by Bruce Catton
There weren't many Barlows. But the army did contain the kind of generals the radicals were really looking for, and they were beginning to make their presence felt. One of them was General Israel B. Richardson, who—for all that he was a West Pointer—carried informality of dress and behavior to a point that made Barlow look like a fency-thet Briton in the Horse Guards. Richardson might have been modeling himself subconsciously after old Zachary Taylor, or maybe he just didn't care; at any rate, he went around camp with a battered straw hat on his head and his hands in his pockets, looking like a seedy old farmer—uniform coat discarded half the time, so that no insignia of rank were visible. A dapper young shavetail galloped up to his division headquarters one time with a dispatch; saw Richardson, took him for an orderly, and tossed him his bridle reins as he dismounted with a curt "Here—hold my horse." A few moments later the shavetail was admitted to the headquarters tent, to find the supposed orderly sitting behind a camp desk, eying him with grim amusement and asking, "And what do you want, sir?" Another time some privates of the 57th New York were washing in a little brook. A man whom they took to be a wagon driver came up and asked if he could borrow some soap. One soldier told him to go to hell and find his own soap, but some of the others were more generous; and the shabby wagon driver, after a wash, sat on the bank and told them stories about the Mexican War—pleasant enough old coot, the boys thought, in whose remarks there was a little old-timer lecture about how soldiers should always share things with their comrades. A day or so later it happened that three of these privates were detailed to take some contrabands to division headquarters. In front of the tent they found this same old-timer, and they asked him if he could tell them where to find General Richardson. "Well," he said, "I guess I can tell you. Sometimes they call me General Richardson—and other times they call me Greasy Dick."4
He was not pure eccentricity, however, and all that slouchiness was strictly confined to camp. In the field he was a first-rate fighter who had commanded a brigade to the eminent satisfaction of Phil Kearny and was now pleasing Bull Sumner, in whose corps he was. His men liked him immensely; called him "Fighting Dick" and bragged that he was the plainest general in the army. One private wrote that "he has good common sense, a rare commodity apparently." The men recorded that when they went into battle he would tell them to come on—"I won't ask you to go anywhere I won't go myself." It was his division, incidentally, which contained the irrepressible Barlow. Like so many of the successful generals in that war, Richardson had resigned from the army in the 1850s; was a Detroit businessman when war came, raised the 2nd Michigan Regiment, and won his general's stars shortly thereafter.
There were others. Among them there was a rising cavalry officer, Brigadier General John Buford, who had made first-rate use of Pope's cavalry until Pope's incessant, jumpy countermarching wore out horses and men alike. Buford was another of the plain-as-an-old-shoe soldiers; wore corduroys tucked into cowhide boots, always had a big pipe and tobacco pouch bulging his blouse pockets, and was beginning to show an ability to persuade the clumsy horsemen of the Federal cavalry that they might yet face Jeb Stuart's troopers on even terms. He had that streak of grimness the radicals were unconsciously looking for. He once hanged a guerrilla, in a neighborhood seething with secessionist sympathy, and left the body dangling from the limb of a tree under a big sign: "This man to hang three days; he who cuts him down before shall hang the remaining time." Also worth a passing glance was the 5th New Hampshire's Colonel Cross: a tall, lean, rangy man with reddish whiskers and a balding pate who had fought in the Mexican War and, later, had held a commission in the Mexican Army; a man of rough and jocose energy who had made his regiment one of the best combat units in the army and was obviously in line for promotion.
And there were better-known men, like Meade, with his naming temper, his sardonic smile, and his constant attention to detail—woe to the regimental officer in his command who frittered away strength by the unnecessary assignment of men to non-combat jobs; like Hancock, who swore at his officers but always remembered their names and made them feel somehow that they were intimate with him, and who had a fine fury in the hour of action; like solid John Sedgwick, always cool and unruffled, who commanded a division under Sumner, was known as "Uncle John" to his men, and would one day command the army's most famous corps. They were there if one looked for them, the kind of men who could use this army as it was meant to be used.
But the trouble was that the radicals had the wrong touchstone. Neither West Point nor civilian life had failed: from both sources the driving, slashing, fighting type of general was coming up, and in the end the war would be grim enough to satisfy Ben Wade and his whole committee. But the men who were going to make it grim—to drive for the enemy relentlessly, grinding up his strength in pitiless combat and forcing victory no matter who got hurt—were not going to be the kind of men whose political beliefs would please the Con-duct-of-the-War inquisitors. Take the list of Union officers who were in the key positions when the war was finally won—Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Meade: not an abolitionist in the lot, not a man who began the war with any particular animus against slavery.
And it was not just by accident that these men were so long in being called to the top spots. The radical bloc, demanding the kind of warfare which only such men could provide, was actually making it harder for the administration to find these men and use them: for it was providing an ideological qualification for purely professional jobs, and instead of inquiring about men's competence it was asking about their loyalty. The Army of Northern Virginia was able to find its best men quickly and it was able to use them once it found them; with all his problems, Jefferson Davis did not have to fight his war and run his country in the midst of a witch hunt. If the dominant leaders in the Confederate Congress—the men who had created and shaped the war party in the South—had worked night and day to keep the army out of the hands of General Lee, on the ground that Lee had not supported secession before Fort Sumter was fired on and hence must be a disloyal person, the story of the war in the Virginia theater would have been considerably different.
One thing must be said for the radicals. They believed their own gospel, down to the last inspired word. And during the weeks after Pope's inglorious defeat they suffered an agonizing extreme of suspense and gloom. They had had their way and nothing had worked out right. Pope was a hard-war man and he was also thoroughly "loyal" by their standards; but he was used up now, no pressure of politics could save him, and he was under orders to go back into obscurity in the Northwest, far from the Rebel generals whose minds he could not read. He was complaining enough about it, those days, bombarding Halleck with angry letters, reminding Halleck that he was under certain obligations to him, making veiled, ugly threats of political reprisal. There was some secret between the two men, and Pope was trying to let Halleck know that he would not be above telling it, if he had to, to re-establish himself. Whatever hold he might have thought he held over the general-in-chief, he at last let it go loose. But before departing he created one last, festering sore to plague the army. He filed formal charges against several generals, including chiefly Fitz-John Porter, alleging disobedience of orders at Bull Run and angrily claiming that a conspiracy of generals had foully done the North out of an overwhelming victory. With McClellan back in command, Porter had protection, and the charges were held in abeyance; if McClellan should ever leave the army,
Porter would be at the mercy of every force in Washington that was hunting for a scapegoat.
The record of that first fortnight in September makes fantastic reading, showing, as it does, enough ill will and all-round distrust afloat in Washington to lose any war. The Union cause had reached low-water mark for the war, and the infection in its central nervous system had all but induced complete paralysis. Lee was invading Maryland with an army so exhausted, ragged, and ill-equipped that by any ordinary standard it ought to have gone back to some rest camp for a couple of months' refit. But Lee knew what h
e was fighting against just then, and if his daring in beginning an invasion with a worn-out army can be explained only by the assumption that he held his opponents in supreme contempt, there were ample grounds to justify such a feeling.
The Federal mainspring had run down. That will-o'-the-wisp of the Confederacy, foreign intervention, was on the verge of coming true. The Prime Minister of Great Britain, having compared notes with the Foreign Secretary, was getting ready to propose to the British Cabinet that England take the lead in inducing a concert of powers to step in and bring the Civil War to an end—which, of course, could only mean independence for the Confederacy. The Foreign Minister, agreeing, added that if such a concert of powers could not be arranged, England ought to go ahead on its own hook, granting full recognition to the South. The two men were waiting now to see how the invasion of Maryland turned out before taking final action.
At home the belief in victory had faded. As fine a soldier as General John Sedgwick had given up hope and had accepted the idea of two separate nations, North and South. On September 4 he was writing to his sister: "I am in despair of our seeing a termination of the war until some great change is made. On our part it has been a war of politicians; on theirs [the Confederacy's] it has been one conducted by a despot and carried out by able generals. I look upon a division as certain; the only question is where the line is to run. No one would have dared to think of this a few weeks since, but it is in the mouths of many now."5
In the White House, Lincoln had finally come to see that the war could not be carried on any longer as a simple fight to re-establish the Union. There had to be a broader base: the fight had to be pinned to a cause, something that would change the entire emotional climate, both at home and abroad, turning the deep vitality of the radical group into an asset rather than a liability, making foreign intervention impossible no matter what military setback might take place on the hills of Maryland or Pennsylvania. There was but one step possible: the war had to become a war for human freedom, a war to end slavery. Otherwise it was lost. So he had in his desk the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation—that amazing document which is at once the weakest and the strongest of all America's state papers.
But as things stood just then he could not issue it. Seward had warned him: Put that out now, when we have been defeated and our armies are in retreat, and it will look like a shriek of despair—not an attempt by us to help the black race, but an appeal to the black race to help us. We must have a victory first.
And Seward was right. The paper lay folded in a pigeonhole. The war could not be won without it, but it could not be issued until a victory had been won. And the rival armies now were drifting up through Maryland, eying each other like two boxers circling in the ring, jabbing tentatively with cavalry, looking for the opening.
It was all up to the army, then. Leadership had failed and chances had been missed, and the climax was here; the bewildered, homesick boys with muskets on their shoulders would finally have to say which way American history henceforth would go. They knew none of these things. They were quite "unindoctrinated," for none of the oratory and the lofty war talk had prepared them for this. All they knew was that there was going to be a big fight pretty soon, and most of the time they tried not to think about it. They had the general they wanted, and they seemed to be back among their own kind of folks, and maybe this time it would work out all right.
FIVE
Opportunity Knocks Three Times
1. At Daybreak in the Morning
The 27th Indiana never forgot that day at Frederick. The day didn't especially stand out at the time, except for the welcome the townspeople gave, with the fruit and the ice water and the pretty girls waving flags; but afterward the soldiers built it up and made many stories about it, and almost everybody claimed to have been in on it, or to have seen it, or at least to have known about it. It was a Big Thing, as army talk had it, and it all began right in the middle of this Hoosier regiment.
The army got to Frederick on the twelfth of September, the mounted patrols going into town from the east just as the last of Wade Hampton's cavalry went out of it to the west, with a fine rackety-spat of flying hoofs on the turnpike and stray shots from carbines nipping through the orchards and the front-yard flower gardens. The 27th Indiana was pushed through in a long skirmish line next morning, and when it got to an empty field a courier rode up from the rear with orders from corps headquarters: stack arms in the field, put pickets out, and stand by for a while. The men broke
ranks, and most of them sauntered about to find bits of wood to boil coffee.
It was a nice morning, and it wasn't too warm, and the men took it easy. The field had been a Rebel camping ground a few days before, and the boys didn't especially like that. It was never too pleasant to occupy a spot where the enemy had just camped, as departing armies weren't too tidy about picking up the litter they had made, and the ground was apt to be messy. Still, this was a big field, and the rest was good, and the men drank their coffee and lit their pipes and talked about nothing much; and two lounging non-coms suddenly became very important men. Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of Company E lay at full length chinning with his pal, First Sergeant John McKnight Bloss. A few feet away, half hidden in the tall, trampled grass, was a long, bulky-looking envelope. The two men stared at it idly for a while, lazily wondering who dropped it there and what might be in it, until at last Mitchell's curiosity got the better of him and he rolled over, stretched out one arm, and picked it up. It was unsealed, and it contained a long paper, covered with writing, wrapped around three cigars.
Three cigars were a find, any day. They appeared to be fresh, and the two soldiers began to feel in their pockets for matches. As they did so, Mitchell's curiosity—which, by one of the stupendous oddities of war, was that day the Republic's greatest asset—gave him another dig, and he uncrinkled the paper that had been folded around the cigars and took a lazy look at it. As he looked he forgot about the matches and nudged the sergeant: hey, would you take a look at this?
The paper was headed "Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia," and was dated September 9. It was labeled "Special Orders No. 191," and it was studded with names like General Jackson, General Longstreet, General McLaws, and so on—names known to every enlisted man in the Union Army. It was signed "R. H. Chilton, Assist. Adj.-Gen.," and at the bottom was the name of the addressee: "Maj. Gen. D. H. Hill, Commanding Division."
Whatever this might amount to, it seemed altogether too hot for any two enlisted men to hang onto, so the soldiers got to their feet and hurried off to show it to Captain Kopp, skipper of Company E. The captain took one look and sent them to regimental headquarters, where they handed it to Colonel Silas Colgrove, who was having a chat just then with Brigadier General Nathan Kimball, brigade commander from Sumner's corps. These two read it and exchanged glances; Kimball went away and Colgrove got on his horse and went galloping off to his division commander, Brigadier General A. S. Williams. Williams took his turn reading it and beckoned to his assistant adjutant general, Colonel Pittman, who stuck the paper in his pocket, yelled for his horse, and set out for army headquarters as fast as the beast could carry him. And so the paper got to McClellan, while Bloss and Mitchell went back to the field and stretched out on the grass again.
It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that none of the accounts of this affair mention what finally happened to the cigars. Bloss wrote later that he and Mitchell simply forgot about them; Colonel Colgrove had the impression that the boys had rewrapped the cigars in the paper and put them back in the envelope before they gave it to him. There the trail dies out. Did anybody ever smoke them, in the end—those cigars that were so important in the history of the war?1
Fate had not been too kind to McClellan up to now. After that first dazzling, too-lucky stroke that had lifted him from the western Virginia mountains to the top command at Washington he had had nothing but bad fortune. But as he studied the paper the Hoosier corporal had picked up he could see that
the opportunity of a lifetime had come to him. For what he had in front of him was nothing less than Lee's official orders, telling where every last division of the Confederate Army was and what it was up to—the plans of Confederate GHQ in complete detail. It was just too good to be true, and McClellan was cautious: could the paper possibly be genuine? His staff examined it. One officer, it developed, had known Colonel Chilton, Lee's assistant adjutant general, quite intimately in the old army and was familiar with his handwriting. He studied the paper and gave his verdict: genuine, beyond a doubt—that was unquestionably written in Chilton's hand.
With that verdict the fog of war which always limits the vision of an army commander suddenly dissolved and everything became clear. McClellan knew as much about Lee's plans as if he had personally attended Lee's last staff conference. The game was being handed to him on a silver platter.
The town of Frederick, where McClellan then was, is some forty miles northwest of Washington. The National Road, as it was called in those days, comes up from Washington, passes through Frederick, and continues west and north until it reaches Hagerstown, about twenty-five miles farther on, where it swings west to reach Wheeling and the Ohio country. From Hagerstown, good roads drop southward to the Potomac and the Shenandoah Valley; other roads lead north into Pennsylvania. Just about halfway between Frederick and Hagerstown the National Road climbs over the long, wooded height of South Mountain—not an isolated peak, as one usually pictures a mountain, but a great, slowly curving ridge that begins on the Potomac nearly opposite Harper's Ferry and runs far up into Pennsylvania, where it passes a few miles west of Gettysburg. Just now it lay on McClellan's western horizon like an ominous thundercloud fifty miles long, full of veiled lightnings: for behind that blue curtain lay the striking power of the Confederacy, embodied in the dusty gray divisions of the Army of Northern Virginia, securely hidden from inquisitive Federal eyes.
