Mr Lincoln's Army (20 page)

2.
The
Voice
of
Caution

In
the end, the big show at Yorktown never came off. The army waited in front of
the Rebel lines for a month, nerving itself for the great test; and then one
morning the pickets sent back word that the enemy trenches were all empty.
Patrols went groping forward and confirmed the news: nobody there, nothing left
but a few dozen heavy guns which the Confederates had been unable to move—not
wooden guns this time, as at Manassas, but sure-enough cannon of the navy
model, too heavy and cumbersome to be taken along by an army that proposed to
make speed on the retreat. McClellan had finally completed his approaches, and
his siege guns and heavy mortars were all in position. In one more day he would
have been ready to open a shattering bombardment, and Johnston had decided not
to wait for him.

So instead of the great drama of a ten-mile
cannonade and a mighty assault by storming battle lines extending beyond
vision, what the army got was a floundering pursuit and a nasty, confused
rear-guard action in damp thickets and flat, dismal fields, where reality was
limited to the actions of the nearest dozen comrades, where men fell killed or
maimed without seeing the enemies who struck them, and where it was quite
impossible for most of the men to get any sort of idea of what was actually
going on.

The troops got across the empty entrenchments
and moved up the unspeakable roads, with a dull rain coming down, over a soggy
level country of soaked fields and gloomy woods and scattered farms, none of
them like the familiar green farms of home; and far up ahead the men heard the
noise of fighting, and the roads were hopelessly clogged with mired wagon
trains, and Phil Kearny came galloping up to force a way for his troops. He
stormed mightily, put two officers of the train guard under arrest, demanded that
the wagons be tipped over off the road or burned where they stood—he was ordered
up to fight and he would have the road regardless. Admiring, the soldiers
listened while he roared: "I will show you what fire
feels
like unless you set
the torch to your goddamned cowardly wagons!"
¹
And his men
finally got by the tangle, passing open fields wherein huge bodies of troops
were unaccountably standing quite idle, and went plodding unevenly forward
until they got up within range; and there, in an obscuring haze of smoke, the
boys formed fine as well as they could and blazed away in the general direction
of the bursts of rifle fire that were coming out of the woods and fields a
couple of hundred yards away.

Some
of them were formed out in the open and some in dense forest, full of fallen
trees and bothersome underbrush; the enemy was a more or less invisible
presence—an area, like a hazy, indistinct wood lot, or a smoky line of rail
fence with briars grown up around it, from which came little spitting streaks
of flame, and whistling bullets that made an unnerving noise. The 55th New
York, with its baggy red French pants quite rain-soaked, got into a stretch of
timber where the soldiers could hear the Rebels but could seldom see them. They
stayed there for three hours, firing as fast as they could load, using up
sixteen thousand rounds of ammunition, and—as the colonel discovered later,
when he went out to examine the ground in front of them—killing just fifteen
Confederates. The colonel made a rough calculation and figured that perhaps a
hundred and fifty more of the enemy, at a maximum, had been wounded: where had
all those bullets gone, anyhow?

Hooker's men discovered that the neat,
formal battle lines of the training camp didn't seem to make their appearance
in actual combat. Instead everybody got behind a tree or a stump or a boulder
if he could possibly manage it. One private, thus protected, called out to a
buddy: "Why don't you get behind a tree?" and heard the buddy shout:
"Confound it! There ain't enough for the officers!" Men of the 5th
New York went up to the front through a little cemetery where were buried
Confederate soldiers who had died during the preceding winter. The little
burying ground was full of graves, but over the gate someone had tacked a sign:
"Come along, Yank, there's room outside to bury you."
²

The firing at last died down and the Rebels
drew off. It was only a rear-guard action, after all, and Joe Johnston had no
intention of keeping his men there to make a finish fight of it. Then the
Federals at the front heard a great cheering behind them, and they knew what
caused it and joined in it lustily; and there, spattering across the damp
fields, came General McClellan, blue coat all stained with mud, a glazed
covering over his cap, his staff riding furiously in a vain effort to keep up
with him. McClellan rode all along the lines, each regiment got a chance to
cheer, and night came down on the army's first battlefield.

Among the higher echelons the battle gave
rise to grumblings. Heintzelman, who had command of the advance, asserted that
Sumner was on the field with thirty thousand men and failed to get any of them
into action, and the two generals argued the matter hotly. McClellan, coming up
as the fight ended, got the idea that most of the fighting had been done by
Hancock's brigade, which had indeed done well, though it got into the action
late. He built his dispatch around that part of the battle, telegraphing
Stanton that "Hancock was superb," and thereby roused the anger of
Hooker and Kearny, whose troops had suffered far more than had Hancock's, and
who felt that the major general commanding was purposely slighting them. But in
the end that was straightened out, and the army went toiling on up the peninsula,
while Johnston pulled his own troops close to Richmond and made ready for a
finish fight.

The men were beginning to get their officers
sorted out by now. Hooker and Kearny were already known to the whole army. They
had fire, ardor, the quality which writers of that generation called
"dash"; like McClellan, they insisted that members of their staffs be
brightly uniformed and excellently mounted, and they made their rounds as
McClellan made his, with a fine brave clattering and show, very martial and
stimulating for young soldiers to see. They built high morale in their troops.
Hooker's division, going into action in this rear-guard fight at Williamsburg,
saw a regiment of cavalry stringing out its mounted line in the rear, according
to army custom, to check stragglers and round up laggards. Angrily the men set
up the shout: "Hooker's men don't need any cavalry to make
them
stay in front!"

All kinds of stories were beginning to
cluster about Kearny. His headquarters wagon carried a fancy carpet for his
tent, a special camp bed imported from Europe, and a huge stock of imported
wines and brandies; and he had a field kitchen on wheels, on the French army
model, which always kept up with his headquarters so that he could have hot
meals. (Kearny was independently wealthy and could afford such frills.)
Officers of the New Jersey brigade claimed that he had happened along once just
as they had taken over a planter's house for brigade headquarters. They found
in the parlor a decanter of whisky which they hesitated to drink, fearing that
it had been poisoned—army rumor said that was a favorite Rebel trick. Kearny
listened as they explained their fears, then poured out a thumping major
general's dose and drank it down. "If I'm not dead in fifteen minutes,"
he said, turning to mount his horse, "go ahead and drink all you
want."
³

The men were getting acquainted with Edwin V.
Sumner, too; a tough old man with white hair and beard, who had been in the
army since 1819 and had a tremendous booming voice. They called him "Bull
Sumner," or "The Bull of the Woods," and liked him even though
he was a great martinet, with old-army ideas about discipline. He was a
formidable-looking general, now in command of an army corps, always erect and
proud in the saddle, and he never quite realized that the army was any
different now than it had been before the war, when he spent almost forty years
in slow progress from second lieutenant to colonel. Youthful Major Thomas Hyde
of the 7th Maine was sent to deliver some report to him one day; Sumner looked
him over from head to foot and finally burst out: "You a major? My God,
sir, you will command the armies of the United States at my age, sir!"
⁴
After one searing fight the 66th New York showed up under temporary command of
a second lieutenant, who happened to be the senior surviving officer. Sumner
looked at the boy and instead of seeing the frightfully cut-up regiment he saw
only that a shavetail had a colonel's job. He shook his head and said: "If
I had found myself, when a second lieutenant, in command of so fine a regiment,
I would have considered my fortune made."
⁵
He was still the
cavalry colonel of the Indian-fighting plains army, with all the defects and
virtues which that implies; not qualified for proper corps command, but a fine
old smoothbore for all that.

Then there was Heintzelman, another corps
commander, very much like Sumner in many ways; an old-timer, an Indian fighter
from the plains, rugged and stiff and hard, still a regimental officer at
heart, brave enough for a dozen men but unfitted for any problem of leadership
that extended beyond men he could reach with his own voice. Like Sumner, he
could put Johnny-come-lately officers in then-place. When Oliver Otis Howard
first reported to him, proudly bringing in his new 3rd Maine Regiment,
Heintzelman looked the men over and said to Howard: "You have a fine
regiment; they march well and they give promise for the future; but they are
not well drilled—poor officers but good-looking men!"
⁸
Heintzelman had been in the middle of the fighting at the first battle of Bull
Run, where he had been badly wounded.

The Pennsylvania troops were beginning to
know George Gordon Meade, even though he was as yet only a brigadier, and a new
one to boot. He was a tall, grizzled man with a fine hawk's nose and a
perfectly terrible temper, which would lash out furiously at any officer who
failed to do his job. A war correspondent considered that Meade, on horseback,
looked "like a picture of a helmeted knight of old"; one of his staff
complained that he rode "in a most aggravating way, neither at a walk nor
a gallop but at a sort of amble." He was notably cool under fire; sat his
horse with his staff, one time, surveying the situation through glasses, while
Rebel bullets whizzed wickedly all around and the staff earnestly wished the
general would finish his reconnoissance so they could get out of there; lowered
his glass at last, took in the staff's nervousness, and remarked sardonically
that maybe they had better leave—"This is pretty hot; it may kill some of
our horses." He lacked the ability to inspire troops; once remarked,
without any rancor, that he had heard his men call him "a damned
goggle-eyed old snapping turtle." He never drew the kind of cheers that
Hooker and Kearny always got, but he kept his command in good shape and had a
sharp eye for details. He was wholly admirable as a man, with no trace of
self-seeking; would reach high place in the army, do his hard job to the best
of his ability, and indulge in no argument or complaint when promotion and
praise finally missed him.
⁷

One by one the officers were beginning to
stand out, for this virtue or that. Already noticeable was an extremely junior
second lieutenant on McClellan's staff, to which he had recently graduated
from Kearny's: a broad-shouldered six-footer with a slim waist and muscular
legs, fresh out of West Point, known as one of the finest horsemen in the
army—George Armstrong Custer, who was to survive hot actions of this war only
to die under the guns of the Sioux on the Montana hills. Custer was familiarly
known as "Cinnamon" because of the cinnamon-flavored hair oil he used
so liberally; wore long glistening curls and a show-off uniform with a tight
hussar jacket and black trousers trimmed with gold lace, and looked, as another
staff member remarked, "like a circus rider gone mad." Like Confederate
George Pickett, who also wore curls, and Jeb Stuart, who was also a show-off,
he was all soldier. He first impressed himself on McClellan's attention when
the general, accompanied by his gilded staff, rode up to the bank of the
Chickahominy for the first time and remarked, "I wish I knew how deep it
is." The staff exchanged glances, looked thoughtfully at the dark water,
began to make estimates. Custer spurred up to the bank, muttering "I'll
damn soon show him," and rode his floundering horse out to the middle of
the river, where he turned in his saddle and called out, "That's how deep
it is, General."
⁸

But standing out above all of these, of
course, was McClellan. He had become the general who could do no wrong, in the
soldiers' eyes, and they blithely overlooked things that would have earned
bleak hatred for any other general. Officers of an anti-slavery cast noted
suspiciously that McClellan took uncommon pains to protect Rebel property from
the moment the army landed on the peninsula. One of them complained bitterly
that provost guards were to be found protecting every farmhouse, stable,
kitchen garden, and well, and asserted that they stood guard even over the
rail fences, regarded by soldiers as prime material for campfires. "I have
seen our men," protested this officer, waxing warm, "covered with
dust and overcome by the heat, try in vain to get water from wells overflowing,
from which stringent orders drove them away because the supply of water for a
Rebel family might be diminished. I have also seen them, covered with mud and
shivering with the rain, prevented by orders of the general-in-chief from warming
themselves with the fence rails of dry wood which were ready at their hands,
because the cattie of a Rebel farmer might get out and eat the grass in his
fields while he was rebuilding his fences."
⁹
Another officer
noted indignantly that the fanners admitted that McClellan protected their
property against the men of his army better than Johnston had protected it
against the Confederates.