Along toward the end of October the general
was able to make good his promise to the 20th Massachusetts. A colored teamster
who had deserted the 13th Mississippi at Leesburg was brought into camp with a
tale to tell, which was that the Confederates at Leesburg had sent all their
baggage back to Joe Johnston's lines at Manassas and expected to retreat very
soon, fearing that the Yankees over in Maryland heavily outnumbered them and
planned aggression. Right at this time McClellan sent a division up the river
on the Virginia side, halting it at Dranesville, a village some ten miles
southeast of Leesburg, to see what the Rebels might be up to; and to General
Stone he sent word of this move, suggesting that the general might make a small
reconnaissance of his own. The suggestion was a bit vague, and General Stone
interpreted it liberally; crossed a regiment or two at Edwards' Ferry and sent
others three miles upstream to make a crossing at Harrison's Island, figuring
that a slight demonstration there might make the enemy evacuate Leesburg.
The 20th Massachusetts thus found itself
making a night march, and at midnight it was down on the bank of the dark
river, the men waiting their turn to get into three small boats to be ferried
over the water. There was much confusion and waiting; nobody in particular
seemed to be in charge of anything, and the boats were ridiculously inadequate,
having a combined capacity of only twenty-five men. But by the time the sky was
beginning to get light in the east, most of the 20th was roosting on the flat,
uninteresting length of Harrison's Island, peering at the 150-yard channel that
separated the island from the Virginia shore. There was a high, wooded bluff
over there—Ball's Bluff, it was called—and the boys of the 20th learned that
five companies of the 15th Massachusetts had crossed the evening before and
were up to something beyond the rim of the hill. At dawn two companies of the
20th, accompanied by Colonel Lee himself, went across, found their way up the
bluff by a roundabout cow path, and joined the 15th in an open glade on the
heights. During the morning the rest of the regiment joined them.
Nothing much appeared to be happening, nor
did there seem to be any especial point to the proceedings. Colonel Charles
Devens, the Boston lawyer who had become colonel of the 15th and who was
ultimately to develop into quite a soldier, had taken a few of his men nearly
to Leesburg, in the early dawn, without discovering any Rebel camp. Then, a
little later, he had brushed into some Confederate outposts, and there had been
a desultory exchange of random shots. Now he was back in the glade,
reinforcements were coming up, and it looked as if there might be a fight
sooner or later. The Confederates were off in the woods; nobody knew just
where they were or how strong they were, but the pickets were doing a little
shooting. Devens had sent back all the news he had to General Stone, who had
messaged him to hang on: he was sending Colonel Edward D. Baker over to take
charge, with additional troops.
Presently Colonel Baker appeared. He was a
man of some fame, with a streak of romance in him, an intimate friend of
President Lincoln, a man who had roamed to far places and loved the swing of
poetry and the ring of great words. A veteran of the Mexican War, he had gone
to California and had become a man of considerable note in gold-rush San
Francisco. In 1860 he had moved to Oregon, winning election there to the United
States Senate, and he had introduced Lincoln to the crowd at the inauguration
ceremonies in March, riding with him in his carriage as his chosen companion.
He told the Senate that spring: "I want sudden, bold, forward, determined
war," and he set out to get it personally, raising and becoming colonel
of the 71st Pennsylvania—a Philadelphia regiment which, as compliment to its
colonel, was then known as "the California regiment," although Baker
by now was officially an Oregonian. He went off to war gaily, and to a friend
he quoted: "Press where ye see my white plume shine amidst the ranks of
war." Now he was here on Ball's Bluff in charge of an advance against the
enemy. He had been delayed getting here; bringing his regiment up on the
Maryland side, he had been dismayed by the lack of boats and had spent an hour
or more getting an old flatboat out of the canal, nearby, into the river so
that more men could be carried. He had a couple of guns coming up, and he was ready
for a fight.
The fight was beginning to develop. The
Confederates were gathering in the surrounding woods in some strength, and
when Baker came up to the 20th Massachusetts he shook Colonel Lee's hand and
said briskly, "I congratulate you, sir, on the prospect of a battle."
Turning to the soldiers, he called out, "Boys, you want to fight, don't
you?" Quite sincerely the boys cheered, and yelled that they did. Baker
hurried back to the edge of the bluff, where there was a great deal of trouble
getting the guns up, and the boys of the 20th peeled off their overcoats—fancy
gray coats with brilliant linings of red silk: the Bay State had equipped them
nobly—and hung them on the trees and got ready to fight. From the woods in
front of them there came a ragged volley, which hurt no one—in the uncertain
shadows the Rebels seem to have mistaken the line of hanging overcoats for
soldiers, and the empty coats were liberally peppered. Then there began a noisy
uproar of earnest file firing and the battle was on; the heavy smoke drifted
across the little clearing like a rank fog, and the 20th Massachusetts began to
fire back. Men were hit now, and there was a high nervous tension in this green
regiment. The Rebels began to be visible through the trees and the smoke. A
Massachusetts private saw a Confederate officer on a big horse and drew a bead
on him. Unaccountably, when he tried to pull the trigger nothing happened. He
lowered his musket and stared stupidly at his right hand; the trigger finger
had been neatly removed by a bullet, and he had not even felt it. Off to the
left the two guns were finally put into position and began to bang.
Colonel
Baker went back to the edge of the bluff. His own regiment had come up and was
in line, and another one was scrambling up—the 42nd New York, widely known as
the Tammany Regiment, led by Colonel Milton Cogswell. Baker waved to him and
came close enough to sing out an adaptation of a couple of lines from Scott's
Lady
of
the
Lake—
"One blast upon your bugle horn Is worth a thousand
men"—
and
asked Cogswell how he liked the looks of things. Cogswell, who was a West
Pointer, didn't like it much. The confusion around the river crossing seemed
inexcusable, with no one in charge of the boats and no sort of order being
maintained; a knack for quoting poetry while under fire seemed a poor
substitute for executive ability, and it struck him that the force on the bluff
was in a desperately bad spot, with the Confederates shooting down at them from
higher ground in the woods and with no intelligent plan of battle being
followed. The two guns were silent, sharpshooters having knocked off the
gunners; Colonel Lee himself was helping with the loading for a time. On its
final discharge one gun recoiled back to the edge of the bluff and toppled
over. Baker hurried to the right of the line, exhorting everyone to hold on. A
swift mental calculation had shown him that with the few boats available it
would take three hours to get everybody back across the river, and it seemed
better to stay and fight. Nobody knows what sort of tactics he might have
devised to continue the battle, because just at that moment he fell dead with a
Rebel bullet in his heart.
After that everything began to go to pieces.
Cogswell led an abortive assault off to the left, in an attempt to cut an
opening so that the command could go downstream on the Virginia side to join
the troops that had crossed at Edwards' Ferry. The assault crumbled almost
before it began, and there was nothing left but to try to get down the bluff
and cross the river.
So there was a wild scramble down the steep
hill in the dusk, with exultant Confederates following closely to the brow of
the hill and shooting down at the fugitives. The 15th Massachusetts held them
off for a while with a skirmish line, but finally they had to go, and a
detachment from the Tammany Regiment which tried to take their place fared no
better. Pretty soon everyone was on the beach, and it was almost dark, and
musket fire was coming down heavily from the bluff, and there were only four
boats—two of them the merest skiffs—to carry upward of a thousand men across a
wide river. The big flatboat that Colonel Baker had horsed out of the canal
earlier in the day was loaded down until it was almost awash, and then it set out,
with men standing on each side to pole it along.
Rifle fire followed it—so many bullets were
splashing in the water, a soldier wrote, that the river was "as white as
in a great hail storm" —and presently a couple of the men who were poling
were shot and fell heavily on the gunwale, tilting the overloaded boat so that
water came rushing over the side and it capsized. Thirty or forty men were
drowned, and the boat floated away in the darkness, bottom-side up. The two
skiffs disappeared and were seen no more. The one remaining craft, a
sheet-metal lifeboat, was punctured by bullets and sank in midstream, and all
hands were marooned. A few men found a neck-deep ford to Harrison's Island and
made their escape that way. Others took off their clothing and swam, an officer
warning them to throw their rifles into the river so that the Rebels couldn't
have them. The rest were taken prisoner.
Next day, when what was left of the command
assembled on the Maryland side and counted noses, they found that more than
nine hundred men had been lost—some two hundred or more shot, the remainder
captured. Colonel Lee, Colonel Cogswell, and the major of the 20th
Massachusetts, Paul Joseph Revere, descendant of the Revolutionary rider, went
off to Libby Prison in Richmond. Among the wounded left on the Virginia shore
was a young first lieutenant of the 20th's Company A, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr. And Colonel Baker, the friend of Abraham Lincoln and the hero of the United
States Senate, was dead.
Which meant that there was going to be a
post-mortem, and a big one. If the nation had known as much then as it knew two
years later about war and loss and the mischances of the battlefield, the dark
little tragedy might not have aroused such an uproar. But the war was still
new, and Baker's death meant that a bright flame had suddenly been snuffed
out, and the confusion and mishandling that had caused the defeat seemed to cry
aloud for investigation. This was no Bull Run, where defeat had obviously been
due to the greenness of the troops. The men who fought here had fought well
enough, but it was inescapably clear that there had not been any very good
reason for their crossing the river in the first place, and that, once they had
gone across, no one had known what to do with them. Baker was dead, and his own
brave but incompetent efforts were not to be criticized, but there was angry
criticism and to spare piling up for somebody.
Somehow the spotlight stayed on this affair.
The papers told how Colonel Devens paraded what was left of the 15th
Massachusetts a few days after the fight and gave them a brief pep talk, asking
them if they were ready to meet their "traitorous foes" once more:
"Would you go next week? Would you go tomorrow? Would you go at this
moment?" To which, of course, the emotional youngsters replied with a wild
shout of "Yes!"
6
From beyond the enemy lines it was
reported that the Confederates had said that fewer of the Massachusetts
officers would have been killed had they not been too proud to surrender—which
inspired Union Brigadier General Lander, a regular-army officer to whose
brigade the Massachusetts regiments actually belonged, to write a poem,
beginning:
Aye, deem us proud, for we
are more Than proud of all our mighty dead . . .
It went on for eight full stanzas. The
anthologies no longer carry it, but it must come close to winning the
distinction of being the best threnody ever written by a brigadier general in
the United States Army; and it drew plenty of attention at the time.
Furthermore, public attention was painfully
focused on Colonel Lee and Major Revere. The United States Navy had just
captured a Confederate privateer, and it was announced that since the Confederacy
was not a legitimate nation her so-called privateersmen were in fact pirates
and would be hanged as such; and the government at Richmond promptly replied
that if these privateers were hanged an equal number of Federal army officers,
chosen by lot from among the prisoners at Richmond, would be hanged in
reprisal. The lot fell on Lee and Revere, among others, and they were lodged in
condemned cells. A captured sergeant from the 20th Massachusetts talked to Lee
just before he was locked up: did the colonel have any message for his old
regiment? Colonel Lee was reputed to be the oldest officer in the army, except
for General Sumner, and he was deeply affected by emotion. "Tell the
men—" he began. He stopped and cleared his throat heavily; when emotion
takes an old soldier it usually takes him hard. "Tell the men their
colonel died like a brave man." The message got back and was printed.
Agonized attention fell on the officers waiting for death—until at last the Lincoln
administration decided that nothing was to be gained by getting into a hanging
contest with Jefferson Davis, and let it be known that the privateersmen would
be treated as regular prisoners of war, after all. In time Lee and Revere were
exchanged and came north, and Lee later became a brigadier.