Glory Road (22 page)

The muddle-headed conspirators who devised ancient-mariner recognition signals and who talked solemnly about casting the divided bodies of traitors out of the gates of mystical temples had been carrying on as if someday they would do a fearsome thing, but they were in fact legalists. They professed bloody revolution, and they were to go on doing so for another eighteen months, but in action they relied on a legislative majority. They knew that the majority would eventually make the decisions because the books said so. But when the showdown came the other side was ready to play by different rules, and all of the books went out of the window.

Morton proposed to rule Indiana so that it would stand in the front line of the war against secession. He could not do it legally without the money which he could get only from the legislature, and he had sent the legislature home. Therefore, unable to rule legally, he would rule illegally. He would get the money where he could and he would keep Indiana in the war, and Northern Democrats who did not like it might come around after the war was over and speak their minds fully. Until that time Indiana would have a one-man government named Morton, in whose presence no damned secessionist was going to laugh.

The money problem being at the heart of things, Morton organized a Bureau of Finance, which appealed to bankers, to heads of town and county governments, to the people themselves. Some of the towns and counties responded promptly, appropriating sums ranging from $2,000 to $20,000 and placing the money at the disposal of the governor. Additional money came from citizens and from business firms, and there was a loan of $15,000 from a railroad. There was also that state arsenal, which had acquired illegality ahead of time and which was now showing a fairly substantial profit.
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Most important of all, there was the Federal government, which was what really kept Morton in business.

The Secretary of War was Edwin M. Stanton, who had a knack for devious operations, and Stanton had at his disposal certain funds which could be used somewhat loosely. Morton went to Stanton asking for help, and Stanton dipped into these funds and got money for him. (Technically, it appears that the money was "advanced" to Morton as a disbursing officer dimly representing the War Department. The device was probably legal enough as long as the all-out-war crowd could make its own definitions of legality.) So Morton got a Treasury warrant for $250,000, and as he got it he reflected on the way they were stretching the law.

"If the cause fails," he said, "you and I will be covered with prosecutions, imprisoned, driven from the country."

"If the cause fails," said Stanton, who now and then could emit a very high-sounding sentence, "I do not wish to live."
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So Indiana got money and paid its bills, and Indiana troops remained in the field, and it continued a hard war for Hoosiers. Morton continued to be a dictator for two years, during which time he was considered a great man by ardent Union folk and an unspeakable tyrant by peace-minded Democrats. What few people noticed was that he and his opponents, between them, had helped to accomplish something which they had no faintest desire to accomplish. They had made a prairie revolution, and their handiwork lived after them.

Indiana had a dictator, and he was a man of force and power in his own right, but he really existed by grace of the Federal government, which was paying most of the bills and providing all of the law. Separatism was dying, and beneath the old concept of the sovereignty of the states there was opening a gulf filled with great darkness and echoing quiet. The Democratic legislators and the stage-struck conspirators had succeeded only in forcing the Republicans to go farther than they had consciously meant to go. If the Lincoln administration was demonstrating in South Carolina and in other Southern states that the real power was to be found henceforth in Washington, it was demonstrating exactly the same thing in Indiana.

2. The Imperatives of War

It was really the army's doing. The old tables were being broken up and far-reaching change was riding down the winds of war, and even such a man as Morton himself, with his heavy hands and his pale hairy flesh and his booming, be-damned-to-you-sir voice, was more a symbol than a prime mover. In this winter of discontent American institutions could be recast, not to fit the ideas of anyone in particular, but simply to make it possible for the army to do the things which it had been created to do. A process had been set in motion which was beyond stopping, and the fact that these hundreds of thousands of young men had been turned into soldiers had become dominant for the whole country.

The changes, of course, did not begin in the camps. In the camps there was the old routine, with snow in the woods and mud on the roads and unending drills on the hard-packed parade grounds, and the immense restlessness of uprooted youth was reaching constantly for an outlet.

When occasion offered there were mild sprees. March brought St. Patrick's Day. There were many Irishmen in camp, and they saw to it that the day was observed notably. The 9th Massachusetts held open house for the 62nd Pennsylvania, broaching barrels of beer and erecting a greased pole on the parade, with a fifteen-day furlough pinned to the top. (The pole had been greased too well, and nobody was able to get to the top.) A half-mile race track was laid out and there were horse races, which wound up with an accident that killed two horses and the regimental quartermaster, who had fancied himself as a gentleman rider.
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The Irish Brigade, naturally, put on the biggest party of all on this day, and General Hooker and his staff and all of the officers of the II Corps were guests. General Meagher turned out garbed as a crimson-coated master of hounds, and at the close of the day he had a huge banquet, with more guests than places at table. Addressing the throng, he begged the unseated guests to remember that "Thomas Francis Meagher's hospitality is not so large as his heart." Nobody really minded very much because there was an enormous punch bowl filled with what one officer remembered as "the strongest punch I ever tasted," and the evening ended with a grand row between Meagher and his brigade surgeon, who furiously challenged each other to a duel that was never fought.
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Meagher was famous for his parties. The whole II Corps remembered a fabulous banquet the Irish Brigade had thrown in ruined Fredericksburg on the fifteenth of December, while the dead men lay still unburied on the frozen fields in front of the stone wall, and the echoing town itself presented bleak roofless walls to the wintry sky, with rival gunners on Marye's Heights and Stafford Heights blessing the place now and then with casual rounds of high explosive. Meagher's brigade had just received three new regimental flags, purest green silk made up by the ladies of New York, and nothing would do but a jollification. So they had taken over some half-wrecked hall and had invited in everybody who was anybody in the II Corps. Long tables had been set up amid the wreckage, loaded with chicken and cold turkey and ham, and good things to drink had been circulating liberally, and when the flags were presented to the Irish regiments there had been a great deal of oratory. In the end everybody had such a good time and cheered so loudly that even Burnside's moribund headquarters on the far side of the river had caught on and had sent staff officers over with frantic orders: stop the party and send everybody home, or the Rebels will take notice of all this noise and open a new bombardment.
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It was a hard-drinking army as far as its officer corps was concerned. Any officer could legally buy all the whisky he thought he could handle from the commissary stores, and the commissary whisky was originally famous as "a cheap and reliable article." Later on, as the original supply became exhausted, it was raw and harsh, although it continued to be cheap enough. Some officers would simmer it over a fire in order to reduce the harshness; others believed in setting fire to it and letting it burn awhile, arguing that this destroyed the fusel oil and other harmful substances. However they treated it, they used a good deal of it, and the soldiers' sleep was occasionally disturbed by singing and yelling from the officers' quarters. Colonel Cross of the 5th New Hampshire broke up one such party in his own regiment by stalking in with his drawn saber in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other.
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But the parties and the whisky were not for the enlisted man, except very rarely and by good luck. The VI Corps had a tale about one of its most distinguished brigadiers, who attended one of these festive occasions and came out full of a rich, sympathetic fellow feeling for his orderly, who presumably had been standing in the cold all evening, holding the brigadier's horse. The brigadier took his bridle reins and teetered gently on his heels and remarked to the orderly: "Do you know, I'd like to take a drink with you." Then sadly he added that this just would not do because there was a great gulf fixed between them. "You're an orderly, sir, and I'm a general, sir; recollect that, sir." The orderly swayed in the dim light, exhaling an aroma fully as fruity as that of the brigadier's and replied: "By George, General, hadn't you better wait till you're asked?"
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For the most part, the private soldier found his life unexciting, not to say dull. A Pennsylvanian that winter wrote in his diary that military glory consisted in "getting shot and having your name spelled wrong in the newspapers," and a man in the 12th New Hampshire recorded that he and his fellows had enlisted too early. Bounties were running as high as fifteen hundred dollars per man up in the White Mountain country, and the average citizen was cheerfully voting for higher taxes to pay for them because "every such enlistment made his chances one less of having to go himself."
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It was a confusing sort of war, and if the enlisted man sometimes wondered what it was all about it is not surprising. Up the Rappahannock, Federal pickets continued to make friends with the Rebels across the water, to the horror of security-minded officers. A major in the 2nd Rhode Island wrote that he had 340 of his men on riverside picket duty, under strictest orders to have no truck with the men on the far side of the stream. Yet one day he heard the Confederates calling across to let the Rhode Island boys know that the Yankee paymaster had just got to camp and that the Rhode Islanders, accordingly, would get their pay very shortly. This, the major remarked glumly, happened barely fifteen minutes after the paymaster had arrived. Next day the Rebels told the Rhode Island pickets that the Yankee cavalry had moved on upstream, and one Rebel called across to ask what had been done with a Rebel who had deserted into the Federal lines the night before: would he be conscripted into the Yankee army? The Rhode Islanders called back that that would not happen, whereupon the inquiring Confederate asked them to look out for him—he would be over himself as soon as it got dark.
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Scandalized by such laxity, the provost marshal of the army, Brigadier General Mason R. Patrick, a gruff old party with flowing white hair and whiskers, who held little prayer meetings in his tent every morning and then went forth (as the men supposed) to bite the heads off tenpenny nails, reported that when the 62nd New York was on duty by the river its officers took charge of rigging and sending out the toy boats which carried on the illicit trade with the Rebel army.

One of Patrick's officers seized such a boat, laden with coffee and sugar, in an effort to break up the trade, and was immediately denounced angrily by a regimental officer as a spoilsport.

Worse yet, said Patrick, he had detected pickets of the 169th Pennsylvania in flagrant verbal communication with the Rebels. A Rebel had called across: "Any signs of a move?" and a Pennsylvanian had replied: "Yes, we've got eight days' rations and we expect to move in a few days." When the Rebel asked which direction the move would take, the Pennsylvanian obligingly told him that it would be upstream, to the right. Quite gratuitously the Yankee outpost added that they were going to use pack mules for transportation and hence obviously would not be following the line of the railroad.
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What chance, asked General Patrick wrathfully, did an army have to deceive the enemy with that sort of talk going on?

From Ohio the governor was writing the War Department that for the past sixty days he had been trying to recruit men but that "success had been trifling," and the governor of Iowa was asking for five thousand stands of arms to use on dissidents who opposed recruitment and a vigorous prosecution of the war. Also from Iowa, a United States marshal was reporting that there had recently been a public meeting in Madison County at which armed men hurrahed for Jefferson Davis and declared that they would like to see Iowa join the Southern Confederacy. Simultaneously the governor of Illinois was wiring the War Department that "an extensive and dangerous traffic in arms" was going on between Illinois exporters and ultimate consumers in the Southland, and a draft-enrolling officer at Cham-bersburg, Pennsylvania, was quitting his job because indignant citizens had gone around and burned his sawmill.
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All of these things were happening, and it was hard for any man to say which incidents were really important and which were frothy bubbles on the surface. One significant occurrence could have been the publication of a formal document which was issued from the White House about the time General Burnside had his day and ceased to be as commander of the army.