The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (134 page)

When Thomas came up on the 20th, Buell pushed forward and found the rebels gone. Convinced that they were headed for Louisville, he followed at a respectful distance, fearing an ambush but hoping to strike their rear while they were engaged with the troops William Nelson was assembling for the defense of the city. To his surprise, however,
less than twenty miles beyond the river Bragg swung east through Hodgenville, over Muldraugh’s Hill and across the Rolling Fork to Bardstown, leaving his opponent a clear path to Louisville. Gratefully Buell took it.

He was not the only one who was grateful. Nelson, his flesh wounds healing rapidly since the removal of the bullet from his thigh, had been preparing feverishly, and with a good deal of apprehension based on previous experience, to resist the assault he expected Bragg to launch at his second collection of recruits. When he learned that the gray column had turned off through Lincoln’s birthplace he drew his first easy breath since the early-morning knocking at his bedroom door, almost four weeks ago, first warned him that Kirby Smith’s invaders had come over Big Hill and were nearing Richmond. The arrival, September 24, of Buell’s advance division—12,000 veterans and half a dozen batteries of artillery—produced a surge of confidence within his shaggy breast. He wired department headquarters, Cincinnati: “Louisville is now safe. We can destroy Bragg with whatever force he may bring against us. God and liberty.”

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As Pope’s frazzled army faded eastward up the pike toward Washington, and as Lee’s—no less frazzled, but considerably lighter-hearted—poked among the wreckage in search of hardtack, the problem for them both was: What next? For the former, the battered and misused conglomeration of troops now under McClellan, who had ridden out to meet them, the question was answered by necessity. They would defend their capital. But for the victors, confronted as usual with a variety of choices, the problem was more complex. Lee’s solution, reached before his men’s clothes were dry from the rain-lashed skirmish at Chantilly, resulted—two weeks later, and by coincidence on the same date as Wilder’s surrender to Bragg at Munfordville—in the bloodiest single day of the whole war.

The solution, arrived at by a narrowing of choices, was invasion.
He could not attack the Washington defenses, manned as they were by McClellan’s army, already superior in numbers to his own and about to be strengthened, as he heard, by 60,000 replacements newly arrived in response to Lincoln’s July call for “300,000 more.” Nor could he keep his hungry soldiers in position where they were. The northern counties had been stripped of grain as if by locusts, and his wagon train was inadequate to import enough to feed the horses, let alone the troops. A third alternative would be to fall back into the Valley or south of the Rappahannock. But this not only would be to give up much that had been gained; it would permit a renewal of pressure on the Virginia Central—and eventually on Richmond. By elimination, then, the march would be northward, across the Potomac.

Not that there were no practical arguments against taking such a step. After much strenuous marching on meager rations, the men were bone-weary and Lee knew it. What was more, he wrote Davis on September 3, “The army is not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory. It lacks much of the material of war, is feeble in transportation, the animals being much reduced, and the men are poorly provided with clothes, and in thousands of instances are destitute of Shoes.… What occasions me the most concern is the fear of getting out of ammunition.” Nevertheless, in Lee’s mind the advantages far outweighed the drawbacks. Two successful campaigns within two months, on Virginia soil and against superior numbers, had won for the Confederacy the admiration of the world. A third, launched beyond the Potomac in conjunction with Bragg’s two-pronged advance beyond the Cumberland, might win for her the foreign recognition which Davis had known from the start was the one best assurance that this second Revolution, like the first, would be successful. Besides, Maryland was a sister state, not enemy territory. Thousands of her sons were in the Virginia army, and it was believed that thousands more would join the colors once they were planted on her soil. In any event, invasion would draw off the northern armies and permit the Old Dominion farmers, now that the harvest was at hand, to gather their crops unmolested. The one thing Lee could not do was nothing; or as he put it, “We cannot afford to be idle, and though weaker than our opponents in men and military equipments, must endeavor to harass them if we cannot destroy them.” Next day, having convinced himself—and hoping, by the usual kid-gloves treatment, to have convinced the President—he wired Davis that he was “fully persuaded of the benefit that will result from an expedition into Maryland, and I shall proceed to make the movement at once, unless you should signify your disapprobation.”

Without waiting for a reply—indeed, without allowing time for one—he put the army in motion that same day for White’s Ferry,
twenty miles south of Frederick, the immediate objective. Approaching the ford on September 6 and 7, the men removed their shoes, those who had them, rolled up their trouser legs, and splashed across the shallows into Maryland. One cavalryman considered it “a magnificent sight as the long column … stretched across this beautiful Potomac. The evening sun slanted upon its clear placid waters and burnished them with gold, while the arms of the soldiers glittered and blazed in its radiance.” There were for him, in the course of the war, “few moments … of excitement more intense, or exhilaration more delightful, than when we ascended the opposite bank to the familiar but now strangely thrilling music of
Maryland, My Maryland.”

Not everyone was so impressed, however, with the beauty of the occasion. A boy who stood on that opposite bank and watched the vermin-infested scarecrows come thronging past him, hairy and sunbaked, with nothing bright about them but their weapons and their teeth, was impressed by them in much the same way as the Kentucky civilian, this same week, had been impressed by their western counterparts. They made him think of wolves. “They were the dirtiest men I ever saw,” he afterwards recalled, “a most ragged, lean, and hungry set of wolves.” Accustomed to the Federals he had seen marching in compact formations and neat blue uniforms, he added: “Yet there was a dash about them that the northern men lacked. They rode like circus riders. Many of them were from the far South and spoke a dialect I could scarcely understand. They were profane beyond belief and talked incessantly.”

Their individuality, which produced the cackling laughter, the endless chatter, and the circus-rider gyrations, was part of what made them “terrible in battle,” as the phrase went. But in the present instance it also produced hampering effects: one being that Lee had considerably fewer men in Maryland than he had counted on when he made his decision to move north. Hampton’s cavalry brigade, the reserve artillery, and three divisions of infantry under D. H. Hill, Major General Lafayette McLaws, and Brigadier General John G. Walker—20,000 troops in all—had been forwarded from Richmond and had joined the army on its march to the Potomac. After the deduction of his Manassas casualties, this should have given Lee a total strength of 66,000. The truth was, he had barely more than 50,000 men in Maryland; which meant that close to 15,000 were absent without leave. Some few held back because of conscientious objections to invasion, but most were stragglers, laggards broken down in body or skulkers broken down in spirit. They would be missed along the thin gray line of battle, invalids and cowards alike, though their defection gave the survivors an added sense of pride and resolution. “None but heroes are left,” one wrote home.

Hard-core veterans though they were, they were subject to various ills. Diarrhea was one, the result of subsisting on green corn; “the Confederate disease,” it was coming to be called, and the sufferers, trotting white-faced to catch up with the column, joked ruefully about it, offering to bet that they “could hit a dime at seven yards.” Another was sore feet; a fourth of the army limped shoeless on the stony Maryland roads. In addition to these ailments, mostly but by no means entirely confined to the ranks, a series of accidents had crippled the army’s three ranking generals, beginning with Lee himself. Clad in rubber overalls and a poncho, he had been standing beside his horse on the rainy last day of August when a sudden cry, “Yankee cavalry!” startled the animal. Lee reached for the bridle, tripped in his clumsy clothes, and caught himself on his hands as he fell forward, with the result that a small bone was broken in one and the other was badly sprained. Both were put in splints, and Lee, unable to handle a mount, entered Maryland riding in an ambulance. Longstreet too was somewhat incapacitated by a raw blister on his heel; he crossed the river wearing a carpet slipper on his injured foot. Marylanders thus were robbed of the chance to see these two at their robust and energetic best. The third high-ranking casualty was Jackson. Ox-eyed Little Sorrel having been missing for two weeks, the gift of a sinewy gray mare from a group of Confederate sympathizers was welcome on the day he crossed the Potomac. Next morning, however, when he mounted and gave her the reins she did not move. He touched her with his spur: whereupon she reared, lost her balance, and toppled backward. Stunned, Jackson lay in the dust for half an hour, fussed over by surgeons who feared for a spinal injury, then was transferred, like Lee, to an ambulance.

These were partial incapacitations. Two others involving men of rank were unfortunately total, at least for the time being. The charges against Bob Toombs had been dropped in time for him to share in the final hour of victory at Manassas, but no sooner was the battle won than his place in arrest was taken by a general whose services the army could less afford to lose. When Shanks Evans laid claim to some ambulances Hood’s Texans had captured, Hood, although outranked, refused to give them up. Evans referred the matter to the wing commander, who ruled in his favor, and when Hood still declined to yield, Longstreet ordered him back to Culpeper to await trial for insubordination. Lee intervened to the extent of allowing Hood to remain with his division, though not to exercise command.

By then the trouble between A. P. Hill and Jackson had come to a head, with the result that another of the army’s hardest fighters was in arrest. On the march to the Potomac, Little Powell’s division straggled badly. As far as Stonewall could see, Hill was doing little to correct this. What was more, he broke regulations by not calling resthalts
at the specified times. Finally Jackson himself halted one brigade: whereupon the red-bearded general came storming back down the column, asking by whose orders the troops were being delayed. The brigadier indicated Stonewall, who sat his horse beside the road. Hill unbuckled his sword and held it out to Jackson. “If you are going to give the orders, you have no need of me,” he declared, trembling with rage. Stonewall did not take it. “Consider yourself under arrest for neglect of duty,” he said coldly. “You’re not fit to be a general,” Hill snapped, and turned away.

With his army thus short of equipment and presenting its worst appearance, himself and his two chief lieutenants distracted by injuries, and two of his best division commanders in arrest, Lee busied himself and his staff with the composition, in accordance with instructions received from Davis, of a proclamation addressed “To the People of Maryland”: