Mr Lincoln's Army (25 page)

"Dry
up, you old fool—pull your eagles off-go home to your mother."
⁹

The 1st Minnesota was one of the regiments
sent in to repair the break. Sumner came riding up as they formed their battle
line; reining up in front of them, he called out: "Boys, I may not see
all of you again, but I know you'll hold that line." Then he waved his
hat, and they moved forward. Kearny, holding on over to the right and looking
for any help he could get—both Longstreet and Hill were attacking now, and the
safety of the whole army was in the balance—sent staff officers back to bring
up the first troops they found. These turned out to be General George Taylor's
brigade—1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th New Jersey, which used to be Kearny's own: the
same which had been lawlessly robbing an orchard when Kearny first took command,
disciplined by his own hand, still famous foragers. (Kearny once told Lincoln,
in effect: If you really want to capture Richmond, put a hen house and a peach
orchard on the far side and the New Jersey brigade on this side—they'll get
through all the fortifications of Richmond to get the hens and the peaches.)

Staff officers pulled up, all in a lather:
General Kearny had lost a battery and wanted the old brigade to help him get it
back—would they come? Brigade let out a yell and swung into line almost before
the orders could be given; swarmed across a field, chased assorted Rebels out
of a sunken road, and recaptured the guns, boasting afterward that they got
there before Kearny's own men arrived.
...
It was this brigade's General Taylor, incidentally, who had been momentarily
confused at Gaines's Mill a couple of days earlier. He had led his brigade up
as reinforcement and was met by one of the French princes serving on
McClellan's staff, loaned that day to Fitz-John Porter and riding to Taylor
with Porter's orders. In the excitement of the fight the young prince began
shouting the orders in French, of which Taylor knew not a word. Turning to his
staff, Taylor demanded: "Who the devil
is
he, and what does he
want?" A staff officer who could speak French finally showed up, and the
puzzle was straightened out. . . . Somewhere in this Glendale fight was another
Union battery which the Rebels attempted to capture. As the Southerners
advanced, the battery commander told his men to stand firm; a grim Yankee
gunner, looking at the tattered foe, remarked:

"I
ain't goin' to git from no such ragged fellers as they be," and the
battery held its ground.

After the Glendale fight there was more
marching. The army was continuing its retreat to the James River, where
gunboats and fleets of supply steamers promised safety; but to the soldiers it
was just another night march rather than a retreat. They had been hurt badly at
Glendale, but when the line was broken they had restored it, and at the end of
the day the Rebels had been beaten back, and the men felt they had done well.
They were confirmed in this opinion next day, when part of the army and most of
the artillery lingered on Malvern Hill, where Lee's last attempt to destroy the
Army of the Potomac was decisively repulsed. This fight was a field day for the
gunners; Rebel artillery couldn't seem to get into position to do much damage,
the roads being few and Lee's staff work defective, and solid rows of Union
fieldpieces, lined up hub to hub at the top of a long slope, broke the charging
Confederate infantry to bits. The Confederate General D. H. Hill noted after
the battle that more than half of all the casualties Lee's army suffered that
day were caused by artillery fire—an unprecedented thing for that war, where
the infantry musket was the big killer.

Rain
set in again during the night, and in the early morning Colonel Averell, who
had the rear guard, found his little command alone on the broad hilltop. Behind
him, in the low country where the muddy lanes led to the banks of the James,
the army and its heavy wagon trains were struggling along to the most cheerless
of camps, with the dark gunboats anchored offshore. In front of him there was a
heavy mist, blotting out the terrible slope where the battle had been fought.
In the mist he could see nothing, but out of it came a pulsating, endless wave
of pitiful sound—the agonized crying and moaning of thousands of wounded boys
who had been lying on the ground, unattended, all night long. By and by the sun
came up and the mist thinned, and presently he could see the battleground, one
of the most horrible sights of the war. Five thousand men lay there, covering
the ground like a ragged carpet that lived and made incoherent sounds and,
here and there, moved dreadfully. "A third of them were dead or dying,"
he wrote, "but enough of them were alive and moving to give the field a
singular crawling effect." The ambulance parties came out to do what they
could for the mangled men, and at one side of the field Stonewall Jackson had
details out hastily burying the dead: he expected to have to fight over that
ground and he felt it would hurt morale to make his men advance past so many
corpses. And Averell finally recalled his rear guard and went down the reverse
slope of the hill to join the rest of the army in the new camp at Harrison's
Landing.
¹⁰

4.
Pillar of Smoke

It
was either the end of everything or a new beginning. The fields by the river
were sodden, and the sky kept dripping rain as if the bottom had fallen out of
all the clouds, and the fine hopes of a year of unlimited promise had been
ground under in mud and bloodshed and the nameless horrors of the battlefields.
Weary with a week in the saddle and with the unutterable loneliness and weight
of command, McClellan took over the house and grounds of Berkeley Plantation
for his headquarters. The house was a fine one, spaciously built of brick in
the colonial days, but he did not care to occupy it. Ambulance details had got
there ahead of him, and it was filled with desperately wounded men—"a
gruesome place," one officer confessed after visiting it—and the
commanding general's tents were pitched on the lawn some rods away from the
dwelling.

Lee had failed in his big effort to surround
and demolish this army. It was safe here on the river, with gunboats on guard
in the stream and with a fleet of transports and supply steamers ready to bring
new men and equipment. Yet the army was isolated, just the same; in the war,
but curiously out of it for the moment, as if it had been stranded here on the
mud flats by some strange ebb tide, damaged by wind and wave, inert, its future
wholly problematical. For it was an army which, by now, drew its spirit and its
tone from its commander, and its commander was walled away from the world. It
was not for nothing that he identified himself, in the purple prose of his army
proclamations, with the lives and well-being of his men. The seven days of
fighting which had torn the army so cruelly had torn him in the same way. The
emotional tension thus created in him had led to a blind and angry reaction:
the army had suffered; suffering, it had failed; the failure could only be due
to betrayal by those who should have supported it. At any cost, its commander
must show that the cause of this suffering was not himself. In the heat of this
feeling he had sent Secretary Stanton a passionate telegram after the fight at
Gaines's Mill—a strange, taut message, explaining how evil the fortunes of the
day had been and bitterly disclaiming any responsibility for the defeat. With
only ten thousand more men, he cried, he could yet gain the victory; the battle
just fought would have been so different if Washington had not held back the
few reinforcements he had asked for. He continued:

"I
feel too earnestly tonight. I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to
feel otherwise than that the government has not sustained this army. If you do
not do so now the game is lost."

And
then the final, bitter sentences, calculated to burn all bridges —or,
conceivably, not calculated at all, just slipping out like a cry of unendurable
passion:

"If I save this army now, I tell you
plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You
have done your best to sacrifice this army."

Passionate or cold, McClellan was a man of
clear intelligence and he knew as well as anyone that an army commander does
not say that to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President, without
forcing a showdown. Everything said and done in Washington, after this message,
would be judged by McClellan in light of the fact that those words had been
spoken. Presumably he would be cashiered; if not, it could only mean that
Washington was knuckling under and was tacitly confessing its guilt as
well—continuing him in command and leaving so flat an accusation unanswered!
But what McClellan never knew was that neither Lincoln nor Stanton ever saw
that bitter, accusing conclusion until many months later. A War Department
functionary, decoding dispatches from army headquarters and preparing them for
the Secretary, found his eyes popping out when he read those two closing
sentences. Shocked to the bottom of his orderly governmental soul, he simply
deleted them, and the general's dispatch went spiraling upward through the
hierarchy with the damning charge omitted. Irascible Stanton did not see it
until long after he and McClellan had ceased to be problems to each other.

Meanwhile,
the general was more than ever thrown in on the army.

He
might draw supplies from Washington, might even get reinforcements-he was
telling the War Department that he needed fully a hundred thousand fresh
soldiers—but he could not get emotional support from that source any longer.
That could come only from the soldiers. To his wife, on the day the dejected
army filed into the lines at Harrison's Landing, he wrote that "the dear
fellows cheer me as of old as they march to certain death, and I feel prouder
of them than ever," and he confessed that it was only among the troops
that he felt at home. Describing the week of fighting and marching, he wrote:
"You can't tell how nervous I became; everything seemed like the opening
of artillery, and I had no rest, no peace, except when in front with my men.
The duties of my position are such as often to make it necessary for me to
remain in the rear. It is an awful thing." But the men never failed. He
rode among them and "they began to cheer as usual, and called out that
they were all right and would fall to the last man for 'Little Mac'"

So
he tried to give the army the reassurance which the army gave him. Independence
Day came three days after the army reached the river. To the troops McClellan
issued a stirring proclamation: "Under every disadvantage of numbers, and
necessarily of position also, you have in every conflict beaten back your foes
with enormous slaughter. That your conduct ranks you among the celebrated
armies of history, no one will ever question; then each of you may always say
with pride, 'I belonged to the Army of the Potomac' "
¹

It must be admitted that when it first
reached camp the army did not feel particularly heroic or distinguished. The
flat fields around Harrison's Landing struck it as a poor place for a camp.
Most of the ground was growing wheat, which was cut down and laid to serve as
bedding under the shelter tents. It didn't work very well. The ground turned
into semi-liquid mud, the tent pins wouldn't hold, the soggy straw either
floated away or was mashed out of sight, and worn-out men awoke to find
themselves lying in mud puddles with clammy canvas collapsed on top of them.
(Some of them did, anyway: many others had had to abandon tent-and-blanket
rolls during the retreat and had nothing whatever to sleep on or under.) The
8th
Ohio, coming down from the north in a reinforcement
brigade and reaching the landing the day after camp had been made, thought at
first that the whole country had been flooded. "It was almost as
muddy," wrote one soldier, "as if the waters of the deluge had just
retreated from the face of the earth."
²

Nobody had had much to eat for several days,
what with the constant fighting and marching, and it was hard to find wood for
fires here—or, while the rain lasted, to make fires burn if wood could be
found. There was great confusion at first, with men separated from their
commands, and brigades and divisions were all split up and intermingled. While
they were trying to sort themselves out an obnoxious battery of Confederate
horse artillery popped up on a low ridge north of camp and began flinging
shells down on the plain. The men swore wearily, a brigade went up to drive the
guns away, and the high command—almost as punch-drunk momentarily as the men
themselves—got some field fortifications built along the ridge so that further
disturbers of the peace could be held away.

It was right at this time, too, that the army
as a whole made a horrifying discovery about itself. It was lousy.

The men were ashamed when they discovered it,
until they found that everybody was in the same boat; then they accepted it as
one of the miserable facts of army life and made jokes about it. One man
declared that in the Glendale fight he had seen a high officer dramatically
calling a brigade to the charge—posing bravely on his horse, his right hand
holding his sword high, while with his left hand he busily and unconsciously
kept scratching himself. The surgeon of the 57th New York would not believe it
when the colonel told him the regiment was infested; said it must be just a few
of the men, careless fellows, no doubt, who didn't bother to keep clean. The
colonel, probably wondering how anyone could be expected to keep clean in a
solid week of unbroken fighting and marching, exploded at him: "The whole
army is lousy! I am lousy, you are lousy, General McClellan is lousy!"
³
The army got some relief as supply ships came up. New clothing was distributed,
and details were formed to collect and burn verminous underwear and uniforms.