CHAPTER XV

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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