CIVIL WAR--GENERAL McCLELLAN--GENERAL HOOKER
The failure of Pope's campaign and his retreat upon the Capital
demoralized his army and demoralized Washington to an extent which
few remember. The degree of the demoralization may, however, be
measured by the reappointment of General McClellan to the command of
the Army of the Potomac and of Virginia. In the absence of any
general whose name inspired confidence, General McClellan was thought
a synonym of safety, or, at any rate, of caution, and he had not
wholly lost the confidence of his men. He was not expected to enter
upon large operations.
An engagement near Washington was, however, thought probable. On a
hint from a friendly official I rode out one afternoon from
Washington to the army headquarters, expecting to be away at most a
day or two. My luggage consisted of a mackintosh and a tooth-brush.
I was absent six weeks. But this was not so tragic as it sounds, for
Maryland was a country in which, even with a war afoot, it was
possible to buy things. In the interval, I had seen two battles;
South Mountain {138} and Antietam, which came as near to being real
war as could be expected under General McClellan.
Correspondents were not now allowed with the army in the field any
more than in General Pope's time. We were contraband. But so long
as we yielded nominally to the inhibition of the War Office nobody
seemed to care. The War Office was then named Edwin M. Stanton. To
this day I have never been able to understand how Mr. Stanton--a man
all energy, directness of mind and purpose, scorning compromise and
half measures and scorning those who practised them--came to assent
to the replacing of General McClellan at the head of the Army of the
Potomac. But he did, and at first General McClellan seemed to
justify the new hopes newly placed in him. He might have sat still,
but after providing for the defence of Washington he moved out upon
an aggressive-defensive campaign. General Lee had entered Maryland
and McClellan went in search of him. He moved slowly, but he moved.
His soldiers, so far as I could judge, believed in him in spite of
his disasters in the Peninsula. His generals, I think, did not. I
saw and talked with some of them, for I found myself making this
campaign as a volunteer aide-de-camp to General Sedgwick. I had met
General Sedgwick before, and when I had to consider how I was to get
leave to go with the troops I went to General Sedgwick and told him
my difficulty. "Come along with me," he said. That was all the
appointment I had. It would not have been {139} possible in a
European army, but in the armies of the Union many things were
possible. And it was quite sufficient to take me outside of Mr.
Stanton's order about correspondents. I was not a correspondent; I
was one of General Sedgwick's aids. His kindness to me was a service
for which I could never be too grateful.
It was a still greater service because General Sedgwick belonged in
the category of fighting generals, who were none too popular with the
general commanding, since he, mixing politics with war, believed in
half-beating the enemy. Sedgwick, so far as I know, had no politics.
Certainly he had none in the field. He was there to fight, not to
build bridges over which the Rebels might come back into the Union.
It had become known that General Lee had entered Maryland, to enable
her people "to throw off a foreign yoke." He was not, as it turned
out, a welcome guest. Maryland would have been much obliged to him
if he had stayed on the other side of the Potomac. McClellan, taking
time to think things over, and perhaps not liking to be considered a
foreign yoke, advanced toward Frederick, Lee's headquarters for the
moment, at the breakneck pace of six or seven miles a day. I suppose
McClellan must have known that Lee wanted Harpers Ferry. But even
after Lee's general order had come into his possession, with specific
directions for the movement of each division, McClellan hesitated and
finally took the wrong road.
Hence the battle of South Mountain; a {140} picturesque performance;
part of which I watched by the side of General McClellan himself. At
the moment he was quite alone; his staff away carrying orders; an
officer now and then returning only to be sent off again at once.
The general presently saw that a stranger was standing near him and
asked a question or two. I offered him my field glasses, but he said
he could see very well and declined them.
There was in his appearance something prepossessing if not
commanding: something rather scholarly than warlike; amiable,
well-bred, cold, and yet almost sympathetic. His troops were slowly
forcing their way up the steep mountain side upon which we looked.
It was, in fact, from a military point of view, a very critical
moment, but this general commanding had a singular air of detachment;
almost that of a disinterested spectator: or of a general watching
manoeuvres. The business of war seemed to be to him merely what Iago
calls "the bookish theoric"; and he himself "a great arithmetician."
He had the face of a man of thought. Napoleonic, said his idolaters,
who called him the young Napoleon: not considering dates, or not
aware that when Napoleon planned and won his great Italian campaign,
a masterpiece of war, he was twenty-seven. When McClellan planned
and lost his Peninsula campaign, he was thirty-seven. But there he
stood; an interesting figure; as if stargazing. Compact,
square-chested, his face well moulded. That he was directing the
assault of {141} the forces struggling up yonder hill no human being
could have guessed. Whether his tailor had been too stingy in the
material of his uniform, or Nature too lavish in the contents of it,
he was uncomfortable; he and his clothes did not seem made for each
other. There were wrinkles. There was a missing button; nor was he
a well set-up figure. It may well enough have been because of his
military career, but I thought an air of indecision hung about him.
Men had died by hundreds and were yet to die because he could not
make up his mind, nor push an attack home. They were dying now, as
he looked on; they lay dying and dead on the opposite slope; for when
he had at last made up his mind he had made it up wrong. The battle
of South Mountain was a victory in a sense, but it need never have
been fought. A position which might have been turned had been
forced, and the road to Antietam lay open.
Again it was like McClellan, on approaching Sharpsburg and the
battleground of Antietam, to halt and think it over. If he had
struck at once, he would have found Lee's army divided and the path
weakly held. But McClellan had it not in him to do anything at once,
or to do it once for all. The armies faced each other idly all that
day. In the afternoon I heard that a flank movement on the enemy's
left was to be tried under General Hooker. So I rode over and joined
that general's command. It was well known that Hooker would fight if
he was allowed. He was already called {142} "Fighting Joe"; a
well-earned sobriquet. He put his troops in motion about four
o'clock that afternoon, himself at the head as usual, doing his own
reconnoitring. I rode with the staff, not one of whom I knew.
Nobody took the trouble to ask who I was or why I was there. For
aught they knew I might have been a Rebel spy.
General Hooker had his own way of doing things. This was what might
be called a reconnaissance in force; two brigades in line pushing
steadily forward; a force of cavalry in advance, two divisions
following. By the time we came in touch with Lee's left, it was
dusk. We could see the flashes of the Rebel rifles which drove
Hooker's cavalry back upon the infantry division. Hooker played the
game of war as the youngest member of a football team plays football.
He had to the full that joy of battle which McClellan never had at
all; and showed it.
Between the man by whose side I had stood two days before at South
Mountain, and the man near whom I now rode, the contrast was
complete. McClellan was not a general; he was a Council of War, and
it is a military axiom that councils of war never fight. He surveyed
the field of battle beneath him at Turner's Gap as a chess-player
surveys the board. At the naval battle of Santiago, as the Spanish
ships were sinking, our bluejackets began to cheer. Said Admiral
Philip: "Don't cheer, boys. They are dying over there." If
everything else about Philip should be forgotten, that will be
remembered; and he will be loved {143} for it; for this one touch of
human feeling for a human enemy amid the hell of war. But for the
pawns and pieces the chess-player sends to slaughter he has no
regrets. I don't say McClellan had none for the men whom his
mistaken strategy drove to death. All I say is that as I looked at
him I saw no sign of it. A general, we are told, can no more afford
to have feelings amid a battle than a surgeon with the knife in his
hand can feel for his patient. It may be. But Napoleon, who is
always cited as the highest example of indifference to the lives of
men, is perhaps the best example to the contrary. He would sacrifice
a brigade without scruple for a purpose; never one single armed man
without a purpose. He had men enough to consume for victory; never
one to squander. He was an economist of human life, though for
purely military reasons. It is awful to reflect how many thousands
of Americans in these early Civil War days were sent to death
uselessly by the ignorance of their commanders; or as in McClellan's
case by his irresolution, and his incapacity for the handling of
troops in the field.
General Hooker's was a face which lighted up when the battle began.
The man seemed transformed. He rode carelessly on the march, but sat
straight up in his saddle as the martial music of the bullets
whistled past him. He was a leader of men, and his men would have
followed him and did follow him wherever he led. Hesitation, delay,
he hated them. "If they had let us start earlier {144} we might have
finished to-night," he muttered. But night was upon us, and even
Hooker could not fight an unknown force on unknown ground in the
dark. It was nine o'clock when we went into camp; Union and Rebel
lines so close that the pickets got mixed and captured each other.
"Camp" is a figure of speech. We lay down on the ground as we were.
I slept with my horse's bridle round my arm. At four o'clock next
morning, with the earliest light of a coming dawn and as soon as a
man could see the sights on his rifle, the battle began.
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