Mr Lincoln's Army (3 page)

By good luck the first general Haupt found
was Winfield Scott Hancock, a brigade commander in the Army of the Potomac,
recently back from the peninsula, where in spite of the fact that his brigade
had not had too much fighting to do he had somehow marked both it and himself
as men who would be very useful indeed before the war was over. Late as it was,
Hancock had only just gone to bed. He liked to do all his paper work around
midnight and had a habit, whenever he encountered a report that was in any way
faulty, of having the author hauled out of bed at once and brought to brigade
headquarters to receive a dressing-down that was usually loud enough to arouse
the nearby regiments. This trait was a trial to Hancock's staff, but it meant
that most reports by now were letter-perfect before they ever reached the
general.

Hancock was a direct actionist, who both
looked and acted like a soldier—a burly, handsome man, who somehow managed
always to be wearing a clean white shirt even when the army had been in the
field for weeks, and who, in an army where the officers were notably profane,
was outstanding for the vigor, range, and effectiveness of his cursing. His men
liked to tell how, at the battle of Williamsburg, he had galloped up,
outdistancing his staff, to order his troops to the charge—"the air was
blue all around him," one of them recalled admiringly. There was a great
breezy vigor and bluffness about the man. Earlier in the war, when his brigade
was still in training, his men had taken to killing and eating the sheep of
fanners near camp, and Hancock had determined to stop it. One afternoon, riding
the lines near his camp, he had seen a knot of soldiers in a meadow, bending
over the body of a sheep. Putting his horse to the fence, he galloped up,
shouting mightily, and the men of course scattered—all except one who tarried
too long and whom Hancock, flinging himself from his saddle, seized with strong
hands.

"Now, you scoundrel, don't tell me you
didn't kill that sheep—I saw you with my own eyes!" roared the general. Just
then the sheep, not yet knifed, realized that it was no longer being held and
sprang to its feet and scampered nimbly away. Hancock stared at the rocketing
sheep, looked blankly at the quaking soldier in his hands—and then threw his
head back and made the meadow ring with shouts of laughter.
³

It
was this Hancock whom Haupt found on his midnight quest for troops. Hancock
heard his story and immediately detailed the men for him, and early in the
morning Haupt's trains went lurching off into Virginia. By ten in the morning
Haupt was notified that the bridge near Burke's Station had been rebuilt. He
also learned that enemy troops were still somewhere in the vicinity of Manassas
in very great strength; the head of the construction gang had been told that Lee
himself was with them. A little later trains came steaming back from Fairfax
Station loaded with wounded men.

For the moment this was all the news there
was. Haupt's line of track went off into the darkness where moved shadowy
forces made large by rumor. For all anyone knew, Lee and his whole army might
be between Pope and Washington. McClellan picked up a report that 120,000
Confederates were moving toward Arlington and the Chain Bridge, bent on the
capture of Washington and Baltimore. Halleck sagely remarked that the thing to
be afraid of at that moment was the danger that Rebel cavalry might dash
forward by night and enter the city—"Rebel cavalry" in those days
being terrifying words, since the plow hands and mechanics whom the Federals
were earnestly trying to turn into cavalrymen were no match at all for Jeb
Stuart's incomparable troopers.

McClellan sent four infantry regiments out to
the works at Upton's and Munson's hills, covering the main highway in from
Centreville, and instructed them to hold the lines there at all hazards. The
two divisions of Franklin's army corps, just disembarked, loitered about
Alexandria waiting for orders; Halleck and McClellan agreed that they ought to
go forward to aid Pope, but nobody knew quite where Pope was to be found, and
anyway, Franklin had no horses to pull his artillery and no wagon train to
carry food and ammunition, and there seemed to be no cavalry at hand to scout
the road for him. Haupt darkly remarked to himself that a march of twenty-five
miles would put Franklin in the fortified lines at Centreville, which would
surely be within reaching distance of Pope, and felt that Franklin's men could
carry on their backs enough food and ammunition to take them that far. Besides,
Haupt seriously doubted that there was anything hostile this side of
Centreville which could hurt a whole army corps. But nobody asked Haupt's
opinion, McClellan and Halleck began to bicker fruitlessly about the advance,
and Franklin's troops stayed where they were.

The next day was August 29, and outposts
reported hearing the rumble of gunfire from beyond Centreville. Somewhere off
in the outer darkness the armies apparently had collided. Later in the day
Haupt was able to confirm this. Sitting at the end of the railway telegraph
line, he got a message from Pope himself—in Centreville, by now— and Pope
seemed to be in good spirits, reporting that he was engaged with sixty thousand
Confederates, that Joe Hooker was driving them handsomely, and that McDowell
and Sigel were cutting off the enemy's retreat. McClellan ordered Franklin to
move forward, telling him: "Whatever may happen, don't allow it to be said
that the Army of the Potomac failed to do its utmost for the country"—a
remark which is a complete tip-off to the strange jealousies, rivalries, and
antagonisms that were besetting the high command just then. The troops started
to move that morning, Franklin remaining behind in an attempt to get supply
wagons, of which he finally rounded up a scant twenty; then McClellan began to
have second thoughts, wired Halleck that he did not think Frariklin's men were
in shape to accomplish much if they ran into serious resistance along the road,
and finally ordered Franklin to halt at Annandale, seven miles out. Haupt had
his railroad open as far as the Bull Run Bridge and was pushing supplies
forward as fast as the trains could move.

As far as Haupt could see, things were on the
mend. Pope was in touch with Washington and with his supply line again, his
wagons were moving the stores up from Fairfax Station to Centreville, and the
fighting seemed to be going favorably. But on the following day the luckless
railroad man entered into a full-fledged nightmare, which was visited on him by
order of the Secretary of War, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton.

Stanton, with his pudgy, bustling figure, his
scraggly beard, and his hot little eyes, was prone to disastrous impulses when
the going got tough, and he gave way to one on the thirtieth of August, 1862.
Late the night before, Pope reported having fought a heavy battle in which he
had lost ten thousand men and the enemy twice that many. The Confederates, he
assured the Secretary, were in full retreat and he was about to pursue with
vigor, which was all to the good. But Stanton, reflecting on those ten thousand
casualties—plus the Rebel wounded, who must be tended for humanity's
sake—suddenly concluded that the wounded would never in the world be cared for
unless he departed swiftly from regular channels, and he immediately departed
therefrom with restless energy. He publicly issued an invitation to government
clerks, private citizens, and all the sundry to volunteer as nurses and
stretcher-bearers for the wounded out beyond Centreville. Simultaneously he
ordered Haupt to stop whatever he was doing and prepare to transport this
volunteer brigade to the field at once. (He also rounded up all the hacks and
carriages he could find in Washington and sent them off to Centreville by road,
but that did not affect Haupt; it just clogged the highway that Pope's men had
to use.) Shortly thereafter scores and hundreds of civilians began to pour into
Alexandria demanding transportation. Most of them were drunk, and those who
were not were carrying bottles of whisky and obviously would be drunk before
very long.

Haupt's head swam at the thought of dumping
this howling mob down on a battlefield. Orders were orders, to be sure, but he
was enough of an army man to know that there are ways and ways of rendering
obedience. He delayed the train as long as he could; then, when he finally sent
it off, he wired the officer in command at Fairfax Station to arrest all who
were drunk. Also, he bethought himself that while he had been ordered to take
this mob out he had not been ordered to bring it back, so as soon as the train had
been unloaded he had it hauled back to Alexandria.

"Those who were sober enough straggled
off as soon as it was light enough to see, and wandered around until all whisky
and provisions became exhausted, when they returned to the station to get
transportation back," Haupt wrote later. "In this, most of them were
disappointed."

It
seemed cruel, he added, to make these people walk all the way back to
Washington in the rain, but it was better to do that than to ignore the
wounded; besides, his opinion of the volunteer nurses was not
high—"generally it was a hard crowd and of no use whatever on the
field." He learned later that some of the men bribed army ambulance
drivers to leave the wounded and carry the civilians back to Washington.
⁴

And as this affair began to be straightened
out the news from the front abruptly became worse. Having announced that he had
won a great victory, Pope was slow to report bad news, but the news came
trickling back anyway. One of the first to get the drift was General Jacob Cox,
an Ohioan who had gone to the lines at Upton's Hill in command of the four
regiments McClellan had sent out to hold the ground "at any hazard."
On the morning of August 30, Cox saw the ambulances coming in from Centreville,
accompanied by the walking wounded. These were men who had left the field the
night before, and their impression was that they had won the battle and that
the enemy was in retreat. Cox noticed that the sound of the firing, which he
had been hearing all the previous day, was not nearly so loud. Adding that to
the reports from the wounded men, he assumed that Pope was pursuing the foe and
that the gunfire came from rear-guard actions—an assumption which Pope himself
held until he finally reached the point at which further delusion was impossible.
During the afternoon, however, Cox could hear that the sound of the firing was
getting louder—much louder and much heavier, with long, sustained,
reverberating rolls of gunfire in which the individual shots could no longer be
distinguished. Toward evening the pathetic parade of wounded was coming in
greater numbers. It was accompanied by stragglers, and by dark the evidence of
a disastrous defeat was all too visible.
⁵
The spirits of the
soldiers in the camps around Alexandria, which had been raised mightily by the
early report of a victory, began to sag, and the provost marshal notified the
War Department that he needed more men if he was to preserve order—"we are
being overrun with straggling officers and men." The colonel of the 55th New
York Infantry, landing at the Alexandria wharves next morning, noted an air of
great depression as soon as he stepped ashore. Nobody knew just what had
happened, but all sorts of rumors were afloat; he found the word
"treason" being used freely.

Treason: betrayal, treachery, a will to lose
when the means to win are at hand; a dark, frightening word, coming up out of
the shadows, carrying fear and distrust and panic unreason with it, so that the
visible enemies in gray and butternut off toward the Bull Run Mountains seemed
less to be feared than those who might be standing, all unsuspected, at one's
elbow. The word was used everywhere: in the President's Cabinet, in the War
Department, in the tents of the generals, and—most disastrously of all—in the
ranks of the tired army that was plodding back toward Washington. All of the
disillusionment which began when the army was repulsed before Richmond, all of
the sudden war-weariness which had come so soon to a land that had been long at
peace, all of the bewilderment felt by men who saw themselves striking
ineffectually at targets that mysteriously shifted and dissolved as one
struck—all of this, welling up in the hearts of men who had done their best to
no avail, began to find expression in that word. There had been betrayal: of
high hopes and noble purposes, of all the army meant to itself and to the
country. The country had suffered more than a defeat. What was happening now
was the beginning of disintegration.

2.
We Were Never Again Eager

In
the end it would become an army of legend, with a great name that still clangs
when you touch it. The orations, the brass bands and the faded flags of
innumerable Decoration Day observances, waiting for it in the years ahead,
would at last create a haze of romance, deepening spring by spring until the
regiments and brigades became unreal—colored-lithograph figures out of a
picture-book war, with dignified graybeards bemused by their own fogged
memories of a great day when all the world was young and all the comrades were
valiant.

But
the end of August in the year 1862 was not the time for taking a distant and
romantic view of things. The Army of the Potomac was not at that moment
conscious of the formation of legends; it was hungry and tired, muddy and
ragged, sullen with the knowledge that it had been shamefully misused, and if
it thought of the future at all it was only to consider the evil chances which
might come forth during the next twenty-four hours. It was in a mood to judge
the future by the past, and the immediate past had been bad. The drunken
generals who had botched up supply lines, the sober generals who had argued
instead of getting reinforcements forward, the incredible civilians who had
gone streaming out to a battlefield as to a holiday brawl, the incompetents who
thought they were winning when they were losing were symbols of a betrayal
that was paid for in suffering and humiliation by the men who were discovering
that they had enlisted to pay just such a price for other men's errors.