Glory Road (30 page)

Tragically enough, the army itself had its own soft spot, a place that might collapse if touched sternly, a soft spot that was part of the army's character just as Hooker's was part of his character. It was different in that its growth and development could be traced exactly. One can see where it began, and extensive casualty lists show what it led to, and the steps in between are quite visible. The army's soft spot was the XI Army Corps, Major General Oliver Otis Howard commanding.

The XI Corps was the Cinderel
la of the army, the unwanted or
phaned child, and it was deeply aware of its own status. It seems to have felt, collectively, like a poor ignored wallflower at a high school dance. The corps contained many German soldiers, known to one and all as Dutchmen, a contemptuous title by which the soldiers expressed the national feeling—that men who talked with a foreign accent just did not need to be taken seriously. It is hardly going too far to say that what happened at Chancellorsville was the price the country paid for its indulgence in that feeling.

The nation had inherited something rich and strange when the German revolutionary movement of 1848 broke up in blood and proscription lists, with the best men of a dozen German states hastening to America. The nation had received these men, but it had never quite known what to make of them. These Germans were deadly serious about words which Americans took blithely for granted, words like liberty and freedom and democracy. They made up a substantial part of the ground which the free-soil men had cultivated in the 1850s, and when war came they had seen the Union cause as their own cause, with freedom for the black man as one of the sure ultimate goals. Their leaders were men who had lost their fortunes and risked their necks, taking up arms for liberty in a land of kings who resisted change, and these leaders called the Germans to the colors as soon as Fort Sumter was bombarded. Even more than the New England troops, these German regiments had welcomed and supported the Emancipation Proclamation. If the anti-slavery cause had an old guard, they perhaps were it.
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This old guard was the kernel of the XI Corps. About half of the men in the corps, as it happened, were native Americans; only fifteen of the twenty-six regiments were listed as German, and several of these contained a number of non-Germans.
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But it was the German regiments which set the tone for the corps. They had brought to it officers with names like Von Steinwehr and Von Gilsa and Buschbeck and Schimmelfennig and Kryzanowski, they had come in with a number of incomparable bands and singing clubs, they had brought in both solid professional soldiers from Europe and a set of fortune hunters combed out of petty ducal courts, and in the end it appears that they had also brought their own tradition of incredible bad luck.

Louis Blenker originally had commanded most of these German regiments. He was out of the army now, dying of an accidental hurt received in a fall of his horse, but early in 1862 he had had a great name. He was a revolutionist in exile, a man who had led the men of Hesse-Darmstadt against Prussian troops and who had had to fly for his life when the revolution of 1848 was suppressed. A resident of New York when the Civil War came, he had raised the 8th New York, one of the first of the German regiments, and he and it had fought well at First Bull Run. Early in 1862 McClellan had given him a division composed of three brigades of Germans from the East and Midwest.
³
The Germans' woes had begun shortly afterward.

In the spring of 1862 this divisio
n was posted in Virginia, sprad
dled out from near Manassas to the edge of Alexandria. Just at that time the administration was giving John Charles Fr6mont an army command in
western Virginia. Fre
mont was the unspotted hero of the abolitionists, and it seemed advisable to give him abolitionist troops whenever possible, so when he needed reinforcements McClellan was ordered to detach Blenker's Germans and send them to him.

It was a long hike up over the Bull Run Mountains and the Blue Ridge, across the
Shenandoah Valley and on to Fre
mont's headquarters at Petersburg, deep in the Alleghenies, and American soldiers have rarely had a more miserable time than these troops of Blenker's had on what was supposed to be a perfectly routine cross-country move.

The first trouble was that through some lapse in paper work the division was sent out lacking the most elementary kind of equipment, from shelter tents (of which they had none at all) to overcoats, blankets, shoes, and rations. The next trouble was that the division got lost. The War Department forgot all about it. The division had moved out from under McClellan's control, but it had not yet come under Fremont's, and apparently no one gave Blenker a decent map. So the Germans went floundering cross-country through cold spring rains, losing sick men and stragglers wholesale, and leaving the country smoldering with angry complaints from the citizenry, who alleged that homes and barns and corncribs were being looted by ragged Germans who seemed not to have been fed for generations. On top of all other troubles, the division quartermasters had no money to use when they went out to buy provisions, so they simply requisitioned what they needed. They spoke poor English and they acted hastily, and anyway, the inhabitants were secessionists and objected to the whole process on principle. The Germans got the name of being the worst thieves and looters unhung. Crossing the Shenandoah, it seemed characteristic that some inexpert subaltern managed to swamp a ferryboat, and forty men were drowned.

Eventually the authorities realized that they had lost a division of troops, and Major General William S. Rosecrans was sent out to find the Germans and bring them in. He did so (after hunting around for several days), his eyes popping out of his knobby red face as he took a look at this lost command. Blenker's men, he reported to Stanton, "were short of provisions, forage, horseshoes and horseshoe nails, clothing, shoes, stockings, picket ropes and ammunition, without tents or shelters, and without ambulances or medicines for any important work." They were also practically out of horses, and the men had not been paid since December. All things considered, said Rosecrans, it was "not much wonder they stole and robbed."
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All in all, it took the division six weeks to get
up from Alexandria and join Fre
mont's troops. The union was not happy. Fremont's native American regiments were discontented. Yankee soldiers were sniffing the air and reporting, "The air around here was found to be rather Dutchy," and Ohio soldiers objected to the presence of so many foreigners on Fremont's staff. It seems that these foreign officers rode their horses with the English rising seat, whereas the Middle Western boys believed that a man ought to get on his horse and go jogging along without any fancy tricks of equitation. Sentries coming to salute when these bedizened aides rode by were presently discovered to be saying something as they saluted. Upon investigation it was found that they were repeating: "Don't rise for me, sir," a gag which pleased everyone but the aides.
⁵

Fr6mont's mountain campaign was less than a success. It almost duplicated, as a matter of fact, the experience Blenker's division had already had, with rations running out and soldiers collapsing from hunger, fatigue, and sickness. By the end of May fewer than six thousand of Blenker's original ten thousand were present for
duty, Fre
mont's medical director was demanding "in the name of humanity" that something be done to restore the soldiers' health, and Carl Schurz was warning Lincoln that the whole outfit was half starved "and literally unable to fight."
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Things improved after Fr6mont left. His place was taken by Franz Sigel, another revolutionist in exile—little more of a soldier, unfortunately, than Fremont himself, but a good deal more of a man. When he took over the command the Germans were proud, and "I fights mit Sigel" became a catch phrase all across the North. When Sigel's command was finally denominated the XI Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the fact that Sigel led it helped to fix it, in the army's eyes, as a German command.

The rest of the army did not welcome this XI Corps. The corps ha
d never licked anybody under Fre
mont and it had done little better under Sigel; it got to Falmouth too late to fight at Fredericksburg, and its camp there happened to be isolated from the camps of the other corps. Anyway, the soldiers were Dutchmen, or at least a good many of them were, and their broken-English dialect struck the other soldiers as comic.

When the spring of 1863 came, Sigel left. After Hooker he was the ranking general in the army. His corps was the smallest of the lot, and Sigel thought that in simple justice to himself it ought to be enlarged. Halleck had an anti-foreign bias and would do no favors for Sigel, who then asked to be relieved and saw that one request granted immediately. General Howard was also a man with a lot of seniority, and he had been complaining because Sickles, his junior, had been given a corps while he, Howard, still led a mere division. Sigel's departure offered a chance to pacify Howard, and he got the XI Corps,
⁷
which decided quite soon that it did not like him very much.

Howard was not the type to make soldiers warm up to him quickly. He addressed them as "my men," which did not go over any better in the 1860s than it would today, and he was a little too widely known as the Christian soldier, a major general who went to hospitals on Sundays to distribute baskets of fruit, which were welcomed, and religious tracts, which regrettably were not. This did not add to his popularity. His Germans were mostly freethinkers with a strong anti-clerical tradition, and his native Americans were inclined to be jocose about excessive piety. There were contradictions in the America of that generation, with deep religious feeling going hand in hand with rough skepticism, and these two warring traits had to be embodied in this one unhappy army corps. In addition, Howard brought in a pair of new generals, Charles Devens and Francis Barlow, who were ferocious disciplinarians and who displaced generals the soldiers liked. Howard wrote later that "I was not at first getting the earnest and loyal support of the entire command."
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So it was the soft spot, this army corps. It had a tradition of bad luck and defeat, it was unhappy with itself and with its leadership, and, worst and most dangerous of all, it was an outcast from the spirit and affection of the army.
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In this reaction the army simply reflected national sentiment. The Civil War had come to a nation which was suspicious of its immigrants. Its traditions and habits of thought still deified the simple, uncrowded, slow-moving society of an earlier day. In its adolescence the country was beginning to look back fondly to a lost golden age when there had been no problems that hard work and plain living would not solve. Fantastic growth and development were taking place, the old traditions were outdated, the new arrivals were part of this growth, and somehow the incomprehensible, unwelcome changes seemed to be their fault.

So men of foreign birth were, in plain fact, second-class citizens, and the men of the XI Corps wore the uniform of a country which did not like them. Hardly half a dozen years had passed since the Know-Nothings had been a powerful political party, and a country which hated foreigners almost as much as Negroes was now using the one to enforce freedom for the other and was suffering from emotional indigestion as a result. It might yet find that a fight to end slavery would also, in the end, be a fight to improve the lot of the immigrant, and that was something it had not counted on.

The way Hooker had his army lined up on the morning of May 2, it seemed unlikely that the XI Corps would have much to do, which was perhaps a measure of the general feeling that the men were something less than first-class troops.

The left end of Hooker's line ran along a wooded ridge from the Rappahannock to a clearing a few hundred yards north of Chancel-lorsville and was held by Meade and his V Corps. Next to Meade, covering the turnpike from Fredericksburg and the ground on either side of it, stood Hancock's division of the II Corps. On Hancock's right, bulging out in a big horseshoe curve to cover the plateau of Fairview Cemetery, a lonely country burying ground a few rods southwest of the Chancellorsville mansion, Slocum's XII Corps was dug in, with guns massed in the rear. Just west of this, holding a line that also bulged out to the south to take advantage of the elevated fields of Hazel Grove farm, were two divisions of Sickles's I
II Corps. On Sickles's right, run
ning straight west along the turnpike for more than a mile, was the line of the XI Corps.

Hooker apparently was waiting for the Rebels to attack him. If they did they would be coming along the turnpike from Fredericksburg and they would hit either Hancock's men or Slocum's, shock troops, well entrenched, men who could be counted on. If they swung off to the north they would strike Meade's corps, equally reliable and occupying a practically impregnable position. Howard's men held the sector farthest removed from any possible point of attack, and to get at them Lee would have to march squarely across Hooker's front—a fatal maneuver, as any student of Austerlitz could testify. Anyway, the woods and underbrush around Howard's front were so thick and tangled that a regular line of battle could not get through. The Dutchmen might stack their arms and butcher their cattle and let their excellent bands play, while the real army of the Potomac took care of the fighting.