Mr Lincoln's Army (23 page)

Regiments which were still equipped with the
old Harper's Ferry muskets were disgusted with these weapons: ancient flintlocks
which had been altered to percussion firing, with a rifled tube inserted in the
barrel. They had a tremendous kick and were considered almost as dangerous to
the user as to his target. Members of the Pennsylvania Bucktails—the 13th
Pennsylvania, recruited in the Northern mountains and used to good
rifles—found that the kick arose from the fact that the original bore of the
musket was deeper than the tube; they remedied matters by ramming two or three
dimes solidly down the bottom of the barrel, filling the chamber and preventing
"back action."

The Frenchmen of the 55th New York, who knew
things about cookery that most of the American boys did not know, felt that
there were worse places to camp than the Chickahominy Valley. The place was
full of bullfrogs, and the regimental mess reveled in frogs' legs "as
large as and more delicate than the legs of chicken." The venturesome
Frenchmen also learned that the blacksnakes found in the swamps were good to
eat, although the other regiments were slow to copy them. A number of the
generals, gifted with some political awareness, took the trouble to write to
the state governors, telling them how well their troops had behaved.

New troops came in. McDowell's corps was
still an independent command, but McCaU's division was detached from it and
joined McClellan via Fortress Monroe, while a division under General William
B. Franklin came along a bit later. McClellan got permission to form a couple
of new army corps and name the commanders himself, Porter and Franklin getting
the posts; now he at least had two corps commanders of his own selection, and
he began to feel encouraged. Day by day he got his lines closer in toward
Richmond, bringing up the heavy guns that were to have blasted Joe Johnston at
Yorktown, defending himself every step of the way with earthworks.

Lee concluded that McClellan's attack would
be a matter of regular approaches and siege guns, as at Yorktown, and confessed
that the Confederates could not play that sort of game. Longstreet wrote long
afterward that the Yankee plan was sound "and would have been a success if
the Confederates had consented to such a program." McClellan kept Porter
and his new corps north of the river—McDowell was under orders to march down
from Fredericksburg and join him, and it was important to extend a hand to him.
A little later Stonewall Jackson erupted again in the Shenandoah Valley, and
McDowell was held back on panicky orders from Washington, and Porter's corps
was left extending its welcoming hand into empty space. Once again McClellan
felt betrayed; but the long rainy spell had ended, the sun was drying the
roads, and the prospects for an advance looked good.

Indeed, McClellan was whistling quite a
hopeful tune just then. A week after the Seven Pines fight he wired Secretary
Stanton that he would be "in perfect readiness to move forward and take
Richmond the moment McCall reaches here and the ground will admit the passage
of artillery." Three days later he assured the Secretary: "I shall
attack as soon as the weather and the ground will permit." Four days after
that he wired: "After tomorrow we shall fight the Rebel army as soon as
Providence will permit."

Nor was this just his official version. To
his wife McClellan wrote with equal confidence. In mid-June, a few days after
McCall's division had checked in, he assured her that he would begin his
advance "on Tuesday or Wednesday," when the roads would be thoroughly
dry and all the temporary bridges over the river would be complete.

He
gave her a peek at his strategy; as Lee and Longstreet had suspected, he would
try to get his heavy artillery far enough forward to blast an opening for his
troops, driving the Rebels from their trenches by gunfire, moving his soldiers
up to the abandoned works, bringing the siege guns up close again, shelling the
city, and then making a final assault. He was confident because of the soundness
of his plans and because of the ardor of his men: "I think there is
scarcely a man in this whole army who would not give his life for me, and
willingly do whatever I ask.
...
I
think I can so use our artillery as to make the loss of life on our side comparatively
small." Two days later he was writing that "we shall soon be on the
move," and four days after that he confided that he would strike his first
great blow "within a couple of days." Two days after this letter he
wrote: "I expect to be able to take a decisive step in advance day after
tomorrow."

Day after tomorrow was slow in coming. For
more than a fortnight the opening of the grand assault was always just a day or
two ahead; and always there were additional last-minute preparations to make,
final repairs to be put on the roads and the bridges, new dispositions to be
made in the arrangement of the waiting troops. He believed that he was
outnumbered, even with the reinforcements; Pinkerton's reports on Lee's
overwhelming strength were detailed and explicit. Everything must be completely
ready before the army can move, the last perfecting touch must be added, when
the fight begins there must be nothing left to chance. And this was not only
because of the overmatching strength of the enemy. There was Washington to think
of; men there were trying to wreck the country, and if anything went wrong in
the army the nation's ruin would be complete.

McClellan went into detail on this subject in
a letter to his wife. The grapevine told him that Secretary Stanton and
Secretary Chase had quarreled, and that McDowell—whom, by this time, McClellan
had written down as a conniving schemer who wanted the top command for
himself—had given up his old alliance with Chase and was now cultivating the
Secretary of War. Sadly (and, heaven knows, understandably enough) McClellan
wrote: "Alas! poor country that should have such rulers." He added:
"When I see such insane folly behind me I feel that the final salvation of
the country demands the utmost prudence on my part, and that I must not run the
slightest risk of disaster, for if anything happened to this army our cause
would be lost." A day or two earlier he had written her that recent
messages from Lincoln and Stanton had quite an amiable tone, but he added
acidly: "I am afraid that I am a little cross to them, and that I do not
quite appreciate their sincerity and good feeling.
Timeo
Danaos et dona ferentes.
How glad I will be to
get rid of the whole lot!"

From all of which it is clear that the whole
miserable combination of sorry circumstances—estrangement from his superiors,
false reports from his intelligence section, and dreadful suspicion and enmity
clouding all the channels between army headquarters and Washington —had piled
up too much of a load for this man's army to carry. The great assault on
Richmond must be delayed to the last moment because caution, above all other
qualities, is the one great essential: caution in the face of powerful foes in
front, caution because of treachery and foul conspiracy in the rear. Everything
that had been building up through nine long months of disillusionment, every
paralyzing force created by the willingness of public men to believe the worst
of their fellows, was pressing on him now to make him wary, to compel him to
think twice and thrice before taking a step, to people the starless darkness of
imagination with just-discernible dangers that must be prepared for in advance.
One false move and the country itself is lost! No wonder that tomorrow never
quite comes, that there is always a final safeguard to erect.

And while all of this was going on, Lee, half
a dozen miles away, was exerting all his strategy to keep McClellan immobile,
with Porter's corps extended helplessly north of the river, until by the use of
every possible expedient the Rebel army could be made strong enough to hit that
one weak spot. McClellan could not be attacked south of the river—his works
there were too strong, Lee's numbers were too few —but at all costs he must be
kept from asserting the initiative and beginning his remorseless siege-gun
advance, for if that were once well begun Richmond would inevitably be lost.
And so while McClellan waited and made ready (he was writing: "I have a
kind of presentiment that tomorrow will bring forth
something—what,
I do not know"), Lee brought Jackson down from the
valley and with an audacity that still looks breath-taking assembled three
fourths of his outnumbered army on the north side of the Chickahominy to
assault the troops of Fitz-John Porter.

Lee
was barely in time. Even while he was grouping his forces for the grand attack,
McClellan was at last beginning to move. Orders filtered downward, from army to
corps to division; and on the morning of June 25, Kearny's and Hooker's men
left their knapsacks in camp, formed line of battle, and started out toward the
Rebel capital.

They passed the advance entrenchments along
the old Williamsburg road, where the Seven Pines fighting had centered, and
set out across the gloomy country in a drizzling rain. There was a broad open
field, and on the far side there was a stretch of timber, with the ground all
swampy underfoot, the black tree trunks coming up in damp twilight out of dead
pools and spongy earth. At the near side of this wood the infantry halted, and
the guns in the rear opened up and raked the timber. Rebel batteries off in the
distance answered back, and for a time there was a spirited artillery duel,
noisy but not doing much harm to either side. Then the gunfire died away, the
soldiers moved forward into the wood, and the skirmish line began to shoot at
the Rebel pickets and waited for the main line to come up; and there was a
slow, mean fire fight in the wood, where wounded men had to be propped up
against trees or stumps, while they waited for the stretcher-bearers, lest they
drown. In the end the Rebels withdrew—they were not present in any great
strength—and the Northerners cleared the wood and got to the far edge, where
they looked out upon a broad clearing which held the dark earthworks of Lee's
main line of defense. The drizzly afternoon wore away and word came to dig in;
the new line was a mile or more in advance of the old one, and it looked as if
the big push for Richmond had begun.

But next day everything slowed down. The
Confederate Army seemed to be in a high state of nervous irritability. The
Yankee picket line had to be strengthened until it had almost the weight of a
regular skirmish line; here and there, up and down the front, little detachments
of Rebels would attack in a rush, drawing off again when the fire got hot. All
along the line, throughout the day, there would be sudden bursts of artillery
fire as Confederate batteries sprang into unexpected activity, fired a dozen
rounds, and then subsided into silence. Nothing ever quite developed into a
real battle, but it was not what could be called quiet, either.

Through gaps in the trees, in the rare spots
where one could get a look into the distance, lines of marching troops could be
seen. There was an ominous sense that something was building up, as if
thunderheads were piling high on the horizon, about to break forth with wild
lightning. Off to the north, muffled by distance and dead air, there was a
steady rumble of gunfire during the afternoon and evening, but three quarters
of the army was south of the river and the boys had their minds on what was
right in front of them; what was going on north of the river didn't sound much
different from what was going on right here, except that there were fewer
breaks in it. The men spent an uneasy night on the line; a number of regimental
bands were kept playing long after dark, the brisk tunes dying away in the
somber pine flats. Some of the men heard vague talk of a victory won north of
the river.

Next day there was more of the same, with a
slightly increased tempo. The outposts in front of Hooker's division could hear
a good deal of frenzied activity beyond the Rebel picket posts. Southern officers
were shouting constantly, apparently trying to get large bodies of troops
formed up and moved; the Northerners could hear repeated commands—"From
the right of companies to rear in a column. . . . Right face. . . . Don't get
into a dozen ranks there. . . . Why don't they move forward?" Something
big was in the wind; yet afterward the outposts remembered that they had been
mildly puzzled: with all that shouting and maneuvering going on, they didn't
seem to hear the actual tramp of marching men.
⁵

At the various headquarters the men noticed a
good deal of coming and going, with aides and mounted orderlies constantly
galloping in and galloping out. To the northward, as the afternoon of June 27
wore away, a huge cloud of dirty white smoke went rolling up the sky, and the
men who saw it wagged their heads: lot of guns being fired over there across
the river, to make all that smoke. The atmosphere was heavy, and for some
reason it affected the acoustics; in places the roar of that battle could be
heard plainly, in other places there was no noise at all, even though the
firing was abnormally heavy and was taking place only a few miles away. Along
in mid-afternoon Slocum's division of Franklin's corps was pulled out of camp
and was sent hiking along the miserable woods roads to the Chickahominy
bridges. In this division was the 16th New York, gay and bright with a fancy
touch to its uniforms; the colonel's wife had sent down a huge bale of
brand-new straw hats, one for each man, and the whole regiment was wearing
them. A few days later it was noticed that every straw hat was gone. The men
found that when they got into action—which they did, as soon as they crossed
the river—the hats turned them into perfect targets, and they lost 228 men
before they discarded them.