This Hallowed Ground (28 page)

The shortest and quickest way, as far as the private soldier was concerned, was to hit hard at anything that stood in his path — to
devastate country as well as to fight enemy armies; in general terms, to wreak vengeance on all inhabitants of the Confederacy. The judge advocate in a court-martial in Buell’s army summed it up a little later when he defined “a vigorous war policy” as one in which the man who actively or passively aided the secession movement “is considered to have no rights that the government is bound to respect.”
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Quite simply, this meant that the institution of slavery was doomed. The great majority of Union soldiers had entered the war with no particular feeling against slavery and with even less feeling in favor of the Negro. They had no quarrel with the idea that the Negro was property; indeed, it was precisely that fact that was moving them and writing the institutions doom. Because looting and foraging held “marvellous beauties” for the army of occupation, because ruining a farm seemed one way to strike at the enemy, and because general hell-raising was fun anyway, they were commissioning themselves to strike at Rebel property — and here was the most obvious, plentiful, and important property of all. With the Negro’s ultimate fate they rarely bothered their heads. It was enough to know that the South would have a hard time functioning without him.

U. S. Grant got this idea ahead of his troops. Grant had never been an anti-slavery man. He had once owned a slave himself, his wife had owned several, his wife’s family had owned many. But as early as the fall of 1861 he was writing to his father, saying that while he wanted to whip the rebellion but preserve all southern rights, “if it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war on slavery, let it come to that.” In the summer of 1862 he saw the myriad contrabands that were following northern armies, and commented: “I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end, but it weakens the enemy to take them from them.” Somewhat later he told his friend Congressman Elihu B. Washburne: “It became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with one another except as one nation, and that without slavery.”
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Not only was the Negro a visible and easily removable piece of Rebel property; he was also a very helpful fellow, and Union soldiers who found him so began to feel a vague sort of sympathy for him. Ormsby Mitchel’s men were learning that contrabands would give full information about movements of Confederate troops, and if they were utterly unable to estimate numbers correctly — when asked how many Rebels were in a given detachment they would usually say, “Three hundred thousand!” — their services nevertheless were invaluable. When Buell sternly ordered Mitchel to keep fugitive slaves out of his lines, several of Mitchel’s officers came to his tent, laid down their swords, and said they could not obey the order. This was plain mutiny, but Mitchel
ignored it and wrote his own angry protest at Buell’s order direct to Secretary Stanton. An Ohio soldier, musing on the rights and wrongs of the situation, wrote down his thoughts:

“The white Rebel, who had done his utmost to bring about the rebellion, is lionized, called a plucky fellow, a great man, while the Negro, who welcomed us, who is ready to peril his life to aid us, is kicked, cuffed and driven back to his master, there to be scourged for his kindness to us … There must be a change in this regard before we shall be worthy of success.”

This soldier saw at a Tennessee crossroads one day a road sign that read: “Fifteen miles to Liberty.” He reflected: “If liberty were indeed but fifteen miles away, the stars tonight would see a thousand Negroes dancing on the way thither; old men with their wives and bundles, young men with their sweethearts, little barefoot children all singing in their hearts.”
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 … The war itself, in plain words, was going to destroy slavery; not the fevered arguments of the abolitionists, nor the stirring of vague humanitarian sentiments among the northern people, but simply the war, and the fact that men were going to do whatever they had to do to win it. Lincoln himself was governed by this as much as was the most heedless soldier in the ranks.

For Lincoln this was an uneasy summer. The military machine had slowed almost to a stop and there did not seem to be any easy way to get it started again. He had brought John Pope east from Mississippi and had created a new army for him in upper Virginia, an army made up of the baffled fragments that had tried so clumsily to round up Stonewall Jackson a few weeks earlier. This had led to the immediate resignation of John Charles Frémont, but so far it had had no other good result. A week after Malvern Hill, Lincoln went down to Harrison’s Landing to talk to McClellan, who was jaunty and confident and who thought that he could yet take Richmond if he were properly reinforced. (That phantom, nonexistent Rebel army of the Pinkerton reports was still being taken seriously at headquarters.)

McClellan had another thought, which he put on paper for the President’s benefit. He believed that the Union armies would refuse to fight if this war became a war against slavery.

In a long memorandum McClellan spelled out his ideas of what war policy ought to be: “Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Military power should never be used to interfere with “the relations of servitude”; where contrabands were pressed into army service, their lawful owners should be properly compensated.
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It was a bad time for a general to hand that sort of document to Lincoln, who was not contemplating property confiscation, political executions, or territorial organization of rebellious states, but who had reached the conviction that he could not win the war without coming out against slavery.

Lincoln was a mild-mannered prairie politician who, in his own brief time as a soldier, had been told to go to hell by red-necked volunteers and had been ordered by a court-martial to carry a wooden sword for gawky unofficerlike ineffectiveness; but of all the leaders of the North, he more than any other had the hard, flaming spirit of War — the urge to get on with it at any cost and to drive on through to victory by the shortest road. So far he was little more than a name to the men in the ranks, and McClellan was the man they adored above all others; but of the two, it was the President and not the general who understood what was on the enlisted man’s mind.

Lincoln had said that if he did anything at all about slavery he would do it solely because he believed that it would help to win the war. Now the machine was stalling, and he had to get it moving again; and he had concluded that to do this he would have to call on the emotional power of the anti-slavery cause. The thoughts that would finally become the Emancipation Proclamation were taking shape in his mind when he visited McClellan; less than a week later, back in Washington, he would voice them to two members of his Cabinet. In the previous autumn he had rebuked Frémont for proclaiming abolition prematurely in Missouri; early this spring he had similarly rebuked General David Hunter for doing the same thing along the Carolina coast; now he was making up his mind to proclaim it himself … and the general of his principal army was telling him that the soldiers would not fight if he did.

Lincoln went back to Washington. Not long after, he called Halleck east and made him general-in-chief, in command of all the armies.

On form, the appointment looked good. The biggest gains had been made in the West — Missouri cleared, Kentucky saved, half of Tennessee in hand, armies of invasion poised in northern Mississippi and Alabama, with another army and a strong fleet in New Orleans — and all of this except the New Orleans business had been done by men under Halleck’s orders. The fact that a great chance had been missed on the slow crawl from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth was not yet apparent — not in Washington, anyway, although Grant and Ormsby Mitchel had been smoldering over it — and neither was the folly that had dispersed Grant’s and Buell’s armies and substituted the occupation of territory for a drive to destroy Rebel armies. In July 1862 the performance sheet made Halleck look like a winner, and so Halleck
was summoned to Washington to take the top command.

It would take time for him to get oriented. This time would be a free gift to the Confederacy, which was led by men to whom it was dangerous to make gifts. And as a result this would be the summer of the great Confederate counterattack, with final Confederate independence looking more likely for a few brief haunted weeks than at any other time in all the war.

Major General John Pope was an odd figure. Montgomery Blair once remarked venomously that he was a cheat and a liar like all the rest of his tribe, and while a disgruntled Blair was apt to be harsh in his judgments, Pope did have a pronounced ability to irritate people. He came on from the West exuding headstrong energy and loud bluster, and for a few weeks he held the center of the stage; then he evaporated, exiled to the western frontier to police the Indian tribes, leaving hard words and recriminations behind him. He had been given a comparatively minor part to play, and he almost succeeded in losing the war with it.

The War Department brought him east in a well-meant effort to get a little drive into the Virginia campaign, and it turned over to him some fifty thousand troops that were scattered all across northern Virginia and told him to weld them into an army and go down and fight Lee. Pope did his best, but the odds were all against him. It would have taken a good deal of time and some really inspired leadership to make a cohesive army out of the fragments that had been given him, and Pope did not have either.

To begin with, there was McDowell’s corps. These men, who had marched vainly back and forth across upper Virginia while the Army of the Potomac was fighting in front of Richmond, still considered themselves McClellan’s men. They did not like McDowell — for some incomprehensible reason they considered him disloyal to the Union cause — and they resented the orders that had held them away from McClellan’s command.

Next came the mountain army with which Frémont had vainly contemplated making a dash down into eastern Tennessee. About half of this corps was made up of German troops, and there was a noticeable lack of harmony between these and the native American regiments; the latter had not cared at all for Frémont, and when he was replaced by Franz Sigel, who had campaigned with varying success in Missouri, they liked Sigel no better. Their spirits were not improved
when they learned that the rest of the army was lumping themselves and the Germans together, indiscriminately, as a Dutch outfit.

Lastly, there was the corps which Nathaniel P. Banks had led up and down the Shenandoah Valley. These men had never had any luck. Stonewall Jackson’s men had run rings around them and had seized their supply dumps and trains so consistently that jeering Rebels referred to Banks as their favorite commissary officer. The human material in this corps was good enough — which, for the matter of that, was true of the other two corps as well — but the men had never won anything so far and they seem to have been dismally aware that under Banks they were not likely to win anything in the future.

Pope tried to fit these three groups together into an army. To raise the men’s spirits he issued a spread-eagle proclamation, announcing that out West the Union armies were used to looking upon the backs of their enemies; he hoped that eastern armies would get the same habit, and from now on they would forget about defensive positions and lines of retreat and would devote themselves entirely to the attack. He was quoted as saying that his headquarters would be in the saddle, which led the irreverent to remark that he was putting his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be, and instead of inspiring the men his impassioned words just made them laugh. In addition, Pope published harsh rules to govern the conduct of Rebel civilians within the Union lines, threatening wholesale imprisonments, executions, and confiscations. Nothing much ever actually came of these rules, but they did win for Pope a singular distinction: he became one of the few Federal generals for whom General Lee ever expressed an acute personal distaste. Lee remarked that Pope would have to be “suppressed” — as if he were a lawless disturber of the peace rather than an army commander — and he undertook to see to it personally, a fact that was to have extensive consequences.

Pope was moving down the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, preparing to descend on Richmond from the northwest while McClellan’s presence on the James forced the city’s defenders to look toward the southeast. But Pope and McClellan were too far apart to co-operate effectively, and they were such completely dissimilar types that it is hard to imagine them working together anyway. McClellan remained in his camp, making no offensive gestures, and Lee presently concluded that it would be safe to send Stonewall Jackson up to look after Pope.

Jackson had not lived up to his reputation in the Seven Days’ fighting, but he seemed to be himself again now and he moved with vigor. Some word of his move got to Washington, which began to suspect that the Pope-McClellan operation was not going to work very well, and
Halleck, the new generalissimo, went down to Harrison’s Landing to talk to McClellan. And now, once more, McClellan tripped over his wild overestimate of Confederate manpower.

It was essential to the present operation that McClellan move to attack Richmond. He could do this, he told Halleck, if he had thirty thousand more men. Halleck told him twenty thousand would be tops and asked if he could make the move with those reinforcements; McClellan said that he would try, although he was obviously dubious about it — for Lee, he assured Halleck, commanded two hundred thousand men.
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Halleck quickly reached what would seem to be a logical conclusion. If Lee’s army was bigger than Pope’s and McClellan’s combined — which was what McClellan’s estimate said — then it was obvious folly to let him occupy a position between them. There was only one thing to do: fuse these two Union armies into one and have them operate as a unit. To do this without uncovering Washington, it would be necessary to withdraw McClellan from the banks of the James. Early in August the orders went out. McClellan was to get his men north as quickly as possible so that he and Pope could join forces.