Glory Road (23 page)

This paper recited the findings of a recent court-martial and closed by asserting that "the foregoing proceedings, finding and sentence . . . are approved and confirmed"—as a result of which Major General Fitz-John Porter was cashiered and dismissed from the service and was barred from ever again holding any office of trust or profit under the United States Government.
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Fitz-John Porter's was a name which had once carried weight. Brave, talented, and handsome, Porter had been McClellan's right-hand man all through the peninsular campaign; he had, in fact, done most of the actual fighting which kept McClellan's army from destruction when Robert E. Lee cast a net for it in the Chickahominy bottom lands. He had been trusted to fight Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill by himself, and at Second Bull Run he had led a final forlorn-hope assault on Stonewall Jackson's invulnerable lines, and he had been respected and honored among men. Now he was being ruined, his career as a professional soldier closing in black disgrace. The signature at the end of the paper which condemned him was that of Abraham Lincoln.

This paper was rather surprising, for a conviction had not generally been looked for. Porter himself had been so confident of acquittal that he had recently gone to the White House to discuss with Lincoln himself his next assignment in the army. Since his day the verdict has come to seem cruel and unjust, the passage of time having indicated that the military court was hasty and biased, its principal function having in fact been to make somebody sweat for the loss of the second battle of Bull Run. John Pope, who commanded the army that lost that battle, had pointed the finger at Porter in a frantic effort at self-exculpation, and so Porter had come to trial.

Porter found himself accused, specifically, of violation of the ninth and fifty-second articles of war, the general idea being that he had refused to attack the Rebel flank as ordered by Pope and that the battle therefore had been lost. Porter had tried to show that his orders could not be executed, since the Rebel flank was nowhere near where Pope thought it was, but it had done him no good. He was a close friend of McClellan, and McClellan had been uprooted so that there could be an all-out war. The wind and the sun had bleached white the bones of Bull Run's unburied dead, Pope was in exile in Minnesota fighting the Sioux Indians, and not for another generation could there be a full understanding of the ins and outs of the tragic lost battle. Meanwhile, Porter had been broken, and there was in the action a meaning which did not appear on the surface.

While it was valuable to punish a scapegoat for Bull Run, a more important motive seems to have been operating in the background.

One interpretation can be found in the carefully worded memoirs of Alexander K. McClure, who as a Republican politician and editor had a fair understanding of what was happening in Washington then. McClure wrote that the military court, as set up by Secretary Stanton, was "studiously organized to convict." Lincoln, he added, approved the verdict even though he was by no means convinced that Porter was in fact a faithless officer. Said Editor McClure: "New conditions and grave military necessities confronted Lincoln; and while he did not approve of the judgment against Porter, he felt that Porter and others of his type merited admonition to assure some measure of harmony in military affairs, and he finally decided that to approve the judgment would be the least of the evils presented to him."
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The administration was groping through a red fog toward a shore dimly seen, and if McClure might not be qualified to say what was in Lincoln's mind, he could at least identify the angle from which the administration's action made good political sense. Porter was blameless, but he was being crushed because, in an excessively slippery situation, the civil authorities were finding it necessary above all things to get a solid grip on the army and on the war. Porter might not in fact be an obstacle in their way, but they thought that he was, which was what mattered. At the very least he had come to symbolize the obstacles which, being intangible, could not be dealt with directly.

Ordinarily the government would not need to ruin a general in order to establish its control, but these times were far from ordinary. Fear and hate and suspicion had been created in order that these incomprehensible soldiers who failed to hate their enemies might at least be inspired and directed by men who did hate. (Grim old Thad Stevens had recently offered in Congress a resolution denouncing, as guilty of "a high crime," anyone in the executive branch of the government who should so much as propose a negotiated peace with the South.)
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Everybody in Washington was being victimized, and the bloodcurdling fol-de-rol of the Indiana conspirators was part of the emotional background. Porter was one victim. Another victim, looking with unutterable melancholy to a day beyond death and hatred, brooding darkly about what the people might buy with this sacrifice of their blood if they could be enabled to make their purchase with charity and without malice, was Abraham Lincoln. In between the two, the immediate victim and the tragic humorist who was appointed to sit in judgment upon him, there were many others. Among them was the coarse, savagely cruel, everlastingly vital little man with the straggly whiskers and the furious eyes, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

Stanton represented driving force. He was a terror to all traitors, to most Democrats, and to a good many officers of the United States Army. There were those who said that if one who came before him for a scolding barked back at him sharply the Secretary would change his tack and become ingratiating, and it appears that old-fashioned fortitude in personal combat may not have been one of his basic virtues.
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McClellan had considered him a double-dealer who could talk falsely of friendship while he dug a pitfall before one's feet. Others spoke of his intolerable insolence, and it was a byword that his favorite cry to officers brought before him was a passionate "I'll dismiss you from the service!"

Stanton looked at the army and found its officer corps full of cliques—the friends of McClellan, the pals from West Point, the tent mates from the old Indian-fighting army from the Western plains. He saw, also, that this army somehow was not quite responsive to the will of the government. On the horizon lay the fleeting shape of a vision which was noble beyond utterance, but in the immediate foreground there were the blood and the mud and the inexpressible ignobility which doomed sick men to a diet of salt pork and hardtack, or squandered men's lives through sheer incompetence, or schemed and plotted for rank and promotion. The contrast was beyond endurance. So as a first step, and beginning with the destruction of the luckless Porter, Stanton would break up the cliques.

The technique was brutal, but the idea was sound enough. A rather obscure brigadier of cavalry, who served for a time in the provost guard in the capital and hence got a good look at the seamy side of things, applauded vigorously as he watched what the Secretary was doing.

"When Stanton was appointed," this officer wrote, "a military aristocracy of the regular army and of immense power had arisen in the bosom of the army of the volunteers. This aristocracy had at its head the commander-in-chief and stretched its roots into every corps, regiment, and bureau, defying the government at home with only a little less disdain than Davis manifested at Richmond. Our own army was first to be made subordinate to the President, and then the Southern army made subordinate to it. To relieve McClellan, court-martial

Porter, and eliminate all traces of West Point class traditions, uniting by nicknames, I consider victories as important as Appomattox, and these nothing but the wooden and numb audacity of Stanton dared to achieve."
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The crack about West Point nicknames, to be sure, indicates a general of volunteers whose feelings were hurt one day when he found that he did not belong to the club, and this doubtless colored what he had to say. Yet he did have a point. There was ever so much more to the Porter business than Porter himself. Porter was an innocent who stood in the line of fire, and he got hit. From this winter onward the army might have many defects, but one thing at least was certain: its higher officers would realize that a hard war was called for.

Others besides the offended cavalry general got the point. Major Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin, who never suffered from his own lack of a West Point nickname, wrote in March that army morale had been restored, and he set down the verdict of a front-line fighting man:

"By the prompt dismissal of disaffected and disloyal officers, the army is being purged of the damnable heresy that a man can be a friend to the government and yet throw every clog in the way of the administration and prosecution of the war."
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Fuzzier, yet speaking an honest emotion springing from the upswing that followed Stanton's purge, was the outburst written down by that eminent Bostonian, Major Henry Lee Higginson of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry:

"We'll beat these men, fighting for slavery and for wickedness, out of house and home, beat them to death, this summer, too. . . . We are right, and are trying hard; we have at last real soldiers, not recruits, in the field, and we shall reap our harvest. . . . My whole religion (that is, my whole belief and hope in everything, in man, in woman, in music, in good, in the beautiful, in the real truth) rests on the questions now really before us."
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Neither Major Dawes nor Major Higginson quite said it. Yet there was something unexpressed, perhaps something finally inexpressible, lying beneath the change which they saw coming over the army and the war that winter and spring. America was changing, changing by violence, with much blood to be shed and many lives to be wrecked. Nobody was ready for it, and nobody could quite understand it now that it was happening. But somehow it was being determined that democracy henceforth, perhaps for some centuries to come, would operate through a new instrument. Sovereignty of the states was dying, North as well as South, and going with it was the ancient belief that the government which governs least is the government which governs best.

Between that fact and the mangling of General Porter the connection might seem to be remote, but it was there. Neither Porter nor the men who broke him could have told quite what was happening, nor could they have said why it was happening. All men were victims and agents of the irresistible current of change. It was necessary for some of them to die of dysentery, eating bad food in unheated hospital tents beside the Rappahannock, and it was necessary for others to hammer a desk and threaten army officers with ignominy, and in the end something bigger than any man knew would come of it all.

In this desperate war which America was waging—with itself and with its own past, and with all of the habits of thought which had grown up out of that past—the nation was unexpectedly finding that it possessed enormous strength. The possession of that strength was a fact of incalculable significance. None of the old means for wielding and controlling it seemed to be any good. Yet the power existed, and the one certainty was that someone would eventually control it no matter what happened to the war, to the country, or to the country's traditional method of governing itself. So the necessity of taking control of this immense power was going to dominate everything for a time, and it was going to work through many instruments.

One of these instruments—least likely of the lot, perhaps, but extremely effective—was Joe Hooker, exercising the functions of the profane hard-drinking soldier to bring the army back to fighting pitch, and inspiring Boston's Major Higginson to a confused rhapsody about the higher values. Another was Secretary Stanton, smashing blindly at officer cliques to extend the power of the central government. Still another was the great anonymous private soldier himself.

He was the central fact in the whole situation. For the time being, government existed for him. He fought without poetry, as the regular said of the New Englanders, and he died by platoons when the time came for him to die, and all of the raw power which the country was beginning to assert had meaning only through him. Without in the least intending to, he was now driving the government on to a fuller assertion of its own powers.

He fought and he died without any particular complaint (except for remarks about bad food and incompetent leadership), but someone had to keep sending him up to the firing line. This job originally fell to the several states, and they had done nobly as long as individual Americans would respond to the call. But the unhappy fact was that volunteering had just about ceased. The states had tried coercion—that is, they had gingerly tried drafting their own people—but that was not working well either. The war had begun as an effort by one coalition of states to impose its will on another coalition of states, and it could not be fought that way any longer.

Hooker's army contained something like 120,000 men. Nearly 30,000 of these were men who had signed up for short terms—many of them were nine-month men, enlisted the summer before when Lee drove north into Maryland and made Northern pulses flutter—and their enlistments would expire in mid-May. There was no way to hold these men in service, since they had enlisted with the states and not with the Federal government. (Hooker was remarking that even the men who were willing to re-enlist would insist on being sent home and paid off first, so that they could join new regiments and collect fat bounties.)