This Hallowed Ground (8 page)

It was not quite unanimous. A young esthete graduating from Yale delivered a “commencement poem” whose sole allusion to the war was the scornful line: “What is the grandeur of serving a state, whose tail is stinging its head to death like a scorpion?” After graduation, the question presumably being unanswered, he took ship for California, not to return until the unpleasantness had died down. A Wisconsin boy found with dismay that his regiment was sent to western Minnesota to fight the Indians and not to the Deep South to fight Rebels, recalled that in his home state he had always been good friends with Indians, and wrote to his parents: “I can’t help thinking of the wrong-doing of the government toward the Indians … It must be I ain’t a good soldier.”
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For the most part, though, things went with a whoop and a holler, and if there was much lost motion in the way the new regiments were recruited, equipped, and drilled — western boys used to firearms came almost to mutiny when harassed supply sergeants outfitted them with clumsy Belgian muskets in place of the rifles they demanded
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— the government was moving with remarkable effectiveness to make the long fringe of the border states secure.

In Maryland there was Ben Butler, his troops camped on Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore Harbor, himself camped at Annapolis, opening a new road to Washington; Ben Butler, who had worked energetically for southern rights in the Democratic convention of 1860, all out for the Union now, grinning sardonically with eyes that did not mesh, revolving monstrous ambitions in his mind as he followed a new political tack; Ben Butler, with his lawyer’s mind and his flair for administrative detail and his whole-souled lack of scruple, contriving to make capital for himself out of this war that cut him loose from his old moorings, a one-time friend of the South who was presently to become the most hated man in the entire Confederate legend.

In Washington itself there had been uneasy moments in the days just after Fort Sumter’s surrender, when the cutting of railroad and telegraph lines through Baltimore left the capital temporarily isolated. There were hardly any soldiers in the city, and it was easy to imagine armed Virginians coming across the Potomac and bringing the war to a quick end by seizing capital, President, and government entire. That period quickly passed, and now Washington was full of troops — state militia, for the most part, called in for ninety-day service, poorly trained and almost totally unorganized, but impressive nevertheless with their bright uniforms, their cocky airs, and the numbers of them. Detachments of these before long were sent across the Potomac to occupy the high ground on the southern shore, and Federal soldiers pitched their tents on an estate known as Arlington, lately the home of Robert E. Lee.

While Arlington was occupied, other troops were sent a few miles downstream to seize Alexandria. The outfit chosen for this job was the 11th New York, a flamboyant and slightly riotous organization wearing the baggy pants, short jackets, and turbans of the Zouaves: the Fire Zouaves, as they were called, since most of the members had been recruited from various New York fire companies.

Colonel of the Fire Zouaves was young Elmer Ellsworth, who had made something of a profession of being an amateur soldier; his Chicago Zouave drill team had given exhibitions all over the North in the year or so just before the war. Ellsworth was dashing, eager to win fame and glory, was perhaps a little headline-happy, and apparently he was destined to have a spectacular role in this war. As he led his men into Alexandria, Ellsworth spied a southern flag on a stump of a flagpole on the roof of a hotel. Full of dramatic ardor — a correspondent for the New York
Tribune
was along — Ellsworth drew his sword and dashed into the building to cut the flag down … and died ingloriously when the hotel proprietor, a mere civilian but a staunch secessionist, met him on the stairway, thrust the muzzle of a shotgun against his belly, and pulled the trigger. The hotel man was promptly bayoneted, Ellsworth’s body was brought back to Washington to lie in state in the White House, and the North mourned a lost hero.
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Meanwhile the army authorities were trying desperately to make an army out of the assortment of militia units in Washington. The job fell to Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, a tall, plump, serious-minded regular who had studied in France, owned a good Mexican War record, and had served on Scott’s staff. He had a very hard assignment. He had to organize his regiments into brigades and divisions, had to find some way to instruct them in brigade and division tactics — very intricate, calling for innumerable hours on the drill field; he lacked anything resembling an adequate staff, and the War Department’s inefficiency was raising serious problems of supply and equipment. Worse yet, people were beginning to demand that he move out at once and capture Richmond, first defeating a Confederate army that was in camp near Manassas, some two dozen miles from Washington. The fact that this army was in no better shape than his own was cold comfort: before he had his carefree militia regiments organized and drilled enough to make any sort of cross-country march possible (let alone a formal battle) the terms of service of a great many of them would begin to expire. The United States Army has not had very many generals as unlucky, all things considered, as Irvin McDowell.

In Ohio there was a very different man — short, stocky, handsome young George B. McClellan, West Pointer, Mexican War veteran, official observer for the War Department in the Crimea when the British
and French fought the Russians; an ambitious, brilliant man who had left the army to become a railroad president and who now held a major general’s commission. He commanded everything along the Ohio line, he was revolving elaborate plans for a down-the-Mississippi invasion of the South, and he was moving now to slice western Virginia off from the Old Dominion and create a new state between the Alleghenies and the Ohio River.

McClellan was worth a second look. If his fellow West Pointers had balloted on a “most likely to succeed” classmate, they would almost certainly have elected him. He had brains, connections, a winning personality, the quality known as brilliance. Putting together the new Ohio regiments, he was showing a definite knack for organization and administration; leading them across the river and into western Virginia—as he was doing this June — he was also showing powerful qualities of leadership, with a marked ability to make his troops believe in themselves and in him. His campaign was going well, and it was one of the Union’s most important moves this summer.

Leading twenty-seven regiments, mostly from Ohio and Indiana, McClellan struck at a Confederate force that had come west with the dual intent of holding this part of Virginia for the Confederacy and of cutting the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line, which connected Washington with the West. He had chosen his troops wisely — ninety-day regiments they were, for the most part, selected so that they might do a little service before their time expired while the three-year volunteers got a little more seasoning — and if these men were imperfectly drilled, the Southerners they were going up against were in no better case and in addition were substantially fewer in numbers.

Campaigning in the picturesque mountain country struck the ninety-day soldiers as exciting, even though the men did make disparaging remarks about the region as “a land of secession, rattlesnakes, rough mountains and bad whiskey,” and when they were finally led up to the Rebel outposts around Rich Mountain they still had their enthusiasm. Actual fighting, to be sure, turned out to be a little different from what they had imagined it would be. One Ohioan whose regiment had to attack a log blockhouse wrote indignantly that the Southerners were “cowardly dogs” who fired through loopholes in the log walls instead of coming out in the open and fighting like men. To their surprise, the men looked at the prisoners they took and discovered that Virginia boys looked exactly like Ohio boys; and they concluded that if all Southerners were like these “we have no mean enemy to contend with.”
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In the end McClellan’s troops swept the Confederates off the mountain range and out of the valley that lay beyond it, driving them all the
way back to the main ridge of the Alleghenies; and if their victory was not especially spectacular — except in McClellan’s prose: his message of congratulations to his soldiers sounded like something Napoleon might have said after an especially good campaign — its effects were permanent. There would be a spatter of skirmishes, advances, retreats, and sullen little mountain battles in this area for months to come, but the Confederates had lost western Virginia for good. Creation of the new state of West Virginia would follow in due course.

Kentucky was a strange no man’s land as spring drew on into summer. Governor Magoffin was as ardently pro-Confederate as ever and his legislature, along with a good majority of the voters, was equally hot for the Union. Officially, the state was neutral. Everybody was watching everybody else, and neither the Washington nor the Richmond government was willing to make the first move.

Kentucky had a state guard commanded by General Simon Bolivar Buckner, a former regular army officer who, back in the mid-fifties, had in New York run into an old classmate just back from the West Coast, broke and in disgrace, and had lent him money to get back to his home in Ohio — an obscure ex-captain of infantry named Ulysses S. Grant. In Washington it was hoped that Buckner would eventually go with the Union, but Union men in Kentucky were sure he would turn up on the side of the Confederates; to hamper him, the legislature refused to vote any money for the arming and equipping of his state guard. As a counterweight, in Louisville and elsewhere, semi-official home guards of a strong pro-Union cast were organized.

These home-guard companies presently found themselves assembling at a central rendezvous, Camp Dick Robinson, between Lexington and Danville, where they came under the command of a breezy three-hundred-pound giant named William Nelson. Nelson had been a lieutenant in the navy. Resigning when the war broke out, he stopped off in Washington long enough to wangle a brigadier general’s commission and the authority to draw on the Federal government for ten thousand stand of arms; then he hurried to his home state of Kentucky to see what could be done about organizing Union troops. He was bluff, blustering, profane, a driver and a martinet, and the home guards were not enthusiastic about him. They were wild young men, these home guards, with even less taste for discipline and drill than most recruits of that innocent day; their ideas of military life, a veteran recalled afterward, had been drawn exclusively from “the glowing accounts of the fertile pens of historians and the more exciting works of fiction,” and Nelson was bearing down hard on them.
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Recruiting for both armies was going on openly. Confederate recruits were assembled in camp just over the Tennessee line, and Unionists
— aside from Nelson’s amorphous home-guard outfits — were put in camp just north of the Ohio River, in Indiana; it was not uncommon for rival groups of recruits, heading for their respective training camps, to pass one another on the streets of Louisville. Once a passenger train pulled out of a town in the central part of the state with a carful of Union recruits and at the next station picked up a carload of Rebels; company officers met on the platform and arranged a truce for the duration of the ride. Symptomatic was the case of Senator John J. Crittenden, who had struggled hard, and in vain, during the winter to work out a compromise that would avert war. Of his two sons, one was to become a general in the Confederate Army, the other a Union general.
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From President Lincoln the situation got very careful handling. If he did not formally recognize the state’s neutrality, as Confederate President Jefferson Davis did, he was careful not to disturb it. When southern-minded Kentuckians protested that Nelson’s presence at Camp Robinson was a violation of neutrality, Lincoln blandly replied that no coercion was implied or intended; the home guards there were Kentuckians, not Federal troops, and they were entirely under the control of the state legislature. Meanwhile he made a brigadier general out of Robert Anderson, the sorely-tried regular who had commanded in Fort Sumter, and stationed him in Indiana with a command which — on paper, and rather on an if-and-when basis — embraced the state of Kentucky.

It was a queer summer in Kentucky. And yet, although nothing much seemed to be happening, the Confederates were playing a losing game. Whether they realized it or not, they had to have Kentucky. While it stayed neutral the rest of the border was being nailed down for the Union, and if western Virginia and Missouri were firmly held by the national government, Kentucky would eventually be held also, even though southern leaders would ultimately go through the motions of voting the state into the Confederacy. From Kentucky the road to the Deep South would be wide open.
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By the middle of July, in fact, the Lincoln administration had taken the all-important first trick. It had the border states — not firmly, as yet, by any means, and either military reverses or political clumsiness (both of which would be encountered) might easily lose them — but the first big danger had been passed. The time for serious fighting was approaching, and when it came the North would be operating with a solid advantage.

Nearly four years later, when he was just five weeks away from the casket with the bronze handles, the echoing capitol dome above, the blue-coated soldiers standing with sober and disciplined unease in the flickering purple twilight, Abraham Lincoln tried to sum it up.

“Neither party,” he said, “expected for the war the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.… Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”
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The easy triumph did not look very far away in the early summer of 1861. There was going to be a short war, and it would be romantic and glorious — crowned, of course, with victory. In the Confederacy people held to the belief that one Southerner could whip five Yankees; in the North it was supposed that secession would collapse once a blue battle line came over the hills with the sunlight glinting on polished musket barrels; and no one, as Lincoln remarked, could see that what was going to happen would be fundamental and astounding, a tearing up and a breaking down, a consuming tragedy so costly that generations would pass before people could begin to say whether what it had bought was worth the price.