Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  Next day there was bitter fighting late in the afternoon around a crossroads settlement named Glendale, where Lee led Longstreet's and A. P. Hill's divisions up to the middle of McClellan's long column and tried to break it in half. The worst of the fighting fell to McCall's Pennsylvania division, which met Longstreet's attack head-on, and there was deadly hand-to-hand fighting around a Union battery, with Northern and Southern boys savagely braining each other with clubbed muskets, driving bayonets into human flesh. A Confederate officer slew two gunners with his sword, went down when three Federals fell on him with bayonets. Captain Hazzard, who had been left behind the night before, was killed, and General McCall was taken prisoner, and the Pennsylvanians finally broke and went to the rear fast. Going back, they met Hooker's division coming up. A Pennsylvania colonel, riding to the rear faster than the soldiers thought necessary, tearfully implored the oncoming troops to "hurry up and save my poor men." Hooker's boys jeered at him, yelling:

  "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 se
en 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.

  The heat was oppressive. Mosquitoes seemed even worse here than they had been around Richmond. The camp stank horribly: too many men were crowded into too small an area, the pits that were dug for refuse never seemed quite adequate, the latrines were an abomination. There was a plague of flies, and the drinking water (obtained, for the most part, by digging shallow wells) was unpleasantly warm and muddy, and was beyond all question tainted. A new surgeon arrived to join the 5th New Hampshire just at this time, and he wrote feelingly of the impression made by what he saw: "the barefooted boys, the sallow men, the threadbare officers and seedy generals, the diarrhea and dysentery, the yellow eyes and malarious faces, the beds upon the bare earth in the mud, the mist and the rain." All of this, he confessed, instantly destroyed his "pre-conceived ideas of knight-errantry."4

  Fresh provisions came down from the North, which was a help; cabbages, tomatoes, and potatoes were welcome, although the men were not entirely sure that fresh beef was much better than salt pork —the butchers were inexpert and hasty, carcasses were usually cut up while lying on the ground, and the meat had a way of being sandy by the time it got to the company cooks. In any case, the cooks rarely knew of any way to cook beef except by boding it. The one good feature about the place, the men agreed, was that they could bathe in James River.

  But even though Harrison's Landing was a miserable camp, where the regimental sick lists kept lengthening and tired boys had enough unwanted leisure to remember that they were homesick, the army was not altogether discouraged. It had learned things about war that it had never dreamed of, to be sure, but as the men compared notes on what they had been through it seemed to them that they had done very well indeed. They could not understand just why they had had to retreat, and it was a disappointment not to be in Richmond; but every battle, when they looked back on it, seemed to have been no worse than a draw, and Malvern Hill they rightly considered a distinct victory. If some of them felt that so fine a victory ought to have been followed up by an advance on Richmond, they concluded after talking it over that Little Mac knew what he was doing and that they could safely leave all such problems to him.

  Had they known it, as stout a friend of McClellan as Fitz-John Porter himself believed that the retreat after Malvern Hil
l was a mistake; a determined advance next day, he thought, would have pushed Lee aside and opened the way to Richmond. Phil Kearny, who had long since come to dislike McClellan intensely—he still thought McClellan had slighted him in his dispatches describing the battle of Williamsburg, and anyway, McClellan just wasn't the type that hot-blooded Kearny could admire—was violent in his criticism. When the order to retreat reached him at the end of the battle, he cried out: "I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, enter my solemn protest against this order for retreat. We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and take Richmond. And in full view of all the responsibility of such a declaration, I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason."5

  Kearny's remarks were to get back to Washington in time, but they did not circulate among the enlisted men. With them McClellan's name still had the old magic. The 3rd Michigan, which was one of Kearny's regiments, was making a despairing effort to boil coffee on one of the first mornings in camp. Fires wouldn't burn in the rain, and men were gathered around trying to hold blankets, overcoats, and what not over the smoldering embers, when McClellan came riding by. The men dropped everything and ran over to cluster around him and shout, and when he could make himself heard he quiedy told them that he knew things had been tough but that everything was going to be all right from now on: they were fine soldiers, they had given the Rebels more than they had received, and they'd take Richmond yet. The boys cheered and went back to their fires, got them going somehow, drank their coffee, and felt better. Talking things over after they had finished their coffee and had their pipes lighted, they agreed that they were quite a regiment and the army was quite an army; they had marched all night and fought all day for a week, most of the time they had whipped the enemy—who could have done better than that? And as for McClellan: he was still the man.0