THE FIRST WEEK OF JULY--A CHAPTER THAT SHOULD ONLY BE READ BY THOSE WHO
THINK--THE DESPAIR OF THE SEVEN DAYS BATTLES--SHOULDER-STRAPS AND
STAY-AT-HOME SOLDIERS--AN INCIDENT OF THE SECOND.
The first week of July, eighteen hundred and sixty-two. What a time it
was!--and who that took part in it, in any portion of the loyal States
to which the telegraph and the newspaper had reached, can ever forget
it? Everything was hopeless, blank despair--dull, dead desolation. Not
even the fatal Monday following the defeat of Bull Run, when we believed
that all our New York troops had been cut to pieces or fled
ingloriously, produced the same total discouragement in the great city.
Bull Run was our first signal reverse--the first blow from the rod of
national chastisement, that was afterwards to cut so deeply. Though that
stroke pained, it also fired and awakened; and repeated blows had not
yet produced that weakness and exhaustion so difficult to arouse to any
further effort. And we had not, at the same time, passed through the
repeated disasters of the few months following, which stunned and
hardened while they pained. We were quite unprepared for the disaster,
coming as it did after several months of continued comparative victory
(the Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland period of the Lincoln Empire, if it
has had one); and the country felt it most keenly.
The heart of the nation had been bound up in McClellan. The confidence
and love reposed in him may have been man-worship, without ground or
reason, but it was no less real and positive. While in the
Command-in-Chief, everything had gone well, and the Butler and Burnside
expeditions, the two great successes of the war, had been planned and
executed. On the Army of the Potomac the people had looked as the
bulwark of the country--the central force that should in good time take
Richmond and give the last blow to the rebellion. The miserable
bickering and paltry fears which had detached McDowell's division from
the grand army, to defend Washington when never threatened, had been
comparatively unknown or little understood. Many and disastrous months
were yet to elapse, before the letters of the Orleans Princes could tear
away the curtain of mystery and show the official action in its naked
deformity of malice and misjudgment. McClellan had left Manassas with a
gallant army of immense force, whose numbers had no doubt been all the
while exaggerated to the popular ear. They had proved themselves
soldiers and heroes, and had won whenever and wherever brought to the
test. The young commander had had the Command-in-Chief taken from him,
at the moment when he first moved forward; but it was believed that the
change had been made with his consent if not at his own request, so that
he might be the more unhampered in the field. We did not know the chain
which had been cruelly locked around his strong limbs, and which he had
been dragging through every mile of that long march. He had complained,
it is true, from Williamsburgh, of the insufficiency of his force for
the great end in view; but he was known to be a cautious man, and when
he had won Williamsburgh, forced the evacuation of Yorktown and
afterwards won Fair Oaks, all fears for him and for the army had been
gradually dismissed.
He had been set down to win--to take Richmond: that had formed the great
culmination of the programme--the red fire and flourish of trumpets on
which the curtain of the rebellion was to go down. If any one had spoken
disapprovingly or doubtfully of his long delay in the swamps of the
Chickahominy, the reply had been: "Wait patiently! McClellan is slow,
but sure. He will take Richmond before he ends the campaign, and that is
enough!" Such had been public confidence--the confidence of a public who
perhaps did not know the General, but who certainly did not know the
government directing and overruling his every action. At last even the
time of the great capture had been fixed. Officers leaving on short
furlough had been admonished to return quickly, "if they expected to
take part in the capture of Richmond." What else could this mean, than
confidence on the part of the commanding general, that the approaches to
the rebel capital had been made sufficiently close to ensure its
capture, and that the prize was at length in his grasp? Then the Fourth
of July had been seized upon as the auspicious period, and the whole
country had grown ready to celebrate the National Anniversary in the
loyal cities, simultaneously with the shouts and bonfires of the Union
Army that should then be treading the streets of the conquered capital
and opening the prison-doors of the loyal men who had been suffering and
starving in the tobacco-warehouses.
Such had been the supposed aspect of affairs in the field, up to the
last week of June, and young orators preparing their Fourth of July
orations had introduced rounded periods referring to the added glory of
the day and the new laurels wreathing the brows of the Union commanders.
Those who contemplated speaking on the great day, and had not made any
allusion to the fall of Richmond in their prepared orations, had already
seen cause to repent the omission. One, who had incautiously mentioned
in a city passenger-car that "he hoped Richmond would not be taken until
after the Fourth," and who had lacked time to give as a reason that "if
it should be taken before, he would be obliged to write his oration all
over again"--had been assaulted for the offensive expression, and only
escaped after a hard fight, with a black eye and a sense of damaged
personal dignity. It had been settled that Richmond was to be in
possession of the Union troops on the Fourth--wo to him who doubted it!
Hark! was there muttering thunder in the heavens?--thunder from a sky
hitherto all bright blue? Business men, going down town on the morning
of the twenty-eighth of June, found that "fighting had commenced before
Richmond," and that "McClellan was changing his front." That "change of
front" looked ominous. A few read the secret at once--that heavy
reinforcements had come into Richmond from the half-disbanded rebel army
Halleck had checked but not defeated at Corinth; and coupled with
strange rumors of this came hints about "Stonewall Jackson," which
indicated to the same persons that that rebel officer had advanced from
the North-west and made an attempt to take McClellan's right wing in
flank, necessitating a retrograde movement of that wing to bring him in
front. Still, confidence was not lost, in McClellan or in the army.
While his right wing fell back before an attack in force, his left might
swing in towards Richmond and even take the city--who could say?
Then the telegraph closed down, and the morning papers contained "no
later intelligence" from the field before Richmond. This was "the
feather that broke the camel's back" of the national spirit. The
government had no confidence in the people--it dared not trust them with
the truth--it dared conceal! Our army was being cut to pieces, and we
were permitted to know nothing of the calamity except the dreadful fact.
No development could have been so injurious as this concealment--no
stroke at the national confidence so deadly as the want of reliance
shown by the government censors. The nation's heart went down beneath
the blow: to this day[6] it has never risen to the same proud and
courageous determination shown through all previous disasters.
[Footnote 6: January, 1863.]
It is said to be a terrible spectacle when a strong man weeps--a
thousand times more terrible than the grief of the softer sex and the
gentler nature, because it is evident what must have been the blow
inflicted and what the struggle before the pent waters burst forth. But
even the strong man's grief is tame compared to the spectacle of the
grief of a _nation_--that aggregation of strong men and of vital
interests. When the very sky seems dimmed and the bright sunshine a
mockery. When the foot falls without energy and the voice breaks forth
without emphasis. When men, who meet on the corners of streets, clasp
hands in silence or only speak in low and broken words. When the silver
moonlight seems to be shining upon nothing else than new-made graves.
When the sound of revelry from ball-rooms jars upon the heart until it
creates deadly sickness; and the glare of lights from places of public
amusement seems to be an indecorum like a waltz at a funeral. When a
uniform in the street is a reproach and a horror; and the music of the
band to which soldiers tramp, sounds like nothing but the "Dead March in
Saul." When business is impossible, and idleness an agony. When the old
flag is looked up to without pride, and the very pulses of patriotism
seem dead because they have no hope to keep them in motion. When all is
darkness--all discouragement--all shame--all despair. These are the
tears of a broad land--this is the spectacle we witness when a nation
weeps. The loyal men of this generation have wept more bitterly and
sorely, within the past two years, than those wept who saw the armies of
the Revolution starved and outnumbered--who pined in the Prison-Ships
and tracked the bloody snow at Valley Forge. God forgive those who have
wrung these tears--whatever the ultraism they may represent! The people
they have outraged will not forgive until a terrible vengeance is taken.
The first days of July, when fell the President's fifth proclamation,
calling for "three hundred thousand more." If ever a cry of despair
burst out from an overcharged heart, it went up to heaven from the whole
land at that moment. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the depopulated
city and the desolated village. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the
father with one son remaining of his six brave boys; "Have I yet more to
give?" echoed the widow whose last stay was to be taken from her; and
"Have I yet more to give?" re-echoed the wife as she buckled the sword
or the bayonet-sheath on the side of her husband and sent him forth as
one more sacrifice to the insatiate demons of Ambition and
Mismanagement. Have not the days following Manassas, and the Seven Days
before Richmond, and Fredericksburgh, been hours in a national
Gethsemane? And has not the hand been almost excusable, lifted in the
prayer: "Father of Nations!--if it be possible let this cup pass from
us!" And yet the cup has not passed--we have been draining it to the
very dregs!
The introduction of this chapter, which does not in the least advance
the action of the story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every
artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical
composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and
thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here
introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background
of current events, certainly--without a knowledge of which their
actions might be altogether unaccountable. And general as may be a
feeling to-day, it must be caught and put upon record to-morrow, or the
very persons who held it most deeply will forget it by the third day.
Ten years hence--perhaps a year hence--the bitter humiliation through
which the country has been passing between the opening of 1861 and the
opening of 1863, will be almost entirely forgotten in after glory or
after shame. A few will remember, but faintly and dimly, as the old
veterans of the Revolution remembered in their tottering age the
conflicts through which they had passed in youth, beside Washington or
with Mad Anthony. A few will remember something of the truth, but only
as veteran play-goers remember a performance at the Old Park in its
palmy days--a Cooper or a Power prominent, but all the other actors lost
in the mists of time.
When Thomas Wilson left the field of Brandywine, after that disastrous
defeat, and with a bullet-hole through his neck, narrowly missing the
jugular, which had been received in aiding to rescue and bear off the
wounded Lafayette,--that battle-scene was so imprinted on his mind that
he believed he could ever afterwards, to his dying day, recall the
position of every squadron, and even the place of every rock and tree
beside which he had fought; and yet when he saw him, more than half a
century afterwards, hobbling along on his stout hickory cane to the
place where he was to draw the scant pittance afforded him by a nation
grudging in its gratitude--he remembered Lafayette and that he was
wounded in helping to bear him off--nothing more. No doubt John Wilson,
grandson of the old man, wounded in the assault at Fredericksburgh, came
away from that murderous field with the same impression of the eternity
of his own memory; but he will forget all except the very event of the
action, like his grandsire. And yesterday evening, coming out from among
the plaudits of the crowd that had been paying honor to the wonderful
renderings of Couldock and Davidge in the "Chimney-Corner," Wetmore, the
critic and habitue, did not even bring away a play-bill. That little
domestic scene was so daguerreotyped upon his memory that he should
never forget one detail of cast or incident--never! And yet five years
hence, Wetmore will turn to some companion of the present and say: "Ah,
confound it--I cannot remember! Who _was_ it that played with Couldock
at the Winter Garden, in the--the--there, hang me if I have not even
forgotten the name of the piece!--that capital little Robson domestic
drama--the--the--the 'Chimney Corner'?"
So much by way of explanation, if not of apology, for catching the
colors of the background of general feeling at the particular period of
this story, before they have time to fade. And yet a few more words with
reference to that general feeling, as it took particular directions.
"Vox populi, vox Dei" is a motto so often falsified, at least in
appearance, that the world has come to place but little reliance upon
it; and yet it is as true to-day as when the old Latin maximist first
penned it, with the plurality of the gods of his dependence fully
manifest in the original "Dii" or "Deis." The people do not often err
materially or long. They may throne a wooden god or a baboon for a short
moment, but that moment soon passes. As a political body no demagogue
with words supplying the place of brains, can long override them; and as
an army they never make a favorite of a fool or a coward. The American
people did not err for a moment as to where the responsibility of the
sad check to the army of the Potomac did _not_ belong; and they erred
but little in their calculation of where it _did_. The army was
brave--its leader was both careful and capable--the very man for the
place: that they knew intuitively. They doubted the existence of brains
at Washington, and of loyalty in many of those who had been urging
"forward movements" without sufficient force or proper preparation; and
they have already been fully justified in the doubt.
But the people saw something more--execrated it, howled against it, spat
upon it; and after the Seven Days before Richmond, their abhorrence
culminated. That terrible something was _absenteeism_. Thousands and
tens of thousands who should have been in their places in the army, were
shamelessly absent when their brothers-in-arms were being sacrificed
from their very want of numbers. Wounded soldiers who had come home on
furlough, and afterwards recovered, had never rejoined their commands;
and in spite of the calls of McClellan no steps had been taken to force
them back into the ranks. The Provost Marshals were too busy looking for
summer-boarders at Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren, to think of their
obvious duty of protecting the armies of the Union against indolence and
desertion! A still more serious defection existed among the
officers--those who had been awhile in the service, and those who had
merely entered it in _pretence_. Half the New York regiments,
especially, had originally been officered by men who had no intention of
fighting, and who merely took commissions and spent a few weeks in camp
or in the field of inactive operations, in order that they might have
"Colonel," "Major," or "Captain" attached to their names, and be ready
to make more successful plunges into the flesh-pots of well-paid
offices, on the plea that they had been "patriots" and "served the
country" in its need. Hundreds had come home, leaving their commands
half-officered, on one pretext or another, and their leaves-of-absence
obtained by more or less of political influence or favoritism. They
never intended to go back; for were not the elections coming within a
few months? and was it not necessary to plough the political field with
those very harmless swords in order to raise a fall crop of offices?
Then the other class--those who had never intended to go at all--those
who had no heart in the cause, from the first, and who had merely
assumed the regulation uniform to feed _vanity_ or the _pocket_. The
former, to strut Broadway in unimpeachable blue-and-gold, be called by
military titles, lounge at the theatres or create sensations at the
watering-places, confident of being able to escape, on some pretext,
before their commands (if they had any) should leave for the seat of
war. The latter, to find profitable employment in raising companies,
regiments or brigades, for Staten Island, East New York or the Red
House, drawing pay and subsistence for twice or three times the number
ever in camp, and coolly pocketing the difference! It is idle to talk,
as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the
pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or
forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to
go to protest,--it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal
heartlessness: the men who could thus trade--the men who _have_ thus
traded, during the whole war--on the public patriotism and the public
necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition,
following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills--if there was not
a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country
into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.[7]
[Footnote 7: January 17th, 1863.]
The public disgust at these "shoulder-straps" of both classes culminated
during the first week of July. It might be unpatriotic and even cowardly
to make no movement towards joining the Army of the Union: it was base
and utterly contemptible to make such a movement merely as an injurious
sham. So thought the people--seeing in this _desire of military
reputation and profit without service or sacrifice_, the worm gnawing at
the very heart of the republic. "If they are not soldiers, why do they
wear these trappings of the battle-field?" asked the public. "If they
are soldiers, why are they loitering here when their comrades are being
overpowered and slaughtered?" Alas! the question has been continually
asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the
soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the
great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep
out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped,
strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle.
God help us!--Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history
tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away
to admiring audiences during _our_ conflagration!
Is this to be a wholesale attack, then, on our national courage? Had we
no brave men, then, that only these apologies for men are exhibited?
Yes!--thousand upon thousand of brave men, and hundred upon hundred of
brave officers--the world over no better or truer! But they were, as
they _are_, the men of action, not of _show_, or at least not of show
_alone_.
One incident of the morning of the Second of July, when the Seven Days
Battles were yet in progress before Richmond, will at once supply a few
figures for this background, and an illustration of the public feeling
for the soldiers of the little army of action and the great army of
sham!
A few words had been permitted by the telegraph-censors to come through,
and they had arrived too late for the morning papers. They were
consequently bulletined. They gave some hint of the abandonment of the
White House and the severe fighting which followed that movement, on
Saturday and Sunday. They were not hopeful--they were discouraging--much
worse, as it afterwards appeared, than the truth demanded; and the knit
brows and set teeth of the readers did not show any symptoms of
improvement under the new revelation.
A considerable group of men were standing about the "World" bulletin,
stopping, reading and passing on--all the more slowly because the shade
of the high building was refreshing in that hot, blinding, cloudless
July morning sun. A group of politicians who had read the bulletins and
taken their second breakfast at Crook and Duff's, were digesting the one
and picking their teeth from the fragments of the other, before the door
of that unaccountably-popular establishment, on the block above. Over
the street from the "World" corner, at the Park fence, a dozen or two of
invalid soldiers, with jaundiced faces and shabby uniforms, who had
arrived by steamer from the South the day before and taken up their
temporary abode in the dirty Barracks,--were standing lounging and
listening to what was read from the bulletin; while a sentinel paraded
up and down the walk, outside, to prevent escapes that did not seem
over-probable. Voices were a little high, though not in disagreement,
among the group at the corner--for they were discussing the very subject
noted--that of _absenteeism and military sham_.
At that moment a good-looking young officer in spotless full uniform,
with his cap so natty that the rain could never have been allowed to
fall upon it, with his hair curled and his moustache trim as if he had
been intended for any other description of "ball" than one met on the
field of battle, and with a Captain's double-bars on his shoulder,--came
across the Park from the direction of Broadway, over to the Beekman
Street corner, as if to pass down that street. Some of the talkers
noticed him, and connected him and his class a little injuriously with
the events of the day. Just as he passed the corner, brushing very near
some of the talkers and casting a hurried glance at the
bulletin-board--one of the crowd, a rough fellow who might have belonged
to the set who growled and hooted Coriolanus out of Rome,--broke out
with:--
"There goes one of them, now!"
"Yes," muttered another, almost in front of the officer. "D--n 'em all!
Much good those shiny uniforms are doing the country!"
The officer, who must have heard the words and known that they were
intended for his ears, paid no attention and was passing on--the part of
prudence and propriety, beyond a doubt. But one of the crowd was not
satisfied. He must make wrong of the right (a thing very common in all
causes) and the insult a personal one.
"See here!" and he laid his hand on the officer's arm, detaining him,
but not roughly. "Do you see what there is on that bulletin?"
"I see!" said the Captain.
"Yes, they are cutting our boys all to pieces down there!" went on the
aggrieved citizen.
"Well?" again said the officer, apparently neither angry nor frightened.
"Well!" spoke the other, repeating his word, but a little abashed by the
calmness of the officer, whose arm he had let go the moment he turned to
speak to him. "Well!--perhaps it is none of my business, you know--but
why the d--l don't you fellows who have such handsome uniforms, and
commissions, and all that sort of thing, go down and help?"
"Humph!" said the Captain, still with no symptom of being abashed or
angry. "Perhaps it _would_ be as well, for all of us who _could_."
"Oh, you can't go, eh?" said another member of the assemblage, in a
sneering tone.
"Not _yet_!" was the reply of the officer.
"I thought not!" said the man who had first addressed him.
"See here, boys!" said the Captain, "haven't you made a mistake in your
man? I hate a stay-at-home soldier, quite as much as you."
"Why don't you go, then?" one of the others again interrupted.
"I have _been_, and I am _going again_!" said the Captain, emphatically.
"I see what is the matter. I have just put on a new uniform, and you
think that looks suspicious. So it does, I suppose; but my old one has
been through six pitched battles and looks rough enough to suit you."
"The d--l it has!" said the man who had addressed him. "Really, Captain,
I beg your pardon!"
"Never mind that!" said the Captain. "You will probably hit the right
man next time, and the quicker you shame the make-believes into doing
something or pulling off their uniforms, the better. McClellan wants us
all--"
"McClellan's the boy!" broke out a voice.
"You are right--'Little Mac's' the boy!" said the Captain. "He wants us
all. The doctor told me this morning that I might go back, and I am
going to-morrow."
"The doctor?--then you have been sick or wounded! What a fool I have
been making of myself!" said the first speaker, generous as rough.
"A little!" answered the Captain, and by a dexterous movement he flung
back his coat, threw open his collar and bared his neck almost to the
shoulder. The whole top of the shoulder seemed to have been shot away,
and the blade broken, by a ball that had struck him there and ploughed
through into the neck; and the yet imperfectly healed flesh lay in torn
ridges of ghastly disfigurement. Thousands of men have died from wounds
of not half the apparent consequence; and yet the wearer of this was the
smiling and even-tempered man of the new uniform--going back to-morrow!
The world has not lost all its heroes yet; and some of them have the
same fancy for a clean shirt and spotless broadcloth, when attainable,
as Murat displayed for a velvet cloak, or white plume and plenty of gold
embroidery on his trousers, when making the most reckless of charges at
the head of the most dashing cavalry in the world. "That," said the
Captain, closing up the wound as rapidly as he had opened it, but not
before a general shudder had run through the crowd at its ghastly
character--"that I got at Fair Oaks, three weeks ago last Sunday. How do
you like it? Am I going back soon enough? Good morning, boys!"
"And your name?" asked the man who had stopped him, as he attempted to
pass on. "Who are you?--Do tell us."
"Nobody that you would know," said the Captain. "My name is D----, and I
belong to the Sickles Brigade."
He passed on, hurriedly, down Beekman Street, as if "Little Mac" had
sent for him and he had been wasting time in going; but the cheer that
went after him was joined in by the invalids at the Park fence, who had
caught a part of the dialogue; and the people in the "World" office
looked up from their account books, wondering what was the matter in the
street; while the politicians in front of Crook and Duff's, among whom
were some of the City Fathers and their backers and bottle-holders,
losing the other part of the affair and only hearing the shouts,
wondered whether some new notability had not just arrived at the Astor
House, who could be turned to profitable use in the way of a reception
in the Governor's Room, a few "Committees," gloves, carriages from Van
Ranst and a dinner or two all around--of course at the expense of the
economically-managed city treasury.
And this closes a chapter which has made no direct progress whatever in
following the leading characters of this story, who must now be again
taken up in their order.