McClellan fell before the genius of Lee, and Pope was put in his place.
They met at Second Manassas. The new general ended his brief campaign in
a disaster so complete, so appalling that it struck terror to the heart
of the Nation. Lee had crushed him with an ease so amazing that Lincoln
was compelled to recall McClellan to supreme command. When the toll of
the Blood Feud was again reckoned twenty-five thousand more of our brave
boys lay dead or wounded beneath the blazing sun of the South.
The Confederate Government now believed its army invincible, led by Lee.
In spite of poor equipment, with the men half clad and half barefooted,
Lee was ordered to invade Maryland. It was a political move, undertaken
without the approval of the Commander.
As the gray lines swept Northward to cross the Potomac into Maryland,
Lincoln was jubilant. To Hay, his young secretary, he whispered:
"We've got them now, boy. We've got them! The war must speedily end. Lee
can never get into Maryland with fifty thousand effective men. The river
will be behind them. I'll have McClellan on him with a hundred thousand
well-shod, well-fed, well-armed soldiers and the finest equipment of
artillery that ever thundered into battle.
"McClellan's on his mettle. His army will fight like tigers to show their
faith in him. They were all against me when I removed him. Now they'll
show me something. Mark my words."
Luck was with McClellan. By an accident Lee's plan of campaign had
fallen into his hands. Yet it was too late to forestall his first master
stroke. In the face of a hostile army of twice his numbers Lee divided
his forces, threw Jackson's corps on Harper's Ferry, captured the town,
Arsenal and Rifle Works, twelve thousand five hundred prisoners and vast
stores of war material. Among the booty taken were new blue uniforms
with which Jackson promptly clothed his men.
Lee met McClellan at Antietam and waited for Jackson to arrive from
Harper's Ferry.
When McClellan's artillery opened in the gray dawn, more than sixteen
thousand of Lee's footsore men had fallen along the line of march unable
to reach the battlefield. The Union Commander was massing eighty-seven
thousand men behind his flaming batteries. Lee could count on but
thirty-seven thousand. He gave McClellan battle with his little army
hemmed in on one side by Antietam Creek and on the other by the sweeping
Potomac.
The President in Washington received the news of the positions of the
armies and their chances of success with exultation. As the sun rose
a glowing dull red ball of fire breaking through the smoke of the
artillery, Hooker's division swept into action and drove the first line
of Lee's men into the woods. Here they rallied and began to mow down the
charging masses with deadly aim. For two hours the sullen fight raged in
the woods without yielding an inch on either side. Hooker fell wounded.
He called for aid. Mansfield answered and fell dead as he deployed his
men. Sedgwick's Corps charged and were caught in a trap between two
Confederate brigades concealed and massed to meet them. Sedgwick was
wounded and his command barely saved from annihilation.
While this struggle raged on the Union right, the center saw a bloodier
tragedy. French and Richardson charged the Confederate position. A
sunken road crossed the field over which they marched. For four tragic
hours the men in gray held this sunken road until it was piled with
their bodies. When the final charge of massed blue took it, they found
to their amazement that but three hundred living men had been holding it
for an hour against the assaults of five thousand. So perfect was the
faith of those gray soldiers in Robert E. Lee they died as if it were
the order of the day. It was simply fate. Their Commander could make no
mistake.
Burnsides swung his reinforced division around the woods and pushed up
the heights against Sharpsburg to cut Lee's only line of retreat. He
forced the thin, gray lines before him through the streets of the
village. On its outer edge he suddenly confronted a mass of men clad in
their own blue uniform.
How had these men gotten here?
He was not long in doubt. The blue line suddenly flashed a red wave
squarely in their faces. It was Jackson's Corps from Harper's Ferry in
their new uniforms. The shock threw the Union men into confusion, a
desperate charge drove them out of Sharpsburg, and Lee's army camped on
the field with the dead.
For fourteen hours five hundred guns and a hundred thousand muskets
thundered and hissed their message of blood. When night fell more than
twenty thousand of our noblest men lay dead and wounded on the field.
Lee skillfully withdrew his army across the Potomac. Safe in Virginia he
rallied his shattered forces while he sent Stuart once more in a daring
ride around McClellan's army.
Again McClellan fell before the genius of Lee. Burnsides was put in his
place.
They met at Fredericksburg. Burnsides, the courtly, polished gentleman,
crossed the Rappahannock River and charged the hills on which Lee's
grim, gray men had entrenched. His magnificent army marched into a death
trap. Lee's batteries had been trained to rake the field from three
directions.
Five times the Union hosts charged these crescent hills and five times
they were rolled back in waves of blood. A fierce freezing wind sprang
up from the North. The desperate Union Commander thought still to turn
defeat into victory and ordered the sixth charge.
The men in blue pulled down their caps and charged once more into the
jaws of death. The lines as they advanced snatched up the frozen bodies
of their comrades, carried them to the front, stacked the corpses into
long piles for bulwarks, dropped low and fought behind them. In vain.
The gray hills roared and blazed, roared and blazed with increasing
fury. Darkness came at last and drew a mantle of mercy over the scene.
The men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their dead along the outer
line as dummy sentinels and crept through the shadows across the river
shattered, broken, crushed. They left their wounded. Through the long
hours of the freezing night the pitiful cries came to the boys in gray
on the wings of the fierce North winds. They crawled out into the
darkness here and there and held a canteen to the lips of a dying foe.
At dawn they looked and saw the piles of the slain wrapped in white
shrouds of snow. The shivering, ragged, gray figures, thinly clad, swept
down the hill, stripped the dead and shook the frost from the warm
clothes.
Burnsides fell before the genius of Lee and Hooker was put in his place.
Fighting Joe Hooker they called him. At Chancellorsville a few months
later he led his reorganized army across the same river and threw it
on Lee with supreme confidence in the results. He led an army of one
hundred and thirty thousand men in seven grand divisions backed by four
hundred and forty-eight great guns.
Lee, still on the hills behind Fredericksburg, had sixty-two thousand
men and one hundred and seventy guns. He had sent Longstreet's corps
into Tennessee.
Hooker threw the flower of his army across the river seven miles above
Fredericksburg to flank Lee and strike him from the rear while the
remainder of his army crossed in front and between the two he would
crush the Confederate army as an eggshell.
But the unexpected happened. Lee was not only a stark fighter. He was a
supreme master of the art of war. He understood Hooker's move from the
moment it began. His gray army had already slipped out of his trenches
and were feeling their way through the tangled vines and underbrush with
sure, ominous tread. In this wilderness Hooker's four hundred guns would
be as useless as his own hundred and seventy. It would be a hand-to-hand
fight in the tangled brush. The gray veteran was a dead shot and he was
creeping through his own native woods. On this beautiful May morning,
Lee, Jackson, and Stuart met in conference before the battle opened.
The plan was chosen. Lee would open the battle and hold Hooker at close
range. Jackson would "retreat." Out of sight, he would turn, march
swiftly ten miles around their right wing and smash it before sundown.
At five o'clock in the afternoon while Lee held Hooker's front,
Jackson's corps crept into position in Hooker's rear. The shrill note of
a bugle rang from the woods and the yelling gray lines of death swept
down on their unsuspecting foe. Without support the shattered right wing
was crushed, crumpled and rolled back in confusion.
At eight o'clock Jackson, pressing forward in the twilight, was mortally
wounded by his own men and Stuart took his command. The gay, young
cavalier placed himself at the head of Jackson's corps and charged
Hooker's disorganized army. Waving his black plumed hat above his
handsome, bearded face, he chanted with boyish gaiety an improvised
battle song:
"Old Joe Hooker,
Won't you come out o' the Wilderness?"
His men swept the field and as Hooker's army retreated Lee rode to
the front to congratulate Stuart. At sight of his magnificent figure
wreathed in smoke his soldiers went wild. Above the roar of battle rang
their cheers:
"Lee! Lee! Lee!"
From line to line, division to division, the word leaped until the
wounded and the dying joined its chorus.
The picket lines were so close that night in the woods they could talk
to one another. The Southerners were chaffing the Yanks over their many
defeats, when a Yankee voice called through the night his defense of the
war to date:
"Ah, Johnnie, shut up--you make me tired. You're not such fighters as ye
think ye are. Swap generals with us and we'll come over and lick hell
out of you!"
There was silence for a while and then a Confederate chuckled to his
mate:
"I'm damned if they mightn't, too!"
The morning dawned at last after the battle and they began to bury the
dead and care for the wounded. Their agonies had been horrible. Some
had fallen on Friday, thousands on Saturday. It was now Monday. Through
miles of dark, tangled woods in the pouring rain they still lay groaning
and dying.
And over all the wings of buzzards hovered.
The keen eyes of the vultures had watched them fall, poised high as the
battle raged. The woods had been swept again and again by fire. Many of
the bodies were black and charred. Some of the wounded had been burned
to death. Their twisted bodies and distorted features told the story.
The sickening odor of roasted human flesh yet filled the air.
It was late at night on the day after, before the wounded had all been
moved. The surgeons with sleeves rolled high, their arms red, their
shirts soaked, bent over their task through every hour of the black
night until legs and arms were piled in heaps ten feet high beside each
operating table.
Thirty thousand magnificent men had been killed and mangled.
The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly and ominously northward.
The White House was still. The dead were walking beside the lonely, tall
figure who paced the floor in dumb anguish, pausing now and then at the
window to look toward the hills of Virginia.
Lee's fame now filled the world and the North shivered at the sound of
it.
Volunteering had ceased. But the cannon were still calling for fodder.
The draft was applied. And when it was resisted in fierce riots, the
soldiers trained their guns on their own people. The draft wheel was
turned by bayonets and the ranks of the army filled with fresh young
bodies to be mangled.
Hooker fell before Lee's genius and Meade took his place.
The Confederate Government, flushed with its costly victories, once more
sought a political sensation by the invasion of the North. Lee marched
his army of veterans into Pennsylvania.
At Gettysburg he met Meade.
The first day the Confederates won. They drove the blue army back
through the streets of the village and their gallant General, John F.
Reynolds, was killed.
The second day was one of frightful slaughter. The Union army at its
close had lost twenty thousand men, the Confederate fifteen thousand.
The moon rose and flooded the rocky field of blood and death with silent
glory. From every shadow and from every open space through the hot
breath of the night came the moans of thousands and high above their
chorus rang the cries for water.
No succor could be given. The Confederates were massing their artillery
on Seminary Ridge. The Union legions were burrowing and planting new
batteries.
Fifteen thousand helpless, wounded men lay on the field through the long
hours of the night.
At ten o'clock a wounded man began to sing one of the old hymns of Zion
whose words had come down the ages wet with tears and winged with human
hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices, from blue and gray, had
joined. Some of them quivered with agony. Some of them trembled with a
dying breath. For two hours the hills echoed with the unearthly music.
At a council of war Longstreet begged Lee to withdraw from Gettysburg
and pick more favorable ground. Reinforced by the arrival of Pickett's
division of fifteen thousand fresh men and Stuart's Cavalry, he decided
to renew the battle at dawn.
The guns opened at the crack of day. For seven hours the waves of blood
ebbed and flowed.
At noon there was a lull.
At one o'clock a puff of white smoke flashed from Seminary Ridge. The
signal of the men in gray had pealed its death call. Along two miles on
this crest they had planted a hundred and fifty guns. Suddenly two miles
of flame burst from the hills in a single fiery wreath. The Federal guns
answered until the heavens were a hell of bursting, screaming, roaring
shells.
At three o'clock the storm died away and the smoke lifted.
Pickett's men were deploying in the plain to charge the heights of
Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand heroic men were forming their line to
rush a hill on whose crest lay seventy-five thousand entrenched soldiers
backed by four hundred guns.
Pickett's bands played as on parade. The gray ranks dressed on their
colors. And then across the plain, with banners flying, they swept and
climbed the hill. The ranks closed as men fell in wide gaps. Not a man
faltered. They fell and lay when they fell. Those who stood moved on and
on. A handful reached the Union lines on the heights. Armistead with a
hundred men broke through, lifted his red battle flag and fell mortally
wounded. The gray wave in sprays of blood ebbed down the hill, and the
battle ended. Meade had lost twenty-three thousand men and seventeen
generals. Lee had lost twenty thousand men and fourteen generals.
The swollen Potomac was behind Lee and his defeated army. So sure was
Stanton of the end that he declared to the President:
"If a single regiment of Lee's army ever gets back into Virginia in
an organized condition it will prove that I am totally unfit to be
Secretary of War."
The impossible happened.
Lee got back into Virginia with every regiment marching to quick step
and undaunted spirit. He crossed the swollen Potomac, his army in
fighting trim, every gun intact, carrying thousands of fat Pennsylvania
cattle and four thousand prisoners of war taken on the bloody hills of
Gettysburg.
The rejoicing in Washington was brief. Meade fell before the genius of
Lee, and Grant, the stark fighter of the West, took his place.
The new Commander was granted full authority over all the armies of the
Union. He placed Sherman at Chattanooga in command of a hundred thousand
men and ordered him to invade Georgia. He sent Butler with an army
of fifty thousand up the Peninsula against Richmond on the line of
McClellan's old march. He raised the army of the Potomac to a hundred
and forty thousand effective fighting soldiers, placed Phil Sheridan in
command of his cavalry, put himself at the head of this magnificent army
and faced Lee on the banks of the Rapidan. He was but a few miles from
Chancellorsville where Hooker's men had baptized the earth in blood the
year before.
A new draft of five hundred thousand had given Grant unlimited men for
the coming whirlwind. His army was the flower of Northern manhood. He
commanded the best-equipped body of soldiers ever assembled under the
flag of the Union. His baggage train was sixty miles long and would
have stretched the entire distance from his crossing at the Rapidan to
Richmond.
Lee's army had been recruited to its normal strength of sixty-two
thousand. Again the wily Southerner anticipated the march of his foe
and crept into the tangled wilderness to meet him where his superiority
would be of no avail.
Confident of his resistless power Grant threw his army across the
Rapidan and plunged into the wilderness. From the dawn of the first day
until far into the night the conflict raged. As darkness fell Lee had
pushed the blue lines back a hundred yards, captured four guns and
a number of prisoners. At daylight they were at it again. As the
Confederate right wing crumpled and rolled back, Long-street arrived on
the scene and threw his corps into the breach.
Lee himself rode forward to lead the charge and restore his line. At
sight of him, from thousands of parched throats rose the cries:
"Lee to the rear!"
"Go back, General Lee!"
"We'll settle this!"
They refused to move until their leader had withdrawn. And then with a
savage yell they charged and took the field.
Lee sent Longstreet to turn Grant's left as Jackson had done at
Chancellorsville. The movement was executed with brilliant success.
Hancock's line was smashed and driven back on his second defenses.
Wardsworth at the head of his division was mortally wounded and fell
into Longstreet's hands. At the height of his triumph in a movement that
must crumple Grant's army back on the banks of the river, Longstreet
fell, shot by his own men. In the change of commanders the stratagem
failed in its big purpose.
In two days Grant lost sixteen thousand six hundred men, a greater toll
than Hooker paid when he retreated in despair.
Grant merely chewed the end of his big cigar, turned to his lieutenant
and said:
"It's all right, Wilson. We'll fight again."
The two armies lay in their trenches watching each other in grim
silence.