Mr Lincoln's Army Read online

  "General Hooker was in Alexandria last night, but I will send to Willard's and see if he is there. I do not know any other place that he frequents. Be as patient as possible with the generals; some of them will trouble you more than they do the enemy."1

  That was a judgment with which Haupt was ready to agree. He had no sooner got Hooker out of his hair than General Samuel D. Sturgis got into it. Sturgis showed up with a division of troops, demanding immediate transportation to the front. To make sure that his request for transportation got top priority Sturgis had moved his soldiers out and had seized the railroad—or that part of it which lay within his reach, which was enough to tie up the entire line-swearing that no trains would go anywhere until his division had been moved. Haupt tried to reason with him, but it was no go— Haupt was a colonel and Sturgis was a general, and Sturgis would not listen. Sturgis had the rank and he had the soldiers, and for the moment he had the railroad, too, and no temporary colonel was going to tell him what to do.

  Haupt had had to go through that sort of thing before. General Pope had had similar ideas when he first took command in northern Virginia, announcing that his own quartermaster would control the movement of railroad cars just as he ran the wagon trains, and informing Haupt that his function was to do as he was told. Within two weeks the line had got into such a snarl that no trains could move in any direction. Pope came to see that it took a railroad man to run a railroad—he could get a point now and then if it was obvious enough, could John Pope, for all his bluster—and he was glad to hand the road back to Colonel Haupt: particularly so since Haupt by this time had got from the Secretary of War an order giving him complete and unqualified control over the railroad and everything on it, regardless of the orders any army commander might issue. Haupt, therefore, was ready to take Sturgis in his stride; but Sturgis had troops and guns and swore he would use them. Furious, Haupt telegraphed Hal-leck, getting in return a bristling order which specifically authorized him, in the name of the general-in-chief, to put Sturgis under arrest if there was any more funny business. Haupt summoned Sturgis to his office. Sturgis came, rather elevated with liquor, accompanied by his chief of staff.

  Haupt showed Halleck's order and explained that he was getting all sorts of troops and supplies forward to General Pope and that Sturgis would simply have to wait his turn. Sturgis was not impressed, and he somehow got the idea that the order Haupt was exhibiting had been issued by General Pope.

  "I don't care for John Pope one pinch of owl dung," said Sturgis solemnly—a sentiment which had its points but was hardly germane. Patiently Haupt explained: this order was not from Pope, it was from Halleck, who held the power to bind and to loose. Sturgis shook his head and repeated his judgment of Pope, savoring the sentence as if the thought had been bothering him for a long time. Haupt fluttered the order at him and went over it a third time. Sturgis, his needle stuck in one groove, repeated:

  "I don't care for John Pope—"

  His chief of staff tugged at his sleeve to stop him, and hastily and earnestly whispered in his ear. Sturgis blinked, finally got the point, and rose to his feet ponderously.

  "Well, then," he said—with what, all things considered, might be called owlish dignity, "take your damned railroad."2

  So that had been settled, and Sturgis had awaited his turn. But the episode had tied up the railroad for the better part of a day and had canceled the movement of four troop trains. Haupt was more than ready to agree with Assistant Secretary Watson about the generals.

  Anyway, that was over. Now there was the problem of reopening Pope's supply line. Pope's soldiers must be getting hungry; and besides, with the outer end of the line gone, the Alexandria yards were clogged with loaded freight cars that had no place to go. Across the river, in Washington, the Baltimore and Ohio was complaining that boxcars consigned to Pope's army were filling the tracks on Maryland Avenue; the available B. & O. engines were too heavy to go over the Long Bridge; would Colonel Haupt please send an engine over from Alexandria and get them, so that the B. & O. could go on with its regular work? This Haupt could by no means do, having more cars in Alexandria now than he could handle. The B. & O. needled the War Department, which sent plaintive messages; and the day wore on, and the situation did not improve. Haupt reflected that he was, after all, in charge of the railroad, and that somewhere off to the southwest there was an army that greatly needed supplies. He determined to go ahead on his own hook. After dark he sent a message to McClellan—who by now had established his headquarters on shore—notifying him that at four in the morning he would start his construction train forward, followed by the subsistence train. Would McClellan at least let him have two hundred soldiers to go along as train guard? If the men did not report, Haupt added, the trains would go ahead without them.

  He got no answer. At midnight he gave up on McClellan, got on his horse, and set out to appeal to the first general he saw—any general, just so long as he had a few troops to spare and was willing to loan a few of them to help open a vital railway line.

  By good luck the first general Haupt found was Winfield Scott Hancock, a brigade commander in the Army of the Potomac, recently back from the peninsula, where in spite of the fact that his brigade had not had too much fighting to do he had somehow marked both it and himself as men who would be very useful indeed before the war was over. Late as it was, Hancock had only just gone to bed. He liked to do all his paper work around midnight and had a habit, whenever he encountered a report that was in any way faulty, of having the author hauled out of bed at once and brought to brigade headquarters to receive a dressing-down that was usually loud enough to arouse the nearby regiments. This trait was a trial to Hancock's staff, but it meant that most reports by now were letter-perfect before they ever reached the general.

  Hancock was a direct actionist, who both looked and acted like a soldier—a burly, handsome man, who somehow managed always to be wearing a clean white shirt even when the army had been in the field for weeks, and who, in an army where the officers were notably profane, was outstanding for the vigor, range, and effectiveness of his cursing. His men liked to tell how, at the battle of Williamsburg, he had galloped up, outdistancing his staff, to order his troops to the charge—"the air was blue all around him," one of them recalled admiringly. There was a great breezy vigor and bluffness about the man. Earlier in the war, when his brigade was still in training, his men had taken to killing and eating the sheep of fanners near camp, and Hancock had determined to stop it. One afternoon, riding the lines near his camp, he had seen a knot of soldiers in a meadow, bending over the body of a sheep. Putting his horse to the fence, he galloped up, shouting mightily, and the men of course scattered—all except one who tarried too long and whom Hancock, flinging himself from his saddle, seized with strong hands.

  "Now, you scoundrel, don't tell me you didn't kill that sheep—I saw you with my own eyes!" roared the general. Just then the sheep, not yet knifed, realized that it was no longer being held and sprang to its feet and scampered nimbly away. Hancock stared at the rocketing sheep, looked blankly at the quaking soldier in his hands—and then threw his head back and made the meadow ring with shouts of laughter.3

  It was this Hancock whom Haupt found on his midnight quest for troops. Hancock heard his story and immediately detailed the men for him, and early in the morning Haupt's trains went lurching off into Virginia. By ten in the morning Haupt was notified that the bridge near Burke's Station had been rebuilt. He also learned that enemy troops were still somewhere in the vicinity of Manassas in very great strength; the head of the construction gang had been told that Lee himself was with them. A little later trains came steaming back from Fairfax Station loaded with wounded men.

  For the moment this was all the news there was. Haupt's line of track went off into the darkness where moved shadowy forces made large by rumor. For all anyone knew, Lee and his whole army might be between Pope and Washington. McClellan picked up a report that 120,000 Confederates were moving toward
Arlington and the Chain Bridge, bent on the capture of Washington and Baltimore. Halleck sagely remarked that the thing to be afraid of at that moment was the danger that Rebel cavalry might dash forward by night and enter the city—"Rebel cavalry" in those days being terrifying words, since the plow hands and mechanics whom the Federals were earnestly trying to turn into cavalrymen were no match at all for Jeb Stuart's incomparable troopers.

  McClellan sent four infantry regiments out to the works at Upton's and Munson's hills, covering the main highway in from Centreville, and instructed them to hold the lines there at all hazards. The two divisions of Franklin's army corps, just disembarked, loitered about Alexandria waiting for orders; Halleck and McClellan agreed that they ought to go forward to aid Pope, but nobody knew quite where Pope was to be found, and anyway, Franklin had no horses to pull his artillery and no wagon train to carry food and ammunition, and there seemed to be no cavalry at hand to scout the road for him. Haupt darkly remarked to himself that a march of twenty-five miles would put Franklin in the fortified lines at Centreville, which would surely be within reaching distance of Pope, and felt that Franklin's men could carry on their backs enough food and ammunition to take them that far. Besides, Haupt seriously doubted that there was anything hostile this side of Centreville which could hurt a whole army corps. But nobody asked Haupt's opinion, McClellan and Halleck began to bicker fruitlessly about the advance, and Franklin's troops stayed where they were.

  The next day was August 29, and outposts reported hearing the rumble of gunfire from beyond Centreville. Somewhere off in the outer darkness the armies apparently had collided. Later in the day Haupt was able to confirm this. Sitting at the end of the railway telegraph line, he got a message from Pope himself—in Centreville, by now— and Pope seemed to be in good spirits, reporting that he was engaged with sixty thousand Confederates, that Joe Hooker was driving them handsomely, and that McDowell and Sigel were cutting off the enemy's retreat. McClellan ordered Franklin to move forward, telling him: "Whatever may happen, don't allow it to be said that the Army of the Potomac failed to do its utmost for the country"—a remark which is a complete tip-off to the strange jealousies, rivalries, and antagonisms that were besetting the high command just then. The troops started to move that morning, Franklin remaining behind in an attempt to get supply wagons, of which he finally rounded up a scant twenty; then McClellan began to have second thoughts, wired Halleck that he did not think Frariklin's men were in shape to accomplish much if they ran into serious resistance along the road, and finally ordered Franklin to halt at Annandale, seven miles out. Haupt had his railroad open as far as the Bull Run Bridge and was pushing supplies forward as fast as the trains could move.

  As far as Haupt could see, things were on the mend. Pope was in touch with Washington and with his supply line again, his wagons were moving the stores up from Fairfax Station to Centreville, and the fighting seemed to be going favorably. But on the following day the luckless railroad man entered into a full-fledged nightmare, which was visited on him by order of the Secretary of War, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton.

  Stanton, with his pudgy, bustling figure, his scraggly beard, and his hot little eyes, was prone to disastrous impulses when the going got tough, and he gave way to one on the thirtieth of August, 1862. Late the night before, Pope reported having fought a heavy battle in which he had lost ten thousand men and the enemy twice that many. The Confederates, he assured the Secretary, were in full retreat and he was about to pursue with vigor, which was all to the good. But Stanton, reflecting on those ten thousand casualties—plus the Rebel wounded, who must be tended for humanity's sake—suddenly concluded that the wounded would never in the world be cared for unless he departed swiftly from regular channels, and he immediately departed therefrom with restless energy. He publicly issued an invitation to government clerks, private citizens, and all the sundry to volunteer as nurses and stretcher-bearers for the wounded out beyond Centreville. Simultaneously he ordered Haupt to stop whatever he was doing and prepare to transport this volunteer brigade to the field at once. (He also rounded up all the hacks and carriages he could find in Washington and sent them off to Centreville by road, but that did not affect Haupt; it just clogged the highway that Pope's men had to use.) Shortly thereafter scores and hundreds of civilians began to pour into Alexandria demanding transportation. Most of them were drunk, and those who were not were carrying bottles of whisky and obviously would be drunk before very long.

  Haupt's head swam at the thought of dumping this howling mob down on a battlefield. Orders were orders, to be sure, but he was enough of an army man to know that there are ways and ways of rendering obedience. He delayed the train as long as he could; then, when he finally sent it off, he wired the officer in command at Fairfax Station to arrest all who were drunk. Also, he bethought himself that while he had been ordered to take this mob out he had not been ordered to bring it back, so as soon as the train had been unloaded he had it hauled back to Alexandria.

  "Those who were sober enough straggled off as soon as it was light enough to see, and wandered around until all whisky and provisions became exhausted, when they returned to the station to get transportation back," Haupt wrote later. "In this, most of them were disappointed."

  It seemed cruel, he added, to make these people walk all the way back to Washington in the rain, but it was better to do that than to ignore the wounded; besides, his opinion of the volunteer nurses was not high—"generally it was a hard crowd and of no use whatever on the field." He learned later that some of the men bribed army ambulance drivers to leave the wounded and carry the civilians back to Washington.4

  And as this affair began to be straightened out the news from the front abruptly became worse. Having announced that he had won a great victory, Pope was slow to report bad news, but the news came trickling back anyway. One of the first to get the drift was General Jacob Cox, an Ohioan who had gone to the lines at Upton's Hill in command of the four regiments McClellan had sent out to hold the ground "at any hazard." On the morning of August 30, Cox saw the ambulances coming in from Centreville, accompanied by the walking wounded. These were men who had left the field the night before, and their impression was that they had won the battle and that the enemy was in retreat. Cox noticed that the sound of the firing, which he had been hearing all the previous day, was not nearly so loud. Adding that to the reports from the wounded men, he assumed that Pope was pursuing the foe and that the gunfire came from rear-guard actions—an assumption which Pope himself held until he finally reached the point at which further delusion was impossible. During the afternoon, however, Cox could hear that the sound of the firing was getting louder—much louder and much heavier, with long, sustained, reverberating rolls of gunfire in which the individual shots could no longer be distinguished. Toward evening the pathetic parade of wounded was coming in greater numbers. It was accompanied by stragglers, and by dark the evidence of a disastrous defeat was all too visible.5 The spirits of the soldiers in the camps around Alexandria, which had been raised mightily by the early report of a victory, began to sag, and the provost marshal notified the War Department that he needed more men if he was to preserve order—"we are being overrun with straggling officers and men." The colonel of the 55th New York Infantry, landing at the Alexandria wharves next morning, noted an air of great depression as soon as he stepped ashore. Nobody knew just what had happened, but all sorts of rumors were afloat; he found the word "treason" being used freely.

  Treason: betrayal, treachery, a will to lose when the means to win are at hand; a dark, frightening word, coming up out of the shadows, carrying fear and distrust and panic unreason with it, so that the visible enemies in gray and butternut off toward the Bull Run Mountains seemed less to be feared than those who might be standing, all unsuspected, at one's elbow. The word was used everywhere: in the President's Cabinet, in the War Department, in the tents of the generals, and—most disastrously of all—in the ranks of the tired army that was plodding back toward
Washington. All of the disillusionment which began when the army was repulsed before Richmond, all of the sudden war-weariness which had come so soon to a land that had been long at peace, all of the bewilderment felt by men who saw themselves striking ineffectually at targets that mysteriously shifted and dissolved as one struck—all of this, welling up in the hearts of men who had done their best to no avail, began to find expression in that word. There had been betrayal: of high hopes and noble purposes, of all the army meant to itself and to the country. The country had suffered more than a defeat. What was happening now was the beginning of disintegration.

  2. We Were Never Again Eager

  In the end it would become an army of legend, with a great name that still clangs when you touch it. The orations, the brass bands and the faded flags of innumerable Decoration Day observances, waiting for it in the years ahead, would at last create a haze of romance, deepening spring by spring until the regiments and brigades became unreal—colored-lithograph figures out of a picture-book war, with dignified graybeards bemused by their own fogged memories of a great day when all the world was young and all the comrades were valiant.

  But the end of August in the year 1862 was not the time for taking a distant and romantic view of things. The Army of the Potomac was not at that moment conscious of the formation of legends; it was hungry and tired, muddy and ragged, sullen with the knowledge that it had been shamefully misused, and if it thought of the future at all it was only to consider the evil chances which might come forth during the next twenty-four hours. It was in a mood to judge the future by the past, and the immediate past had been bad. The drunken generals who had botched up supply lines, the sober generals who had argued instead of getting reinforcements forward, the incredible civilians who had gone streaming out to a battlefield as to a holiday brawl, the incompetents who thought they were winning when they were losing were symbols of a betrayal that was paid for in suffering and humiliation by the men who were discovering that they had enlisted to pay just such a price for other men's errors.