Unholy Fire
A Riveting Thriller of the Civil War
Robert J. Mrazek
For my parents, Bill and Blanche,
the source of any and all inspiration
The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills the most people, receives the highest awards.
—Prince Andrew Bolkonski, in
War and Peace
Tolstoy
During the winter (1862–63) when Gen. Joseph Hooker was in command, I can say from personal knowledge and experience that the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac was a place to which no self-respecting man liked to go, and no decent woman would go. It was a combination of barroom and brothel.
—Capt. Charles Francis Adams Jr.
(grandson of Pres. John Quincy Adams)
First Massachusetts Cavalry
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the winter of 1862 Pres. Abraham Lincoln was desperate to find a successful commanding general for his ill-fated Army of the Potomac. As the second year of the war drew to a close, many considered his previous selections of field commanders to be scandalously, if not criminally, deficient.
The Union had begun the Civil War with high hopes for a quick victory. The army’s commanding general was Winfield Scott, the valiant warrior who had helped defeat the British fifty years earlier in the War of 1812, and then gone on to glory as the hero of Chapultepec in the war against Mexico.
At seventy-five, Winfield Scott was still an imposing six feet, five inches tall, but there were few traces left of the powerful warrior. His weight had ballooned to more than four hundred pounds, and he spent most of each day preparing himself for supper, when he would mount a huge throne chair and typically consume four dozen oysters, a brace of snipe, a leg of lamb, a joint of beef, and a full platter of pastries, all topped off with his favorite wines and brandies. No horse was large enough to carry him into battle. He could barely fit inside a carriage.
Clearly, Lincoln needed to find a more active field commander. He settled on Gen. Irvin McDowell. It was an unfortunate choice. A man of peculiar contrasts, the teetotaling McDowell viewed even tea and coffee as dangerously stimulating to the brain. Yet his gluttony rivaled Winfield Scott’s. One of his favorite culinary practices after consuming a gargantuan meal was to eat an entire watermelon, including the rind. When it came to fighting battles, however, Lincoln had to push him hard to use the army. McDowell was reluctant to move against the Confederates even though their forces were considerably smaller than his own. Under pressure, he finally headed south into Virginia.
On the night before the first great battle of the Civil War, McDowell collapsed at his headquarters after an intestinal attack caused by a bad section of watermelon. The next day, the Union army was routed at Manassas, Virginia, its remnants retreating in complete panic back to Washington that same night. Rumors immediately began circulating through the capital that General McDowell was a traitor. The morning after the battle, Lincoln dismissed him as commander.
President Lincoln’s next choice was the diminutive Gen. George Brinton McClellan. Just thirty-four, “Little Mac” patterned himself after Napoleon. He was the first American general to understand the art of public relations. The victor of a small skirmish in the mountains of West Virginia, McClellan and his supporters had embroidered the tiny engagement into the greatest victory since Yorktown. However, he proved to be an expert at reorganizing an army shattered by its humiliation at Manassas. His problems only began when Lincoln asked him to use it. If McDowell had been reluctant to fight, McClellan made avoiding battle an art form.
By November of 1861, his army numbered more than 120,000 men, while the Confederates could muster only 45,000 to repel him. Yet McClellan managed to convince himself that the enemy force was four times the size of his own and demanded more troops. Lincoln became increasingly impatient.
In the spring of 1862, McClellan decided to ferry his vast army by ship to the southeastern tip of the Virginia Peninsula. He then slowly moved north toward the Confederate capital of Richmond. After a long, unsuccessful attempt to lay siege to the city, he retreated back down the Peninsula. When McClellan began whining for more troops, Lincoln decided to bring in Gen. John Pope, who had recently won a successful engagement in the Western Theater of the war.
Unfortunately, Pope was incompetent, as well as a blowhard. After publicly denigrating the troops he was about to command, he stated that henceforth, “My headquarters will be in the saddle,” which led one irreverent observer to declare, “The dumb son of a bitch doesn’t even know his headquarters from his hindquarters.”
This proved to be exactly the case. Outmaneuvered at every step by Gen. Robert E. Lee, he suffered another disastrous defeat near Manassas, in virtually the same place where McDowell had been routed a year earlier. With the Union army in a state of near chaos, Lee now led his forces into Maryland in the first invasion of the North. The prime minister of England, Viscount Palmerston, was fully prepared to recommend that the Confederacy be recognized as an independent nation after Lee’s next anticipated success. Lincoln was forced to call McClellan back to try to save the day.
Fate now presented “Little Mac” with a golden opportunity that remains unparalleled in American military history. By chance, a written copy of Lee’s complete plan of operations was found by two Union soldiers and taken to the commanding general. It revealed that Lee had split his army into four separate parts. If McClellan moved quickly, he had a chance to annihilate Lee’s forces before they could reunite, thus ending the war.
McClellan squandered three days moving his army just thirty miles to the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland. There, Lee, with a force only one-third the size of McClellan’s, audaciously decided to stand and fight. McClellan, instead of using his overwhelming advantage to attack along the whole battle line, sent his men into the battle piecemeal. When the carnage at Antietam was over, the two armies had simply fought to a bloody standstill.
President Lincoln was finished with McClellan. Who would be his next choice? The decision was complicated by the fact that Lincoln’s popularity had sunk to its lowest ebb in the war. In addition to having selected a parade of losing generals to command the Union army, he had shown a terrible penchant for appointing militarily incompetent political friends like Sen. Edward Baker to important army commands. Their failures had led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of brave Union soldiers. Further, his appointment of corrupt politicians like Simon Cameron to the highest posts in the War Department had resulted in the theft of public funds on a monumental and unprecedented scale. Even worse, war profiteers were delivering military equipment to the army that was often shoddy and defective.
Understandably, many of the army’s career officers had come to revile the president. As the military defeats piled up, their anger became increasingly palpable. It was shared by the public at large. In the national election that took place just a few weeks after the Antietam battle, Lincoln’s Republican Party lost thirty-four congressional seats.
President Lincoln narrowed his next choice of army commander to two senior generals, Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker.
Like McClellan, Burnside had achieved a small success early in the war. Lincoln had taken notice of it and promoted him. Although his performance thereafter was undistinguished, few others in Lincoln’s army had excelled either
. It was said of Burnside that he not only knew he was incompetent but was the first to admit it. This self-deprecating geniality appealed to Lincoln, as it did to many of Burnside’s fellow officers. Early in his career, he had been an ardent poker player, once losing six months’ pay in a single game. He fell in love with a girl from Kentucky and proposed marriage. As they stood together at the altar, the minister asked if she would take him to be her husband. “No,” she exclaimed. Burnside, who also suffered from chronic diarrhea, handled all his disappointments with manly dignity. At Antietam, he came up woefully short again. As usual, he was the first to admit it.
Joe Hooker had different problems. Often called the most handsome officer in the Union army, he was an unrelenting critic of his superior officers, who naturally despised him. He had also earned a reputation as a hard drinker and a libertine. At the same time, Hooker had achieved the best combat record of any senior officer in the Union army. Almost rashly brave, he usually rode a white horse into battle, which made him as conspicuous a target as any general could be. A brilliant brigade commander, he had proven similarly successful when promoted to division and then corps command. Hooker fought his troops with a drive that bordered on recklessness. At Antietam, he sustained a serious wound while personally leading his men into the battle.
As history records, Lincoln chose Burnside, the man he personally liked, to command the army. By mid-November, 1862, the Army of the Potomac, 115,000 strong, and the largest military force then assembled on the planet, was on the move again.
Ambrose Burnside had a plan, and it reflected the simplicity of a man devoid of imagination. He proposed to push his whole army across the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and then head straight for Richmond, just fifty miles farther south. By capturing the Confederate capital, he could end the war.
The truth be told, if Burnside had carried out his plan with dispatch, American schoolchildren might today be laying flowers at Ambrose Burnside’s tomb, not Ulysses S. Grant’s. For when Joe Hooker, commanding the Center Grand Division, arrived at the Rappahannock River on November 19, 1862, he was amazed to discover that Lee had been caught by surprise. The enemy force facing him consisted of two batteries of field artillery, one regiment of cavalry, and three hundred infantrymen.
From his advance headquarters at Falmouth, Virginia, Hooker immediately requested permission to move his forty thousand men across the river, it then being shin-deep in places, and to take the high ground above the city of Fredericksburg. Burnside considered the request and promptly rejected it. Instead, he ordered Hooker to remain at Falmouth and wait for his engineers to bring up pontoon bridges that would make it easier for the rest of the army to cross.
So Hooker and his men sat down to wait.
CHAPTER ONE
Camp Benton, Maryland
Along the Potomac River
October 1861
On the morning before my first battle, I awoke to find a rime of frost on the moss-covered ground under my tent. Although it was only mid-October, the weather had grown markedly colder every day.
At around eight o’clock, a Rebel sharpshooter shot and killed one of our pickets down at the river. It was the first death in the regiment, and I wondered how many more there would be before the war was over.
We had spent five weeks trying to turn the six hundred men of the Twentieth Massachusetts into fighting soldiers. The regimental drummers would beat reveille every morning at six. After the first roll call there were squad drills, then breakfast, followed by sick call. We had company drill until dinner, followed by combat drill, dress parade, roll call, supper, and, finally, tattoo at nine o’clock. Along with the other officers, I would then work until one or two in the morning to prepare for the next day.
Our camp was situated on a low mountaintop near Poolesville, Maryland. At night the sky was so clear that we could actually see the signal fires in the Blue Ridge Mountains nearly fifty miles to the west where Confederate scouts were monitoring the movements of our army in the Shenandoah Valley. Just across the Potomac, the landscape was lit by the gleaming campfires of the Confederate brigade bivouacked around Leesburg, Virginia.
Every Saturday, we joined our sister regiments in Colonel Baker’s new brigade for parade drills. They were the Nineteenth Massachusetts, the Seventh Michigan, and the Forty-second New York, also known as the Tammany Regiment. Those men impressed me as the toughest group in the bunch. Based on the number of brawls they kept getting into, it seemed they were definitely spoiling for a fight.
On the night before the battle, Major Fred Wheelock strode briskly into my tent right after tattoo sounded. He had been at brigade headquarters all evening and could barely suppress his excitement.
At thirty, Major Wheelock was much older than the other junior officers, but like me he had no prior military experience. On the day Fort Sumter fell, I was in the middle of my last term at Harvard. Major Wheelock was then a Massachusetts state senator. Like thousands of others, we had both enlisted as soon as we learned the news.
“The Twentieth is going into action tomorrow, Lieutenant McKittredge,” he said. “General Stone has ordered our brigade to cross the Potomac into Virginia. Colonel Baker has given us the honor of going in first, ahead of the main force.”
I was thrilled that we were finally moving into action. Major Wheelock unfolded a map and spread it on the camp table. His index finger went directly to a spot on the Virginia side of the Potomac River.
“This will be our point of attack. It’s called Ball’s Bluff,” he said. “They say the river is fairly wide there … well over a man’s head most of the way. Between the Maryland shore and the Virginia side there is a small island.”
I could see the island on the map. Someone had scribbled the name Harrison’s on it.
“How high is Ball’s Bluff?” I asked Major Wheelock.
“Close to two hundred feet, I understand,” he said.
Just the thought of it took me aback.
“But why there?” I blurted.
The hard stare Major Wheelock gave me reflected his obvious exasperation at the idea that a twenty-year-old lieutenant was questioning important military strategy.
“Colonel Baker is confident that the Rebels will never expect a force of this size to attack there,” he said coldly. “He told us to think of this movement like the gambler who stakes his whole fortune on one bet.”
“How are we getting over?” I asked in a chastened voice.
“They are sending a small fleet of barges up the river to us,” he said. “Because you were once an island lad yourself, I thought you might want to lead the first element across tomorrow night.”
I immediately volunteered for the job. Major Wheelock showed his approval with a terse smile. In spite of the chill, he was sweating profusely, and I wondered whether he was ill.
“After making sure there are no Rebels on Harrison’s Island, you will lead the advance element across to the Virginia side, there to secure the high ground above the bluff for the main force that will follow you in the morning,” he said. “Colonel Baker will be in tactical command of the whole operation.”
I had met Colonel Edward Baker just once on the parade ground, although I had read about him since I was a boy. One of the great men of the Republic, he had enjoyed a brilliant political career before the war and been elected as a U.S. Senator from two different states. Many men claimed to be a friend of Abraham Lincoln, but the president had actually named one of his sons after Baker. Although he had no more military experience than Major Wheelock or me, he certainly looked the part of a fine military leader.
“Well, you have a lot to do,” said Major Wheelock, folding up his map and placing it inside his uniform coat. “Don’t let me down, Kit.”
“I won’t, sir,” I replied.
As soon as he left, I went straight to the tent of my first sergeant, Harlan Colfax. He was a bull-necked farrier from western Massachusetts and knew more about soldiering than any man in the regi
ment. In the Mexican War, he had fought as a private and come back with two promotions for gallantry under fire.
Sergeant Colfax was forty-six years old, with the weathered face of a downeast lobsterman. Although his manner toward most junior officers was as rough as a December cob, he had seemed to take a liking to me from the first day I had been assigned to the company. Maybe it was because I was the same age as his youngest son. Whatever the reason, his adroit handling of the men, in spite of my own ineptitude, had turned our company into the best in the regiment.
I told him the details of Colonel Baker’s plan for the attack and repeated Colonel Baker’s words about the gambler who was willing to stake his whole fortune on one bet. Harlan removed his battered pipe from his mouth and spat tobacco juice on the ground.
“It may be his bet,” he said, clearly unimpressed, “but it’s our lives.”
We spent the rest of that night as well as the next morning preparing and equipping the men I would be leading over. Our advance group moved out late in the afternoon, arriving at the Maryland side of the Potomac River with two hours of daylight left.
Ball’s Bluff was visible through the haze across the river, and I took a moment to examine the terrain through my binoculars. It was very imposing; but unlike the rocky cliffs of Maine, the bluff was completely covered by trees and vegetation. I couldn’t even tell if there was a path leading to the top. In the setting sun, the opposite shore was on fire with red-and-gold foliage.
Sergeant Colfax, who had gone ahead to meet the unit that was bringing the barges up from Washington, came toward me waving his arms in disbelief.
“No boats, no barges,” he said.
The thought that we would have no means of crossing the river had never occurred to me, and I silently berated myself for not having considered the possibility. At the same time, I tried not to show my misgivings to the men who were crowded around me.
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