A FRAGMENT OF UNWRITTEN MILITARY HISTORY
By this time--September, 1862--Mr. Dana had retired from _The
Tribune_ and Mr. Sydney Howard Gay had become managing editor in Mr.
Dana's place. The natural gift of command which belonged to Mr. Dana
had not descended upon Mr. Gay; it never does descend; but he was
capable of a quick decision, and when, having returned that morning
from Antietam, I saw him in the afternoon, he was in a
managing-editor state of mind. With much firm kindness of manner he
suggested that I should start that evening to rejoin the army. I
said yes, because, in my inexperience and in my artless awe of my
superior officer, I did not know what else to say. And I took the
night train to Washington.
With the discomforts of the night railway service between New York
and Washington I had already made acquaintance. They were
considerable, but less than they are now. There was then no
overheated Pullman car; there was no overbearing coloured porter to
patronize you, and to brush the dust from other people's clothes into
your face, and to heat the furnace--by which I {154} mean the
steam-heated car--seven times hotter; there was no promiscuous
dormitory. When Lord Charles Beresford was last in Washington, four
or five years ago, he told me one afternoon he was going to New York
by the midnight train. When I suggested that the day service was
less unpleasant than the night, he answered: "Oh, it doesn't matter
to me. I can sleep on a clothes-line." There spoke the sailor lad
of whom there are still traces in the great admiral of to-day. I
have never tried the clothes-line, but I had lately been sleeping for
many nights together on the sacred soil of Virginia, or the perhaps
less sacred soil of Maryland, thinking myself lucky if I could borrow
two rails from a Virginia fence to sleep between. I am not sure
whether I liked the stiff seats of the old-fashioned coach much
better, but I am quite sure I should prefer the open air and the
sacred soil and the Virginia rails to the "luxurious" stuffiness of
the modern sleeping car. The only real luxury I know of in American
railway travel is the private car.
However, I might as well have stayed in New York, for I was soon
invalided back again with a camp fever, and then remained in the
office to write war "editorials," and others.
But I was to make one more journey to the field, and once more to see
General Hooker. General McClellan, thinking it over for a month and
more after Antietam, had finally crossed the Potomac, dawdled about a
little, and been ordered to Trenton, New Jersey, well out of the way
of {155} further mischief. General Burnside had succeeded McClellan;
had fought and lost the battle of Fredericksburg, with the maximum of
incompetency, in December, 1862; had McClellanized till January 25th,
and had then yielded up the command of the unhappy Army of the
Potomac to General Hooker. Fighting Joe spent some three months in
getting his army into good fighting order; then tried his luck
against Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. Luck in the
shape of a bullet, whether Union or Rebel took Jackson out of his
way; but Lee, perhaps for the first time, showed the greater
qualities of generalship, and Hooker, at the end of a three days
battle, was defeated; the Union forces recrossing the Rappahannock on
the night of May 4th, 1863.
I must apologize for restating, even in the briefest form, facts
which everybody knows. I do it because, soon after Chancellorsville,
I was sent again to the Army of the Potomac on a mission of inquiry.
It was almost the blackest period of the war; the darkness before
dawn; a dawn which was to come from the West as well as from the
East. The army was demoralized; so was public opinion; so, I think,
were the military authorities in Washington; and nobody knew where to
look for a commanding officer. There remained not one in whom the
President or the Army of the Potomac had faith. They were groping
for a General, and groping so far as the East was concerned, in the
dark. My business was to throw such as light as I could on the
causes {156} of Hooker's defeat, and to find out, if I could, whom
the Army of the Potomac wanted as leader. And I was given to
understand that the results of my inquiry would be published in _The
Tribune_.
They never were. I spent rather more than a week with the army, at
one headquarters or another. General Hooker, to whom I of course
presented myself in the first instance, very kindly asked me to be
his guest, but that was impossible. I could not be the guest of the
man whom I was to investigate. I told Hooker my errand. As General
commanding, he had the right to order me out of the lines, which
would have brought my mission to an end. Instead, he offered me all
facilities consistent with his duty. "If I am to be investigated,"
he said, rather grimly, "it might as well be by you as anybody."
Indeed; he had a kindness for me and had offered me, or tried to
offer, after Antietam, a place on his staff; which military
regulations did not permit. It was not necessary to tell him I had
every wish he might come well out of the examination. But I had.
So I went about to one general and another and from one corps to
another, and talked with men of all ranks and of no rank. I knew
General Sedgwick best and went to him first. He was a man of action
rather than words, and was reluctant to talk. Besides, his share in
the battle had been greater than anybody's but Hooker himself. He
told me what his orders had been, and how he had tried to carry them
out. Up to a certain point, he had been successful. He had crossed
the Rappahannock {157} in the early morning of May 3rd, carried the
heights near Fredericksburg by noon, advanced toward Chancellor's
with intent to turn Lee's rear, till he brought up against an
immovable Rebel force late in the afternoon. He held his position
all night and during most of the next day, the 4th. Then Lee, who
was at his best, brought up more troops, and forced Sedgwick back
across the river at night. He had lost five thousand men.
From what Sedgwick told me and from what others told me, I gathered
that this was the critical point of the battle. If Hooker could
either have kept these Rebel reinforcements busy elsewhere, or have
strengthened Sedgwick earlier in the day, the Rebel lines would have
been broken or turned, and the battle won. But he was outmanoeuvred
by Lee, here and elsewhere.
That is Chancellorsville in a nutshell. Hooker was, I suppose,
overweighted with the command of an army of a hundred and twenty
thousand men. As a corps commander and for fighting purposes, he had
no equal. But he was pitted against a General whom European critics
have praised till they seem inclined to put him on a level with
Hannibal or Moltke, where he certainly does not belong. But he was
good enough in these May days of 1863 to defeat General Hooker.
There have been stories in print to which I refer because they have
been in print. It was said of General Hooker, as it was said of a
greater General in this Civil War, that he drank. Lincoln's {158}
wish to send a barrel of Grant's whisky to every other General in the
Union armies had not then been expressed. But, in the first place,
having heard this rumour before I left New York, I asked everybody
likely to know, and not one witness could testify to having seen
General Hooker the worse for whisky. There is, in the second place,
a statement that while Hooker was standing, on the morning of the
3rd, near Chancellor's Inn, the porch was struck by a cannon shot,
and a beam fell on Hooker's head. He was not disabled, but the
working power of his brain, at high pressure night and day for some
sixty hours, may well have been impaired. One story may be set off
against the other.
Rightly or wrongly, the Army of the Potomac had lost confidence in
General Hooker. It had also lost confidence in itself. It was a
beaten army and the soul had gone out of it. On both points, the
evidence was overwhelming. There could be no doubt that I must
report to Mr. Gay that the demoralization was complete. When I set
myself to discover a remedy--in other words a possible successor to
General Hooker--I was at a loss. General Sedgwick's officers and men
believed in him, but the army as a whole thought he was in his right
place as a corps commander. Other names were mentioned and put
aside. There was no reason why officers high in rank should talk
freely to me. There was every reason they should not talk freely to
the representative of _The Tribune_, if _The Tribune_ was to publish
an {159} account of the state of public opinion in the army with
reference to a new commander. I endeavoured to make it clear that
all statements on this matter would be treated as confidential.
Still, as you may imagine, there were difficulties.
If one man was named more often than another, it was General Meade.
I was urged by a number of officers--mostly staff officers--as I had
been at Antietam in connection with General Hooker, to see General
Meade and lay before him what my friends declared to be the wish of
the army, or of a great part of the army. They wanted him to succeed
General Hooker. It did not seem desirable to pledge myself to
anything, but I did see General Meade. I had met him but once
before. He was just mounting his horse, and proposed that we should
ride together. Explaining that, though I came on no mission and with
no authority, I had been asked to lay certain matters before him, I
gave him such an account as I could of what my friends thought the
army wanted. When he saw what was coming, he turned as if to
interrupt. "I don't know that I ought to listen to you," he said.
But I asked him to consider that I was a civilian, that I was in no
sense an ambassador, that I brought no proposals, that he was asked
to take no step whatever not even to say anything, but only to hear
what others thought. Upon that, I was allowed to go on. I said my
say. From beginning to end, General Meade listened with an impassive
face. He did not interrupt. He never asked a question. He never
made a {160} comment. When I had finished I had not the least notion
what impression my narrative had made on him; nor whether it had made
any impression. He was a model of military discretion. Then we
talked a little about other things. I said good-bye, rode away, and
never again saw General Meade. But Gettysburg was the vindication of
my friends' judgment.
Thinking I had done all I could, I said good-bye to General Hooker,
who asked no questions, went back to New York, made a full oral
report to Mr. Gay, and asked him whether I was to write a statement
for publication. He considered a while, then said:
"No, it is a case where the truth can do only harm. It is not for
the public interest that the public should know the army is
demoralized, or know that Hooker must go, or know that no successor
to him can yet be named. Write an editorial, keep to generalities,
and forget most of what you have told me."
I obeyed orders. But the orders were given forty-odd years ago.
Such interest as the matter has is now historical, and so, for the
first time, I make public a part, and only a part, of what I learned
in that month of May, 1863, on the banks of the Rappahannock.
{161}