This Hallowed Ground (10 page)

Lyon had got all the way to Springfield by this time. His base of supplies was at the town of Rolla, at the end of the railroad that came over from St. Louis, and Rolla was 120 miles away from Springfield, over some very bad roads. It was clear that Lyon would have to retreat, but he hoped that he could strike a quick blow first, before his enemies had concentrated all of their troops.

Like all armies at this date, Lyon’s was a mixed one. It contained two small battalions of regular infantry and a few companies of regular cavalry, three batteries of regular artillery, three of the semi-irregular Missouri regiments recruited from among the Germans in and around St. Louis, and two volunteer regiments from Kansas and one from Iowa. Altogether it amounted to fifty-eight hundred men. Except for the regulars, with their hard discipline and precision drill, these men were no better trained than the men who had fought at Bull Run.
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They were at least learning how to manage a cross-country march, for they had done a power of walking since Lyon started chasing Governor Jackson, and if they were not getting much time on the drill field they were learning soldiering on the hoof. Lyon had them breaking camp and hitting the road well before sunrise, and the volunteers were not sure that they liked this. Army life had several aspects they had not counted on. The army mule, for instance, had a way of beginning to bray at midnight, and he was likely to keep it up for hours — a habit that (as a diarist asserted) was finally broken by a Mexican War veteran, who said that mules would not bray in the night season if weights were tied to their tails: a trick that was tried and actually seemed to work. The volunteers were awed by the regulars; they detested what they saw of regular army discipline (whose punishments they considered too revolting and brutal for free-born
Americans), but they greatly admired the way the regulars looked and marched, and they strove to be like them. In Lyon’s army there was a ninety-day outfit, the 1st Iowa, whose time was due to expire early in August. The Iowans said that they did not want to go home without getting into one good fight, and they offered to stick around for an extra week or so in the hope that maybe there would be one.
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There would be. On August 10, Lyon took his army down to Wilson’s Creek, an unpretentious little stream that meandered cross-country ten miles from Springfield, where twelve thousand Confederates under General Sterling Price and a former Texas Ranger captain named Ben McCulloch were waiting. Lyon had a distinguished subordinate, a former German brigadier named Franz Sigel, who had defied the Prussians in the revolution of 1848, had led troops against them, and had fled for his life to America when the revolution was suppressed. Sigel was told to take his men in a big sweep around the Federal left and get in rear of the Confederate line of battle. When Sigel’s guns were heard the rest of Lyon’s men would make a frontal attack.

It could have worked, but it did not, quite. Sigel got his men where he was supposed to get them, but unhappily it turned out that although he was a devoted and a high-minded man he was almost totally incapable of handling troops in the field. His men opened fire, got Confederate fire in return, and then somehow went all to pieces, tumbling back across dreary woods and stumpy meadows in complete rout, leaving the rest of the army to fight its way out of the battle which their firing had commenced. The rest of the army did its best, but its best was not quite good enough, and the day ended in disaster.

Before the battle began Lyon went through the camps, talking to the men like an undersized red-whiskered father: “Men, we are going to have a fight. We will march out in a short time. Don’t shoot until you get orders. Fire low — don’t aim higher than their knees. Wait until they get close. Don’t get scared — it’s no part of a soldier’s duty to get scared.” Then he swung them out into line of battle and sent them into action.
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The Confederates were banked up four ranks deep, and the firing started with the rival lines no more than fifty yards apart — murderously close range, for the clumsy muzzle-loaders that constituted the infantry weapon in those days were deadly at anything under two hundred and fifty yards. The Iowa boys, who had hoped they could have one good fight before they were paid off, got their wish. They stood next to a battery of regular artillery, six guns commanded by an uncommonly hard-boiled West Pointer, Captain James Totten, who went into action with a canteen of brandy at his hip. Even in the excitement of their first battle the Iowans marveled at the profane fury with which
Captain Totten stormed at his lieutenants and his gunners — “Forward that caisson, God damn you, sir!… Swing that piece into line, God damn you, sir!” — as his guns slammed canister and case shot into an advancing Rebel line and blew it apart.

The Rebels withdrew briefly, the smoke lifted from the field, and the volunteers found themselves facing an empty pasture with a snake-rail fence on the far side. A lone Confederate was perched on this fence, defiantly swinging a Confederate flag, and when the Iowans prepared to shoot him their officers went along the line ordering them not to: he was too brave, something about his valiant posture made it indecent to take pot shots at him. Captain Totten’s regulars felt otherwise; an Irish gunnery sergeant swung a piece around, got the Rebel in his sights, pulled the lanyard, and blew the man all to fragments — and with an angry yell the Confederate line surged forward in a new assault. The Kansans came in to help repel this attack, smoke settled close to the ground, everything was a wild clangor of beaten metal and shouting men, and a remarkable number of the northern volunteers got shot. For untaught soldiers it was rough, and men fought blindly, not knowing what they were doing; an officer came on one man who was loading his musket feverishly, firing straight up into the air, reloading and firing again, an automaton acting entirely by blind instinct.
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Lyon came along the line, bleeding from two wounds, his shaggy whiskers clotted with blood. He was profoundly depressed: a third of his men were down, Sigel’s attack had gone completely astray, no help was in sight, all the Rebels in Missouri seemed to be coming in on him. When Totten offered him a pull at the brandy he waved him aside, and to an aide he muttered: “Major, I fear the day is lost.” The aide said something hopeful, and Lyon galloped off to bring up a few companies he had been holding in reserve. He got them up to the front, and some of the untried young hotheads shouted that if he would lead them they would charge with their bayonets and chase the Rebels all the way to Arkansas. Lyon was the man for that. He swung his hat, wreaths of smoke floating about him, blood on his hair and blood on his uniform, and he wheeled to lead them — and then a stray bullet whacked into his heart and killed him. The charge died before it got started, and it developed that there was no surviving Union officer above the rank of major.
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The principal major turned out to be one Samuel D. Sturgis. He looked things over, concluded that the little army had about fought itself out, and took it away in retreat with the regulars to bring up the rear. Eventually the army arrived at the railhead at Rolla. There the 1st Iowa found a consignment of new uniforms, together with
orders to head back home and get paid off. The boys took a bath in the nearest pond, threw away their filthy old uniforms, put on the new, and set off for Iowa, glad they had been in that one battle. At Burlington twenty thousand people were waiting to welcome them home, and they paraded down the streets singing a little tune called “The Happy Land of Canaan.”
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W
INFIELD SCOTT
was an old man, vain and ponderous, dropsical and infirm, a swollen and grotesque caricature of the brilliant soldier who had won the Mexican War and who, because he once so perfectly acted the part of the proud soldier, had been known half affectionately as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He was mixed up now in a war that had come too late for him, a bewildering sort of war that saw his pet enemy, Jefferson Davis, and his pet soldier, Robert E. Lee, making common cause against the country that had all of his loyalty. He was greatly partial to the regular army, believed that volunteer troops needed many months in training camp before they could take the field, and doubted that cavalry would be of much account in this war; everybody knew that it took a full two years of drill to turn an ordinary recruit into a competent trooper. He blamed himself for having let political pressure make him send McDowell’s unready army out on the disastrous expedition to Bull Run, and his own physical disabilities — getting in and out of the chair behind his desk, with much puffing and wheezing, was about all he could manage — must have been a painful reminder that this war was in process of slipping out from under the commanding general of the army.

Yet the old man had a clear eye. Others might talk about the one swift blow that would end the rebellion. Bright young General McClellan, for instance, had proposed a quick stab up the Kanawha Valley, across western Virginia, and over the mountains to Richmond, and since he proposed that this be done with the ninety-day men, he had obviously been thinking of a short war. But Scott saw it differently. The Confederacy, he believed, would never be subdued by piecemeal; it would have to be enveloped and throttled. The job could hardly be
begun before the enlistments of the ninety-day men had expired, and it was time to think in terms of the long pull.

Let the navy (said Scott) blockade the southern coasts. The army, then, must drive down the Mississippi, opening the river all the way to the Gulf, splitting the western states from the Confederacy and holding the valley in such strength that the blockade of the Southland would be complete. With rebellion isolated, it could then be crushed at leisure.

The proposal got to the White House and was talked about, and before long it was being discussed in the press. It called up the picture of a gigantic constrictor tightening a deadly inexorable grip about the seceding states, and it became generally known as the “Anaconda Plan,” under which title it was widely derided by impatient patriots who looked for a quick and easy war. Scott, they complained, believed that the war could be won without fighting — visible proof that he was a senile old fumbler who had lived beyond his usefulness. “On to Richmond” had more of a swing to it.

But Scott had something. He had submitted a general idea, not an actual strategic plan, and he was not suggesting that the war could be won without fighting. Instead, he was trying to show the things that would have to be done before a really effective fight could be made. And although his idea was scoffed at, it did take root in the mind of Abraham Lincoln. In the end, the Anaconda idea became the basis for the Federal war effort.
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By midsummer it appeared that the lieutenants through whom most of the spadework for this plan must be done would be chiefly two — George Brinton McClellan and John Charles Frémont.

The army in 1861 hardly possessed two more completely different soldiers — and yet, in an odd way, they had certain traits in common. They came into their new posts as ready-made heroes, welcomed by a land that wanted heroes to worship. They had the gift for making fine phrases, and so for a time they could express perfectly the spirit with which men of the North were going to war. A great many men believed in them passionately and went on believing in them long after failure had come. They had color and dash, romance seemed to cling to them, and at bottom each man was essentially a romantic. That was their great handicap, for this was not going to be a romantic war and it would never be won by romantics.

The romantic in McClellan was buried under a layer of crisp, energetic efficiency. Called to Washington immediately after Bull Run and given command of all the troops in and around the capital, he seemed the very model of the businesslike, self-reliant administrator. He found the town overrun with men in uniform who drifted about the streets (and
jammed the saloons) in aimless confusion, not knowing what they were up to or what was expected of them, conscious of the shame of panic and defeat. He detailed regular army soldiers to police the place, got the wanderers back into camp, saw that the camps were properly laid out and intelligently managed, ironed out the kinks in the commissary system so that everyone got plenty to eat, and set up a regime that involved endless hours of drill. In short, he restored order, made the men feel like soldiers, and before long he instituted a series of grand reviews in which the new soldiers could look at themselves in the mass and could begin to realize that they were part of a powerful, disciplined, smoothly functioning army.

The transformation was taking place. The Bull Run fight had taken off a little of the pressure, and McClellan was doing what McDowell had never had a chance to do; he was creating an army, and it had a name, a name that would cast long shadows and stir great memories before the end came — the Army of the Potomac. More often, though, the newspapers spoke of it simply as “McClellan’s army,” and that was the way the men themselves thought of it. They were McClellan’s men, and in spirit most of them would continue to be that as long as they lived.

For McClellan had touched their spirits. To the men who had lived through Bull Run he brought back pride and self-respect. To the newcomers, who did not carry Bull Run in their memories, he gave the feeling that it was grand to be a soldier. To all he gave a sense of belonging to something big and powerful that was going according to plan.

The men did not set eyes on him very often, to be sure. Instead of living in camp he rented a large house in downtown Washington not far from the White House, and he lived in considerable splendor, giving elegant dinner parties for important people, his doors guarded by swanky regulars, with glittering staff officers and aides following him wherever he went. The average soldier saw him only at the big reviews, and at such times McClellan always made a dramatic entrance. There would be the great level field, long ranks of men in blue standing at attention (the men secretly proud of their ability to stand and march and look like real soldiers), carriages full of senators and diplomats and starchy womenfolk waiting on the far side of the field, officers with drawn swords poised immobile in front of their commands, everybody tense with expectancy. Then the jaunty little man on his big black horse would come galloping down the line, his escort trailing out after him, and the whole field would break out in a wild shout of enthusiasm … and all at once army life would be just as exciting and romantic and wonderful as it had seemed to be when one stood with
raised hand before the mustering officer, and all the drudgery and annoyance of training camp would be forgotten.
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