This Hallowed Ground (34 page)

Armies are strange human societies — rootless, wholly self-contained, creating derisive legends and folk tales as they tramp along toward death and destiny. These soldiers liked to tell tales about themselves; tales like the one about the teamster in the Indiana regiment who was the champion sprinter in his brigade. He was so prodigious a runner, indeed, that he beat every other runner in camp and finally, inspired by his speed, ran all the way out of the army, was listed as a deserter, and was never seen again at all. They cherished the memory of the Irish private’s wife, in an Illinois regiment. By some superhuman effort this woman managed to get all the way from Chicago down to Nashville to visit her husband, and by some even more unimaginable effort she had brought with her a five-gallon keg of whiskey for his
refreshment. But when she reached camp she found that he had basely deserled both the army and herself — whereupon, undaunted, she erected a tent, peddled the whiskey to her absconding husband’s comrades at fifty cents a drink, and so raised a stake for her future support.

There was a tale about an Iowa cavalry regiment that had a very fat trooper who was unhorsed one day in a clash with rebel cavalry and who, his own regiment riding off in rout, sought to escape capture by crawling under a small culvert. This bridge was treacherous — two limber stringers, with crosswise planking, spanning a very shallow ditch. It sagged when it bore a load, and the fat cavalryman became stuck, face down, under the middle of it as the Rebel troopers went over it at a pounding gallop … and the Iowan got the father and mother of all spankings, so that he was totally unable (after he had been extricated) to sit in a saddle for months to come.
¹⁰

There was also a Kentucky regiment which swore that one of its members owned a lifetime furlough signed by General George H. Thomas himself. This soldier, it was said, quite early in the war had been notified that his wife was dying, and he obtained from the general a pass permitting him to go home and to stay there until after her death. Most considerately the lady had then recovered, and it seemed likely that she would survive for at least fifty years more; and her husband, who cherished her, stayed at home with her, except that now and then he would go back to camp for a friendly chat with his comrades.…
¹¹

Increasingly the men ran into the problem of slavery, and as they did they began to encounter an arrogance in the southern attitude toward slavery that increased their own antagonism. Slavery seemed to be central. It was the one sensitive, untouchable nerve-ending, and to press upon it brought anguished cries of outrage that could be evoked in no other way.

A Union general in Kentucky wrote reflectively that he had recently called off an advertised property sale in a county-seat town on the ground that since half of the residents were excluded from the town as pro-secessionists the sale could not be fair. Nobody complained in the least, he said, at the prohibition that was put on sales of land and livestock, but the fact that slave auctions were also barred drew furious protests. “A single Negro,” wrote the general, “is sufficient to demand the attention of the Governor.” The peculiar institution’s chief peculiarity, it began to appear, was the fact that it was wrapped in a special kind of inviolability. It could not simply be left alone, it had to be given favored treatment; its claims were positive and not negative.

The Union soldiers which this general commanded (he wrote) were new men from the Northwest, recruited that summer. When fugitive
slaves came into camp these boys would shelter them; yet there were not really very many cases of this kind, after all, “and had the owners been satisfied to exercise a little patience when the fugitives could not readily be found the soldiers would soon have got tired of their new playthings and turned every black out of camp themselves.”
¹²

But there was no patience. The slaveholder was driven on by a perverse and malignant fate; he could not be patient, because time was not on his side. Protesting bitterly against change, he was forever being led to do the very things that would bring change the most speedily. He was unable to let these heedless Federals get tired of their new playthings. He had to prod them and storm at them, and because he did, the soldiers’ attitude hardened and they grew more and more aggressive.

They were growing aggressive just as President Lincoln himself was doing, and for much the same reason.

Lincoln had promised to decree emancipation by the first of the new year; and as his armies began to move late in the autumn, he sent a message to Congress on December 1 suggesting the adoption of a constitutional amendment providing for gradual, fully compensated emancipation all across the land, in loyal states and in rebellious states alike.

Geography, said Lincoln, was controlling; there could not be two nations here, the land itself would compel a reunion even if the attempt at secession won; and without slavery, the effort to force a separation could not long continue. Why not meet the inevitable halfway? Compensated emancipation would be expensive but would not cost as much as the war itself was costing; also, it would kill no young men. To save their country, men must disenthrall themselves from the dogmas of the past. To give freedom to the slave was to preserve it for all others, and “the fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”
¹³

It was no use. The peculiar institution’s inviolability ran across the North as well as across the South; for emancipated slaves might demand jobs in mill and shop and elsewhere, might someday have to be treated like ordinary human beings, would infallibly compel all sections, sooner or later, to face up to the problem of race relations. Neither above nor below the Mason and Dixon line could the thing be treated rationally. The fiery trial Lincoln was talking about was an ordeal no one could avert.

It did not, as a matter of fact, seem a promising time for the Lincoln administration to propose vast new experiments, for the administration just now was in trouble. It had done very badly in the fall elections, losing seven important states to the Democrats and retaining
control of Congress by an extremely thin margin. As far as anyone could see, neither emancipation nor the way the war was being run had made a very good impression on the voters. Each would have to justify itself, and during the immediate future it would all be up to the armies.

There were three principal armies, owning a common background and sharing a common heritage, yet somehow standing in the oddest contrast to each other.

There was McClellan’s old army, the Army of the Potomac — “General McClellan’s bodyguard,” Lincoln once called it in a despairing moment; the only American army ever to be suspected (however falsely) of a desire to overthrow the government and set up a military dictatorship. The army was jaunty, setting much store by military formalities, consciously serving what was imagined to be a romantic ideal; and it had acquired thus early a dark foreknowledge of disaster, a remarkable reputation for bad luck, and a fine legend that would survive years of war and win a place at last in the national memory. It could fight hard, it could endure a fantastic amount of killing, serving faithfully under any general who came along; it could, in short, do practically anything except win the war. Without suspecting it, the army was a Cinderella.

Then there was Rosecrans’s army, recently taken over from luckless Buell, officially styled the Army of the Cumberland. It was not unlike the Potomac army in some ways — it had been schooled to a certain amount of spit-and-polish discipline (not all of which quite registered) and taught to admire parade-ground formality — but it never acquired any glamor, in its own eyes or in anybody else’s, and its reputation was that of an enduring work horse. It would finally go under the command of George Thomas, and far ahead of time it was beginning to resemble him: it was unbreakable, somewhat plodding, with an unexpected volcanic capacity for exploding all over the landscape just when an explosion was most needed. All in all, it may possibly have been the best army of the lot, but its great day was far in the future.

Finally there was Grant’s army, eventually to be known as the Army of the Tennessee. Never was there an army quite like this one. It was half instrument of destiny and half frontier mob, an army that refused to accept discipline and that stamped its own imprint on its generals; predominantly and eternally, it was an army of enlisted men. Taking nothing very seriously, it would go across the land like the embodiment of wrath, pillar of fire by night and pillar of cloud by day to mark its passage, both pillars largely of its own making. For the moment it was an army forgotten, lying in obscure camps far to the south, not yet ready to trample out the way that was appointed for it. The other
two armies would take the stage first, to fight terrible battles on frozen fields, providing unendurable drama at a price almost too great for payment.

Winter was approaching, a winter of cold blue moons and frozen fields, with deadly rivers winding across landscapes that had a doom on them. There was the Rappahannock, coming down from the Virginia piedmont and broadening out for a lazy curling route to the sea, the lovely town of Fredericksburg drowsing on its right bank just below the fall line; and in Tennessee there was Stone’s River, the market town of Murfreesboro lying just to the south of it, rolling Tennessee farm country all about. Two rivers and two towns, drawing the tide of war to them, with two Union armies coming in and two Confederate armies making ready for defense. Rappahannock and Stone’s rivers would be crossed, and Fredericksburg and Murfreesboro would be occupied, but many young would die before it was done.

In Virginia, whiskered Burnside considered his problem and made up his mind to do other than as McClellan had planned. The Army of the Potomac lay east of the Blue Ridge, on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, with Lee’s army grouped loosely in its front. It seemed unlikely that Lee could be outmaneuvered here, which is what McClellan had contemplated, and Burnside decided on a long sweep to his left; he would go forty miles to the southeast, cross the Rappahannock quickly at Fredericksburg, and so compel Lee to come down and fight him at a disadvantage.

In Tennessee, Rosecrans had his Army of the Cumberland at Nashville. As far as he could learn, Bragg’s army was at Murfreesboro. Rosecrans would march down and fight, and when Bragg had been crushed, the way to Chattanooga and eastern Tennessee might at last be open. Grant, meanwhile, from the Memphis area, could perhaps do something about taking Vicksburg and opening the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans.

It was Burnside who got started first. Through dismal late-November weather his men plodded cross-country amid failures of supply and equipment that told an ominous tale about defects in army management; and they got to the Rappahannock at the town of Falmouth, opposite Fredericksburg and a mile upstream, before Lee realized what was going on. Lincoln had told Burnside that his plan might work if he moved fast, and in the beginning Burnside moved very rapidly. At the end of a fortnight everything had worked as he had hoped. It
remained now to cross the Rappahannock, base himself in Fredericksburg, and then go driving on to a region where Lee would have to come and attack him.

Crossing the Rappahannock, however, presented problems. There were places above Fredericksburg where sturdy men could easily wade the river, but it seemed to Burnside that it would be very rash to put troops across until he could build proper pontoon bridges for his supply trains; and when he made ready to do this he found that the pontoons he had been counting on were not there.

They were missing because — to put it at its simplest — this was an army in which some arrangement or other was always going wrong. Men could be recruited, fed, drilled, and disciplined in large numbers; they could even be led into a battle, after a fashion, with their own bravery making up for many failures in leadership; but to take care of the daily routine of housekeeping and maintenance was for some reason beyond the capacity of this army’s authorities. Burnside had ordered pontoons sent to Fredericksburg to be ready for him when he needed them, but in some way his orders had gone astray; the pontoons were not where everybody supposed they were, and anyway, when the orders finally reached them, nobody remembered to explain to the men in charge that there was a great hurry about things. So the Army of the Potomac sat in idleness by the Rappahannock while these mistakes were set right; and because it took a long time to set them right, Lee brought his army to Fredericksburg, arrayed it carefully on high ground back from the river, and calmly waited to see what Burnside would do next.
¹

Burnside would do just what he had set out to do, for there was a great stubbornness in him — a great stubbornness, and nothing more. He had said he would cross at Fredericksburg, and at Fredericksburg he would cross, even if destruction awaited him. By December 11 everything was ready, pontoons and all, and on the next morning the engineers came down to the water to build the bridges.

The Confederates were waiting, and from houses and riverside shacks they laid fire on the river, killing many of the engineers. Bridges half built, the engineers had to stop, while more than one hundred Federal guns hammered the town, pulverizing houses, knocking bricks and timbers into the empty streets, and sending a great cloud of smoke billowing up toward the autumn sky. Silence again, and a new rush by the engineers; then Rebel sharpshooters, little harmed by the fire that had wrecked the town, opened fire again, more of the engineers were killed, and once more the bridge-building failed.

In the end Burnside’s men took some of the ponderous pontoons, filled them with infantry, paddled them across the river in spite of the musketry, and drove combat patrols through the town, gouging
the sharpshooters out of their holes. This ended the resistance. By midafternoon the bridges were finished, and at last the great, sinewy Army of the Potomac began its crossing. It moved glacially, hour after hour, the enormous blue columns coming down the banks to the river and swaying endlessly over the bridges, flooding the town and fanning out into an open plain just downstream; it moved with flags and with bands and with a great rumbling of moving cannon, making a display of might that impressed the waiting Confederates, impressed even Lee himself. Yet this Union army which seemed to move so irresistibly was in fact plodding blindly into a trap.