Never Call Retreat (26 page)

Washington would have been surprised, and possibly a little outraged, to know this. Living by politics, the capital had responded to Chancellorsville with the purely political assumption that a defeat so resounding was bound to create an opening for somebody, and the city had been a windy cave of rumors ever since, growing windier as Lee's army moved north. Naturally, the name of General McClellan was back in circulation; like the price of gold, his prospects rose when the country's military fortunes sank and sank when those fortunes rose. His stock was rising now, and it was impossible for anyone to speculate on Hooker's future without also speculating on McClellan's. It went so far that a good McClellan Democrat examined the pro-McClellan maneuvers and wrote in disgust that "the stinking aroma of party politics has tainted the whole concern," and a young officer in the Army of the Potomac, reflecting on the claims and counter-claims that had sprung up since that appalling battle, said that as far as he could see "the only use or purpose of all this effusion of blood is to show which is the greatest general and which has committed the more blunders, McClellan or Hooker or Burnside."
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Yet the President himself was not part of it. As loyal a Republican as Alexander K. McClure, the Pennsylvania publisher who often helped mend political fences for the administration, sent word from Philadelphia that McClellan must be recalled to active duty and given command in Pennsylvania, where militia levies were hastily being called to the colors; he added, sapiently, "without military success we can have no political success, no matter who commands." Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey went further, proposing that McClellan be restored to command of the Army of the Potomac forthwith.

Mr. Lincoln refused to be drawn. He quietly asked McClure, "Do we gain anything by opening one leak to stop another?" and to command militia in Pennsylvania he sent, not McClellan but General Darius Couch, who was so disgusted by Hooker's bungling at Chancellorsville that he flatly refused to serve under the man any longer. Mr. Lincoln assured Governor Parker that the whole case was much more intricate than Parker supposed. He refused to consider bringing McClellan back, and he did not bother to argue about it. It was no longer necessary to believe that the salvation of the Union depended on the political views and personal popularity of the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The complexion of the war had changed, and so had the President's attitude. He had turned Hooker over to Halleck, and anyone could guess how that was going to come out; what was harder to see was that the President's attention now was focused largely on other matters. T. J. Barnett gave Barlow a hint of this, pointing out that Mr. Lincoln was looking westward: "He is in great spirits about Vicksburg, and looks to that as the beginning of the end of organized opposition to the war." Near the end of May Mr. Lincoln wrote to a friend in Illinois: "Whether General Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty-second of it is one of the most brilliant in the world."
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The fact that Lee's army was in Pennsylvania might mean less than the fact that Grant's army was deep in Mississippi.

So the powerful support Hooker got from the radical Republicans no longer had its old value, and Hooker seems to have been aware of it. He got his army north of the Potomac shortly after Lee crossed, formed a loose concentration in the neighborhood of Frederick, Maryland, nursed the idea of moving troops over by the Harpers Ferry route to block Lee's rear and cut off Lee's tenuous communications with Virginia—and then got into a torrid row with Halleck over proper use of the Harpers Ferry garrison. The point was not nearly as important as subsequent arguments made it seem, but Hooker let it irk him, and at last—on June 27, with Lee's vanguard approaching Harrisburg—Hooker stiffly asked that he be relieved of his command.

Halleck replied that since Hooker had been appointed by the President the general-in-chief had no power to act, but he promised to see the President about it; did see him, with remarkably little delay, and found Mr. Lincoln willing to part with this general. Before the day ended the Adjutant General's office issued a formal order. Hooker had been relieved at his own request and command of the army, "by direction of the President," had been given to Major General George Gordon Meade, a regular, a Pennsylvanian, currently commander of V Corps, a good soldier who found room in his spirit for strangely contrasting qualities—a violent, often uncontrollable temper, and a streak of genuine humility not touched by cant. To a large extent he was an unknown quantity, the one certainty being that he was a man who did not scare easily.
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It was an odd time to make a change in command, with a battle so close; the general officers respected Meade but the rank and file had barely heard of him. The army had had leaders whom it adored and leaders whom it detested, and it had had poor luck under all of them; now, facing its supreme test, it must fight under a stranger, its spirit sustained not by loyalty to a man but by loyalty to a cause. Somewhere off to the north of the sprawling camps in Maryland it must show the full measure of its devotion ... on its own. Perhaps the President believed that it had at last come of age.

5.
Mirage on the Skyline

MARCHING INTO Pennsylvania was like entering a different world. General Lee's men were used to Virginia, where the country had been trampled and ravaged and fought over until whole counties were desolate. Pennsylvania had never been touched. Its farms looked incredibly rich, with barns so big that the men said a whole brigade might be quartered in each one, and all ranks were getting plenty to eat. General Lee had issued stern orders against pillage, specifying that supplies could be seized only by quartermaster and commissary officers, who must pay (in Confederate currency) for everything they took; but even his massive authority could not keep private soldiers from going about in the evening to do some unofficial foraging. Perennially hungry, the Confederate soldier now was in a land of plenty. Also, he knew how Yankee soldiers behaved in Virginia and he saw no harm in a little retaliation.

In the main the invaders behaved with restraint. An Austrian military observer was impressed to the point of asserting, perhaps inaccurately, that "teetotalers will rejoice to hear that none of the Confederate soldiers ever touch spirits," and most of the citizens' complaints came because the army methodically carried off all the livestock. A Louisiana soldier boasted that the men now "lived on the very fat of the land—milk, butter, eggs, chickens, turkeys, apple butter, pear butter, cheese, honey, fresh pork, mutton and every other imaginable thing that was good to eat," but he said the men paid for what they got, the only oddity being that everything they bought came at a standard price of twelve and one-half cents, whether by the pound, the dozen, or the single portion. This, he said, happened because "the old farmers were so awfully frightened that I believe they forgot the denomination of any other piece of currency."

The citizens seemed to be remarkably lukewarm, as a matter of fact. It had been different in western Maryland, where Union sentiment was robust, and an army chaplain wrote scornfully that Sharpsburg was "a miserable Union hole" whose people "looked as though vinegar had been their only beverage since the battle in that neighborhood." But these Pennsylvania farmers appeared to be apathetic, and some of them said openly that they did not care much who won as long as they themselves were let alone.

The rank and file grew confident. For the first time the Army of Northern Virginia was unmistakably in enemy country. The invasion of Maryland in 1862 had not been quite the same, even though most of the citizens were Unionists, because Maryland was a slave state with a certain Southern coloration so that being there was much like being at home. This was Pennsylvania, Yankee-land incarnate, and on close inspection it seemed to be rich and naked and careless, wide open and ready to be had; confronted now by a lean and sinewy army whose spirits rose day by day. An army doctor predicted that Lee's men "will fight better than they have ever done, if such a thing could be possible," and said that the Yankees were bound to be whipped when the big battle came.
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This reading of the case seemed logical, and as the dusty columns threaded their way east through the mountain passes an old mirage took shape on the skyline ahead—the vision of a North whose heart was not really in the war and whose people might before long give up the struggle altogether. These Pennsylvanians were too well-off, too self-centered, too anxious to save what they had; they were not at all warlike, and Federal soldiers as well as Confederates made pointed remarks about their seeming lack of patriotism.
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Furthermore, was not this a fair representation of Northern spirit generally? Ohio was all in a ferment, with troops putting down mobs and arresting a candidate for governor, in Illinois a Federal regiment had mutinied, and the army commander at Cairo warned that "we have a population in southern Illinois ready to spring up and join any organization opposed to the government that offers itself."
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It was easy to suppose that under all of this a true Northern peace party was rising; tilt the balance just a little more and the Lincoln administration must fail. The belief that this was so was a collateral reason for Lee's advance; also, deep in his mind, it was basic to the hope that the Confederacy could yet win despite the odds. In Richmond, Mr. Davis even now was preparing to put forth a feeler regarding peace.

Strong and confusing currents were moving in the North, and the line between stout patriotism and weary defeatism was not easily drawn. One state could contain both—one state, or one county or even (in thousands upon thousands of cases) one man. A deep desire to win the war could be married to passionate bitterness over the things that were being done to win it; if, beyond the reunion that final victory would bring, there was to be a restoration of the happy past, it followed that on the road to victory destruction should be held to a minimum. The Pennsylvania farmers, criticized by friend and by foe, were trying in their own stolid way to prevent breakage. They could easily have made their own the defiant Southern cry:
All we ask is to be let alone.

The desire to be let alone can have explosive effects. It can also be deceptive. Pennsylvania had many things on its mind just now, but it had not lapsed into indifference. In the Army of the Potomac there were more contingents from Pennsylvania than from any other state—sixty-eight regiments of infantry, nine of cavalry, and five batteries of field artillery, volunteers to a man, many of them coming from precisely these farms whose people looked so phlegmatic. Some of them, too, came from parts of the state that apparently were on the edge of outright revolt—the anthracite fields, to which it had been necessary recently to send Federal troops to put down draft riots. It was easy to misinterpret these coal-field riotings. In the only way that was open to them, the anthracite workers were protesting— blindly, angrily, and without much hope—against woes that the war had not so much caused as emphasized: against autocratic mine bosses, against squalid company towns, against evil working conditions. In the hated enrollment officer they probably saw little more than a new reminder of the fact that their lives were hard.
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The currents ran both ways at once. If most of the discontent now so visible in the North came from men who had much to lose and wanted to save as much of it as possible, some of it came from men who had little to lose and might welcome a general overturn. At the moment their common protests were given unity by a new law which had gone into effect in March: the national conscription act, the cause of a great deal of dismay and some outright disorder. To men who had little to lose, this was a warning that the little they did have was likely to be taken: to the others, the men with much to save and a deep desire to save it, this law was an indication that the happy past was gone forever. Either way, the new law was highly unpopular.

Under its terms, all male citizens between twenty and forty-five were "declared to constitute the national forces," and the President could make them go into the army—the President, in faraway Washington, and not some familiar elected official of state or town or county. The measure was obviously necessary, volunteering having fallen off and the need for troops being great, and as a matter of fact the Confederacy had adopted an even stiffer measure a year earlier; yet this law had unquestionably changed the American form of government, and the President now had a power no President ever had before—the power to reach directly into the remotest township and exercise the power of life or death over the individual citizen. Senator Henry M. Rice of Minnesota, a war Democrat of unquestioned loyalty, spoke for many when he cried that this was a bill "violating the constitutions of the states"; and he warned soberly, "The moment you touch upon those rights, I say there will be a rebellion in the North."
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No rebellion took place; but there were scattered outbreaks of a rebellious character. In Holmes County, Ohio, for instance, in the middle of June, certain embattled farmers rose, took up arms, established themselves in a stone house on a hill near the village of Napoleon, and proclaimed defiance of the draft. Colonel William Wallace of the 15th Ohio Infantry was sent up from Columbus with 400 soldiers and a section of artillery, there was a brief exchange of shots in which two of the farmers were killed and three were wounded, and the uprising was put down; but although Colonel Wallace reported that the insurgents were "an ignorant and misguided class who hardly knew what they wanted," it was all too clear that they knew what they did not want. They had fought United States troops to make their point, and they did it while Lee's army was coming north across the Potomac.
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