by Ralph Peters
After seeing off Patrick, their dour provost marshal, Hooker bent over a map spread across a table. Mud gripped his boots. Butterfield joined him and pulled the oil lamp closer.
Hooker stank of horse, but he was gay.
“Properly done … wouldn’t you say, Dan? Hardly thought I could pull it off myself.”
“Nothing like it so far in this war.”
“You should have seen them, though. The crossing … beautiful, and I don’t use that word lightly. Even Howard’s Germans made a good showing.”
“Uncle John’s across at Fredericksburg. A few delays early on, but he’s over in strength, so both flanks are in order. Latest report has the Johnnies strengthening their lines opposite Sedgwick. Jackson’s bunch.”
Hooker clapped his hands. His teeth were not as impressive as the rest of him. That fine shock of graying hair and the ruddy skin suited him, the goodly bulk of the man, but Joe had whiskey teeth and a drinker’s breath. Even now, fully sober.
“Splendid. Splendid, splendid, splendid!” Hooker straightened his back, his figure commanding. “If I don’t compel Bobby Lee to do exactly what I want … I tell you, Dan, they can put me up against a wall and shoot me dead.”
“It’s a good start…” But there still was much to be done, Butterfield finished the thought to himself.
Hooker’s spirits would not be tamed or tempered. If he was the army’s finest-looking general, Joe was far from the humblest.
“A good start means a fine finish. You know the dictum, Dan. All but impossible to recover from flawed initial dispositions. Jomini wasn’t a complete fool. To say nothing of Napoléon. Lee’s dispositions leave him at my mercy.” He gripped Butterfield by the biceps and gave him a playful shake. “I’ve got him, Dan. He’s as good as cooked and on the plate.”
Butterfield nodded. Matters seemed fine, indeed. Better than anyone had a right to expect, it was simply the truth. They’d been a good team, with Hooker the driving wheel and himself the brake, when necessary. And Hooker deserved credit, more than his jealous peers were apt to render. When Hooker had taken command after Burnside’s wretched performance at Fredericksburg—the fellow had shattered the army—morale had been low and conditions beyond description. The Mud March, then the sicknesses in the camps. Bad rations and general lassitude, thieving quartermasters and pay in arrears. Hooker had fixed it in mere weeks, bludgeoning the War Department, reforming everything from field hospitals to the commissary, camp sanitation to hours fixed for drill. It had been little less than a miracle: By St. Patrick’s Day—as wild a day as wanted—the Army of the Potomac had been restored and improved, in the mood for another scrap, in the mood for vengeance.
The only problem pressing was the looming expiration of enlistments for a full fifth of the men. The prospect of losing tens of thousands of soldiers—out of 150,000 present for duty—had demanded the earliest possible date for opening the campaign, and there had been hints of mutiny, quickly suppressed, as the spring rains forced delays.
Still, the force on the march was superb, unrivaled. For all his gifts and grandiose schemes, McClellan had never approached Joe’s skill at hammering the army into shape and making it move. Butterfield’s wound from Gaines’ Mill attested to that, a memento of Little Mac’s utterly botched campaign.
Beside him, Hooker yawned. “Believe I’ll take myself off to the sleep of the just. If a fellow can sleep.… Isn’t it all just grand, though? I’ll have Lee just where I want him, he can either retreat on Richmond, or accept battle on my terms. Either way, he’s buggered.”
Butterfield rubbed the back of his neck, stiff from a long day of bending over maps, that necessary, lesser form of action. They all were tired, with the campaign barely begun.
“I’ll stay up for a bit,” he said. He did not add that he would have liked a drink. Hooker, who was a bully friend to a bottle, had sworn off his whiskey for the campaign’s duration and Butterfield meant to help him keep his vow. There would be no accusations of drunkenness, not this time.
He had even, in Hooker’s absence, made certain that no bottles remained either in the room Hooker used for private matters or in his tent, where he displayed himself as a proper field soldier to visitors.
As if reading his thoughts, Hooker added, “After all this … after we’ve knocked down Lee and strung up Davis … we’ll have us a grand debauch in New York City, you can really show me around.”
“You’ll be my guest, Joe. You’ll be celebrated.”
And he would be, indeed. Hooker would blaze through the city’s finest establishments, breaking the steely hearts of hardened whores. As Marsena Patrick had flushed the last of the wantons out of camp, a famed and ferocious madame from Washington City had resisted her dismissal, moony as a girl over Joe Hooker, if somewhat rougher in language and comportment.
Hooker deployed the lopsided smile he reserved for private exchanges. “And then you can teach me how to make a fortune. Damned if I ever figured it out myself. I’ll go back to California and rub their faces in it.”
Butterfield knew those tales, too, how Hooker had left the Army in California to amass riches but had amassed only debts, scrabbling about the brown fields of Sonoma, welcome in barrooms but ever less welcome in banks, feuding with greasers, and living in a cabin. If the war had killed many another man, the war had saved Joe Hooker.
The thing was that Joe really was a grand fellow, despite all, a talented soldier and jovial companion, sound in command and delightful when carousing. Nor was he a martinet or close-minded ass: Joe was a friend to any man’s good idea. He’d readily backed Butterfield’s propositions, the cap patches to identify the corps to which men belonged, the red, white, or blue flags to distinguish divisions and brigades—small matters, yet touches the men had embraced with pride. His bugle calls had found a welcome, too, even his schemes to support the campaign with deception.
Now they just had to win.
Rain arrived from the west, slapping walls and windows. Many a soldier would get a good soaking this night. Butterfield almost wished that he were out there, in rough camps beside them. As chief of staff, he was tethered to headquarters, imposing the order and discipline he’d mastered not at some stiff-necked academy but as the eastern superintendent of American Express, a company that was almost a family possession. The West Point men were fine in the field, but it took a man of business to run an army.
Midnight
Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia
Robert E. Lee yearned to sleep. And the rain striking the canvas, diffusing the familiar mildew smell, could not be blamed for his wakefulness, no more than the old discomfort of his cot. He had lived with these things for two-thirds of his lifetime, and ease had only rarely been his companion. Nor was it the flutter in his heart or the worsening rheumatism that haunted him. The secret, inadmissible doubt was locked within. And there it would remain.
He had ever been a good keeper of secrets, revealing as little of himself as possible, constructing over decades the armor he wore in the battles of everyday life.
But he needed rest and found none.
Certainly, this retreat from sleep, this unwanted rearguard action at day’s end, had partly to do with the chronic failings he battled, the hunger rations allotted to his soldiers, the lack of forage for horses, the unavailability of shoes or even laces, the regiments and brigades so whittled down.… Longstreet had been dispatched to Suffolk not as a strategic stroke but to feed his men off counties less chewed by war.
Lee felt the quirk in his heart again, the elusive flirt of pain.
He feared that he needed Longstreet now and had pressed President Davis to hasten the return of his two divisions, but a crisis looming on the Rappahannock somehow seemed less urgent on the James. At times, Richmond seemed immune to war’s reality. The president always listened, but he often failed to hear.
The report from Stuart describing those people as marching on Gordonsville had arrived late and already disproven, and there h
ad been no word from Stuart since. Lee’s slight information had come in bits, from fugitive soldiers surprised on the Rapidan and from scouts retained by headquarters, and all that was clear was that great designs were afoot. The Federals were on the march against his left in strength, and he had watched another force pass the Rappahannock on the right, below Fredericksburg. He could not yet reckon where the main blow would fall, and that knowledge was critical. For the first time since that long afternoon at Sharpsburg, Lee felt trapped.
He had sinned the sin of pride, dismissing Hooker and mocking him. Now Hooker had leapt toward him, with startling skill. The Lord had chosen to humble him, to caution him.
But the Lord, he trusted, would not desert him truly, not if there was justice in his cause. His God was the God of miracles, of resurrections, a loyal God.
Robert E. Lee had come late to the Lord. For most of his life, attendance at church had been a social duty, pleasant or dreary, depending on the company. He had believed that he believed in the Lord, but he had not. Then, at his first gray hairs, the spirit had shaken him—not so grandly as was done unto Paul on the road to Damascus, but in a quiet knowledge, an unexpected awareness. His wife’s concerns had been put to rest as Lee embraced his Savior.
He was no zealot, of course, his prayers were not shouted. He was a Lee, and Lees were not demonstrative. The Episcopal Church fit him as if specially tailored, as it had his forebears. He had none of Jackson’s blaze, no trace of that Presbyterian ferocity, that broadsword faith. Lee’s God valued good manners.
Jackson. Some had thought him mad, with his early-in-the-war demands to raise the black flag and slay every Federal, to take no prisoners but to fill the North with dread of massacre, forcing a war just begun to a quick end. His hand had been stayed as Abraham’s had been, if not by the Lord then by decency and sense. And Jackson accepted his superiors’ demurrals as if they had come from the Lord. He was a faithful servant.
Now no man was a greater aid to Lee. Not even Longstreet.
Brilliant, peculiar Thomas Jonathan Jackson, his right hand, this matchless killer.
And yet, at winter’s end, Jackson had been distraught, almost unmanned, at the death of a little girl from scarlet fever, a child who was no kin. And to see him reunited with his wife and lofting his infant daughter had been to view a portrait of every tenderness. That morning, Jackson had been surprised, as they all had been, and he had been compelled to send off his wife and child in haste as he readied for battle. All the day thereafter, Jackson had appeared fierce and fixed and dutiful, but Lee had read the loss deep in his eyes.
He had never met a man as strange as Jackson, a hanging judge with a child’s heart: earnest and awkward, implacable.
Well, Jackson would see to the right, to the Fredericksburg lines, as the situation developed. But all Lee had been able to do for his left, in the absence of certainty, was to dispatch Anderson and his division to slow those people and gather information. But Anderson was no Jackson. A brave man, but lethargic, he required detailed orders and stern tones.
Jackson had identified two Union corps on the right below Fredericksburg. Reports from the left suggested three corps advancing from the west. That left two entire Union corps unaccounted for—where were they? Nor was Stuart certain of the Federal cavalry’s intentions. It was all aswirl, nigh on overwhelming.
Spies and the Northern newspapers granted Hooker an edge of three to one, impossible odds.
No, he must not think so. Nothing could be permitted to be impossible. And nothing was impossible for the Lord.
Was it blasphemous to pray for a miracle? In this fearsome, unwanted war? A war he had hoped might be avoided even after the first shots had been fired? A war his people must win?
He thought of poor old Scott, gargantuan, unable to rise without the assistance of an aide-de-camp. Venerable, with anger and tears in his eyes at once, so disappointed had he been in Lee. But Lee had not had a choice, Virginia needed him. That last ride back to Arlington House had been inexpressibly painful, a betrayal not merely of an oath but of his life entire.
So many ties had been broken, so much abandoned.
Rain slapped the canvas. The damp gripped. His bones ached.
Perhaps all things would seem clear in the morning, perhaps inspiration would present itself, an ingenious solution.…
Lee did not believe it. He had been caught out, that was the truth. In his pride, he had laid a snare for himself. Now he risked being crushed, like Pharaoh, between two great blue waves. And he and these lean-shanked men sleeping wet around him, these good men in their thousands, would have to spend their lives to save the army.
TWO
Eleven a.m., April 30
Germanna Plank Road, west of Chancellorsville
The rain in the night had summoned memories of another land, of a lost world Carl Schurz had fought to free, only to fail. Now, on the march and uniformed in the blue of his new country, he relived that youthful struggle again, an interlude—so brief—of wondrous hopes, of dreams that had ended in exile for the fortunate, leaving behind comrades fallen in unequal battles and others who had been shot by firing squads.
The lyrics of a cradle song assailed him, in damp daylight:
Schlaf, mein Kind, schlaf leis’,
Da draussen geht der Preuss’
Der Preuss’ hat eine blutige Hand,
Er schwebt es ueber das Badische Land …
How might he translate that whispered scrap to tell his new countrymen how fear reigned under tyrants?
Sleep, my child, keep still,
The Prussian comes to kill.
The Prussian has a bloody hand,
He waves it over Baden’s land …
Not a literal translation, not fully, but the meaning was there. The fear, always the fear. Of the petty magistrate, of the wrong word caught by the wrong ear, of soldiers hammering on the door at midnight. Suddenly, in that glorious year of 1848, the dread had been vanquished with bewildering ease. Revolutions swept Europe, the people demanded freedom. Hardly more than a boy, if skilled with a pen, he’d hurtled forward as a disciple of Kinkel, his cherished professor, to join the Frankfurt National Assembly. And there, in the sweat of summer, the heartbreak began.
Germany had a free parliament at last. And Germans squandered the chance. There had been too many theoreticians, too many scribblers and cloud-dwelling idealists, and too few practical men who knew how to govern. The vision of a democratic union of German states had staggered under a burden of rhetoric, undermined by petty jealousies. By 1849, as the revolutions faltered one after the other, the king of Prussia—his overlord—had recovered his footing and set the army in motion. There had been nothing left for good men to do but fight.
He’d hurried southward with Kinkel then, from Bonn to Kaiserslautern, to join a Palatine people’s army that was no army at all, merely a band of shopkeepers and artisans, of students and consumptive intellectuals, furnished with ancient muskets, fowling pieces, or swords recovered from attics. Lacking uniforms, trained in nothing, freedom’s incompetent champions were sent reeling by regiments of well-armed, well-drilled Prussians. The staunchest retreated southward into Baden, where the duchy’s small army had joined the revolution, where one sliver of Germany remained free.
He put on the uniform of a lieutenant of Baden. Witness to follies innumerable, he learned how a retreat becomes a rout. Outfought and outflanked again and again, he and his comrades finally were cornered at Rastatt, shut within fortress walls along the Rhine.
Kinkel was captured. The survivors faced a siege, its outcome predestined. As Prussian subjects, he, Kinkel, and many another rebel expected death.
But he had not died. When a surrender was agreed—to spare civilians—he had taken to the storm drains and the sewers, determined to escape and fight again, somewhere, someday. He and two companions almost drowned before nearly being captured by alert sentries. Driven back, they hid in a loft as Prussian lancers took up quarters below them.
At last, they slipped back into the sewers and, on their second attempt, escaped and crossed the Rhine to France and safety.
Kinkel wasn’t shot but imprisoned for life. Now, on this overcast morning an ocean away, as a different uniform dried between rinses of rain, Schurz remained astonished at the task he had next undertaken, at his daring, his madness. Only a brazen and foolish young man could have pulled off what he achieved—he lacked that fearlessness now. Safe and welcome among fellow exiles in Switzerland, he had chosen to make his way back across Prussia’s borders, all the way north to Berlin. To his own amazement and the world’s, he had all but single-handedly freed Kinkel from Spandau Prison and smuggled his friend and mentor onto a merchant ship bound for England.
At the age of twenty-one, Carl Schurz had found himself feted by London’s babel of political refugees. He had thought only of Kinkel and the professor’s matchless wife, of their needful children, and had become an incidental hero, the author of a victory for freedom. He married a splendid Hamburg girl and they left for the United States.
Greeted by German émigrés, he taught himself English from newspapers, exploring each unknown word, and his knack for accents quickly set him apart. Alone among the Germans he encountered, he could mimic the language of the native-born—a blessing when he moved west to Wisconsin, the latest promised land for Forty-Eighters.
He soon was drawn into politics at a time when the German vote went to the Democrats, despite the party’s association with slavery. The faltering Whigs had been infected by anti-immigrant Know Nothings, and the Deutsche Einsiedler saw them as the enemy. Democrats seemed the lesser of two evils.
But not to Schurz. He aligned with the fledgling Republican Party, braving country roads and frontier tracks, embracing the roughhouse politics of a raw land, suffering defeats but moving forward, eventually speaking to eager crowds from Milwaukee to Boston. Equally persuasive in German and English, Carl Schurz preached freedom, freedom, and freedom. Along the way, he got to know a politician and railroad lawyer named Lincoln.
