But if there were anxiety, unease, and a deep
awareness of weakness at GHQ in Washington, there was also that dazzling
glimpse of greatness, the echo of strange promises of future fame loftier than
any other American had ever had, mysterious whispers that could hardly be
described even in the privacy of a letter to the general's own wife. On the
ninth of August, 1861, McClellan was writing home:
"I
receive letter after letter, have conversation after conversation, calling on
me to save the nation, alluding to the presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I
hope one day to be united with you forever in Heaven, I have no such
aspiration. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my
life when the country is saved. I am not spoiled by my unexpected new position.
I feel sure that God will give me the strength and wisdom to preserve this
great nation; but
I
tell you, who share all my thoughts, that I have no selfish feeling in this
matter. I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands."
To which one can only remark that for a
newcomer this young general had certainly been getting around. He had been in
Washington less than a fortnight, and barely four months ago he had been an
obscure Ohio civilian; but already there was talk of the presidency, and
people were telling him he should become a dictator. It was a moment of
infinite possibilities, the entire country was at his disposal, he could do as
he liked with it: he would spurn the dictatorship, he would gladly lay down his
life after taking the dictatorship, with God's help he would preserve the
nation; and all the while, never to be forgotten, he could get those dark
glimpses of unfathomable Rebel strength and schemings across the river, coiling
and uncoiling in the dim light in movements of infinite menace. Secure in his
own nutshell, he was king of infinite space. But there were those bad dreams.
2.
Aye,
Deem
Us
Proud
The
war was very pleasant for a while, in the fall of 1861, for the soldiers who
were guarding the line of the Potomac above Washington. The Maryland
countryside there is open and gently rolling, with blue mountain ranges
breaking the sky line to the west and with long vistas of cornfield and pasture
and wood lot stretching away south to the river and beyond. The weather was
mild and bright, and the business of learning how to be a soldier was engrossing
and even rather exciting. Across the river there were unknown numbers of
Confederates, whose pickets were often seen and frequently heard from in
exchanges of long-range rifle fire. The 15th Massachusetts, picketing the shore
near Edwards' Ferry, some fifteen miles upstream from the capital, felt that it
was well acquainted with the Mississippi outfit on the other side. Northern
boys and Southern boys used to exchange gossip across the river, and they
finally agreed that "the shooting of pickets is all nonsense"—an
agreement to which the Massachusetts soldiers came the more readily, as one of
their number admitted, because they were armed with old smoothbore muskets which
would barely carry across the stream, while the Southerners had rifles. One day
a Mississippian crossed the river in a leaky skiff and had dinner with a knot
of Massachusetts soldiers on the bank.
1
Permanent camps were laid out, and soldiering
was not too uncomfortable most of the time. There was a great deal to
learn—about the war, and about the people who lived in a state where human
beings were owned as slaves. Boys in the 27th Indiana felt that they had come
to a foreign land; styles of architecture and methods of farming were
different, here in Maryland, than they were back along the Wabash, and even the
language seemed strange. The money, for instance, was spoken of in terms of
sixpences and shillings, and the Hoosiers learned they weren't understood when
they said "quarter" and "dime." The 21st Massachusetts
found that the thrift and neatness of New England farms were not visible here,
and the colored field hands seemed shockingly ragged, ignorant, and shiftless.
To this abolitionist regiment, slavery seen at first hand was abhorrent. A little
earlier, at Annapolis, a fugitive slave came into camp and was hidden, and
after dark the soldiers stole a rowboat, fixed the slave up with hardtack and
salt pork, and helped him steal off north by water. It developed that the slave
was owned by the governor of Maryland, no less, and there were
repercussions—Lincoln and the governor being engaged just then in a delicate
game to keep Maryland in the Union, and the governor's good will being
important.
2
The slavery issue, indeed, was beginning to disturb a
number of the Northern soldiers. By the end of September, Brigadier General
Charles P. Stone, commanding the division which held this part of the Potomac,
felt it necessary to issue general orders admonishing all hands "not to
incite and encourage insubordination among the colored servants in the
neighborhood of the camps."
In
general, the Western troops were less disturbed than the New Englanders. To the
Westerners, this war was being fought to restore the Union; to the New
Englanders, the abolition of human slavery was mixed up in it too, and freedom
was an all-embracing idea that included black men as well as white. Sentiment
back home was strongly abolitionist, and it was felt in camp. Shortly after
General Stone issued his warning, two fugitive slaves sought refuge within the
lines of the 20th Massachusetts. Obedient to the general's orders, a young
officer took a squad, hauled the slaves out of hiding, and returned them to
their owner. The regiment was a bit upset, and some of the men wrote home about
it. Shortly afterward the colonel of the regiment received a stern letter from
John A. Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, officially reprimanding the
young officer for returning the slaves and rebuking the colonel for countenancing
it.
The colonel was William R. Lee, a doughty old
West Pointer, one of whose classmates at the Academy had been a brilliant,
ramrod-straight young Southerner named Jefferson Davis. Lee had simply been
obeying orders, and he passed the governor's rebuke along to General Stone, who
wrote the governor a sharp letter: this regiment was in United States service
now and the governor had no business meddling with discipline, the young
lieutenant and the colonel had properly done what they were told to do and were
not subject to reprimand from any governor, and would the governor in future
please keep his hands off? Governor Andrew, an executive whose strong support
of the administration's war program in the dark days just after Fort Sumter
fell had been an extremely important factor, was the last man in America to
take a letter like that meekly, and he replied with some heat. The
correspondence became rather extensive and passionate, and Governor Andrew
finally passed it all along to the senior senator from Massachusetts, Charles
Sumner, who denounced General Stone on the floor of the Senate. The general,
in turn, wrote to Sumner in terms so bitter that it almost seemed as if he were
challenging the senator to duel.
General
Stone was getting in a bit over his head here, with the war still in its
swaddling clothes, and with both of these Massachusetts statesmen being men of
vast influence with the administration. As a soldier, General Stone felt that
he was on solid ground—as, in fact, he unquestionably was. Stone might have
been influenced, too, by the fact that he himself had more or less of a
stand-in at the White House. Early in 1861 he had been commissioned as a
colonel by James Buchanan, made inspector general of the District of Columbia,
and given responsibility for maintaining order and preventing any secessionist
putsch before and during the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. He used to remark
that he was the very first man mustered in to defend the country against
rebellion. Lincoln had seen a good bit of him and had learned to trust him;
indeed, if there was any substance to the story of secessionist plots to
prevent the inauguration—and to the end of his days Stone believed that there
was a great deal of substance to it—Lincoln had trusted him with his life. Now
Stone was a brigadier commanding a division, he had the strong support of
General McClellan, and he was quite willing to bark back at a senator, a
governor, or anyone else if he had to do it to maintain discipline.
The flare-up over slavery, however, was
not yet ready to come to a head. What was important now was perfecting the
drill and training of the troops and guarding the line of the Potomac. Joe
Johnston had a substantial outpost at Leesburg, over on the Virginia side, just
a few miles away, and the commanding general was suspicious and wanted a good
watch kept. Meanwhile, the boys still had a good deal to learn. There was a
little trouble in the 15th Massachusetts over ambulance drill. The 15th had a
nice twenty-four-piece band, and the bandsmen discovered that when they weren't
tootling on their instruments they were ambulance men, required to put in at
least one hour every day learning how to apply tourniquets, how to carry
stretchers so as to give a wounded man the minimum of discomfort, how to get a
casualty from a stretcher into an ambulance, and so on. They objected bitterly,
refusing to turn out for drill and announcing, somewhat vaingloriously, that
they would die before they would do any such duty. The colonel took them at their
word; he had them locked in the stockade under guard and informed them that
they would get food and water when they decided to obey orders, but not before.
The bandsmen presently recanted.
In their sister regiment, Colonel Lee's 20th,
it was discovered that city-bred Bay Staters had got a long way from the old
tradition of the minuteman with his ever-ready rifle. The regiment was turned
out for target practice and the colonel found that most of the boys simply
pointed their rifles in the general direction of the target, shut both eyes
tightly, and hauled back on the trigger. This had to be fixed, and was. . . .
The artillery needed teaching too. Here and there, on hills commanding the
river, was a battery posted to foil Rebel cavalry, which was believed to be
exceedingly daring and dangerous, and the battery commanders took alarm
easily, smiting the Virginia hills and fields with solid shot whenever anything
suspicious appeared. It is recorded that one battery gleefully reported that it
had bombarded and gloriously routed a whole regiment of Rebel cavalry, only to
find a bit later that it had been disrupting a colored funeral procession.
There were practice marches to be made, too,
by troops which were full of enthusiasm for war but which did not quite see the
point of some of war's training-camp maneuvers. The 55th New York, for
instance, a regiment composed largely of Frenchmen recruited on Manhattan
Island, with non-coms who had served in the French Army, had a comfortable camp
at Tennallytown, on the edge of Washington, and hiked far upriver in a cold,
drizzling rain. The regiment countermarched, at last, and finally took position
on a comfortless hilltop in plain sight of its own snug camp, which was no more
than a mile away; and here, with the rain coming down harder and colder, the
men were ordered to bivouac for the night. They muttered angrily: What point in
sleeping here, shelterless, in the rain, when they could regain their own camp
in another half-hour? A sergeant, veteran of the Crimea and Algiers, ruffled
his Gallic mustachios and spoke soothingly. "Bah!" he said.
"This is but to season the conscripts. We shall see many worse days than
this." (He was quite right about seeing worse days; the 55th New York was
to get so badly shot up that within a year it had to lose its independent
existence and be consolidated with another regiment.)
3
So
the boys learned the ways of soldiering, and bumped against the hard edges of
the slavery problem, and enjoyed the lovely landscape and the good weather and
the relatively harmless thrills of long-range picket firing at Johnny Reb. The
New Englanders discovered that the 1st Minnesota, posted near them along the
river, made good neighbors; the Minnesota regiment had several companies of
lumberjacks from the north woods and the lumberjacks were mostly recent
migrants from the forests of Maine, so that the outfit had something of a
down-East flavor. The Minnesotans were enjoying the war at the moment; had
built bake ovens so that they could have soft bread instead of hardtack, bought
fruit and sweet potatoes from the Maryland farmers, and wrote home that they
were living "like princes and fighting cocks." Their picket post was
on a tree-shaded hill overlooking the Potomac, and they got rope and put up a
swing there and swung in it while keeping an eye open for invaders, and made
friends, long-range, with the Rebels on the opposite shore. Their colonel, just
then, was a man with the surpassingly warlike name of
Napoleon
Jackson Tecumseh Dana, soon to be promoted to a brigadier's commission.
4
The 20th Massachusetts considered itself
tolerably well seasoned. It could laugh, in mid-October, at its greenhorn
nervousness of early September, when it marched up from Washington, bivouacked
dead-tired in the dark, and sprang to arms in a wild panic because of a sudden,
unearthly noise that shattered the midnight stillness: the braying of teams of
army mules tethered in the next field. Colonel Lee was happily writing to
Governor Andrew that General Stone (whatever his defects might be on the
slavery issue) had promised the 20th that "we would not be deprived of our
due share of active service." He related, too, the great pride the
regiment felt in the fine equipment its state had provided. The general had
asked if the regiment had everything it needed, and Colonel Lee had replied:
"My regiment, sir, came from Massachusetts!" The governor could take
a bow on that one; right after Fort Sumter he had sent an agent to England to
buy arms, and the 20th had been equipped from the start with Enfield rifles,
the regulation British army musket.
5