Mr. Lincoln's Army

Preface

The books which make up this trilogy began, very simply, as an attempt to understand the men who fought in the Army of the Potomac. As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age; they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community. They lived in rural Michigan in the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty miles away from the farm or the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they were young; everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for death, which did not frighten them much—they had seen it inflicted in the worst possible way on boys who had not bargained for it, and they had enough of the old-fashioned religion to believe without any question that when they passed over they would simply be rejoining men and ways of living which they had known long ago.

This was too much for an adolescent to understand. Perhaps it is too much for anybody to understand, in a skeptical age. But there it was: these old gentlemen, drowsing out the greater part of their lives in the backwoods, had once been lifted beyond themselves by an experience which perhaps was all the more significant because it was imperfectly understood. They gave a tone and a color to the lives of the people who knew them, and they put a special meaning on such a word as patriotism; it was not something you talked about very much, just a living force that you instinctively responded to. I can remember one old man who had lost his left arm in the Wilderness, and he used to go about town in the summer peddling cherries and blackberries in a bucket—there was just enough of his left forearm so that he could hook it over the bail of the bucket and carry it conveniently—and it never once entered my childish head to feel sorry for him because he had been a cripple for half a century. On the contrary, I thought he was rather lucky. He carried with him forever the visible sign that he had fought for his country and had been wounded in its service. Probably only a very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.

Still, that was what it was like. A generation grew up in the shadow of a war which, because of its distance, somehow had lost all resemblance to everyday reality. To a generation which knew the war only by hearsay, it seemed that these aged veterans had been privileged to know the greatest experience a man could have. We saw the Civil War, in other words, through the distorting haze of endless Decoration Day reminiscences; to us it was a romantic business because all we ever got a look at was the legend built up through fifty years of peace.

We do learn as we grow older, and eventually I realized that this picture was somewhat out of focus. War, obviously, is the least romantic of all of man’s activities, and it contains elements which the veterans do not describe to children. This aged berry-peddler, for instance, who lost his arm in the Wilderness: he had never told me about the wounded men who were burned to death in the forest fire which swept that infernal stretch of woodland while the battle was going on; nor had any of his comrades who survived that fight and went on through the whole campaign to the last days at Petersburg ever mentioned the lives that were wasted by official blunders, the dirt and the war-weariness and the soul-numbing disillusionment that came when it seemed that what they were doing was going for nothing. There was a deacon in the church, who used to remind us proudly that he had served in the 2nd Ohio Cavalry. Not until years later did I learn that this regiment had gone with Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, burning barns, killing livestock and pillaging with a free hand so that the Southern Confederacy, if it refused to die in any other way, might die of plain starvation. In a sense, the research that went into these books was simply an effort to find out about the things which the veterans never discussed.

Yet, in an odd way, the old veterans did leave one correct impression: the notion that as young men they had been caught up by something ever so much larger than themselves and that the war in which they fought did settle something for us—or, incredibly, started something which we ourselves have got to finish. It was not only the biggest experience in their own lives; it was in a way the biggest experience in our life as a nation, and it deserves all of the study it is getting.

In any case, these books try to examine a small part of that experience in terms of the men who did the fighting. Those men are all gone now and they have left forever unsaid the things they might have told us, and no one now can speak for them. Here is my attempt to speak about them.

1962 B. C.

ONE

Picture-Book War

1. There Was Talk of Treason

The rowboat slid out on the Potomac in the hazy light of a hot August morning, dropped down past the line of black ships near the Alexandria wharves, and bumped to a stop with its nose against the wooden side of a transport. Colonel Herman Haupt, superintendent of military railroads, a sheaf of telegrams crumpled in one hand, went up the Jacob’s ladder to the deck—clumsily, as was to be expected of a landsman, but rapidly, for he was an active man—and disappeared into a cabin. A moment later he returned, and as he came down the ladder he was followed by a short, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man, deeply tanned by the sun of the Virginia peninsula, with thin faint lines of worry between his eyes: Major General George Brinton McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, which had been coming up from the south by water for a week and more and which at the moment was scattered all the way from Alexandria to the upper Rappahannock, most of it well out of the general’s reach and all of it, as he suspected, soon to be out from under his authority.

There was an air about this youthful general—an air of far-off bugles, and flags floating high, and troops cheering madly, as if the picture of him which one hundred thousand soldiers had created had somehow become real and was now an inseparable part of his actual appearance. He could look jaunty and dapper after a day in the saddle, on muddy roads, in a driving rainstorm; like a successful politician, he lived his part, keeping himself close to the surface so that every cry and every gesture of the men who adored him called him out to a quick response that was none the less genuine for being completely automatic. It was impossible to see him, in his uniform with the stars on his shoulders, without also seeing the army—my army, he called it proudly, almost as if it were a personal possession, which was in a way the case: he had made it, he had given it shape and color and spirit, and in his mind and in the minds of the men he commanded the identification was complete.

He sat in the stern of the rowboat, beside the superintendent of military railroads, and he was silent as the boat went back upstream to the landing. The docks and the river front were a confusion of steamboats and barges and white-topped wagons and great stacks of boxed goods and equipment, and the quaint little town itself was lost in a restless, lounging concourse of soldiers: loose fringes of a moving army, convalescents and strays and detailed men, and here and there a regiment moving off with cased flags at route step toward some outlying camp. From this same town the general had set out, nearly five months ago, to take his army down to the swamps and forests below Richmond and win the war; he had known in his heart that he was destined to save the country, and the army had gone forth with unstained uniforms and gleaming rifle barrels, and with proud flags that had never touched the ground.

But nothing had worked quite the way he had expected. The Army of the Potomac, made in his own image, had spent some months on the Virginia peninsula—that long neck of land which runs southeast between the James and the York rivers, and which the army remembered as composed chiefly of mud, mosquitoes, and steaming heat, with a great tangle of gloomy forests infested by lean and hairy men with rifles who uttered shrill, nerve-splitting screams as they came forward endlessly to the attack. The luck of the army and the general had been all bad. Many battles had been fought, and while no great defeat had been suffered there had been a weary retreat from in front of Richmond to a dismal camp far down the river. The general considered that this retreat had been a masterful accomplishment, but the government considered it sheer disaster, and it was trying now—in August 1862—to strike the southern Confederacy with another instrument.

This new instrument, as McClellan was frank to state, had been poorly chosen. Scattered fragments of commands had been swept together and entrusted to a self-confident soldier from the Western armies, General John Pope, and Pope had been sent down into Virginia overland, following the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad to the Rappahannock River. Leaving McClellan and his army to swelter in their camp on the James, the Rebels had promptly concentrated against Pope’s army and had been giving him a bad time of it—so bad, indeed, that McClellan’s army was now being pulled back to Washington and was being forwarded to Pope by bits and pieces. McClellan was not being sent forward with it; and this morning, as he passed through the sprawling base of supplies, where white door fronts of the colonial era looked down on muddy streets churned by endless wagon trains, it seemed likely that he would presently be a general without an army.

The general went with the colonel to the colonel’s office. They were both West Pointers, and when the war broke out they had both been railroad men, and they could talk the same language. As soon as they were seated Haupt gave McClellan such news as he had. None of it was good. Seen thus, from behind the lines, the war was untidy, misdirected, discouraging.

Enemy forces, said Haupt, were across the railroad line at Manassas Junction. It had been thought at first that these were merely a handful of roving cavalry—cavalry had descended on the railroad a few days earlier, farther down the line at Catlett’s—but it was beginning to be clear now that they were more important than that. A New Jersey brigade had gone forward to restore the situation and had run into rifle and artillery fire too heavy to come from any cavalry; had, as a matter of fact, been most distressingly cut to pieces. Two Ohio infantry regiments were holding on where the railroad crossed Bull Run, but they were obviously in grave danger and would probably have to come back. Confederates apparently were either on or near the railroad this side of them, between Bull Run and Alexandria; the bridge over Pohick Creek near Burke’s Station, only thirteen miles out, was rumored to have been burned, and the telegraph line had been cut. Nor was it just the two Ohio regiments that were in peril. The seizure of Manassas Junction meant that General Pope was out of forage for his horses and rations for his men.

Colonel Haupt did not know where Pope was, and it seemed that the War Department did not know either. It was bombarding Haupt with inquiries and had evidently developed the jitters—McClellan saw a wire complaining that there had been great neglect and carelessness on the Manassas plain. To McClellan that seemed obvious. He did not admire General Pope, either as a man or as a soldier, and his present prospect of forwarding his own troops to Pope at a time when Pope’s position was unknown and the road leading in his direction was blocked by Rebel soldiers was not one that McClellan could think about with any pleasure.

Clearly, this was no time for an army commander or a superintendent of military railroads to sit holding his thumbs. With the plight of Pope’s army and the dire fix of those two Ohio regiments Colonel Haupt had no direct concern, except that it was up to him to get the railroad back in working order so that these and other troops could be fed, supplied, and, if necessary, transported; and for this he had a plan of action, which he now asked McClellan to approve. A wrecking and construction train, ready to go forward and repair damaged tracks and bridges, was standing on a siding with steam up. Also ready was a freight train loaded with forage and rations. Haupt proposed to send out ahead of these a train of flatcars carrying a battery of field artillery and a few hundred sharpshooters. This could go as far as the condition of the track permitted, and the guns and riflemen could then advance by road and clear out such Rebel marauders as might be in the vicinity. The wrecking train could then get the bridges repaired in short order—Haupt kept a stock of prefabricated bents and stringers on hand, ready for just such emergencies as this, and if they had to, his construction gangs could build a bridge with timber from torn-down farmhouses along the right of way—and when that had been done the supply trains could be leapfrogged through with subsistence for Pope’s army.

The thin lines between McClellan’s eyes deepened slightly and he shook his head slowly. He could not approve the plan. It would be attended with risk. Haupt was primarily a railroad man; any kind of expedient was all right, for him, if it just gave him a chance to put his track gangs on the job and get the line opened up again. Also, there was not, inherently, any very great difference between a Rebel army and a spring freshet on a Pennsylvania mountain river—both broke up a railroad, and when the damage had been done one went out and fixed it as quickly as possible. But McClellan’s mind was full of the mischances that can befall troops which are incautiously thrust out into enemy territory; he repeated that he could not approve. Haupt was irritated. All military operations, he said, were attended with risk, as far as he could see, and the risk here did not seem to be excessive. Surely, if the advance guard were properly handled, nothing very disastrous could happen. The trains could be kept safely in the rear while the skirmishers went forward. If the enemy were found in force, the men could retire to their train and the whole expedition could quickly be brought back out of harm’s way.

McClellan shook his head again. The situation was too obscure. Enemy troops, possibly in very substantial numbers, appeared to be between Pope’s army and Washington; the first thing to do was to arrange the troops actually present in such a way that the capital itself would be safe. Then preparations could be made for an advance in force. Meanwhile—the general had grown pale beneath his tan and appeared genuinely unwell—did the colonel have any brandy and water? The colonel did. McClellan took it and seemed revived, borrowed a scratch pad, and wrote a telegram to the War Department, reporting that he was ashore in Alexandria and describing the situation as he had found it. Then he departed.

Left to himself, Haupt fumed and pondered, and wished that he had not succeeded in finding McClellan at all. Earlier in the morning he had telegraphed his proposal to General Henry W. Halleck, commander, under the President, of the armies of the United States. Halleck, who never made a decision himself if it could possibly be passed along to someone else, had replied: If you can see Gen. McClellan, consult him. If not, go ahead as you propose. Haupt had now seen General McClellan and he wished he hadn’t; if he had only missed him, the expedition could be under way by now.

Although he had been trained as a soldier—he had been graduated from West Point in 1835, in the same class with George Gordon Meade—Haupt was essentially a civilian. Resigning his commission shortly after graduation, he had gone into railroad work, had built a good part of the Juniata division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and had become, successively, division superintendent and chief engineer for that line. He had been brought into the army, somewhat against his will, as a railroad and construction expert, and he was admired in high places. President Lincoln liked to tell about the marvelous bridge Haupt had built out of beanpoles and cornstalks down on the Aquia Creek line out of Fredericksburg. Haupt actually belonged in the next century; as it was, in the Civil War most generals failed to appreciate him. He was used to direct action, and generals irritated him. His present job gave them many occasions to do this, and they never seemed to miss a chance. Three days ago, for example, Haupt had bestirred himself to assemble trains to send General Joe Hooker’s division forward to Pope. He got the trains lined up, Hooker’s troops were at hand ready to go aboard, but Hooker himself had vanished—presumably to seek the fleshpots in Washington. Haupt telegraphed to his good friend and brother railroad man, P. H. Watson, Assistant Secretary of War. Back came Watson’s reply:

General Hooker was in Alexandria last night, but I will send to Willard’s and see if he is there. I do not know any other place that he frequents. Be as patient as possible with the generals; some of them will trouble you more than they do the enemy.¹

That was a judgment with which Haupt was ready to agree. He had no sooner got Hooker out of his hair than General Samuel D. Sturgis got into it. Sturgis showed up with a division of troops, demanding immediate transportation to the front. To make sure that his request for transportation got top priority Sturgis had moved his soldiers out and had seized the railroad—or that part of it which lay within his reach, which was enough to tie up the entire line—swearing that no trains would go anywhere until his division had been moved. Haupt tried to reason with him, but it was no go—Haupt was a colonel and Sturgis was a general, and Sturgis would not listen. Sturgis had the rank and he had the soldiers, and for the moment he had the railroad, too, and no temporary colonel was going to tell him what to do.

Haupt had had to go through that sort of thing before. General Pope had had similar ideas when he first took command in northern Virginia, announcing that his own quartermaster would control the movement of railroad cars just as he ran the wagon trains, and informing Haupt that his function was to do as he was told. Within two weeks the line had got into such a snarl that no trains could move in any direction. Pope came to see that it took a railroad man to run a railroad—he could get a point now and then if it was obvious enough, could John Pope, for all his bluster—and he was glad to hand the road back to Colonel Haupt: particularly so since Haupt by this time had got from the Secretary of War an order giving him complete and unqualified control over the railroad and everything on it, regardless of the orders any army commander might issue. Haupt, therefore, was ready to take Sturgis in his stride; but Sturgis had troops and guns and swore he would use them. Furious, Haupt telegraphed Halleck, getting in return a bristling order which specifically authorized him, in the name of the general-in-chief, to put Sturgis under arrest if there was any more funny business. Haupt summoned Sturgis to his office. Sturgis came, rather elevated with liquor, accompanied by his chief of staff.

Haupt showed Halleck’s order and explained that he was getting all sorts of troops and supplies forward to General Pope and that Sturgis would simply have to wait his turn. Sturgis was not impressed, and he somehow got the idea that the order Haupt was exhibiting had been issued by General Pope.

I don’t care for John Pope one pinch of owl dung, said Sturgis solemnly—a sentiment which had its points but was hardly germane. Patiently Haupt explained: this order was not from Pope, it was from Halleck, who held the power to bind and to loose. Sturgis shook his head and repeated his judgment of Pope, savoring the sentence as if the thought had been bothering him for a long time. Haupt fluttered the order at him and went over it a third time. Sturgis, his needle stuck in one groove, repeated:

I don’t care for John Pope—

His chief of staff tugged at his sleeve to stop him, and hastily and earnestly whispered in his ear. Sturgis blinked, finally got the point, and rose to his feet ponderously.

Well, then, he said—with what, all things considered, might be called owlish dignity, "take your damned railroad."²

So that had been settled, and Sturgis had awaited his turn. But the episode had tied up the railroad for the better part of a day and had canceled the movement of four troop trains. Haupt was more than ready to agree with Assistant Secretary Watson about the generals.

Anyway, that was over. Now there was the problem of reopening Pope’s supply line. Pope’s soldiers must be getting hungry; and besides, with the outer end of the line gone, the Alexandria yards were clogged with loaded freight cars that had no place to go. Across the river, in Washington, the Baltimore and Ohio was complaining that boxcars consigned to Pope’s army were filling the tracks on Maryland Avenue; the available B. & O. engines were too heavy to go over the Long Bridge; would Colonel Haupt please send an engine over from Alexandria and get them, so that the B. & O. could go on with its regular work? This Haupt could by no means do, having more cars in Alexandria now than he could handle. The B. & O. needled the War Department, which sent plaintive messages; and the day wore on, and the situation did not improve. Haupt reflected that he was, after all, in charge of the railroad, and that somewhere off to the southwest there was an army that greatly needed supplies. He determined to go ahead on his own hook. After dark he sent a message to McClellan—who by now had established his headquarters on shore—notifying him that at four in the morning he would start his construction train forward, followed by the subsistence train. Would McClellan at least let him have two hundred soldiers to go along as train guard? If the men did not report, Haupt added, the trains would go ahead without them.

He got no answer. At midnight he gave up on McClellan, got on his horse, and set out to appeal to the first general he saw—any general, just so long as he had a few troops to spare and was willing to loan a few of them to help open a vital railway line.

By good luck the first general Haupt found was Winfield Scott Hancock, a brigade commander in the Army of the Potomac, recently back from the peninsula, where in spite of the fact that his brigade had not had too much fighting to do he had somehow marked both it and himself as men who would be very useful indeed before the war was over. Late as it was, Hancock had only just gone to bed. He liked to do all his paper work around midnight and had a habit, whenever he encountered a report that was in any way faulty, of having the author hauled out of bed at once and brought to brigade headquarters to receive a dressing-down that was usually loud enough to arouse the nearby regiments. This trait was a trial to Hancock’s staff, but it meant that most reports by now were letter-perfect before they ever reached the general.

Hancock was a direct actionist, who both looked and acted like a soldier—a burly, handsome man, who somehow managed always to be wearing a clean white shirt even when the army had been in the field for weeks, and who, in an army where the officers were notably profane, was outstanding for the vigor, range, and effectiveness of his cursing. His men liked to tell how, at the battle of Williamsburg, he had galloped up, outdistancing his staff, to order his troops to the charge—the air was blue all around him, one of them recalled admiringly. There was a great breezy vigor and bluffness about the man. Earlier in the war, when his brigade was still in training, his men had taken to killing and eating the sheep of farmers near camp, and Hancock had determined to stop it. One afternoon, riding the lines near his camp, he had seen a knot of soldiers in a meadow, bending over the body of a sheep. Putting his horse to the fence, he galloped up, shouting mightily, and the men of course scattered—all except one who tarried too long and whom Hancock, flinging himself from his saddle, seized with strong hands.

Now, you scoundrel, don’t tell me you didn’t kill that sheep—I saw you with my own eyes! roared the general. Just then the sheep, not yet knifed, realized that it was no longer being held and sprang to its feet and scampered nimbly away. Hancock stared at the rocketing sheep, looked blankly at the quaking soldier in his hands—and then threw his head back and made the meadow ring with shouts of laughter.³

It was this Hancock whom Haupt found on his midnight quest for troops. Hancock heard his story and immediately detailed the men for him, and early in the morning Haupt’s trains went lurching off into Virginia. By ten in the morning Haupt was notified that the bridge near Burke’s Station had been rebuilt. He also learned that enemy troops were still somewhere in the vicinity of Manassas in very great strength; the head of the construction gang had been told that Lee himself was with them. A little later trains came steaming back from Fairfax Station loaded with wounded men.

For the moment this was all the news there was. Haupt’s line of track went off into the darkness where moved shadowy forces made large by rumor. For all anyone knew, Lee and his whole army might be between Pope and Washington. McClellan picked up a report that 120,000 Confederates were moving toward Arlington and the Chain Bridge, bent on the capture of Washington and Baltimore. Halleck sagely remarked that the thing to be afraid of at that moment was the danger that Rebel cavalry might dash forward by night and enter the city—Rebel cavalry in those days being terrifying words, since the plow hands and mechanics whom the Federals were earnestly trying to turn into cavalrymen were no match at all for Jeb Stuart’s incomparable troopers.

McClellan sent four infantry regiments out to the works at Upton’s and Munson’s hills, covering the main highway in from Centreville, and instructed them to hold the lines there at all hazards. The two divisions of Franklin’s army corps, just disembarked, loitered about Alexandria waiting for orders; Halleck and McClellan agreed that they ought to go forward to aid Pope, but nobody knew quite where Pope was to be found, and anyway, Franklin had no horses to pull his artillery and no wagon train to carry food and ammunition, and there seemed to be no cavalry at hand to scout the road for him. Haupt darkly remarked to himself that a march of twenty-five miles would put Franklin in the fortified lines at Centreville, which would surely be within reaching distance of Pope, and felt that Franklin’s men could carry on their backs enough food and ammunition to take them that far. Besides, Haupt seriously doubted that there was anything hostile this side of Centreville which could hurt a whole army corps. But nobody asked Haupt’s opinion, McClellan and Halleck began to bicker fruitlessly about the advance, and Franklin’s troops stayed where they were.

The next day was August 29, and outposts reported hearing the rumble of gunfire from beyond Centreville. Somewhere off in the outer darkness the armies apparently had collided. Later in the day Haupt was able to confirm this. Sitting at the end of the railway telegraph line, he got a message from Pope himself—in Centreville, by now—and Pope seemed to be in good spirits, reporting that he was engaged with sixty thousand Confederates, that Joe Hooker was driving them handsomely, and that McDowell and Sigel were cutting off the enemy’s retreat. McClellan ordered Franklin to move forward, telling him: Whatever may happen, don’t allow it to be said that the Army of the Potomac failed to do its utmost for the country—a remark which is a complete tip-off to the strange jealousies, rivalries, and antagonisms that were besetting the high command just then. The troops started to move that morning, Franklin remaining behind in an attempt to get supply wagons, of which he finally rounded up a scant twenty; then McClellan began to have second thoughts, wired Halleck that he did not think Franklin’s men were in shape to accomplish much if they ran into serious resistance along the road, and finally ordered Franklin to halt at Annandale, seven miles out. Haupt had his railroad open as far as the Bull Run Bridge and was pushing supplies forward as fast as the trains could move.

As far as Haupt could see, things were on the mend. Pope was in touch with Washington and with his supply line again, his wagons were moving the stores up from Fairfax Station to Centreville, and the fighting seemed to be going favorably. But on the following day the luckless railroad man entered into a full-fledged nightmare, which was visited on him by order of the Secretary of War, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton.

Stanton, with his pudgy, bustling figure, his scraggly beard, and his hot little eyes, was prone to disastrous impulses when the going got tough, and he gave way to one on the thirtieth of August, 1862. Late the night before, Pope reported having fought a heavy battle in which he had lost ten thousand men and the enemy twice that many. The Confederates, he assured the Secretary, were in full retreat and he was about to pursue with vigor, which was all to the good. But Stanton, reflecting on those ten thousand casualties—plus the Rebel wounded, who must be tended for humanity’s sake—suddenly concluded that the wounded would never in the world be cared for unless he departed swiftly from regular channels, and he immediately departed therefrom with restless energy. He publicly issued an invitation to government clerks, private citizens, and all the sundry to volunteer as nurses and stretcher-bearers for the wounded out beyond Centreville. Simultaneously he ordered Haupt to stop whatever he was doing and prepare to transport this volunteer brigade to the field at once. (He also rounded up all the hacks and carriages he could find in Washington and sent them off to Centreville by road, but that did not affect Haupt; it just clogged the highway that Pope’s men had to use.) Shortly thereafter scores and hundreds of civilians began to pour into Alexandria demanding transportation. Most of them were drunk, and those who were not were carrying bottles of whisky and obviously would be drunk before very long.

Haupt’s head swam at the thought of dumping this howling mob down on a battlefield. Orders were orders, to be sure, but he was enough of an army man to know that there are ways and ways of rendering obedience. He delayed the train as long as he could; then, when he finally sent it off, he wired the officer in command at Fairfax Station to arrest all who were drunk. Also, he bethought himself that while he had been ordered to take this mob out he had not been ordered to bring it back, so as soon as the train had been unloaded he had it hauled back to Alexandria.

Those who were sober enough straggled off as soon as it was light enough to see, and wandered around until all whisky and provisions became exhausted, when they returned to the station to get transportation back, Haupt wrote later. In this, most of them were disappointed.

It seemed cruel, he added, to make these people walk all the way back to Washington in the rain, but it was better to do that than to ignore the wounded; besides, his opinion of the volunteer nurses was not high—generally it was a hard crowd and of no use whatever on the field. He learned later that some of the men bribed army ambulance drivers to leave the wounded and carry the civilians back to Washington.⁴

And as this affair began to be straightened out the news from the front abruptly became worse. Having announced that he had won a great victory, Pope was slow to report bad news, but the news came trickling back anyway. One of the first to get the drift was General Jacob Cox, an Ohioan who had gone to the lines at Upton’s Hill in command of the four regiments McClellan had sent out to hold the ground at any hazard. On the morning of August 30, Cox saw the ambulances coming in from Centreville, accompanied by the walking wounded. These were men who had left the field the night before, and their impression was that they had won the battle and that the enemy was in retreat. Cox noticed that the sound of the firing, which he had been hearing all the previous day, was not nearly so loud. Adding that to the reports from the wounded men, he assumed that Pope was pursuing the foe and that the gunfire came from rear-guard actions—an assumption which Pope himself held until he finally reached the point at which further delusion was impossible. During the afternoon, however, Cox could hear that the sound of the firing was getting louder—much louder and much heavier, with long, sustained, reverberating rolls of gunfire in which the individual shots could no longer be distinguished. Toward evening the pathetic parade of wounded was coming in greater numbers. It was accompanied by stragglers, and by dark the evidence of a disastrous defeat was all too visible.⁵ The spirits of the soldiers in the camps around Alexandria, which had been raised mightily by the early report of a victory, began to sag, and the provost marshal notified the War Department that he needed more men if he was to preserve order—we are being overrun with straggling officers and men. The colonel of the 55th New York Infantry, landing at the Alexandria wharves next morning, noted an air of great depression as soon as he stepped ashore. Nobody knew just what had happened, but all sorts of rumors were afloat; he found the word treason being used freely.

Treason: betrayal, treachery, a will to lose when the means to win are at hand; a dark, frightening word, coming up out of the shadows, carrying fear and distrust and panic unreason with it, so that the visible enemies in gray and butternut off toward the Bull Run Mountains seemed less to be feared than those who might be standing, all unsuspected, at one’s elbow. The word was used everywhere: in the President’s Cabinet, in the War Department, in the tents of the generals, and—most disastrously of all—in the ranks of the tired army that was plodding back toward Washington. All of the disillusionment which began when the army was repulsed before Richmond, all of the sudden war-weariness which had come so soon to a land that had been long at peace, all of the bewilderment felt by men who saw themselves striking ineffectually at targets that mysteriously shifted and dissolved as one struck—all of this, welling up in the hearts of men who had done their best to no avail, began to find expression in that word. There had been betrayal: of high hopes and noble purposes, of all the army meant to itself and to the country. The country had suffered more than a defeat. What was happening now was the beginning of disintegration.

2. We Were Never Again Eager

In the end it would become an army of legend, with a great name that still clangs when you touch it. The orations, the brass bands and the faded flags of innumerable Decoration Day observances, waiting for it in the years ahead, would at last create a haze of romance, deepening spring by spring until the regiments and brigades became unreal—colored-lithograph figures out of a picture-book war, with dignified graybeards bemused by their own fogged memories of a great day when all the world was young and all the comrades were valiant.

But the end of August in the year 1862 was not the time for taking a distant and romantic view of things. The Army of the Potomac was not at that moment conscious of the formation of legends; it was hungry and tired, muddy and ragged, sullen with the knowledge that it had been shamefully misused, and if it thought of the future at all it was only to consider the evil chances which might come forth during the next twenty-four hours. It was in a mood to judge the future by the past, and the immediate past had been bad. The drunken generals who had botched up supply lines, the sober generals who had argued instead of getting reinforcements forward, the incredible civilians who had gone streaming out to a battlefield as to a holiday brawl, the incompetents who thought they were winning when they were losing were symbols of a betrayal that was paid for in suffering and humiliation by the men who were discovering that they had enlisted to pay just such a price for other men’s errors.

The army had developed a high spirit down on the peninsula in spite of its troubles; a certain cockiness, even, a feeling that it knew of no other soldiers who were quite as good, plus a deep certainty that there was no general anywhere who could be trusted as much as its own commander, General McClellan. But this spirit was dissolving and the certainty was being mocked; and as it plodded on toward the fortified lines at Alexandria it was on the verge of ceasing to be an army at all. Men drifted off through the fields or formed little knots about campfires in the woods and farmyards. The winding columns on the roads stretched as they moved, the head of each column moving just a little faster than the tail. There was no panic, as there had been a year earlier after the first fight at Bull Run, when what had been thought to be an army simply melted into a frantic mob. Save for a bad hour or so at the Bull Run Bridge on the night of August 30, there had been no headlong rush to get away. But the miracle of the spirit which takes thousands of young men, ties them together in strange self-forgetfulness, and enables them to walk steadfastly and without faltering into the certainty of pain and death was wearing very thin. Bickerings and blunderings had sapped its power; where the men went now they went sullenly and only because they must. It would take little more to cause the men to realize that must had force only so long as they consented to it.

The army had been gay when it went out. The point that is so easy to overlook nowadays, when all of the illusions about war have been abraded to dust, is that those young men went off to war eagerly and with light hearts, coveting the great adventure which they blithely believed lay just ahead. They went to war because they wanted to go, every man of them, and the obvious fact that in their innocence they did not have the remotest idea what the reality was going to be like does not change the fact. The bounty jumpers and the drafted men had not yet appeared. This was the army of the nation’s youth, consciously trying to live up to its own conception of bravery, convinced that a soldier marched forward into high romance; an army with banners that postured pathetically and sincerely as it followed its own boyish vision.

That posturing was of the very essence of the army’s spirit, and it caused things to happen that could not happen in the armies of today. We read, for instance, of the father and son who enlisted together in a regiment of Massachusetts infantry. In the fighting at Bull Run the son was killed, and a comrade took the news to the father in the midst of the action. Well, said the father grimly, I would rather see him shot dead, as he was, than see him run away. And there is a glimpse of a New York regiment holding the line in another battle under heavy fire. The colonel of an adjoining regiment came over to report that this New York outfit was an especial target because its colors were being held too high: lower them a bit and the fire wouldn’t be so costly. The colonel of the New York regiment—himself the most conspicuous target of all, riding slowly back and forth on horseback in rear of his men, who were lying behind a rail fence—looked at the waving flag and said: Let it wave high. It is our glory. Then there was the colonel of another New York regiment, mortally wounded in a charge, who ordered his men to lift him and prop him up against a tree facing the firing. This done, at whatever cost in pain to the dying man, he said faintly: Tell Mother I died with my face to the enemy—and, the message duly noted, died.¹

The spirit of the first campaign these soldiers made comes down to us in a journal written by young Captain George Freeman Noyes, a pea-green but ardent officer on General Abner Doubleday’s staff, who found himself making a night march up the Rappahannock when Pope was concentrating his army against Stonewall Jackson early in August. Wrote Captain Noyes:

And so over a heavily-wooded, rolling country, through roads arched with foliage, the moonlight filling them with fantastic shapes and shadows, we pursued our romantic way. The peculiar quiet of the hour, and the weird influence of the forest scenery, with patches of moonlight flung in here and there among the prevailing shadow, every turn of the road seemingly a narrow pass over which giant and grotesque trees stood guard to oppose our progress, added mystic significance to those reflections which our anticipated battle naturally awakened. No longer Yankee soldiers of the nineteenth century, we were for the nonce knights of the ancient chivalry.²

Those fanciful old ideas about the glory of a waving flag, the shame of running from danger, the high importance of dying with one’s face to the foe—since that war they have come to seem as out of date as the muzzle-loaders that were used for weapons in those days. The American soldier of later, more sophisticated eras may indeed die rather than retreat, and do it as courageously as any, but he never makes a song about it or strikes an attitude. His heroism is without heroics, and fine phrases excite his instant contempt, because he knows even before he starts off to war that fine phrases and noble attitudes and flags waving in death’s own breeze are only so many forms of a come-on for the innocent; nor does he readily glimpse himself as a knight of the ancient chivalry. But in the 1860s the gloss had not been worn off. Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.

The fall was acutely painful, and it was taking place rapidly in the late summer of 1862. The easiest way to see what was going on—in the soldiers’ emotions, and in the war itself—is to follow briefly the career of the Black Hat Brigade, which was to become famous.

This outfit was made up of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin regiments and the 19th Indiana—Western troops in an army predominantly of Easterners—and it was assembled in Fredericksburg in the spring and put under the command of young John Gibbon, lately jumped to a brigadier’s commission from his position as captain of regular artillery. Gibbon was a West Pointer—a lean, sharp-nosed, bearded man with a habit of blunt speech, who was quietly sorry to have to leave his guns and his tough regulars, where he felt at home, for infantry and volunteers, where he felt strange. He had served on the Western plains under Albert Sidney Johnston before the war; came from North Carolina, had three brothers in the Confederate Army, but for his part had elected to stand by the Union.

Rather to his surprise, he found that he liked his new command, and he wrote that all the men needed was discipline and drill to make first-class soldiers: a judgment that was to be vindicated, for these Westerners turned out to be fighters as good as any the army ever possessed. Gibbon applied the drill and discipline, discovered that volunteers were unlike regulars—praise and the promise of reward were more effective than the fear of punishment which the regulars required—and to tone up their morale he saw to it that they were outfitted, beyond regulations, with black felt hats and white gaiters; hence their nickname, the Black Hat Brigade.

The first combat veterans the boys encountered—Shields’s division, down from the Shenandoah Valley after a bloody fight with Stonewall Jackson—jeered at them for bandbox soldiers, but the Westerners retorted that they would rather wear leggings than be lousy like some people, and anyway, they liked their own natty appearance. Like all new troops in that army, when they started cross-country marching in the hot summer they threw their coats and blankets in the nearest ditches, knowing that they could draw new ones, and no questions asked, from the regimental quartermasters. This pained Gibbon’s regular-army soul, and he forced the company commanders to receipt for the issue of clothing thereafter, and compelled them to make regular returns on the requisitions, under penalty of drawing no pay. The brigade carried its coats and blankets henceforward: a thing which caused muttering at first, but morale was high and Gibbon made the men feel like soldiers, and the muttering died away.³

So far the war had been a romantic frolic for these boys. They liked to remember the period of training around Washington, when they had been camped along a stream on the far side of which were home-state neighbors, the 5th Wisconsin. The 5th belonged to General Hancock’s brigade, and Hancock had a bull voice that could be heard halfway to Richmond, and the 5th was commanded by a Colonel Cobb, very much of a leading citizen back home but strictly an amateur soldier here like all the rest of them. One day when Hancock was drilling his brigade Colonel Cobb got mixed up and took his regiment off the wrong way in some evolution, and the delighted Wisconsin boys across the river could hear Hancock roar: Colonel Cobb! Where in the damnation are you going with your battalion? Thereafter, as long as they were neighbors, it struck the Black Hat Brigade as amusing to go down to the riverbank in the still of the evening and chant in unison: Colonel Cobb! Where in the damnation are you going with your battalion?

They had worked out a gag for rainy days, when it was too muddy to drill and all hands were snuggled under their pup tents trying to keep dry and were afflicted by boredom. Some private possessed of a great voice would sing out: When our army marched down to Bull Run, what did the big bullfrog say? And hundreds of men would croak: Big thing! Big thing! (Big thing was Civil War slang for any notable event or achievement—a great battle, promotion to a corporal’s chevrons, a two-week furlough, the theft of a crock of apple butter, or anything else worth talking about.) Then the leader would call: And when our army came back from Bull Run, what did the little frogs say? To which the answer, in unmelodious screeching trebles, was: Run, Yank! Run, Yank! And to close it, the question was: What does the Bully Sixth say? The answer, in deep pinewoods bass: Hit ’em again! Hit ’em again!

The whole brigade took a queer, perverse pride in the regimental band of the 6th Wisconsin—not because it was so good, but because it was so terrible. It was able to play only one selection, something called The Village Quickstep, and its dreadful inefficiency (the colonel referred to it in his memoirs as that execrable band) might have been due to the colonel’s quaint habit of assigning men to the band not for musical ability but as punishment for misdemeanors—or so, at least, the regiment stoutly believed. The only good thing about the band was its drum major, one William Whaley, who was an expert at high and fancy twirling of his baton. At one review, in camp around Washington, the brigade had paraded before McClellan, who had been so taken with this drum major’s lofty pomposity (as a comrade described it) that he took off his cap in jovial salute—whereupon the luckless Whaley, overcome by the honor, dropped his baton ignominiously in the mud, so that his big moment became a fizzle.⁴

At the end of July the brigade moved out of its camp at Fredericksburg and tramped up the Rappahannock to join Pope—the same movement which led Captain Noyes to see knights of the ancient chivalry marching along the moonlit roads. The men were impatient. They belonged to General Irvin McDowell’s corps, and they had been sorely disappointed because orders to go to Richmond and join McClellan’s forces there had been canceled at the last minute. Now they looked ahead to action, for it was believed that Pope would plunge at once into battle. Reaching the point of concentration, they did a great deal of marching and countermarching and heard the rumble of artillery duels from afar, and once or twice long-range shells fell among them, but they got into no fighting. And finally they found themselves, with the three other brigades in the division of General Rufus King, trudging off to the northeast on the Warrenton turnpike, heading in the direction of Centreville. Along the way they captured their first prisoner—a straggler from Stonewall Jackson’s corps, who had had his fill of fighting and surrendered willingly enough, but who was an authentic armed Rebel for all that. This lanky soldier looked with interest at the full packs carried by Gibbon’s boys and remarked: You uns is like pack mules—we uns is like race horses. All Old Jackson gave us was a musket, a hundred rounds, and a gum blanket, and he druv us like hell.

The men did not know exactly where they were going, but they understood vaguely that Old Jackson was somewhere up ahead; it looked as if they would get into a sure-enough fight this time, and their spirits rose. To be sure, if they were being hurried into action their course was obstructed by numerous mix-ups. They had got into Warrenton at dusk, hungry, their rations exhausted, and were met by General McDowell in person, who regretted that they could not have any supper but ordered them to move out on the turnpike at once: this was a forced march, no time to draw rations, they had to keep moving. So they started on, found the road blocked by stalled wagon trains, and made a supperless bivouac two miles from Warrenton. The next day they were led down a country lane and thrown into line of battle on some deserted farm, and held there for several hours in complete solitude, before they were recalled and taken back to the main highway; and there they were halted again, to butcher some of their beef cattle and make a leisurely meal. But the men had been soldiers long enough to understand that that sort of thing just went with army life, and their enthusiasm was undimmed. At last, after an afternoon in which they had heard occasional sputters of musket fire far ahead, they went tramping along the pike a mile or two out of the little hamlet of Gainesville, the brigade well closed up, General Gibbon riding at the head, a mile of empty road in front and behind separating it from the rest of the division. It was getting on toward sunset, and the trees on the left of the road were casting long cool shadows. A regimental band was playing a quickstep—one hopes, somehow, that it was the band of the 6th Wisconsin—and the boys were enjoying the war.

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