by Bruce Catton
A man in the 20th Maine wrote that McClellan still was “almost worshiped” by the soldiers, but that very few would vote for him. By and large, they interpreted his candidacy much as the Confederates did: to vote against Lincoln would be to consent to dissolution of the Union. An officer in what was left of the Iron Brigade, musing about the election, put his thoughts on paper: “On one side is war, and stubborn, patient effort to restore the old Union and national honor; on the other side is inglorious peace and shame, the old truckling subserviency to Southern domination, and a base alacrity in embracing some vague, deceptive political subterfuge instead of honorable and clearly defined principles.” 7
And so, when election day came, the veterans voted by resounding majorities against McClellan, voted for Lincoln and for war to the bitter end—and, voting so, swung shut forever a door into their own past.
For McClellan had always been the great symbol. He was the trumpets these soldiers had heard and the flags they had carried and the faraway, echoing cheers they had raised: the leader of an unreal army which had come marching out of the horn gates with golden light on its banners, an impossible sunrise staining the sky above its path, and now it had gone into the land of remembered dreams. Everything that these men had, one supposes, they would have given to be again the army McClellan had commanded and to have him again for a leader, and yet they did not try to vote the past back into existence because they were fond young men no longer. They had come of age and they gave history something new to look at, not seen before in all the record of wars and men of war—the sight, that is, of veteran soldiers who had long outlived enthusiasm and heroics walking quietly up to ballot boxes and voting for more war to be fought by themselves instead of voting for an end to it and no more fighting.
No one did any fancy talking about it, and it is probable that very little fancy thinking was done. It is even possible to doubt that many of the veterans were consciously voting for freedom and Union. At bottom, what counted most may have been nothing more than a simple refusal to admit that they could be beaten. An officer wrote that “they were unwilling that their long fight should be set down as a failure, even though thus far it seemed so,” and that probably says it. The men were not quitters, and when it came time to vote they said so according to their understanding of the case. But it is not hard to agree with the New England soldier who, looking back after the war, remarked that the Army of the Potomac was never pluckier than when it voted by a big majority for Lincoln’s reelection and the continuation of the war.8
Not long after the soldiers had cast their ballots the army was ordered to load all of its cannon, train them on suitable Rebel targets, and fire 100 rounds from each gun—a colossal salute in honor of Sheridan’s victory at Cedar Creek. There had been many salutes of that kind this fall—salutes for Sheridan’s army, and for Sherman’s, and for victories by the Navy—and it seems to have occurred to no one that although this army was constantly firing salutes to celebrate somebody else’s triumph, no one was ever firing salutes for the Army of the Potomac.
Its role was inglorious, as men then figured glory. It won no victories and earned no applause; its job was just to hang on and fight and make final victory possible. By election day the army had been in intimate contact with its foes for six unbroken months. During all of that time there had been two or three days when contact was maintained by cavalry alone. All the rest of the time, in sunlight and in darkness, infantry and artillery had been in action somewhere along the front. During August, September, and October—months when the front was relatively inactive—the army’s siege artillery alone threw nearly six tons of shell every day into the Rebel lines.9
The Confederates gave as much as they received. A Pennsylvania soldier whose outfit was moved into Fort Sedgwick that fall wrote that “we are now in fort hell and it seems pretty much like it. On Tuesday of last week the Rebs threw 132 mortar shells into our camp … last Friday they threw 129 … every few days we have to practice on dodging shells to save our top knots.” Artillerists on both sides had a way of firing any kind of scrap iron when there was work at close quarters, and a soldier who was wounded by such a salvo in a fight near Drury’s Bluff explained: “the damned rebels fired a whole blacksmith shop over here, but nothing happened to hit me but the anvil.”10
In such ways as they could the soldiers tried to make things easier for themselves. During daylight, the picket lines did little or no firing. When dusk came the men would call across to each other, “Get into your holes!” and the shooting would begin. In some parts of the line the rival marksmen agreed to fire high, and if someone accidentally put a bullet close to his enemies there would be an angry protest.
Even the IX Corps began to find trench life a little easier. Its colored division was transferred over to the Army of the James, and when the Confederates learned about it they dropped their old habit of shooting to kill every time a member of this luckless corps raised his head. When the corps was moved down to the left of the line, where there was a considerable distance between the trenches, one man wrote that “it was a great relief to be able to stand upright without the certainty of being shot,” and another said: “It doesn’t seem like war here. We can walk clear over to their picket line and trade coffee, tea, etc., for articles of theirs.”
When the Irish Brigade found itself stationed opposite Mahone’s Confederate division, which contained many Irish soldiers, it had a fine time and its historian reported: “The soldiers on both sides mingled freely, exchanged newspapers, coffee, tobacco and sometimes whisky.” He added that this did not mean that the Rebels were losing any of their combativeness, for “when it came to actual fighting, they fought like bull-dogs.” 11
The comment was characteristic. The queer, upside-down comradeship which six months of battle-front intimacy had begun to create between the armies did not mean that anybody had ceased to fight hard. Being sensible men, the soldiers tacitly agreed to defang the day-to-day picket-line firing, which would not affect the outcome of the war very much if it went on for a century, but battles were going to be as grim and deadly as ever. A Michigan soldier in the II Corps remembered how his brigade got flanked and cut to pieces during a brisk little fight beyond the extreme left, late in October, and he commented drily: “Of course it would not be gallant to say that anybody run, but if there was any tall walking done during the war, we did it crossing that field.”12
In December, Warren’s corps and some cavalry were sent on a long raid aimed at Southern railroad lines and supply bases near the Meherrin River. The Weldon Railroad, which came up to Petersburg from the south, had long since been cut, but the Confederates were bringing up supplies on it to a point some twenty miles from Petersburg and then hauling them the rest of the way by wagon, and Grant wanted this traffic broken up.
It began like an enjoyable diversion. Once out of the trenches, the soldiers were in country which, at least by contrast with what they had been looking at, seemed untouched by war. It was nice to be in such country, even though a sleety December drizzle had set in, and one man felt that “the lowing of the cow and the tinkling of sheep bells suggested that quieter days than those that came to us still dawned upon the world.” As a more tangible boon, there was good foraging, and the men ate many chickens and turkeys.13 The Atlanta bishop had understood the matter: the Union soldier saw no wrong in taking chickens and turkeys owned by men who were in rebellion.
The big idea of this raid was to destroy so much of the railroad that it would no longer be practical for Lee’s commissariat to run a wagon line to the end of the track, and once the infantry got into position the work of destruction began, soldiers working for miles up and down the right of way. The work went on far into the night, and a rookie in the 198th Pennsylvania saw it as strange and exciting: “As far as the eye could reach were seen innumerable glowing fires, and thousands of busy blue coats tearing up the rails and piling up the ties. It was a wild, animated scene, and the fatigue of the long day’s marc
h was forgotten.”14
It was not all pure fun. Rebel cavalry hung around the fringes of the force, and irregular troops came into action as well, giving the V Corps a taste of guerilla warfare. Stragglers were waylaid and killed, and as the troops finished their work and began to move back to Petersburg they found stripped, mutilated bodies of their comrades lying in field and road. Just how many cases of this kind there actually were is not clear, nor can it be told now how many Union soldiers, if any, looked upon mutilated corpses and how many merely heard about them; but the news went through the army fast, and it raised murderous fury, and the command became a destroying host as it moved back northward. A man in the 9th Massachusetts battery saw many buildings on fire, and heard that every building in sight from the line of march was destroyed. “One thing is certain,” he said. “The burning was approved by the commanders, and there was cause for it; probably murders were the cause of it. We believed it at the time.”15
To a man in the Iron Brigade, this raid was “the most vindictive that the army had ever engaged in.” He said the men had been infuriated by the work of the guerillas, but he admitted that “the destruction of the houses of peaceable women and children, though venomous in their Union hatred, cannot be justified,” and he added proudly that “the Iron Brigade had no share in the vandalism.”16
The year drew to an end: 1864, the year of the Wilderness and the Bloody Angle, of Cold Harbor and the Crater; the year that killed John Sedgwick and saw Abraham Lincoln under fire; the terrible year when war became total; the year of U. S. Grant. In the Shenandoah Valley snow drifted over black ruins, and what was left of Early’s army huddled in a winter camp near Waynesboro, and Sheridan sent the VI Corps back to Petersburg. The people of the North put on a big campaign to give the soldiers a good Christmas dinner, and boxes and barrels of turkeys, doughnuts, mince pies, and cakes came down to City Point. The men in the huge hospital got an especially lavish turkey dinner, and a nurse reflected afterward that “there is not a class of persons in the world more cheerful than a ward full of wounded who are doing well.” New Year’s Day came in clear and cold, and below Fort Hell details went out to cut firewood from a stand of timber between the lines. They found Rebel details out on the same mission, and the woodsmen declared a truce, had a chat, and then pitched in together and cut wood until dusk, at which time they made a fair division of the firewood and went back to their respective lines.17
There was a severe winter that year, and life in the trenches was even less comfortable than usual. Army headquarters frowned upon idleness, and there were drills and work details for everybody, with brigade dress parades every afternoon for all except those actually on the firing line. Orders came through to comb out the non-combat details and get men back into combat roles, and a clerk in V Corps headquarters estimated that this would add fully 6,000 men to the army’s combat strength. Discipline became sharper. Bounty-jumpers, draftees, and substitutes were going to be made soldiers in spite of themselves, and a special court was set up at City Point to give speedy trials to deserters. It hanged seven men in one day.
The army began to get back some of its old-timers. Some were men who had been wounded, earlier, recovered now and returning to their old regiments for duty. Others were men who had been mustered out when their enlistments expired, who had joined up again and were coming down to the front. Some of the new, high-number regiments were almost entirely made up of such veterans. These regiments would be as good as any the army ever had.18
Two generals the army had lost—two who had done much, for better or for worse, to shape its fate. One was Winfield Scott Hancock, still plagued by his Gettysburg wound, gone north now with some vague mission to recruit a new corps of time-expired veterans and bring it to the upper end of the Shenandoah Valley; a mission that somehow never came to much, and Hancock was out of the war. He had not been himself for months, had never really been the same since Gettysburg, but he had been one of the men who gave spirit and color to the army and he had been in the middle of its most desperate fights. The army would not be the same, without Hancock. In his place at the head of the II Corps went Andrew A. Humphreys, Meade’s chief of staff, a hard fighter and the sternest of disciplinarians.
The other loss was sheer gain. Ben Butler had gone home, and although technically he had never belonged to the Army of the Potomac, it had had to pay for a number of his mistakes. In December, Army and Navy had mounted a big expedition to take Fort Fisher in North Carolina, the last seaport open to the Confederacy, and since the operation fell in his department Butler had elected himself commander of it. He had planned to destroy the fort by exploding a ship filled with powder as close to the ramparts as possible; did explode it, at dead of night, damaging the fort not at all, making in fact so little impression that the defenders vaguely supposed a Yankee boiler had burst. Butler then got troops ashore, grew discouraged, ordered them aboard ship again, and sailed away reporting that the fort could not be taken.
That was his last act. The admiral on this expedition was tough David Porter, who had been on intimate terms with Grant ever since the Vicksburg campaign, and Porter told Grant the fort could be had any time they sent a competent general to take it. The presidential election was over and the war was on the downhill slope, and it was suddenly realized that Butler no longer need be handled with tongs. So Grant relieved him of his command and sent him back to Massachusetts, and Lincoln sustained Grant, and the one man who ever bluffed those two citizens had lost all of his terrors.
Another expedition went out, Fort Fisher was captured, and the Confederacy was sealed away from the outside world. Sherman was beginning to come north from Savannah, and for the Army of the Potomac it was a winter of rising confidence. “There was hope in the air,” wrote a veteran in the VI Corps. “All were beginning to feel that the next campaign would be the last.” 10 Much of this was due to the realization that the men in the opposing trenches, the indomitable veterans of Lee’s magnificent army, were themselves beginning to lose hope.
The Confederacy was visibly failing—in manpower, in rations, in equipment. A Union man in Fort Hell, peering through the wintry air, saw a stooped and ragged Confederate detail marching out to relieve the picket line and wrote that “I could not help comparing them with so many women with cloaks, shawls, double-bustles and hoops, as they had thrown over their shoulders blankets and tents which flapped in the wind.” An officer of the day on the VI Corps front recorded that forty deserters had come into his lines in forty-eight hours, and he said that this was about average; “if we stay here, the Johnnies will all come over before the 4th of July.” To another Union officer, the “starved and wan appearance” of the deserters proved that “the Confederacy was on its last legs.” 20
In the lines facing Richmond, Union pickets one night heard a great hallooing and cursing from a swamp out in front, and they crept out and rescued an indignant Rebel conscript who had got stuck in the mud while trying to desert. They took him to their campfire and found that he was fat and sixty, a man who ordinarily wore a wig, spectacles, and false teeth, but who had lost all three while floundering in the swamp. They dried him off and gave him coffee; he drank, looked about the circle, and then began to curse the Confederacy:
“He cursed it individually, from Jeff. Davis and his cabinet down through its Congress and public men to the lowest pothouse politician who advocated its cause; he cursed its army, from General Lee down to an army mule; he cursed that army in its downsittings and uprisings, in all its movements, marches, battles and sieges; he cursed all its paraphernalia, its artillery and its muskets, its banners, bugles and drums; he cursed the institution of slavery, which had brought about the war, and he invoked the direst calamity, woe and disaster upon the Southern cause and all that it represented; while the earnestness, force and sincerity with which it was delivered made it one of the most effective speeches I ever heard, and this together with his comical appearance and the circumstance of his capture made the men roar with la
ughter.”
The Union man who told about all of this added, perhaps unnecessarily, that “the best element in the Southern army” did not desert.21
A New England private said that each evening the men in his company would speculate about the number of deserters who would come in that night: “The boys talk about the Johnnies as at home we talk about suckers and eels. The boys will look around in the evening and guess that there will be a good run of Johnnies.” Heavy firing on the picket lines was always taken to mean that the enemy was trying to keep deserters from getting away. Many deserters were willing to enlist in the Union army, and before 1864 ended it was ordered that all such should be sent West to fight the Indians—it would go very hard with them if the army from which they had deserted should recapture them. When these men talked about the Southern cause, it was said, they would remark that it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.22
Yet there was always one striking point to remember. Confederate soldiers might be deserting in increasing numbers, but up to the moment of desertion they fought just as hard as ever. A VI Corps officer admitted that “the Army of Northern Virginia was still a most formidable foe,” and when he studied the battle front he found that “their forts, with five lines of abatis in front, looked as if they could defy any attack.” As the winter wore away the tension actually increased. Men felt that Lee would find some way to strike a blow before desertions crippled him, and it was agreed that when the blow fell it would come with savage force.23