Glory Road (13 page)

Sunny winter day: 17th Mississippi on picket on the Rebel side of the stream, 24th New Jersey guarding the shore just opposite. Shouted conversation over the water reveals a mutual desire to trade. Jersey men presently get a small board, whittle it into something resembling the shape of a boat, put in a mast, use an old letter for a sail, put a load of coffee aboard, point it for the Confederate shore, and let it go. The intention is good, but the performance is poor: the homemade craft capsizes in a mid-river gust of wind and floats off downstream, bottom up, its cargo a total loss.

Among the Mississippians there seem to have been men who knew a bit more about the design and construction of sailing vessels, and they presently brought a much more practical craft down to the water—a little boat two feet long or thereabouts and five or six inches wide, carefully hollowed out to provide cargo space and equipped with rudder and sails that would actually work. This boat made a successful passage. The Jersey soldiers who received it took from its hold a note reading:

"Gents U. S. Army: We send you some tobacco by our packet. Send us some coffee in return. Also a deck of cards, if you have them, and we will send you more tobacco. Send us any late papers if you have them." The letter was signed by "Jas. O. Parker, Co. H., 17th Mississippi Vols."

The vessel's lading was as stated in the manifest, and in addition there was a small book,
Questions on the Gospels,
by the Reverend R. Bethell Claxton, D.D., which one of the Federals kept with him through the rest of the war. And the Jersey men sent coffee and hardtack over on the little boat's return trip, with a note promising that there would be a deck of cards the next time the outfit came on picket. The boat made a number of round trips and became quite famous—so much so that the better part of each regiment would come down to the shore to greet it.
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This tendency on the part of the soldiers to forget that there was a war on worried the high command, and stern orders were issued, to which the soldiers paid no more attention than they had to. Now and then the thing went farther than toy boats loaded with coffee and playing cards. Men crossed the river at times to get together personally with their enemies, and a Confederate general left a half-scandalized, half-amused account of how he nabbed a few Yankee soldiers visiting his own men and prepared to send them off to Richmond as prisoners of war, only to have his men plead almost tearfully that he just couldn't do it—they had given the Yankees their word of honor that if they came over to visit they would be allowed to go back again. In the end the general relented on a stern don't-let-it-happen-again basis.
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The elements in this war were mixed and contradictory. If one side robbed corpses and the other side robbed housewives, there was on both sides, deep in the bones and the spirit, this strange absence of rancor, which may, in the end, explain why it was that the two sections were finally able to reunite after a war which would seem to have left scars too deep for any healing.

It does not appear that this willingness to fraternize ever appreciably dulled the fighting edge of either army, but it undoubtedly led to a good many security leaks. Armies whose outposts spend much of their time exchanging gossip are not likely to keep their secrets very well. This probably hampered Burnside more than it hampered Lee, for the Confederates just then did not need to make many plans and hence had few secrets to keep. Their job was just to stand by and keep the Yankees from doing whatever they proposed to do next. Burnside was supposed to be aggressive, and he did his best to live up to the role. But to the end of his career as commander of the army he seems to have kept very few secrets from his opponents.

Since nothing came of the plans which he laid after Fredericksburg, the fact that Lee quickly found out about them did no particular harm. What really made trouble for Burnside was the fact that he could not keep his plans hidden from his own subordinates, who learned about them long before they were supposed to and, learning, made much trouble for him.

Burnside bestirred himself on the day after Christmas, nearly a fortnight after the battle. All of the wounded had been removed from the field hospitals to the general hospitals farther to the rear, many of them having been transferred by steamer all the way back to Washington. The unwounded survivors of the battle were making themselves tolerably comfortable in the camps near Falmouth—camps which, as a historian of Hancock's division wrote, now had "room enough and to spare," a full two thousand of Hancock's five thousand men having been shot.
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As before, Burnside's first problem was to get across the river. This time he would leave the Fredericksburg crossing strictly alone. He would make an elaborate feint at crossing by the fords upstream, and then he would throw the bulk of his army across at Muddy
Creek, some seven miles below Fredericksburg. Artillery positions to protect the crossings were selected, and access roads were corduroyed. In addition, Burnside decided to try to make some sort of effective use of his cavalry.

Army of the Potomac cavalr
y had been very poorly handled thus far in the war. It operated under many handicaps, the initial one being that it was almost uniformly recruited from among ardent young men who thought that it would be fine to be dashing troopers but who had never in their lives been on horseback before enlisting. As a result, a Yankee cavalry regiment needed a lot of training. Before it could even begin to amount to anything as cavalry, everybody from the company officers on down had first to learn how to get on a horse and how to stay on once the brute began to move. Since practically all of the Confederate cavalrymen were superb horsemen to begin with, their squadrons started with an enormous advantage. Worse yet, the Yankee high command in the first part of the war does not appear to have understood exactly what cavalry was for. All too often the cavalry commands were split up and attached to separate infantry units, and there was a common tendency to employ them largely for routine picket and courier duty. Hardly anyone ever tried to use them the way Stuart used his mounted brigades. One result of this was that cavalry's standing in the army was not high. A cavalry officer recalled ruefully that "it was a byword in our army that a reward would be paid for a
dead
cavalryman."
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A disgruntled foot soldier remembered:

"Our cavalry had lost caste altogether with the infantry. Their reported skirmishes with the enemy, and 'driving in the Rebel pickets,' were received with incredulous smiles and jeers until they became mum as oysters. When hailed for information . . . they would gaze at the infantry in stupid wonder at such questions, then would laugh among themselves at some remark of one of theirs about 'doughboys'; the laugh would then change to sullen anger as some shrill-voiced infantry veteran would inquire, loud enough to be heard a mile away, 'Did you see any dead cavalrymen out there?' This pertinent question had the effect of making every rider drive spurs into his horse and briskly move forward, while the sounds of laughter and jeers long and loud of their tormentors the 'doughboys' followed them."
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Cavalry's status was not going to improve until somebody made effective use of the mounted arm, and this Burnside set out to do. He detailed fifteen hundred mounted troops to ride upstream in connection with the army's projected move. Five hundred of these, to deceive the Rebels, were to make a feint toward Warrenton and Culpeper, as if the army planned a sally in that direction, and then were to return to Falmouth as ostentatiously as possible. The remainder—picked men, chosen from eight of the army's best cavalry regiments—were to cross the Rappahannock at Kelly's Ford, speed over to the Rapidan and cross it at Raccoon Ford, and then strike boldly south, breaking both the Virginia Central and the Fredericksburg railroads, swinging clear west of Richmond, and then plunging south all the way to the coastal point of Suffolk, where the Federals had a small garrison under General John Peck. At Suffolk transports would be waiting to bring the troopers back to Aquia Creek.

Whether even a picked body of Federal cavalry could at that time have performed a risky maneuver like that under the noses of Stuart's sharp-eyed, hard-riding patrols is probably open to serious question. The mere fact that the venture was to be tried, however, indicated that Burnside was prepared to use the mounted arm with boldness and imagination, and it raised cavalry morale immensely. Major Henry Lee Higginson of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry called the project "a risky expedition but a buster," and felt that it was "a brilliant plan," and when the squadrons trotted upstream it looked as if a new day was about to dawn.
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But these moments of bright hope never seemed to last very long in this army. The cavalry made a brisk thirty-mile march and went into bivouac just inshore from Kelly's Ford, full of enthusiasm, and never got any farther. For just as they were making their camp Burnside got a cryptic telegram from Abraham Lincoln saying, "I have good reason for saying you must not make a general movement without letting me know of it," and the cavalry had to be told to stop and await further orders. Major Higginson wrote angrily that "we could and would have done anything," adding that "such checks destroy the enthusiasm of any army."

Lincoln's telegram was a stunner. As far as Burnside was aware, no one in the army aside from a couple of his most trusted staff officers knew that a general movement was in the cards. He concluded hopefully that something special, to which the movements of his own army had to conform, must be going on in some other military theater, so he went up to Washington to see the President and find out what was up.

What was up was the kind of intrigue which had become standard operating procedure for the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac.

Just before New Year's Day two brigadiers in Baldy Smith's VI Corps had taken leaves of absence. These officers were John Newton, commanding Smith's 3rd Division and John Cochrane, who had the 1st Brigade of that division. Having taken Smith and the Grand Division commander, Franklin, into their confidence, these generals quickly left for Washington to indulge the perennial recourse of the unhappy army officer; viz., to See Their Congressmen. Specifically, they intended to see Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Military Committee, and Congressman Moses F. Odell of New York, a member of the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. As so often happened in the Army of the Potomac, however, their military planning was deficient because of a failure of intelligence; that is, they had neglected to note that Congress was in recess over the holidays, which meant that both of these statesmen were out of the city. Cochrane, however, had been an important Republican congressman himself back in 1861, and he had connections, so presently the two generals were talking with Secretary of State Seward, and before the day was over Seward took them to the White House and got them in to Lincoln's study.

Newton was senior officer and he spoke up first, doing a good deal of clumsy beating around the bush and almost defeating his own purpose. He tried to tell Lincoln that the army was in a bad way and would come to pieces if Burnside tried to maneuver it again, but he said it poorly. Later Newton explained that "I could not say directly to the President that the whole trouble was that the privates had no confidence in General Burnside," although it is hard to see why he could not. That was what he and Cochrane had come to Washington for, and somewhere along the line a little frankness might have helped. As it was, he gave Lincoln the idea that here were two self-promoting officers who simply wanted to get their commander's job, and Lincoln spoke up with a good deal of heat—no doubt, in one way and another, having had about all of that sort of thing he cared to take in his twenty-one months as President. Cochrane, who was a little more outspoken, assured Lincoln that they were moved solely by patriotism and were just trying to give the President information which he needed to have. This got Newton back on the rails, and he went on to say that in his opinion the condition of the army was such that if it were again led into defeat along the Rappahannock it would be utterly destroyed. The two generals wagged their heads to corroborate themselves, suggested that the President might want to look into things for himself, and at last took their leave.

And this was what lay back of Lincoln's telegram, as Burnside learned when he reached the White House. Halleck and Stanton sat in with him, while Lincoln gave the gist of the complaint, withholding the names of the two talebearers. Burnside angrily demanded that the two men be cashiered, and for once Halleck supported him, but after all, that was a side issue. The big question was the intricate relationships existing among Burnside, his generals, the enlisted men in his army, the War Department, and the President, and nobody quite seemed to know what the next step ought to be.
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A bit later Burnside had a private talk with Lincoln in which he had some remarks of his own to make about lack of confidence. Secretary Stanton, he said bluntly, "has not the confidence of the officers and soldiers" and probably lacked the confidence of the country also, and the same went for Halleck. There was likewise a gulf between Burnside and his own generals; Burnside was convinced that the army ought to drive forward for another river crossing, "but I am not sustained in this by a single Grand Division commander in my command." It was his belief, he added, that he himself ought to resign, not merely from the command of the army, but from his commission as a general, becoming a civilian once more. Meanwhile, since it was vital for the President to have about him officials whom the country and the army believed in and would support, the President might want to give some thought to the idea of replacing Stanton and Halleck too.
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