Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Added to these slights was the growing suspicion directed by the Richmond government at the political steadiness of the army’s Georgia and North Carolina troops. Georgia’s governor, Joseph E. Brown, was notoriously critical of Jefferson Davis, and by the summer of 1863 a “sudden lukewarmness had come over many of our people,” to the point where “the State will stand a chance of being handed over to the Lincoln government.” North Carolinians were made to feel that their state had been “slow to leave the old Government” (or “did not secede quite soon enough to suit some other slave states”) and remained a “source of Unionism.” True enough, some of the North Carolina regiments were not all that tactful about suggesting that “the State of South Carolina ought to be sunk” because that “was where the trouble started.” But that meant, in turn, that pro-secession partisans like John Bell Hood, who commanded a division in Longstreet’s corps, professed “no confidence in his Carolinians.”20

  The chill of suspicion cast in the direction of North Carolina was exacerbated by “a most disgraceful spirit of desertion” in North Carolina regiments. Leonidas Torrance in the 13th North Carolina gloomily reported on the embarrassing seepage of deserters from North Carolina units in the spring of 1863. “There was 4 men run the gantlet [i.e., whipping by the whole regiment] in the 5th N.C. Regt the Saturday before … for going Home with out lief,” and “one of them died the 8th day after he was whipped.” In his own regiment, Torrance could count “14 of this Regt in the guard house for the same crime.” In the 43rd North Carolina, an anxious captain wrote that “men are running away very bad,” as poor whites from the western mountains, with a much lower investment in defending slavery, registered their dissent by taking French leave and deserting “in squads, with their arms.” But the response of the Richmond government was to appoint politically reliable secession enthusiasts like Alfred Iverson to command North Carolina brigades, and to practice “a studied exclusion of all ones termed anti-secessionists” from promotion. “If these facts taken together do not constitute a class of suspicion against the great body of our people,” complained North Carolina’s governor, Zebulon Vance, “I am unable to conceive what would.”21

  Governor Vance’s worry about the play of politics in the Army of Northern Virginia was, as it turned out, hugely overmatched by the political travails of the Federal army camped opposite Lee on the north bank of the Rappahannock River. “Unquestionably,” wrote Horace Greeley, the first six months of 1863 were “the darkest hours of the National Cause,” in both political and military terms. The Democratic opposition in the U.S. Congress had found a new voice to rally around, that of Clement Vallandigham, the charismatic congressman from Ohio who was boosted to the level of near-martyr in May 1863 when Federal troops arrested him, after a campaign rally in his native Ohio, for denouncing this “wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war.” The great campaign to capture Richmond in 1862 had fizzled into failure, and with only a brief respite at Antietam it had stumbled bloodily into defeat again at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. A massive naval assault on Charleston harbor in April likewise fizzled despite the use of new ironclad warships. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the first authorization to recruit black soldiers for the Union Army had been met with howling indignation by white Northerners who imagined that the war was being waged solely for the purpose of national reunion. “I am a strong union man,” insisted one Massachusetts artilleryman, “but I am not willing to shed one drop of blood to fight Slavery up or down.” In the West, Federal forces were plagued by “the wholesale desertion of the troops who leave a hundred at a time.”22

  Predictably, Northern voters punished Lincoln and the Republicans in the fall 1862 midterm elections. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives shrank by thirty-one seats, and Republican governors were unseated by antiwar Democrats in New York and New Jersey. Abraham Lincoln’s longtime political friend Orville Hickman Browning (one of those Republicans in the Senate whose head went off in the elections), “thinks our cause hopeless” and believed “we were upon the brink of ruin.” War-weariness “looks like a great, sweeping revolution of public sentiment,” moaned the New York Republican lawyer George Templeton Strong. “All is up … The Historical Society should secure an American flag at once for its museum of antiquities.” Even more unpopular was the new national draft law, passed by the lame-duck Congress on March 3, 1863, which was denounced across New York and Pennsylvania as “oppressive, unjust, and unconstitutional,” and “openly threatened” with riot when enrollment of eligible draftees would begin in June and July. One New York politician-turned-general wailed that “an impression, almost a belief, gains ground that for military, economical, and political reasons the success of the North is doubtful.” Robert E. Lee had not been seeing visions when he predicted that one more firm, aggressive—and this time, successful—Confederate invasion of the North might be all that was needed to bring the Lincoln administration to the negotiating table. “No bright spark seems to arise,” lamented a soldier in the 142nd Pennsylvania on May 21st. “All is dark and gloomy.”23

  A great deal of the trouble lay at the very top of the Federal Army. At the beginning of the war, the 30,000 militia and volunteers who rallied around Washington to defend the capital had marched confidently into Virginia, only to have their noses bloodied in an embarrassingly lame defeat at a meandering little creek called Bull Run. Determined to put this host back on its feet, Lincoln called in the one man whom Winfield Scott had rated even above Robert E. Lee, the talented and elegant George Brinton McClellan. Born to an upper-crust Philadelphia family, second in his class at West Point, tapped for staff service with Scott in Mexico and as the junior member of the military commission sent to Europe in 1855 to report on the state of the European armies, and then (after leaving the army in 1857) vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, McClellan glittered as he rode into the dispirited army camps around Washington in the late summer of 1861. He sorted them into brigades, divisions, and corps, trained and drilled them, and gave them, on the French pattern, their own name—the Army of the Potomac. “McClellan had the most extraordinary results in the organization and discipline of his troops,” wrote an appreciative Pennsylvania politico, Alexander McClure, “and there was every reason to believe that the Army of the Potomac was a most efficient military force, and that it had the one commander best fitted to lead it to victory.” And the army, in turn, adored McClellan. “He was one of those few men in history who had the faculty of making his men love him,” remembered a veteran of a New York regiment. He became “the idol of the old soldiers,” who regarded him as “the greatest strategist the war brought to the front.”24

  The problem was, as a soldier in the 71st Pennsylvania afterward reflected, that McClellan “loved the army better [than] he loved the Cause … which he was engaged for.” McClellan could not contain a silver-spoon contempt for Lincoln as “the original gorilla” and “an idiot,” and for the Republicans in Congress and the cabinet as “imbeciles.” And as a Democrat, he displayed only lukewarm interest in emancipation, and picked quarrels with Lincoln over the political loyalties of the officers appointed to corps command. “You know McClellan as well as I do,” wrote one unsympathetic officer to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, “& I will not describe him further than to say that Jeff Davis has not a greater repugnance to, nor less confidence in, Republicans than has McClellan.” And there would always remain some question about the extent to which McClellan allowed his military judgments to be influenced by his political ones, especially after he took it upon himself to use the prisoner of war exchange system to invite clandestine negotiations for peace between himself and the Richmond government. The Young Napoleon might have gotten away with more of this, had he not turned out to be considerably less talented as a field commander in battle than he was as an organizer and cheerleader. The campaign he designed against Richmond in the spring of 1862 failed nervelessly in the face of Robert E. Lee’s aggressive hounding. Althoug
h McClellan partially redeemed himself by cornering Lee at Antietam, he failed to pursue Lee with anything that looked like eagerness, and balked for a month after Lincoln issued the preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation before publishing it as a general order to the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln finally sacked him in November 1862.25

  But the Army of the Potomac never lost its affection for McClellan. “Little Mac,” recalled the veterans of the 42nd Pennsylvania, “possessed the hearts of nine out of every ten.” Nor did political bickering over emancipation in the army cease with McClellan’s departure. The ineffectiveness of the army “lies in the personal rivalries and more than doubtful policies of some of its … corps commanders,” complained the abolitionist newspaper Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times. These McClellanites “had a sort of fealty to McClellan … and would not permit a new man to rise to glory over his eclipse.” One captain in the 2nd Wisconsin remembered that “many officers talked open treason, while in the ranks men reviled the Government, and nearly all seemed to agree that the war for the Union had degenerated into a ‘war for the nigger.’ ” Lincoln hoped to placate the McClellanites by appointing as McClellan’s successor a close friend of McClellan’s, Ambrose Burnside. But Burnside nearly bled the army to death at Fredericksburg, and unforgiving McClellan loyalists turned on Burnside as though the two men had never known each other. Since appeasement didn’t work, Lincoln turned next to the most bitter anti-McClellanite general in the army, the maniacally ambitious Joseph Hooker, who “was violent in his denunciation of McClellan” and had grown conveniently ardent in support of emancipation.26

  Hooker was a loud-mouthed bruiser with blazing bright eyes who projected a confidence which he did not, in the hollow core of his personality, really have. He promised to do as McClellan had not done, and force Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to “either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.” Instead, Hooker allowed Lee to swing a gigantic left hook (in the form of Stonewall Jackson’s corps) through the tangled woods around Chancellorsville and send one of Hooker’s corps fleeing in confusion. He then abandoned a key high-ground position in the center of his defensive line at Hazel Grove, only to suffer a concussion when a solid ball fired from Confederate artillery that had occupied Hazel Grove smashed into a porch pillar Hooker had been leaning against. Without even bothering to call up two unused corps of his army, the dazed and unhinged Hooker decreed yet another retreat. At once, the same knives which had been used on Burnside were turned on him. Darius Couch, the Army of the Potomac’s senior corps commander, resigned in disgust over Hooker’s failure, and the McClellanites, who “had against him the double grievance of his military judgments and of his political opinions,” agitated for his “overthrow.” Lincoln heard enough lewd rejoicing over Hooker’s downfall that he had to warn him “that some of your corps and Division Commanders are not giving you their entire confidence.” Even the men in the ranks of the 2nd Rhode Island hissed at Hooker as he rode past on the line of march, calling out, “Pull the Chancellorsville Murderer off that horse.”27

  One could, in fact, plot the political loyalties of the seven infantry corps of the Army of the Potomac on a rough line which, corps by corps and commander by commander, ran from the most pro-McClellan and anti-emancipation to the most pro-Lincoln and antislavery. Chief among the McClellanites was Winfield Scott Hancock, “one of McClellan’s devoted friends and admirers,” who inherited command of the 2nd Corps from the departing Darius Couch. John Sedgwick, commanding the 6th Corps, fell in behind Hancock, affirming that “I mean to stand or fall with McClellan”; Sedgwick even proposed passing the hat through the army to raise a “testimonial” to McClellan “to show that he still retains the love and confidence of the Army of the Potomac.” And at the top of the 5th Corps, McClellan’s fellow Philadelphian George Gordon Meade expressed “great confidence personally in McClellan—know him well—know he is one of the best men we have to handle large armies,” and was perfectly happy to “make terms of some kind with the South.” They were a crowd who frequented McClellan’s headquarters, where they “talked freely, abused the civil administration and drank champagne out of a wooden bucket.” Even on the division level, John Gibbon in Hancock’s 2nd Corps frankly admitted that he “was a pro-slavery man,” and in Sedgwick’s 6th Corps, William Newton likewise conceded that “in argument the south had the better side of it.” It was tempting for the McClellanites to imagine that they were the target of deep antislavery conspiracies: Hancock’s wife was convinced that the War Department was planting spies among her household help, and Edward Cross of the 5th New Hampshire, who commanded a brigade in the 2nd Corps, hotly resented Lincoln’s “attempt to make an abolition war,” and believed that “the Army is full of Abolition spies, under the guise of tract distributors, State Agents—chaplains, Sanitary Commission Agents” and “correspondents of the Abolition papers.”28

  On the other hand, the McClellanites did not entirely rule the roost in the army. Hooker succeeded in weeding out a number of McClellan’s favorites and replacing them with generals more favorable to the Lincoln administration. The commander of the 3rd Corps, the raffish New York ex-congressman Daniel Sickles, was a lifelong Democrat, but he also took a gratifyingly strong line on prosecuting the war. “The South must feel the overwhelming power of the Union,” Sickles insisted, “and when they are compelled to acknowledge its supremacy, they will lay down their arms and not until then.” Sickles was already “advocating the re-nomination and reelection of Abraham Lincoln” for 1864. Oliver Otis Howard, commanding the 11th Corps, was an ardent New England evangelical, an abolitionist, and a Republican. At the head of the 12th Corps, Henry Warner Slocum (although not exactly a friend of Joe Hooker’s) was also a Republican and also no friend of McClellan’s, and made his mark at West Point, “when it cost so much to do so,” by his “free expression of opinon … as an opponent of human slavery.” The “Hooker ring”—and especially its card-carrying Republican members—returned the paranoia of the McClellanites in spades. “There have been pro-slavery cliques controlling that army,” complained one Republican general, “composed of men who, in my opinion, would not have been unwilling to make a compromise in favor of slavery, and who desired to have nobody put in authority except those who agreed with them on that subject.” If these halfhearts had the chance, added George Templeton Strong, “they will all come together and agree on some compromise or adjustment, turn out Lincoln and his ‘Black Republicans’ and use their respective armies to enforce their decision North and South.”29

  Somewhere in the middle of the army’s political spectrum was John Fulton Reynolds and his 1st Corps. Reynolds was a Pennsylvania Democrat who had once compared Lincoln to a “baboon,” and believed that McClellan’s removal was “as unwise and injudicious as it was uncalled for.” Nevertheless, he was also a serious, unbending professional who, unlike McClellan, actually lived by the principle of “obedience to the powers that be.” Consequently, Reynolds, “almost alone of all the corps commanders, had not been to Washington to instruct the authorities there how to organize and to operate the Army of the Potomac,” and Reynolds’ staffer Joseph Rosengarten admired Reynolds’ policy of holding “stoutly aloof from all personal or partisan quarrels, and keeping guardedly free from any of the heart-burnings and jealousies that did so much to cripple the usefulness and endanger the reputation of many gallant officers.”30

  Moreover, Reynolds’ 1st Corps had originally been a component of the short-lived Army of Virginia, an alternative to the Army of the Potomac organized under the abolitionist Major General John Pope in 1862, and all three of Reynolds’ divisions were commanded by some of the Army’s most fervent abolitionists—Abner Doubleday, James S. Wadsworth, and John Cleveland Robinson. Wadsworth had actually been the Republican candidate in the New York gubernatorial race in 1862, only to be denounced by New York Democrats as a “malignant Abolition disorganizer”
and by George McClellan as “a pseudo-fanatic.” Doubleday, with a large Johnsonian face that sagged like a sinking battleship, had been a lieutenant in the tiny garrison of Fort Sumter when the Confederates bombarded the post into submission, and from the first he had expected that his antislavery credentials would guarantee a rise to the top of Lincoln’s army. What he discovered was (as his father had howled to the radical Republican senator Zachariah Chandler) that there were “not more than twenty avowed Republican Officers in the U.S. Army,” and none of them was going to be welcomed to senior command. “Slavery had so long dominated every thing with a rod of iron that … all the avenues of promotion in the army and navy, lay in that direction.” For the men in the ranks, “It is enough to make one sick, to see what fools we have for Generals,” wrote a soldier in Sickles’ 3rd Corps. “I am about tired of Generals who are too afraid to be conquered to fight hard to conquer.” A major in the 7th Ohio bewailed the “two years of marches, counter-marches, sieges, and battles” the Army of the Potomac had endured, with “but little territory … gained, and the possession of this little being constantly disputed by a well-organized and gallant” Confederate Army. From Lincoln’s perspective, “the army is one vast hot-bed of bickerings, heart-burnings and jealousies.” Marsena Patrick, the army’s provost marshal general, almost expected “that this Army will be broken up, that it is so thoroughly McClellan as to be dangerous.”31