CIVIL WAR--PERSONAL INCIDENTS AT ANTIETAM
General Hooker was about the first man in the saddle. The pickets
had begun sniping long before dawn. My bivouac was within sight of
his tent. "The old man," said one of his staff, "would have liked to
be with the pickets." No doubt. He would have liked to be anywhere
in the field where the chance of a bullet coming his way was
greatest. Kinglake has a passage which might have been written for
Hooker. That accomplished historian of war remarks that the reasons
against fighting a battle are always stronger than the reasons for
fighting. If it were to be decided on the balance of arguments, no
battle would ever be begun. But there are Generals who have in them
an overmastering impulse of battle; it is in the blood; temperament
prevails over argument, and they are the men who carry on war.
Hooker was one of them. He loved fighting for fighting's sake, and
with the apostles of peace at any price he had not an atom of
sympathy. He would have thought Herbert Spencer something less than
a man, as he was; and Mr. Carnegie, if he had been anything then but
the {146} boy he has never outgrown, a worthy disciple of an unworthy
master.
No, I am not keeping you waiting for the story of Antietam, for I am
not going to re-tell it. But General Hooker, on that day a hero, has
had hard measure since, and I like to do him what justice I can. I
liked the man. My acquaintance with him began that morning. To hear
him issue an order was like the sound of the first cannon shot. He
gathered up brigades and divisions in his hand, and sent them
straight against the enemy. That is not at all a piece of rhetoric.
It is a literal statement of the literal fact. His men loved him and
dreaded him. Early in the morning he had scattered his staff to the
winds, and was riding alone, on the firing line. Looking about him
for an officer, he saw me and said, "Who are you?" I told him.
"Will you take an order for me?" "Certainly." There was a regiment
which seemed wavering, and had fallen a little back. "Tell the
colonel of that regiment to take his men to the front and keep them
there." I gave the order. Again the question:
"Who are you?"
"The order is General Hooker's."
"It must come to me from a staff officer or from my brigade
commander."
"Very good. I will report to General Hooker that you decline to
obey."
"Oh, for God's sake don't do that! The Rebels are too many for us
but I had rather face them than Hooker."
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And on went his regiment. I returned to Hooker and reported. "Yes,"
said he, "I see, but don't let the next man talk so much"; and I was
sent off again.
I was with Hooker when he was wounded, about nine o'clock. He was,
as he always was, the finest target in the field and a natural mark
for the Rebel sharpshooters. It was easy to see that they followed
him, and their bullets followed him, wherever he rode. I pointed
that out to him. He replied with an explosion of curses and
contempt. He did not believe he could be hit. No Rebel bullet was
to find its billet in him. He was tall and sat high in his saddle.
He was of course in uniform--no khaki in those days, but bright blue,
and gilt buttons and all the rest of it; his high-coloured face
itself a mark, and he rode a white horse. Not long after I had
spoken, a bullet struck him in the foot. It was the best bullet
those troublesome gentlemen in grey fired that morning. He swayed in
the saddle and fell, or would have fallen if he had not been caught.
Then they carried to the rear the hope of the Union arms for that
day; and for other days to follow.
I saw him again about four in the afternoon. I had been asked to see
him by one or two of General McClellan's staff who knew I had been
with General Hooker in the morning. I have said long since what the
errand was they wished to lay upon me, or what I supposed it to be.
General Wilson explained to me, on the publication of that {148}
article, that I had mistaken the meaning of the men I talked with;
that the officers who asked me to go never designed that I should
suggest to Hooker to take command of the army, but only to find out
whether he could resume the command of his own corps; and perhaps of
another; not waiting for orders, apparently. It does not much
matter, for I, of course, declined to carry any such message as I
thought was proposed to me. It was for the officers themselves, if
for anybody, to carry it. If they had any such purpose in mind, it
was mutiny; patriotic but unmilitary. Well might they lose patience
when they saw the promise of a shattered rebellion fade before their
eyes. But that day was not yet, happily, since a premature victory
over the South would have left great questions unsettled. This
scheme, or dream, was none the less interesting because it showed, as
I thought, what McClellan's own officers thought of his generalship
on that fateful day; and possibly of something besides his
generalship.
But I went to the little square red-brick house where Hooker had been
taken, and was allowed to see him. It needed no questions. He was
too evidently done for; till that day and many days to come had
passed. He was suffering great pain. I told him I had come by
request of some of General McClellan's staff to ask how he was.
"You can see for yourself," he answered faintly. "The pain is bad
enough, but what I hate to think is that it was a Rebel bullet which
did it."
His courage was indomitable; his contempt for {149} the Rebels not
one whit abated. He asked for the latest news from the field of
battle. I told him it was no longer a field of battle; that
McClellan was resting on his arms; that he would not use his
reserves; and that there was every prospect that Lee would escape
with his beaten army across the Potomac. He raged at the thought.
"Unless,"--I added.
"You need not go on," retorted Hooker. "You must see I cannot move."
It tortured him to think that his morning's work was half thrown
away; and that McClellan, with some fourteen thousand fresh troops,
was content to see the sun go down on an indecisive day. Into his
face, white with the pain which tore at him, came heat and colour and
the anger of an indignant soul. The surgeon shook his head, and I
said good-bye.
I rode back to headquarters; only to find that the decision had been
taken or perhaps that McClellan was incapable of any decision; his
mind halting, as usual, between two opinions; and the negative in the
end prevailing over the positive. He had an irresistible impulse to
do nothing he could leave undone. I asked for General Sedgwick. He
had been badly wounded--I think thrice wounded, but had fought on
till the third--and been carried off the field. Nobody could tell me
where he was. I saw him once again. A Rebel bullet laid him low at
Spottsylvania. One of the best generals we had: a man of utterly
transparent honesty, simplicity, and truth of {150} character;
trusted, beloved, ardently followed by his men; a commander who had
done great things and was capable of greater.
Since it was too late to get anything through to New York that night,
I wasted some hours in one camp and another. Perhaps they were not
wasted. I heard everywhere a chorus of execration. McClellan's name
was hardly mentioned without a curse. Not a soldier in the ranks who
did not believe it had been possible to drive Lee into and over the
Potomac.
At nine o'clock in the evening I started for Frederick, thirty miles
away. My horse had two bullets in him, and I had to commandeer
another from a colleague, who objected but yielded. I reached
Frederick at three in the morning, sleeping in the saddle a good part
of the way, as I had been up since four o'clock of the morning
before. The telegraph office was closed, and nobody knew where the
telegraph clerk lived. I thought it odd that in time of war, and
after an important battle, the Government at Washington should have
kept open no means of communication with the general commanding; but
so it was. Frederick was the nearest and, so far as I knew, the only
available telegraph office. There was no field telegraph. The wires
were not down, but the operator was sleeping peacefully elsewhere.
He reappeared about seven. I asked him if he would take a message.
After some demur he promised to try to get a short one through. I
sat down on a log by the door and began to write, {151} giving him
sheet after sheet till a column or more had gone, as I supposed, to
New York. _The Tribune_ had been notified that a message was coming.
But neither my private notice to _The Tribune_ nor my story of the
battle was sent to New York. It was sent to the War Office at
Washington, and such was the disorder then prevailing that it was the
first news, or perhaps only the first coherent account, of the battle
which reached the War Office and the President. They kept it to
themselves during all that day. At night, in time for next morning's
paper, it was released, wired on, and duly appeared in Saturday's
_Tribune_.
I never doubted that when my telegram had once been sent I should
find a train to Baltimore. There was none. I saw one official after
another. Nobody knew, or nobody would say, when a train would leave.
It might go at any moment, or not at all. I tried in vain for a
special. There could be no special without military warrant. I
wired the War Office and got no answer. It was trying work, for what
I had hoped was to reach New York in time for Saturday morning's
paper. Finally, I was allowed to travel by a mixed train which
arrived in Baltimore some ten minutes before the Washington express
for New York came in.
That is all the margin there was. The cars were lighted by oil
lamps, dimly burning, one at each end of the car, hung near the
ceiling. I had to choose between the chance of wiring a long and as
yet unwritten dispatch from Baltimore, {152} and going myself by
train. The first word at the telegraph office settled it. They
would promise nothing.
So by the light of the one dim oil lamp, above my head, standing, I
began a narrative of the battle of Antietam. I wrote with a pencil.
It must have been about nine o'clock when I began. I ended as the
train rolled into Jersey City by daylight. The office knew that a
dispatch was coming, the compositors were waiting, and at six o'clock
the worst piece of manuscript the oldest of them had ever seen was
put into their hands. But they were good men, and there were
proof-readers of genius, and somewhere near the uptown breakfast
hour, _The Tribune_ issued an extra with six columns about Antietam.
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