Glory Road (15 page)

As 1862 ended and 1863 began, Meigs sat down to send a friendly unofficial letter to General Burnside, and the general tenor of it was that if the army did not soon win a victory the country would be too discouraged to go on with the war any longer. The army was very expensive (said Meigs, who had to purchase much of its materiel and equipment) and it was consuming the country's resources:

"I begin to apprehend a catastrophe. . . . Exhaustion steals over the country. Confidence and hope are dying.
...
I begin to doubt the possibility of maintaining the contest beyond this winter, unless the popular heart is encouraged by victory on the Rappahannock."

In broad and somewhat hasty strokes Meigs then sketched a plan of campaign, which seemed chiefly to call on Burnside to get his army in between the Confederate Army and Richmond—sound advice, unquestionably, if there were just a way to carry it out. Meigs mentioned rapid marches of the kind made by Napoleon at Jena and Robert E. Lee at Second Bull Run, and then ascended to high rhetoric with a demand for speedy action: "Rest at Falmouth is death to our nation —is defeat, border warfare, hollow truce, barbarism, ruin for ages, chaos!"
⁸

Which might possibly be so. Yet the whole case is a bit curious, and the anxiety of General Meigs comes down from the long ago as the deathless symbol of the reluctance of important folk to trust the courage and endurance of their less distinguished fellow citizens. This army had fought for different reasons at different times—to capture Richmond, to repel invasion, to save itself from destruction, and so on. Now, apparently, it must fight to encourage the civilians; or, more accurately, to encourage government officials who believed that the civilian needed to be encouraged. Never before had the army been asked to fight for a reason so inadequate.

Nor was the moment propitious. The weather had been clear and mild ever since the battle of Fredericksburg, which meant that the roads were dry and consequently passable. But the calendar said that midwinter was arriving, and sooner or later midwinter would bring a good deal of rain and snow. To begin a campaign now would be to gamble that more than 100,000 men, plus many thousands of very heavy wheeled vehicles, would be able to move swiftly over a network of totally unpaved roads which would become literally impassable once normal winter weather set in. The dismayed populace which was looking anxiously for victory along the Rappahannock might very easily, instead, see its principal army stuck hopelessly in the mud. The soldiers who had built winter quarters without waiting to be told had things sized up: warfare was just impossible at this time of year, and no sensible man would try it.

Sensible men, however, really had very little to do with it. The war itself did not make very much sense, which may have affected the way it was directed. It was being fought because emotion had been evoked to deal with a crisis that called for intelligence. There had been the great argument between men and sections, with many old values endangered, and on each side there had arisen men with blazing eyes and hot hearts to arouse their fellows to imminent peril. Fear had been called forth (because it is thought that men are most surely to be aroused by fear), and then came the anger that goes with fear, and finally the great unreason that goes with both had come out to take control of things—a situation deeply lamented by all who had created it.

So it might be quite true that a sensible man would not try to begin a campaign in roadless Virginia in mid-January, and yet a mid-January campaign could be ordered for all of that. The young men who were on the march had to walk in the glare cast by all of those frightened yesterdays, which could light both the wise and the foolish in but one direction. Just now the army was being asked to outmarch and outfight Robert E. Lee for the sake of the emotional uplift which such a victory would provide for the people back home: people who themselves neither marched nor fought but simply paid the bills and endured and were therefore believed to be in dire need of emotional uplift, and who, since emotional ties could not easily be dissolved, would be obliged to mourn such men as were destroyed
by
the marching and the fighting. None of this made any sense. The winter campaign was a complete triumph of unreason, and it would be useless to judge it by the standards of sensible men.

After his fashion Burnside had learned something by experience. He was not going to try to cross the river at Fredericksburg, and instead of going headlong over those deadly entrenchments on the low hills he would attempt to go bloodlessly around them. The plans that he now laid called for a swift march upriver with pontoon bridges put across the Rappahannock at United States Ford. The army would cross there, Lee would be outflanked, and the Fredericksburg line would be evacuated; and while General Meigs's rosy dream of actual interposition between Lee and Richmond might fail, it should at least be possible to force a battle in the open country, where superior Federal muscle could make itself felt. It would be tried, in any case, and the orders went out.

They were no sooner out than they had to be changed slightly. Lee was just as much aware as was Burnside that the crossing at United States Ford led straight to his rear, and it developed presently that he had a force dug in there to contest the crossing. So Burnside made Banks Ford, near Falmouth, the objective, and directed that pontoons and other equipment for five bridges be on the bank there by dawn of Wednesday, January 21. General Hunt was to line the hills with guns to deal with any Confederates who tried again to obstruct Yankee bridgebuilders. Hooker and Franklin were to set their grand divisions in motion on Tuesday morning, January 20. Sumner was to wait at Falmouth and put his men over the river after these two had crossed. All in all, here was a new campaign, and maybe it would have an outside chance to work if the weather would just hold.

The weather had been very good so far. January was more than half gone and the ground was dry and firm and the air was balmy— the men had played baseball in the open drill fields, and there had been a big match between a team from the 19th Massachusetts and one from the 7th Michigan for a sixty-dollar side bet, with Howard's entire division looking on. (It was won by the 19th Massachusetts; irritatingly enough, the scribe who recorded the event forgot to say what the score was.)
⁹
Burnside issued a general order announcing that "the auspicious moment seems to have arrived to strike a great and mortal blow to the rebellion," and the rookie 33rd Massachusetts was drawn up and harangued by its colonel, who announced that no Massachusetts regiment had yet lost a flag and added that they would be in action with the enemy "tomorrow morning at 6 o'clock." The regiment cheered and the band struck up "Yankee Doodle" and the army got under way.
¹⁰

It took bugles and drums and flags—these last held aloft by men who bought the privilege of carrying them by taking extra risks in all battles—to get an army started in those days. On this twentieth of January the Army of the Potomac moved out of its unhappy camps near Falmouth under the thin January sunlight with hope and doubt riding invisible, of equal status, at the head of the column. After breakfast, by way of starting things off, the buglers in each brigade sounded a call known as "the general," which alerted everyone. (All bugle calls had names: breakfast call was "peas on a trencher," dinner was "roast beef," and the call which summoned men to advance against the enemy was known for some reason as "Tommy Totten.") The men struck their tents and packed their knapsacks and loaded the regimental wagons, and then they fell into their places by squads. Half an hour later the bugles blew "assembly" and the squads formed into companies—tall men at the right, short men at the left, everybody jostling elbows and passing wisecracks as the lines stiffened across the field, company officers out in front barking little orders and being important. Then, with all the companies formed, the colonels and the brigadiers came out and the bugles sounded "colors," the national and regimental flags were unfurled, and the companies moved in to right and left of them to form regimental front, each regimental adjutant carefully noting which company was last to come into line and assigning that company to the rear of the regimental column during the march.
¹¹

One after another the regiments swung and wheeled into column and went down through the emptying camps—bands playing, drums rolling and crashing, feet hitting the ground all together, nobody lapsing into the informal route step until camp had been left behind. Maybe the road ahead was going to be smooth and dry and easy to walk on, with a pleasant campground at the end of it in the cool of a clear twilight, and maybe it was going to lead through mud to some soggy cold swamp, and indeed, for all anyone knew, it would perhaps for some of the men be the last of all the roads on earth, curling over a far-off horizon from which nobody could take a backward glance. There were always those possibilities every time the army broke camp and took to the road; and this day the army set out glad for the winter sunlight and doubtless hoping for the little favors which a soldier is permitted to expect—dry ground, pleasant sun, clear skies at night.

If the army hoped for these things it did not get them. The sky clouded over during the afternoon, even though the air remained warm for a while, and by evening it was raining; a slow drizzle at first that soon became a steady downpour, with a howling wind whipping the rain down the country roads, setting in like a winter storm that has no intention of stopping. Up in Washington, fifty miles to the north, Secretary of the Navy Welles looked out of his snug office into a "furious storm" and worried over the safety of two of Navy's most prized ships, monitors
Weehawken
and
Nahant,
cruising coastwise down the Atlantic in the trough of this nor'easter. Their skippers, he hoped, would have the caution to take shelter behind Delaware breakwater.
(
Nahant
did put in, Welles found out later;
Weehawken
rode out the storm, being more seaworthy than the secretary dared hope.)
¹²
And the army, launched on a campaign which involved using unpaved roads to get at an unwhipped enemy who lay beyond an unbridged river, took what shelter it could in the tangled second growth back from the river crossings and wondered what was in the cards for tomorrow.

What was going to happen tomorrow was more of the same, only a great deal worse, and there was a very uncomfortable night to endure first. The men pitched their pup tents for covering from the icy rain, and they tried to build fires under the dripping branches. The air seemed too heavy to carry the smoke away and the wood was too wet to burn decently anyway, and the smoldering useless camp-fires made a monstrous smudge miles across and indescribably thick, and the men blinked smarting eyes and lay flat on the soaked ground to get a little air. All wagon trains were lost somewhere in the waterlogged rear, and if a man had food in his haversack he ate.
¹³
He did not eat a hot meal, in most cases, because it was very hard to kindle the wet wood into enough of a blaze to boil coffee or frizzle salt pork.

Morning came and the rain grew worse. The New York
Times
correspondent, surveying the situation with the dispassionate reserve proper to his station, wrote to his paper that "the nature of the upper geologic deposits of this region affords unequaled elements for bad roads." Virginia soil, he explained, was a mixture of clay and sand which, when wet, became very soft, practically bottomless, and exceedingly sticky.
¹⁴

This was putting it mildly. The rainy dawn lightened reluctantly to a dripping daylight, and the troops floundered out into the roads and tried to resume the march. Someone got the orders mixed, and two army corps presently met at a muddy crossroad, committed by unalterable military decree to march squarely across each other. They moved sluggishly but inexorably, the men plodding on with bowed heads, big gobs of mud clinging to each heavy foot. In some fantastic manner the two blind columns did manage to get partly across each other, and everybody was cursing his neighbor, the Virginia mud, the cold rain, and the whole idea of having a war at all. In the end the two corps came to a helpless standstill, having got into a tangle which half a day of dry weather on an unimpeded drill ground would not have straightened out.
¹⁵

But that was a minor problem, the way things were going. The ponderous pontoon trains which were supposed to lead the way to the river had got off to a very late start. Once again headquarters had forgotten to tell the engineers that their boats were going to be needed. When word finally got through the roads were bad, and the tardy trains moved more and more slowly and at last ceased to move at all, axles and wagon beds flat against the tenacious mud. Mixed in with them, and coming down parallel roads and plantation lanes, were the guns and caissons which were also wanted at the riverbank. There were also many quartermaster wagons and ambulances and battery wagons and all of the other wheeled vehicles proper to a moving army, and by ten in the morning every last one of them was utterly mired, animals belly-deep in mud.
¹⁶

The high command made convulsive efforts to hitch along. Infantry was ordered out into the fields on either side of the road so that it might march past these stalled
trains—somebody
ought to be moving somewhere—and the columns quickly churned the fields into sloughs in which a man went to his knees at every step. A soldier in the 37th Massachusetts told what came next: