Many of the antiabolitionist officers were also deeply xenophobic, further inflaming the tensions within the unit. Abbott scorned the foreigners as cowards, dismissing them as “Dutch boors, Maccaronis, & Frogratecs, in short the rag tag & bobtail of all creation, little short beastly fellows with beards & more stupid than it is possible for an American who has never seen them to conceive of.”21
The Twentieth did not even enjoy the cohesion that most Civil War regiments could count on from the traditional practice of filling each company with men from a single town. By the time the Twentieth began organizing, competition for recruits was making it difficult to find a hundred men from one place ready to enlist together.
The regiment’s senior officers did, however, have some important experience, if not specifically military, in commanding men and in understanding the lives of Irish workingmen and others from outside their social class. Colonel Lee had attended West Point, though left before graduating to work as a civil engineer, leading survey crews and becoming a major railroad executive. Major Paul Revere, grandson of his famous namesake of the Revolution, had overseen the rebuilding of a burned-out wharf his family owned in one of the toughest of Boston’s Irish waterfront neighborhoods, and his experiences there had drawn him into helping the homeless children of the city’s most abject poor. And Captain Bartlett, his Harvard pedigree notwithstanding, had spent much of his time at college hanging around billiard parlors and saloons, where he had learned much about the practical side of life as well.22
All of the officers were ordered to help fill the ranks. The Germans—along with the regiment’s sole Irish officer—did the best, bringing in hundreds of recruits from their ethnic communities, but Bartlett led all the Harvard men, with twenty-five. Lieutenant Holmes, dispatched to Pittsfield, came back with a respectable eleven volunteers from among the friends and acquaintances of his boyhood summers there.23
THIRTY MILES NORTHWEST of Washington, the Potomac River divides for two miles around a low, narrow strip of land known as Harrison’s Island. On the Virginia side, the narrower of the two streams flows along the base of a hundred-foot-high bluff that towers over the river for a few hundred yards, cut on each end by a deep ravine where creeks empty into the river.
Ball’s Bluff was fated to be the scene of a relatively minor skirmish of the opening months of the war, one that on the scale of carnage Americans were about to become shockingly accustomed to would barely register a year later, with fewer than one hundred killed and three hundred wounded. But in the wake of the devastating defeat at Bull Run three months earlier, the Union’s debacle at Ball’s Bluff would come as a terrible psychological blow to the country. The setback would also bring painfully to the fore the deep political divisions throughout the North over the purpose and meaning of the war that divided Holmes’s own regiment.
To Holmes and his fellow officers, though, Ball’s Bluff had a different meaning. It was their first chance to see if they could face fear and death with the courage they knew was expected of them, but which many honestly wondered if they would find within themselves when the moment came. Most performed with extraordinary bravery in the midst of the chaos and bungling leadership for which Ball’s Bluff is principally remembered by military historians today. A military disaster, but an individual triumph: Holmes would always look back on his baptism by fire through that intensely personal lens.
The Twentieth had arrived in Washington in the predawn of September 7 and encamped within sight of the unfinished Capitol building, its long-planned expansion halted in mid-construction with the start of the war, leaving a decapitated collar where the soaring new dome was to rise.24
Unlike many of the state forces that were being rushed to defend the city, the Massachusetts regiments had arrived well equipped. “Have you arms, uniforms, ammunition, &c.” asked McClellan when Colonel Lee reported to him on arrival. “My regiment, Sir, came from Massachusetts,” Lee proudly replied. Their competence was another matter. Henry Abbott’s brother Edward, who had been in the field for two months already in the Second Massachusetts, stopped by to visit and saw the same jittery nerves and rookie greenness among the Twentieth’s officers that his own regiment had been through when they first arrived, “thinking a fight was going to take place every five minutes. They actually believed that they were going to march to meet 30,000 men that very night.” The regiment’s surgeon, Nathan Hayward, observed, “Our men are clumsy enough at camping, and take three times as long as is necessary to get things to rights.”25
A few days later, Holmes wrote his mother, “I feel very well & in very good spirits and I think I am learning as I certainly am trying.” Though the camp buzzed with rumors about their destination, the food was plentiful and good; the officers were able to buy milk, eggs, peach and apple pies even if the supply of meat came and went; he reported to his mother that he now weighed 136 pounds.26
By the fifteenth the regiment was camped at Edward’s Ferry, two miles south of Harrison’s Island along the Potomac and the C & O Canal that closely parallels it on the Maryland side.
Across the river they could see Confederate pickets, and from the tops of tree could occasionally spot larger bodies of men and horses moving closer to the small town of Leesburg to the north. Once in a while the pickets would exchange desultory shots, but they also sometimes laid down their arms and met halfway across the river on one of the several shallow fords to chat and exchange newspapers, or called back and forth chaffing remarks: “When are you going to Richmond?” “The day before you go to Washington.”27
There was certainly no plan or expectation for any serious action along the front where they were deployed. McClellan had designated the 6,500-man division north of Washington, under the command of Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, the “Corps of Observation.” Its job was to keep an eye on the Confederate forces across the river and guard against a surprise crossing at any of the fords or ferries.
Headquarters of the Twentieth Massachusetts near the Potomac, autumn 1861
The unintended battle that began on October 20 has been studied ever since as a model for how not to conduct a military operation. Vague strategic objectives, confused lines of command, ambiguous orders, miscommunications, woefully insufficient reconnaissance, and a disastrous absence of logistical planning would have placed even the most experienced troops in an impossible position. Worst of all was the decision—such as it was—to place seventeen hundred men along the top of an indefensible cliff edge with a sheer drop and an unfordable river to their rear.28
At midday on October 20, McClellan telegraphed to Stone that he was sending a division under Brigadier General George A. McCall to march toward Leesburg from its camp in Langley, Virginia; the aim was to assess the size of the Confederate force in the town, and perhaps even induce it to withdraw altogether in the face of this show of force. “Perhaps a slight demonstration on your part would have the effect to move them,” McClellan suggested.29
McClellan later insisted he had never intended Stone to send any troops across the river at all. But after a small scouting party that night crossed over and spotted what they took to be a small Confederate camp of fifteen or twenty tents—they would later turn out to be gaps between trees where the night sky shone through—Stone authorized a raid to destroy the camp and, if the way were open, to continue on to Leesburg. The Twentieth was to wait on Harrison’s Island and then cross to the top of the bluff to cover the retreat of the Fifteenth Massachusetts, which was to lead the raid.
Map of Ball’s Bluff sketched by William Francis Bartlett immediately after the battle. Holmes was shot close to where A Company is shown at the far left of the line.
Everything went wrong from there. The only boats available to cross the swift-flowing currents of the second channel, from Harrison’s Island to the Virginia side, were a small rowboat and two small skiffs, capable of carrying a total of thirty men at a time. Three larger scows, each carrying forty men, were available for the crossing from Maryla
nd to the island, and after some difficulty a rope was stretched across the channel to guide the boats, but that still left a growing bottleneck of men on the island. It was taking an hour or more to move a hundred men all the way across the river. Once there, the only way up the bluff was a steep switchback trail that, as the regiment’s official historian later described it, was little more than a “sheep-path,” wide enough for only a single man.30
Arriving at the top, Captain Bartlett thought “it looked rather dubious.” There was a small grassy field of about six acres in front of them, with only a thirty-foot-wide line of trees at the top of the bluff’s edge for cover. The field was no more than five hundred yards wide, barely enough room for one regiment to deploy in line of battle. “It was in fact one of the most complete slaughter pens ever devised,” Abbott afterward said.31
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Stone, McCall’s force was already marching back to Langley, having completed its reconnaissance toward Leesburg earlier that morning. It was not until midday that McClellan had an inkling that Stone had decided to turn his “slight demonstration” into a major reconnaissance-in-force of his own, right into enemy territory. Stone reported confidently, however, that having found no enemy camp after all, the way to Leesburg was open, and that he could take it that day. He ended his message with a line that has entered the annals of military fiasco: “We are a little short of boats.”
Stone now ordered several additional regiments to cross the river, and placed them all under the command of Colonel Edward D. Baker, who led a brigade of California troops being sent to join the action. Baker had no military experience. Before the war he had been a senator from Oregon, and he had become a close friend of Lincoln’s: the president named his second son after him.
Baker exuded an air of confidence, even as he perceived the precariousness of the situation. Riding up to Colonel Lee he politely introduced himself, saying, “I congratulate you upon the prospect of a battle.” But Baker’s inexperience told from the start. Rather than using his time to study the terrain of the battlefield and position his troops, he spent two hours on Harrison’s Island personally supervising the slow ferrying of men across the rising waters of the Potomac. Due to earlier confusion over plans and orders, a cavalry patrol intended to look for the enemy never went out, and Baker remained unaware that a force of almost two thousand Confederates was rapidly approaching from Leesburg.
Major Revere recalled his men marching up the hill “happy and gay, ready for the fight.” By three o’clock they were in the fight of their lives. The Confederate troops, firing from the shelter of the woods on the far side of the field, quickly had the Union troops surrounded on three sides. Holmes was in the thick of it on the left end of the front line. But hemmed in on their tiny front at the bluff’s edge, many of the Union soldiers were unable to return fire without hitting their own men directly in front of them. Individual companies time and again rallied to charge the Confederates, but the piecemeal attacks repeatedly failed. The crews manning two howitzers that had been hauled by brute strength up the path were hit by friendly fire; horses pulling another gun panicked and plunged back down the cliff.
“Our men were shot on every side of us,” Abbott recounted afterward, describing the desperation of the situation. But like Bartlett, Revere, and the other officers, Abbott found himself able to carry on, coolly encouraging his men by walking up and down the line, heedless of the enemy fire. “Why Lit, aren’t you hit yet?” Bartlett kept calling out in a show of devil-may-care humor, using Abbott’s army nickname, short for “Little.”32 Hallowell showed exceptional courage, too, leading a small group of men stealthily up to the rebel line behind a row of trees to let loose a volley on their flank.
Two hours into the battle, at about four thirty, Holmes was out in front of his men of Company A when a nearly spent round struck him just below the ribcage, knocking the wind out of him and sending him sprawling to the ground. He started to crawl back, and was being helped to his feet by his sergeant when Colonel Lee passed by and said, “That’s right Mr. Holmes—Go to the rear.” But suddenly feeling “that I couldn’t without more excuse” leave the field, he turned and rushed forward to where he heard Lee just then cheering the men on to charge. “I waved my sword and asked if none would follow me when down I went again by the Colonel’s side,” Holmes recounted in the letter he wrote his mother two days after the battle.33
This time the bullet had passed through his chest from left to right. He later found the ball still in his clothes. Bleeding heavily from the mouth, Holmes was carried down the bluff to where the small boats, already heavily laden with wounded men, were making their precarious way across a hundred and fifty yards of water to Harrison’s Island.
By now the position had collapsed completely. Around five o’clock Colonel Baker was shot through the head simultaneously by several bullets, dying instantly. Bartlett, Abbott, and Hallowell organized sixty men in a desperate rearguard action, charging from the grove into the open field to buy some time for the men now tumbling in panic down the side of the bluff. Men were shot as they plunged into the river or waited for the boats that were still slowly trying to ferry the wounded. The water’s surface, recalled Bartlett, “looked like a pond when it rains, from the withering volleys that the enemy were pouring down from the top of the bank.”34 Howell was one of the last to make it; hanging his watch around his neck and holding his sword aloft, he swam across, then helped man a jury-rigged boat made of fence rails to return with a few more of the wounded.
As Holmes lay half-conscious at the river’s edge, he heard another wounded man groan. As he wryly recounted to Mrs. Curtis sixty years later, the thought went through his mind for a moment of “playing Sir Philip Sidney,” and saying, “have that other feller put in the boat first”—referring to the legendary story of Sidney handing his canteen to a dying soldier with the words, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Holmes decided instead to “let events take their course.”35
At a crude field hospital on the island, his first sight was of a severed arm lying on a red blanket in a pool of blood. At last Dr. Hayward approached to inspect his wound.
“How does it look, Doctor, shall I recover? Tell me the truth for I really want to know,” Holmes said.36
“We-ell, you may recover,” the doctor cautiously responded. Holmes had supplied himself with a small bottle of laudanum to hasten his end if ever he were suffering intolerable pain, and that first night “I made up my mind to die,” he later confessed to his mother.37 But another surgeon came by and gave him a dose of something to help him sleep, and when he waked he found the bottle of laudanum had been taken away from him. He never again worried about making such preparations for the end.
In his half-dream, half-nightmare state Holmes remembered Pen Hallowell appearing and kissing him, and feeling a terrible anxiety to make sure that someone would write home “& tell ’em I’d done my duty” if he died.
He later was struck forcefully by “how rapidly the mind adjusts itself” to new circumstances, how contingent even the most fundamental truths seemed to be. “I thought for awhile that I was dying, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world—The moment the hope of life returned it seemed as abhorrent to nature as ever that I should die.” More matter-of-factly he recalled that “one of the thoughts that made it seem particularly hard to die was the recollection of several fair damsels whom I wasn’t quite ready to leave.”
Holmes wrote down most of these impressions about two years after the battle; they were on loose sheets placed inside a diary of his war experiences, and at the end of his account of Ball’s Bluff he appended a brief explanation of why he had so carefully plumbed the memories of his first wound.
At first I only intended to show the rapidity of thought & queer suggestions which occur when one is hit, but as I always wanted to have a memorandum of this experience—so novel at that time to all & especially so to me from the novelty of my service and my youth—I have told the whole
story from the time I was hit until apprehension had left me.
Most striking was the vivid sequence of philosophical reflections about life itself that passed through his mind in that falling-down log hut on Harrison’s Island, as men lay groaning and dying around him:
Of course when I thought I was dying the reflection that the majority vote of the civilized world declared that with my opinions I was en route for Hell came up with painful distinctness—Perhaps the first impulse was tremulous—but then I said—by Jove, I die like a soldier anyhow—I was shot in the breast doing my duty up to the hub—afraid? No, I am proud—then I thought I couldn’t be guilty of a deathbed recantation—father and I had talked of that and were agreed that it generally meant nothing but a cowardly giving way to fear—Besides, thought I, can I recant if I want to, has the approach of death changed my beliefs much? & to this I answered—No—Then came in my Philosophy—I am to take a leap in the dark—but now as ever I believe that whatever shall happen is best.
Later, he vaguely recalled being carried across the island in a blanket, lying on the bank comatose, “swearing terrifically,” finally being placed aboard a canal boat; then, being driven in “one of the two wheeled ambulances which were then in vogue as one form of torture,” with a balky horse and a man who didn’t know how to drive, with Captain Dreher as his companion. For the first time he saw the extent of Dreher’s ghastly head wound. “Two black cavities seemed all that there was left for eyes—his whiskers & beard matted with blood which still poured black, from his mouth—and a most horrible stench.”
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