Never Call Retreat (22 page)

Self-interest was powerful; so also was the Emancipation Proclamation, which was a factor the British cabinet had to weigh along with the threat of privateering. The threat spoke of America's power to do harm; the Proclamation, perhaps to everyone's surprise, spoke of what America was trying to become, and it had a good deal of eloquence. Benjamin Moran, an assistant secretary in the American Legation, wrote that although the Conservative party newspapers in London tried hard to argue away the Proclamation's significance they had not succeeded: there were more and more public meetings and petitions in support of emancipation, and it seemed likely that "this will go very far to prevent the Gov't here from interfering in favor of the Rebels." Gideon Welles, reflecting (as the Secretary of the Navy was bound to do) on rams and blockade runners and privateers, was struck by the same thought. He believed that if America's Civil War ever crossed the Atlantic it would become bigger and more destructive than anything the modern world had seen, because "the sympathies of the mass of mankind would be with us"; expanded thus, the war would bring "the upheaval of nations, the overthrow of governments and dynasties."
⁶

It might be so. Yet proclamations, dispatches of statesmen, the postures of governments themselves, would in the end mean no more than the deeds of the soldiers in the field made them mean. On April 8—it happened to be the very day Mr. Adams wrote his letter about the need to put some general into the White House—Abraham Lincoln was a guest at headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, reviewing the troops, talking with Joe Hooker and trying to make his own estimate of what the soldiers were apt to accomplish in this third springtime of the war.

On the surface all looked well. Mr. Lincoln and his party were cordially received. They went from the wharf at Aquia Creek to army headquarters in a railroad car decked with bunting, were housed comfortably in oversized tents with wooden floors, and were attended by a cavalcade of generals, colonels, and lesser brass whenever they went about the camp. Mr. Lincoln was treated. with much deference by General Hooker, who rode at the President's side when 15,000 cavalry passed in review, while Mrs. Lincoln sat in a six-horse carriage and was cheered by the soldiers. The President finished with the cavalry, saw 300 pieces of field artillery go trundling past, and reviewed three corps of infantry; the soldiers seemed in good spirits, Hooker himself was brightly confident, and a politician in the President's party felt sure that this army "will be able to march not only to Richmond but to New Orleans if necessary." A young Wisconsin staff officer agreed, and wrote hopefully: "Let Heaven give us now good weather, and smile upon the cause of the Republic, and these same boys that I saw today may do something in a few days for the country. They could do a devil of a sight of mischief if turned loose with their guns among the Rebels."
⁷

Mr. Lincoln was impressed but not wholly persuaded. Something about Hooker's easy optimism seems to have worried him, and he apparently warned the man to avoid taking undue risks; much later Hooker said the President told him that the political condition of the country was shaky and that it might not be able to stand another shock like the one it received at Fredericksburg in December. Furthermore, the President had other things on his mind. On the steamboat that brought his party down the Potomac from Washington, while people chatted brightly about Hooker's army, he turned suddenly to his newspaper friend Noah Brooks to whisper: "How many of our ironclads do you suppose are at the bottom of Charleston harbor?"
⁸
He had to think about Charleston, where Du Pont might be overpowering Fort Sumter; about the Mississippi, where Grant was mysteriously on the move, trying a shift down the river after his other maneuvers had failed; about Louisiana, where Banks was at last beginning to make his way northward; and about central Tennessee, where Rosecrans was slowly and methodically

getting ready to smite Bragg. For two years Mr. Lincoln had tried to get his generals to see that the way to defeat the Confederacy was to apply overwhelming pressure in many places at once; this spring, at last, it was going to be tried, and all in all things looked promising; things always looked promising when a campaign was beginning. The President could only wait, knowing that the force needed for victory had been assembled and hoping that it would be used. A hint of anxiety came one evening when he concluded a talk with General Hooker and Major General Darius N. Couch, commander of Hooker's II Corps, by saying earnestly: "I want to impress upon you two gentlemen, in your next fight put in all your men." General Couch considered this advice excellent. General Hooker made no comment, but in his handling of the army a few weeks later there was nothing to show that he had even been listening.
⁹

As Mr. Adams said, the generals were trained for command and Mr. Lincoln was not; and it would seem odd to find this untaught civilian lecturing professional soldiers on elementary points of tactics except for the fact that many of the professionals obviously needed lecturing by somebody. The war was approaching its crisis, and everything the President hoped for would stand or fall on the way the generals did what they had been trained to do. Before April was half gone there were some ominous indications.

There was flat failure at Charleston, where the navy was unable to finish the job and the army was not ready to begin it; already the pressure on the Confederacy here had grown so much lighter that Beauregard was sending infantry off to other duty in North Carolina, and in a short time he would be instructed to send 5000 troops all the way to Mississippi. In Louisiana, General Banks had turned his back on the big river and was marching off through central Louisiana, heading for Alexandria on the Red River, fifty airline miles away from the Mississippi: which permitted the worried General Pemberton to draw much-needed reinforcements from his strong point at Port Hudson, for use against General Grant. And in central Tennessee General Rosecrans was still preparing to do something but was showing no sign that he was ready to do it. Halleck warned him, late in March, that "it is exceedingly important at the present time that you give the enemy in your front plenty of occupation," but nothing happened. Halleck also tried to appeal to the man's ambition, sending word that the first field commander who won a decisive victory would be made major general in the Regular Army—the richest prize that could be given to a professional soldier. Rosecrans was insulted, and he replied stiffly: "I feel degraded to see such auctioneering of an honor. Have we a general who would fight for his own personal benefit when he would not for honor and the country?"
¹⁰

It was hard to tell about Rosecrans. No one ever doubted his loyalty, his energy, his courage or his freedom from political ties; yet ever since the battle of Stone's River he had held his army in camp while he plied Washington unceasingly with demands for more cavalry, more infantry, more equipment, more horses, better arms, better officers and a clearer understanding of his needs. This went on so long that Halleck at last complained about "the enormous expense to the government of your telegrams," saying that Rosecrans was on the wire more than all other army commanders combined. Meanwhile, the fact remained that General Bragg's army, which was in Rosecrans' front, got in the first half of 1863 the longest respite from action that any Confederate army had in the entire war.
¹¹

Rosecrans offered a number of explanations for his inaction. He did not have enough cavalry to protect his own communications and threaten Bragg's: if he drove Bragg out of Tennessee the retreating Confederates would at once go to Vicksburg and enable Pemberton to crush Grant; if Joe Johnston felt Grant's pressure he might call Bragg to him and so give Tennessee to the Federals without a struggle; furthermore, Rosecrans' army was in a sense the government's last reserve and it ought not to be committed to action until the fate of Grant's campaign could be determined. The argument is unconvincing, and apparently it reflects nothing more than Rosecrans' reluctance to start a major campaign until he had perfected all of his arrangements.
¹²
It is natural for a general to feel so; unfortunately, Rosecrans' caution helped the Confederacy much more than it helped the Union. One of the people it helped was Robert E. Lee.

Lee had had to play a waiting game this spring. It was not as easy as it used to be for him to learn what the Army of the Potomac was going to do; Hooker had at least created a cavalry corps, and Jeb Stuart's squadrons could no longer roam as they pleased behind the Yankee lines. Symbol of the change was a brisk battle fought in mid-March when Brigadier General W. W. Averell led a Federal cavalry division across the Rappahannock at Kelly's Ford and ran into a Confederate brigade under Brigadier General Fitzhugh Lee. Lee drove Averell back, but the mere fact that a Yankee cavalry outfit had entered Confederate territory and had fought well after it got there indicated that times were changing. In this fight the Confederates lost their incredibly daring young artillerist, Major John Pelham. Pelham was in the neighborhood on other business, and had no connection with Lee's brigade, nor did he have his battery with him; but when he heard about the fight he got a horse and hurried over to get into action, and he was gaily leading a charge when a shell burst killed him. Pelham was pure swords-and-roses, one of those irrepressible Southerners who actively liked to risk his life, and in a sense he had been living on borrowed time ever since the war began . . . Yankee cavalry taking the initiative, John Pelham dead: the war in Virginia was beginning to grow old.
¹³

Lee's immediate problem of course was Hooker's army. This was problem enough, inasmuch as Hooker's army this spring was at least twice the size of Lee's and was much better equipped; yet Lee's confidence in his troops and in his own ability was so strong that the Army of the Potomac by itself did not worry him greatly. For a time it looked as if Hooker might move his army by water down to the James River as McClellan had done, but Lee was skeptical, doubting that his opponent would dare to uncover Washington. He concluded at last that when Hooker set out for Richmond he would take the direct route, which was solidly occupied by the Army of Northern Virginia, and Lee calmly told Adjutant General Samuel Cooper that if Hooker tried such an advance "I think he will find it very difficult to reach his destination." The real problem was quite different.

Lee had already had to send Longstreet and most of Longstreet's army corps down to the Virginia-North Carolina border, to counter Federal pressure there and also to gather supplies, and he probably would be unable to get Longstreet back before Hooker advanced. If the Federals now made a real combined operation out of the attack on Charleston, and at the same time mounted a strong offensive in Tennessee, the Confederacy would have to strike a heavy counterblow without delay, and the only person who could strike it was Lee himself. It would be necessary, Lee suspected, for him to take the offensive and march boldly for Maryland, because "greater relief would in this way be afforded to the armies in middle Tennessee and on the Carolina coast than by any other method." But the Virginia roads were still bad, he had neither supplies nor transportation for a forward movement, and the odds against him would be appalling. Perhaps it would be necessary to send Longstreet to the west . . . and perhaps, indeed, the problem would go beyond a solution.
¹⁴

It did not happen so. The Lincoln administration, to be sure, was committing itself to a major offensive at Charleston, and it was arranging now to have a new admiral and a new general in charge of it, but this blow would come later. In Tennessee Rosecrans still was not ready to move, and his offensive would hardly begin until the campaign on the Mississippi was finished. Burnside and the IX Corps had been sent west, and Mr. Lincoln's old dream of an advance into eastern Tennessee would eventually be realized . . . but full co-ordination of all of these moves would not be had this spring, and it was the threat of them rather than the unbearable massed weight that bore on the Confederate strategist in Virginia. For his next fight Lee was going to be dreadfully shorthanded, but at least he would not have to be looking back over his shoulder at Tennessee and South Carolina.

Joe Hooker at last got into action. Late in April he had 130,000 men, present for duty equipped, and he put most of them on the road moving up the Rappahannock, with a powerful cavalry force going on ahead, while detachments at Falmouth feinted at making a crossing there. Lee's time of uncertainty came to an end. He had a few more than 60,000 effectives, but at last he knew what his enemies were trying to do and he told Richmond: "Their intention, I presume, is to turn our left and probably get into our rear."
¹⁵
Then, as coolly as if he had all the advantages, he set out to frustrate them.

7.
 
The Darkness, and Jackson, and Fear

8.
 
 

GOING WEST from Fredericksburg in the old days a traveler would follow the Orange Turnpike, which started out through open farming country as pleasant to see in springtime as anything east of the Blue Ridge. Eight or nine miles from Fredericksburg the countryside's mood changed, and the road went down a long slope into a gloomy second-growth forest known as the Wilderness. The Wilderness stretched west for fifteen miles or more, thinly populated, with dense timber covering irregular ravines and low hills; a year or two later a Federal soldier referred to this gloomy, shaded country, with reason, as a land of grinning ghosts. Not long after the road entered this woodland it reached an unremarkable crossroad called Chancellorsville, where a family named Chancellor had built a big house.

Chancellorsville was not important, except of course to the Chancellor family; it was just white pillars and red brickwork at an open clearing in the woods, with country roads converging in front of it. It lay four miles due south of the place where the Rapidan River flows into the Rappahannock, and from Chancellorsville a road led up to the United States Ford, a crossing-place on the Rappahannock just below the fork. Other roads went northwest from Chancellorsville, to Ely's and Germanna Fords on the Rapidan, and the turnpike itself continued through the Wilderness, going west by south and coming out at last at Orange Courthouse. All of these roads and fords and the twilight tangle about them were obscure enough, in 1863, but if General Hooker intended to fight General Lee he would have to go through this country to get at him, and sooner or later he would have to come to Chancellorsville. To Chancellorsville he came, at last, and the word has been a scar on the national memory ever since.