Glory Road (43 page)
The Federal "rear" which he felt ought to be disturbed was, under this conception, the territory between Bull Run and Washington.
In accordance with his orders, then, Stuart began his march at 1
a.m
. on June 25. He immediately ran into trouble. The Federal army was sprawled out over more territory than had been supposed. The VI Corps was at Centreville, well to the east of the spot that was thought to mark the army's rear, and the III Corps was at Gum Springs, which was on Stuart's projected route to the Potomac. And although Mosby had been correct when he reported that the army was quiet, his information had gone out of date and the whole army was on the move, filling all the roads and making Stuart's move impossible. Stuart had to make a disastrous long detour south and east, and the upshot was that he rode his cavalry right out of the campaign.
5
Meanwhile, Hooker had not been entirely in the dark. As early as June 18 he got his pontoons into the Potomac opposite the mouth of the Monocacy, ready to lay bridges if a crossing became necessary. By June 23 he had definitely located the advance Confederate corps north of Hagerstown, Maryland. On that date one division of Rebels led by Jubal Early was up in the Pennsylvania mountains, laying irreverent hands on the Caledonia Ironworks owned by Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens's resident manager gave Early a moving argument about this property, saying that to destroy it would simply put several hundred people out of work; it would not hurt Stevens, because the place had been operating at a loss for a decade. Early was as skeptical as the next man, and he remarked dryly: "That's not the way Yankees do business," after which he ordered the whole place destroyed, with provisions and livestock confiscated for the benefit of the Confederacy. Visiting the place later, Stevens figured that he was out $75,000, and said the destruction was total—"They could not have done the job much cleaner."
8
Hooker waited no longer but ordered three army corps to move over the river at once, and by June 27—while Stuart was still floundering north toward the Potomac, and his brigadier, Fitz Lee, was sending him a hot bulletin to the effect that the Federal army was converging on Leesburg, doubtless planning to cross the Potomac—the entire Army of the Potomac was in Maryland, and one wing of the army was moving west to the passes in South Mountain.
This was tolerably fast action, all things considered. Hooker's army had completed its crossing only twenty-four hours after the last of Lee's infantry had crossed, and the whole of it was in Maryland before either Stuart or Lee knew that the crossing had even begun.
But if Hooker was handling the army skillfully, the fact was not impressing his immediate superiors, Secretary Stanton and General Halleck. They were still refusing him the reinforcements he was demanding.
The Army of the Potomac was lean just now. The Chancellorsville losses had not yet been made good, twenty thousand short-term troops had taken their discharges and gone home, and the forced marches in the sweltering heat had greatly extended the sick list, so that Hooker had fewer than seventy-five thousand effectives with him, not counting cavalry.
7
To be sure, there were plenty of other Federal troops within reach—the eternal Washington garrison, the brigades and regiments that were scattered about in Maryland, whole divisions down on the Virginia peninsula—but these were not for Joe Hooker. Halleck and Stanton would not let him have them, and when he asked for them he got pin-prickings and naggings in return.
Halleck and Stanton obviously did not want to see Hooker in command of the army in another battle. Yet with the greatest battle of all drawing nearer every day they could not quite nerve themselves to remove him. They had in mind, possibly, what Meade was calling "the ridiculous appearance we present of changing our generals after each battle." They also had in mind Hooker's chief cabinet sponsor, Secretary Chase, who was still a power in the land and still firmly committed to Hooker, which meant that to fire Hooker was to invite a shattering political upheaval. So these two set out to make things unpleasant for Hooker in the hope that he would take the hint and resign, and the Hooker who had criticized McClellan so bitterly in the old days began to find out what McClellan had been up against.
It is never safe to come to any firm conclusions about what Stanton really had in mind, but the probability is that he simply mistrusted Hooker's nerve. The blue funk that had suddenly materialized at Chancellorsville might appear again, and Stanton was taking no chances. For the time being, however, Hooker was a first-rate general. Considering the fact that the War Department had not given him a free hand but had limited him to the role of following Lee and trying to parry his blows, Hooker handled the army very well that June. But he felt himself a man on the end of a tether, with Washington restraining his every move, and he was a hot-tempered man, never famous for his patience. There was bound to be a blowup sooner or later, and if one thing did not touch it off some other thing would.
It came to a head at last over the same sore spot that had bothered McClellan during the Antietam campaign—control of the garrison at Harper's Ferry. Hooker could see no point in trying to hold this indefensible spot and he demanded permission to withdraw the troops and use them elsewhere. Halleck refused, and Hooker gave way to petulance and, just conceivably, to an inner reluctance to face once more the searching test of battle in supreme command. Whatever may have been his real reason, he hotly sent off a telegram of resignation, and the War Department accepted it with bland promptness. That night a War Department official took a special train west, and in the early morning hours of June 28 he entered Meade's tent, aroused that sleeping soldier, and informed him that he was now the commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Meade was genuinely surprised, so much so that when he first woke up and saw the War Department man standing by his cot he believed foggily that he was being placed under arrest, and he hastily searched his conscience to consider what he could have done to deserve it. He tried to decline the promotion and was told that that was impossible, he had been put in command whether he liked it or not. Dressing hastily, Meade made his way to Hooker's headquarters to give that officer the news.
8
Meade was a good, decent man, and nothing in all his story is much more creditable than the attitude he had taken toward his own promotion. Ever since Chancellorsville he and other ranking officers had expected that the army would get a new commander, and Meade had heard some gossip that he himself would be named. Considering the matter dispassionately, he concluded that the appointment just was not coming to him, and on June 25 he wrote a long letter to his wife explaining why he felt that way. For one thing, he told her, there would be great opposition from the innumerable cliques and factions of the officer corps itself, and Meade soberly analyzed these:
"They could not say that I was an unprincipled intriguer who had risen by criticizing and defaming my predecessors and superiors. They could not say I was incompetent, because I have not been tried, and so far as I have been tried I have been singularly successful. They could not say I had never been under fire because it is notorious no general officer, not even Fighting Joe himself, has been in more battles, or more exposed, than my record evidences. The only thing they can say, and I am willing to admit the justice of the argument, is that it remains to be seen whether I have the capacity to handle successfully a large army. I do not, however, stand any chance, because I have no friends, political or others, who press or advance my claims or pretensions, and there are so many others who are pressed by influential politicians that it is folly to think I stand any chance upon mere merit alone. Besides, I have not the vanity to think my capacity so pre-eminent, and I know there are plenty of others equally competent with myself, though their names may not have been so much mentioned."
Having explained all of this, Meade went on to twit his wife gently: "Do you know, I think
your
ambition is being roused and that you are beginning to be bitten with the dazzling prospect of having for a husband a commanding general of the army. How is this?"
8
He was genuinely but uneffusively fond of his wife, and in the early days of army life he wrote to her about the "terrible agony" of parting from her when the army sent him off to a distant post. On their twenty-first wedding anniversary he wrote her that he doubted if any other couple alive "have had more happiness with each other than you and I." If he was irritable and touchy in camp, possessed of a famous temper and imperfect means for controlling it, it never cropped out in his letters home. He was deeply and quietly religious, content to do his duty in the sphere where God had placed him, expressing his gratitude to God whenever his health (about which he worried a good deal) improved enough to let him feel robust. A professional soldier, he was inclined to distrust volunteers, and he had no use whatever for abolitionists.
10
This latter trait, as a matter of fact, had got him into the bad books of one of the most influential of all abolitionists, Senator Zach Chandler of Michigan, which was doubtless one reason why Meade felt that he would never be given Hooker's place. Meade had been stationed in Detroit when Fort Sumter was fired on, and while he was a staunch Unionist he was dismayed by the arrogance of the fire-eaters, to whom Southern secession looked like a simple riot which would be suppressed by the mere appearance of Federal troops. Detroit civic leaders called a huge mass meeting to whip up patriotic fervor and pass resolutions, and they invited all army officers stationed in Detroit to appear on the platform and publicly take the oath of allegiance to the Union. Meade and his fellow officers flatly refused to do this, notifying the War Department that they would freely take all the oaths the department asked them to take but that they would not take any in the circus surroundings of a mass meeting. For this stand Meade was publicly denounced at the meeting, and Senator Chandler had distrusted him ever since.
11
With the War Department man, Meade went to Hooker's tent. Hooker took the news as graceful
ly as a man could under the cir
cumstances, and he called in Dan Butterfield, his chief of staff, and sat down with Meade to explain where the army was and what current plans were. (Meade had long since expressed his dislike for Butterfield, and he had tried this morning to bring in G. K. Warren, the army's chief engineer, as his chief of staff. He was talked out of it by Warren himself, who explained that it would simply be impossible to break in a new chief of staff when a collision with the enemy might take place at any moment.) Butterfield and Hooker flared up once when Meade, after looking at their map, remarked unguardedly that it seemed to him the army was rather scattered, but that was smoothed over and the men got down to business.
12
Hooker told Meade that Lee had no pontoons with him and therefore could not be planning to cross the Susquehanna River, to whose bank Ewell's corps had progressed. If the rest of Lee's army followed Ewell, Hooker continued, Lee must be planning to move down the western bank of that river in order to cut off Baltimore and Washington, which meant that the line of march of Lee's invasion would follow a huge semicircle, curving northeast, east, and southeast. The Army of the Potomac, Hooker explained, had been placed so that it could move by a shorter arc inside of this semicircle, covering Baltimore and Washington and falling on Lee's flank if there was an opening. The explanations completed, Hooker withdrew and the army was Meade's.
13
He got it at a bad time—bad for him, and bad for the army. In the whole career of this body of troops, no greater test was ever put upon it than this business of getting a new commander on the very eve of the war's most crucial
battle
. It had had bad commanders and it had had fairly good ones, and all of them had been heckled and second-guessed by Washington, by the press, and by their own subordinates, but never before had there been anything like this.
Meade's appointment on the eve of battle was an act of sheer desperation, done solely to get rid of a man whose heart and nerve were distrusted. What happened now would be largely up to the men themselves. In effect they had no leader. They were almost within rifleshot of a supremely aggressive enemy, and there was no time for a shakedown, no time for high strategy and careful planning, no time for reorganization and regrouping. Whatever happened during the next week, the one certainty now was that the soldiers themselves would run this next battle. The most that could be expected of Meade was that he would make no ruinous mistakes. For the rest . . .
For the rest there were the men in the ranks, the hard brown survivors of the old 1861 regiments, the new levies that had come in to pick up the tone and the casual, unemotional spirit of the old-timers, the men who occasionally cheered one another in tribute to bravery and stoutness of heart which they themselves had seen, but who looked for no cheers or tributes from any other source. These men now were coming up from the river, and the weather was hot again, and the order was out for forced marches—Meade disagreed with Hooker's strategy, feeling that his cue was to follow Lee north and force him to turn and fight—and for a day or so the fate of the Union was going to rest on the sinewy legs of the men who had to do the marching.
The army came up from the Potomac, and some of the men were taken up a narrow strip of land between the river and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the march continuing long after dark, rain coming down and mud underfoot and Cimmerian darkness all around. Humphreys was in command—Humphreys, grandson of the naval constructor who had designed the U.S.S.
Constitution,
a slim dapper driver who had taken over Berry's old division in the III Corps. Humphreys was a grim courtly man who just before he took his troops up to the stone wall at Fredericksburg had bowed to his staff and had said pleasantly: "Gentlemen, I shall lead this charge; I presume, of course, you will wish to ride with me?" Since it was put like that, staff had so wished, and five of the seven officers got knocked off their horses. He was a stickler for the regulations, and the United States Army has possessed few better soldiers, and he was driving his men north now without regard for human frailty.
