Mr Lincoln's Army (8 page)

"Our lines were in the open fields in
front of a strip of woods," a Wisconsin soldier wrote. "The Rebel
musketry fire was pouring from the woods upon our men who were closing together
and rallying under the attack. Regiments would sweep splendidly forward into
the front line, fire a crashing volley into the woods, and then work with great
energy. But they quickly withered away until there would appear to be a mere
company crowding around the colors."
⁶

Joe Hooker, who seemed to be ranking officer
on that part of the field, trotted up at last on his white horse, looked the
hopeless situation over, and ordered a retirement. The blue line drew back,
step by step, still facing to the front; and as it did so the Confederates came
out from behind the embankment and followed them, step by cautious step,
neither side firing. When the Federal line halted, the Confederates would halt and
lie down, holding their muskets ready; when the Federals stepped back again,
the Confederates would get up and step after them—a strange, silent, queerly
ominous advance and retreat, with the crash of battle sounding loudly beyond
the woods to right and to left.

Porter's
men were beaten and fell back, and Hatch's troops were beaten and fell back.
Longstreet brought his men out of their concealment—it was time to disillusion
John Pope at last—and drove them forward in a long charge along the turnpike
and over the hills and fields to the south. And Reynolds's Pennsylvanians had
been taken off to the right, so that there was nobody in front of Long-street's
thirty thousand but one battery of regular artillery and Porter's two volunteer
regiments of infantry, isolated on a knoll behind a farmhouse, and they were
not nearly enough.

These two regiments belonged to Sykes's
division. Except for them the division was composed solidly of regulars, and
when they had first been brigaded with it the volunteers had not known quite
how to act. They remembered how General Sykes, cold and unemotional, with a
fine bushy beard and a crusty regular-army manner, had greeted them when they
had joined his command. He had them lined up on parade and read to them
McClellan's order which made them part of his division. Then he said: "You
have heard what our commander-in-chief General McClellan says. I only add that
if there is any hard work to be done you have got to do it." The soldiers
gulped, then gave three cheers, and after that they belonged to the family.
⁷

Right now they belonged to a forlorn hope.
The 10th New York had been placed in front as a heavy skirmish line, and
Longstreet's advance rolled over it and crumpled it and ground it aside (one
participant remembered "a fat little major" in the 10th whacking the
Federals with the flat of his sword to hold them to their work) and came on up
the hill to capture the battery. The 5th New York were dressed as
Zouaves—bright red baggy pants, white canvas leggings, broad red sash at the
waist, short blue jacket, tasseled red caps; it appears that they were the
soldiers who had taunted Gibbon's boys the day before. They hung on now long
enough to let the regulars get the guns away, and then they retired—what was
left of them, anyway. In their brief fight they had lost 124 men killed and
223 wounded out of 490 present—the highest percentage of loss, in killed,
suffered by any Federal regiment in one battle during the entire war. As they
pulled out they could see Sykes's regular battalions, north of the pike,
wheeling out of line and into column under a merciless fire as only the
regulars could do. Whatever else might happen, Porter's men had lived up to the
boast they had made to the Black Hat Brigade: they had shown any and all straw-feet
how to fight.

Pope
and McDowell saw the danger now and worked frantically to get protection over
on the left. Some of Sigel's men were sent there, and they took with them a
battery of mountain howitzers-funny little guns that were carried into action on
the backs of mules, to be taken down and assembled on diminutive gun carriages
when it was time to fight. Some of Hooker's boys saw these howitzers for the
first time that day as Sigel's Germans took them forward into action, and they
jeered loudly and asked what in the world sort of battery that was. "The
shackass battery, by Gott—get out mit der way or we blow your hets off!"
cried the Germans.

Ricketts sent a couple of brigades over from
the far right, and they took possession of a little swale beside the Germans
and slugged it out with Hood's Texans. In one of these brigades was the 12th
Massachusetts, a kid-glove regiment commanded by Colonel Fletcher Webster, son
of the great Daniel. This outfit had left Boston a year earlier amid impressive
ceremonies, carrying an elaborate flag of white silk presented by "the
ladies of Boston," the silk being edged in blue and gold and bearing the
coat of arms of Massachusetts on one side and on the other a quotation from the
famous orator—"Not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star
obscured."

In
addition to a fancy flag and the admiration of the ladies of Boston, the 12th
Massachusetts had brought a song to war—a fine, swinging song with a deep roll
of tramping feet and ruffled drums in it, a song to which a woman later gave
tremendous words, so that it lives on as the nation's greatest battle hymn,
with something in it that goes straight down to the deepest emotions of the
country's heart. During its training-camp days the 12th had been stationed at
Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, where the 2nd U.S. Infantry was also stationed;
and the regulars had picked up a snappy tune—a camp-meeting revival hymn,
written in Charleston, South Carolina, around 1850, entitled "Say Brothers
Will We Meet You Over on the Other Shore?" What a battalion of U.S.
regulars was doing knowing a gospel hymn is beyond imagination, but they did
know it, and because it was a fine song to march to they had fitted new words
to it: "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave . . . and we go
marching on." The 12th liked the song and learned to sing it, and they
had a fine band to provide the accompaniment. There was a big review on Boston
Common on a bright summer afternoon, with Edward Everett delivering an oration,
and a feminine committee presenting the silk flag, and an open-air dinner on
the Beacon Street mall afterward. When the dinner had been eaten the regiment
paraded back to Fort Warren, going down State Street singing the John Brown
song with the band at the head of the column, and the war was all youth and
music and bright flags and heroism.

A
few days later they marched through Boston to take the train for Washington,
and again they sang the song. When they got to New York they had a big parade
up Broadway, and thousands of people lined the sidewalks and leaned out of the
windows and heard the John Brown song for the first time—1,040 young men
singing it, with a brass band playing and a great roll of drums and all the
feet rhythmically tramping on the pavement. And in Washington they sang it
again, and in no time at all the song was famous from the seacoast to the
Mississippi Valley, and all the troops around Washington were singing it. Then
one afternoon Julia Ward Howe sat in a carriage, heard a marching brigade
singing it—the Black Hat boys claim it was their brigade, which is as it may
be—and regretted that so fine a tune did not have better words. Early next
morning she sat by an open window and wrote the mighty battle hymn, which has
been a heritage of Americans ever since. And the 12th Massachusetts had started
it all—or, if one goes back farther, the workaday 2nd regiment of regulars,
aided by a pious hymnographer from the deepest south.
⁸

But the dandy 12th was a long way from the
ladies of Boston now, and Colonel Webster was killed, and the 12th was finally
forced back, along with the rest of Ricketts's men and the Germans.

For
whatever it might be worth to them, they had at least made Confederate John B.
Hood pause and call for help before they retreated—a thing not too many Union
troops were able to do, then or at any other time.

Dusk came, and the field dissolved in a blur
of retreating regiments, bewildered stragglers, defiant batteries firing
canister to stay the advancing Confederates, and heavy waves of assault
crashing against the last hills this side of Bull Run Bridge, over which the
entire army had to retreat. John Gibbon found himself on one of these hills,
bringing his brigade and steady old Battery B back step by step in such fine
order that General McDowell, riding up, told him to take charge of the whole
rear guard and be last man over the bridge. McDowell rode away and Phil Kearny
came up, furious with the shame of defeat.

"I suppose you appreciate the condition
of affairs here, sir?" said Kearny savagely. Gibbon looked at him
inquiringly. "It's another Bull Run, sir, it's another Bull Run!"

Gibbon hoped it was
not as bad as that.

"Perhaps
not," said Kearny. "Reno is keeping up the fight. He is not stampeded.
I am not stampeded. You are not stampeded. That is about all, sir, my God,
that's about all!"
⁹

The sun went down, and in the twilight the
air was so full of smoke that the Union Army could not see the men who had
beaten it. But the bullets and the shell kept coming, and the rear guard hung
on and let the wreckage stream back across the bridge, and the Pennsylvanians
and Sykes's regulars and some of Sigel's Germans stayed grimly on the Henry
House Hill, where Stonewall Jackson had won his nickname the summer before, and
at last it was time to go. Gibbon's men got across, finally, and formed line
of battle along the far side of the stream, but there was no further pursuit.
The battle was over. Hungry Federals scrabbled among the wreckage of overturned
wagons near the bridge to collect hardtack.

Late that night Phil Kearny overtook his
headquarters wagon and sat down to write out his report. He had a writing pad
on his knee, and since he had but one arm an aide stood by, steadying the pad
with one hand. The aide was young, and what he had been through that day had
shaken him, and he trembled, making the pad quiver.

Kearny
looked up and asked him what was the matter. Frankly the youngster confessed
that he was afraid.

Kearny gave him a
long, sober look.

"You must never
be frightened of anything," he said.
¹⁰

4.
Man on a Black Horse

The
stone bridge and the road leading across it were a tangle of lost soldiers,
sutlers' wagons, jolting guns and caissons, and weary regiments and brigades
striving to keep some sort of formation as they forced their way through the
confusion. A dozen long wagon trains were trying to get on the road
simultaneously—some of them had been called from Centreville that morning, when
the army thought it was going to pursue someone, and they arrived just in time
to turn around and join in the flight—and there was a huge traffic jam. The
sutlers' wagons seemed to be an especial problem; their drivers were almost
frantic in their desire to get on the road and be gone, for in a jam like this,
with discipline loosened, everybody hungry, and pitch-darkness prevailing, the
soldiers were all too likely to consider them fair game and start
indiscriminate looting. Now and then one of these wagons would succeed in
getting on the highway and the driver would force his distracted horses to a
gallop, careening ahead through infantry detachments and sending the men
flying, and winding up, as likely as not, in a ditch.

In
the grass and briars off the road there were little groups of men gathered
about flags—each group the nucleus of some lost regiment trying to
reassemble—and over all the noise of the retreat could be heard the cries of
these men, plaintively chanting their regimental numbers: "Twenty-fourth
New York! . . . Third Maine—Third Maine! . . . Bucktails!" Acrid smoke
tainted the night air, and as the darkness deepened a steady rain set in. A
soldier in the 27th New York remembered that his regiment was drawn square
across the road with fixed bayonets to halt the flood; but blows, bayonets and
threats were of no avail—"the disorganized and demoralized mob rushed
recklessly around our flanks."
¹
Later, he added, the disorder
subsided, and the regiments marched by in more regular order. A war
correspondent who had witnessed the headlong departure from the field after the
first battle of Bull Run insisted that there was "little or none" of
the panic that attended the first retreat, and felt that, all things
considered, this retreat was fairly orderly; but it stood out in the memory of
the men who had to five through it as one of the gloomiest, most miserable
nights of the war.

And if there was no sustained panic there was
a smoldering, unreasoning anger, and there was ugly talk. Luckless General McDowell
sat his horse and watched the army struggle past, and as they went by men
called out "Traitor!" and "Scoundrel!" A private in the
11th Massachusetts, from Hooker's division, turned to another and growled:
"How guilty he looks, with that basket on his head!" This was in
reference to poor McDowell's fancy summer headpiece. In the surviving
photographs it does look somewhat like a battered coal scuttle, but the men's
objections were not based on aesthetic grounds; somehow the army had acquired
the remarkable conviction that for an obscure and traitorous purpose McDowell had
designed this hat as a distinguishing mark for the enemy to see and recognize.
As they trudged along the road the men of the 11th told each other how a
brigadier in Hooker's division, meeting a non-com who was staggering wounded to
the rear during the heat of the day's combat, had asked how things were going
up front.