Mr Lincoln's Army

Mr.
Lincoln's Army

BOOKS BY BRUCE CATTON

This Hallowed
Ground

Banners at Shenandoah
(juvenile)

U. S. Grant and the Military
Tradition

A Stillness at Appomattox

Glory Road

Mr. Lincoln's Army

The War Lords of Washington

THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
Garden City, New York

BRUCE CATTON

Mr.
Lincoln's Army

COPYRIGHT
© 1951, 

1962
BY BRUCE
CATTON

ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

PREFACE

ONE

Picture-Book War

1.
  
There
Was Talk of Treason

2.
  
We
Were Never Again Eager

3.
  
You
Must Never Be Frightened

4.
  
Man
on a Black Horse

TWO

The Young General

1.
  
A
Great Work in My Hands

2.
  
Aye,
Deem Us Proud

3.
  
I
Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed

THREE

The Era of Suspicion

1.
  
But
You Must Act

2.
  
The
Voice of Caution

3.
  
Tomorrow
Never Comes

4.
  
Pillar
of Smoke

FOUR

An Army on the March

1. Indian Summer

2.
  
Crackers
and Bullets                                                                             178

3.
  
Generals
on Trial                                                                                    195

FIVE

Opportunity Knocks Three Times

1.
  
At
Daybreak in the Morning                                                                211

2.
  
Destroy
the Rebel Army                                                                       231

3.
  
Tenting
Tonight                                                                                      245

SIX

Never Call Retreat

1.
  
Toward
the Dunker Church                                                                 263

2.
  
The
Heaviest Fire of the War                                                              282

3.
  
All
the Landscape Was Red                                                                300

4.
  
The
Romance of War Was Over                                                        316

BIBLIOGRAPHY
                                                                                          
333

NOTES
                                                                                                       
341

TO CHERRY

Preface

The books which make up this trilogy began,
very simply, as an attempt to understand the men who fought in the Army of the
Potomac. As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age;
they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long white beards and a
general air of being pillars of the community. They lived in rural Michigan in
the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty miles
away from the farm or the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had
been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them
thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they
were young; everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for
death, which did not frighten them much—they had seen it inflicted in the worst
possible way on boys who had not bargained for it, and they had enough of the
old-fashioned religion to believe without any question that when they passed
over they would simply be rejoining men and ways of living which they had known
long ago.

This
was too much for an adolescent to understand. Perhaps it is too much for
anybody to understand, in a skeptical age. But there it was: these old
gentlemen, drowsing out the greater part of their lives in the backwoods, had
once been lifted beyond themselves by an experience which perhaps was all the
more significant because it was imperfectly understood. They gave a tone and a
color to the lives of the people who knew them, and they put a special meaning
on such a word as "patriotism"; it was not something you talked about
very much, just a living force that you instinctively responded to. I can
remember one old man who had lost his left arm in the Wilderness,

and he used to go about town in the summer
peddling cherries and blackberries in a bucket—there was just enough of his
left forearm so that he could hook it over the bail of the bucket and carry it
conveniently—and it never once entered my childish head to feel sorry for him
because he had been a cripple for half a century. On the contrary, I thought he
was rather lucky. He carried with him forever the visible sign that he had
fought for his country and had been wounded in its service. Probably only a
very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.

Still, that was what it was like. A
generation grew up in the shadow of a war which, because of its distance,
somehow had lost all resemblance to everyday reality. To a generation which
knew the war only by hearsay, it seemed that these aged veterans had been
privileged to know the greatest experience a man could have. We saw the Civil
War, in other words, through the distorting haze of endless Decoration Day
reminiscences; to us it was a romantic business because all we ever got a look
at was the legend built up through fifty years of peace.

We do learn as we grow older, and eventually
I realized that this picture was somewhat out of focus. War, obviously, is the
least romantic of all of man's activities, and it contains elements which the
veterans do not describe to children. This aged berry-peddler, for instance,
who lost his arm in the Wilderness: he had never told me about the wounded men
who were burned to death in the forest fire which swept that infernal stretch
of woodland while the battle was going on; nor had any of his comrades who
survived that fight and went on through the whole campaign to the last days at
Petersburg ever mentioned the fives that were wasted by official blunders, the
dirt and the war-weariness and the soul-numbing disillusionment that came when
it seemed that what they were doing was going for nothing. There was a deacon
in the church, who used to remind us proudly that he had served in the 2nd Ohio
Cavalry. Not until years later did I learn that this regiment had gone with
Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, burning barns, killing livestock and
pillaging with a free hand so that the Southern Confederacy, if it refused to
die in any other way, might die of plain starvation. In a sense, the research
that went into these books was simply an effort to find out about the things
which the veterans never discussed.

Yet, in an odd way, the old veterans did
leave one correct impression: the notion that as young men they had been
caught up by something ever so much larger than themselves and that the war in
which they fought did settle something for us—or, incredibly, started something
which we ourselves have got to finish. It was not only the biggest experience
in their own lives; it was in a way the biggest experience in our life as a
nation, and it deserves all of the study it is getting.

In any case, these
books try to examine a small part of that experience in terms of the men who
did the fighting. Those men are all gone now and they have left forever unsaid
the things they might have told us, and no one now can speak for them. Here is
my attempt to speak about them.

1962

B.C.

ONE

Picture-Book
War

1.
There Was Talk of Treason

The rowboat slid out
on the Potomac in the hazy light of a hot August morning, dropped down past the
line of black ships near the Alexandria wharves, and bumped to a stop with its
nose against the wooden side of a transport. Colonel Herman Haupt, superintendent
of military railroads, a sheaf of telegrams crumpled in one hand, went up the
Jacob's ladder to the deck—clumsily, as was to be expected of a landsman, but
rapidly, for he was an active man—and disappeared into a cabin. A moment later
he returned, and as he came down the ladder he was followed by a short,
broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man, deeply tanned by the sun of the Virginia
peninsula, with thin faint lines of worry between his eyes: Major General
George Brinton McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, which had been
coming up from the south by water for a week and more and which at the moment
was scattered all the way from Alexandria to the upper Rappahannock, most of it
well out of the general's reach and all of it, as he suspected, soon to be out
from under his authority.

There was an air about this youthful
general—an air of far-off bugles, and flags floating high, and troops cheering
madly, as if the picture of him which one hundred thousand soldiers had created
had somehow become real and was now an inseparable part of his actual appearance.
He could look jaunty and dapper after a day in the saddle, on muddy roads, in a
driving rainstorm; like a successful politician, he lived his part, keeping
himself close to the surface so that every cry and every gesture of the men who
adored him called him out to a quick response that was none the less genuine
for being completely automatic. It was impossible to see him, in his uniform
with the stars on his shoulders, without also seeing the army—"my
army," he called it proudly, almost as if it were a personal possession,
which was in a way the case: he had made it, he had given it shape and color
and spirit, and in his mind and in the minds of the men he commanded the
identification was complete.

He
sat in the stern of the rowboat, beside the superintendent of military
railroads, and he was silent as the boat went back upstream to the landing. The
docks and the river front were a confusion of steamboats and barges and
white-topped wagons and great stacks of boxed goods and equipment, and the
quaint little town itself was lost in a restless, lounging concourse of
soldiers: loose fringes of a moving army, convalescents and strays and detailed
men, and here and there a regiment moving off with cased flags at route step
toward some outlying camp. From this same town the general had set out, nearly
five months ago, to take his army down to the swamps and forests below Richmond
and win the war; he had known in his heart that he was destined to save the
country, and the army had gone forth with unstained uniforms and gleaming rifle
barrels, and with proud flags that had never touched the ground.

But nothing had worked quite the way he had
expected. The Army of the Potomac, made in his own image, had spent some months
on the Virginia peninsula—that long neck of land which runs southeast between
the James and the York rivers, and which the army remembered as composed
chiefly of mud, mosquitoes, and steaming heat, with a great tangle of gloomy
forests infested by lean and hairy men with rifles who uttered shrill,
nerve-splitting screams as they came forward endlessly to the attack. The luck
of the army and the general had been all bad. Many battles had been fought, and
while no great defeat had been suffered there had been a weary retreat from in
front of Richmond to a dismal camp far down the river. The general considered
that this retreat had been a masterful accomplishment, but the government
considered it sheer disaster, and it was trying now— in August 1862—to strike
the southern Confederacy with another instrument.