
impossible to express adequately the disgust which must be excited in the mind
of every honorable man by the general order of General Butler, given in the enclosed
extract from yesterday's 'Times.' Even when a town is taken by assault it is
the practice of the commander of the conquering army to protect to his utmost
the inhabitants and especially the female part of them, and I will venture to
say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations, till the
publication of this order, of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an
act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to
the unbridled license of an unrestrained soldiery.

"If the Federal
government chooses to be served by men capable of such revolting outrages, they
must submit to abide by the deserved opinion which mankind will form of their
conduct."
¹

The newspaper clipping, which had given
upper-class England an exquisite case of the shudders, described the conduct
of Major General Ben Butler, who was ruling occupied New Orleans with a
maladroit and offensive efficiency. Not long after he got there Butler promised
Montgomery Blair: "If I am let alone I will make this a Union city within
sixty days."
²

He was overconfident, because New Orleans was
a big city with a deserved reputation for turbulence, and the occupation force
was not large; still, he had restored order, and things had gone fairly well
except that New Orleans did not in any sense become a Union city. General
Butler had not been let alone. The women of New Orleans, who hated him and his
soldiers and the whole Federal government, found a great many ways to show just
how they felt, and the general feared that they might presently touch off a
regular uprising. To prevent it he had issued, on May 15, General Order No.
28, which reverberated near and far. This order announced that any woman who,
by word or deed, insulted the Union flag, uniform, or army made herself liable
to be treated as "a woman of the town, plying her vocation." Having
issued this order, the general sat back to let the world digest it; one result
being the angry letter sent to Mr. Adams by Lord Palmerston.

Admittedly, the situation had been
difficult. Union officers had been spat upon as they walked along the
sidewalks, household utensils had been emptied upon them, and there had been
derogatory remarks and gestures. One woman was said to have rejoiced volubly
when the funeral procession for a dead officer passed her house, and she had
been arrested and given uncomfortable lodgings on desolate Ship Island, under
guard; a scandalous punishment, for she was of gentle birth. An English
merchant who was in New Orleans said that "a pretty Creole lady" told
him: "Oh! How I hate the Yankees! I could trample on their dead bodies and
spit on them!" Another lady wrote that Federal troops were by common
report "the dirtiest, meanest-looking set that were ever seen—nothing at
all of the soldier in their appearance," and one spunky young woman asked
indignantly: "And how did they expect to be treated? Can a woman, a
Southern woman, come in contact with one of them and allow her countenance to
retain its wonted composure? Will not the scornful feelings in our hearts there
find utterance?"
⁸

There
was no outlet for scornful feelings once Order Number 28 was published. Genteel
womanhood could permit itself a certain leeway as long as the invader remained
properly chivalrous, but Ben Butler did not go by the book and he had replaced
chivalry with a lewd riddle: just how would a woman of the town who was plying
her vocation be treated by occupation troops? Lord Palmerston (along with many
others) feared that a licentious soldiery would do its dreadful worst; Butler
himself argued that she would simply be ignored, her words and gestures
disregarded; and ho woman of New Orleans ever put the matter to the test. The
icy silence of the carefully averted glance came down upon the city. No
officers were insulted, and no women were molested, hatred grew deeper and
quieter, and Mr. Adams had this letter from the Prime Minister of Great Britain
to consider.
⁴

He
consulted Lord Russell, who knew nothing about the case and was himself vexed
because the Prime Minister had edged over into the Foreign Minister's
territory. There were conferences and exchanges of additional notes, all very
dignified and very secret, and in the end things were smoothed over: Lord
Palmerston had not meant to offend either Mr. Adams or the United States. Yet
the whole affair had disturbing connotations. Mr. Adams wrote to Secretary
Seward that "this unprecented act of the Prime Minister may not be without
great significance." His Lordship had been "hostile at heart"
all along, and "it may be that he seeks this irregular method of
precipitating us all into a misunderstanding." Mr. Adams would be on his
guard.
⁵

He would need to be. Lord Palmerston
actually was seeking nothing in particular just then; yet his government was
drifting slowly but perceptibly toward the point at which it would recognize
the Confederacy, and Mr. Adams was quite right in considering the Prime
Minister's touchiness an evil omen. The real trouble was not what General
Butler had done in New Orleans but what General Lee had done in Richmond. Lee
had laid his hands on a war that was about to end and had extended it into the
indefinite future, and the American minister was compelled to reflect that a
long war greatly increased the danger of foreign intervention. It could almost
be laid out on a chart. If the line representing the available supply of
cotton continued to drop, while the line representing the military outlook of
the Confederacy continued to rise, the two would eventually cross—at precisely
which moment Britain and France might very well see to it that the Confederate
States of America became an independent nation.