Alter ego Hancock aired his political ambitions fifteen years after the Civil War. He was the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1880, but he lost the general election that fall to another former Union officer, James A. Garfield. Hancock remained in the Army for the next six years, until his death in 1886.
Ironically, the original Winfield Scott had also dallied in politics: In 1852, the hero of the Mexican War had run for president as the Whig Party’s nominee, only to be defeated by Franklin Pierce, a very junior and undistinguished officer under Scott’s command in Mexico fifteen years earlier. Jefferson Davis, incidentally, served as Pierce’s secretary of war.
The venerable General in Chief Scott survived his retirement through the Civil War years, living until 1866. While chafing at his inactive seat on the sidelines, Scott nonetheless could take pride in seeing his Anaconda Plan pretty much followed by the Union to ultimate, albeit costly, triumph. That strategy called for Union control of the Mississippi Valley (thus splitting the Confederacy in two), coupled with a suffocating naval blockade of the South’s Atlantic ports. Scott lived long enough to write his memoirs and to send a copy to Grant, also once a junior officer with Scott in Mexico. The book was inscribed in touching terms by “Ole Fuss and Feathers.” His personal note to Grant was, “From the oldest general to the greatest general.”
Cat Parties Ended
A TALE PAINFUL TO RELATE, BUT NECESSARY TO COMPLETE THE RECORD IN ANY case, is that of the unnamed cat that paid a visit one day to Captain Isaac Coles of Virginia while he was sitting on his bunk and conversing with a compatriot from Kentucky. It was the fall of 1864, and Coles and his partner were prisoners.
Their quarters, located at Hilton Head, South Carolina, consisted of a long structure with rows of bunks on each side and plank tables set up in the middle aisle for meals. Rations had been short and unappealing in their Yankee-operated prison camp, and the two men were discussing the food and the long time—forty or fifty days at least—since they had had a decent meal. They were speaking rather pathetically of “our reduced state and of our longings to satisfy the very humble cravings of the inner man.”
And then along came General John Foster’s cat (it was presumably the Union commandant’s cat since the next day he issued orders to lock up any and all other pets within sight or hearing).
Coles later wrote in good humor of his wartime adventures, his account appearing in War Recollections of Confederate Veterans of Pittsylvania County (Virginia). On this particular occasion, “We were nearly desperate,” he recalled, and “anything would have been joyfully tried that looked like meat.” Their stomachs were “gnawing and begging” and were by no means to be ignored when, he said, “like an answer to prayer,” along came this “big, fat cat” into the barracks, “daintily tripping in, straight up to us, fawning at our feet.”
The rest would be history—cat history. The starving prisoners reacted immediately: “My boyish antagonism to the feline kind vanished, and I hailed her as Manna from heaven, or quail, or what you will—it certainly looked like Providence to me as surely providing for us as for His other children in the wilderness.”
The two men glanced one to another—“He, too, had a look of inspiration— and so from common impulse we acted.”
Perhaps “the fair visitoress” never quite knew exactly what hit her. We can hope that her end was mercifully quick. She certainly never knew the indignities that came next. “How joyously we skinned and dressed her! We surmised she was General Foster’s pet. We hoped so!”
No time was wasted: “We parboiled and stewed her up, no pepper nor salt. She was deliciously fat, she must have been a notoriously fine mouser.”
The entire culinary event unfolded without a hitch. “She required no grease, we baked our corn meal and could scarcely contain ourselves until the feast was ready. And it was a king’s dish indeed, a whole pan full, two whole yawning stomach fulls and to spare! We invited several to dine with us.”
Not a scrap was left, and afterward Coles and his partners were quite ready to declare “the cat as an article of food was misunderstood, that it was wholesome and delicious.”
The only regret was when General Foster ordered “all dogs and cats locked up next day.” There went any hopes for “another cat party.”
The Fighting McCooks
SEVENTEEN OF THE MENFOLK OF THE AMAZING MCCOOKS OF OHIO SERVED THE Union, all but one as Army men and five as generals. Patriarch of the clan was Daniel McCook, born in 1798 in Pennsylvania and later removed to Carrollton, Ohio. In his sixties by the time of the Civil War, he saw eight sons, a brother, and six nephews step forward to serve the Union cause. Three of his sons were killed—as was Daniel McCook himself.
Considered too old for duty in the field, the eager volunteer Major Daniel McCook had been allowed to serve as a paymaster of volunteers far behind normal Union lines. But even homebound troops were called out to oppose John Hunt Morgan’s raid into Ohio in midsummer of 1863. In the running clashes that ensued, the eldest of all the “Fighting McCooks” was mortally wounded July 20, 1863 near Buffington Island, Ohio. He died the next day.
His son Daniel Jr., a law partner to William Tecumseh Sherman in civilian life, became a brigade commander—one of three McCook brothers to reach general’s rank. He fought at Chickamauga and Chattanooga, among other battles, then in the Atlanta campaign suffered a fatal wound of his own as his brigade led a costly charge ordered by General Sherman at Kennesaw Mountain. This Dan McCook received his brigadier’s star on July 16, 1864, and died the next day.
His two brothers also reached general’s rank. Both Alexander and Robert were veterans of the fighting in the war’s western theater.
Alexander survived the war, served in the U.S. Army until 1895, and retired as a major general, although his Civil War reputation was tarnished by the Union defeat at Chickamauga. There he and his command had joined overall Union commander William S. Rosecrans in retreat from the battlefield.
Robert L. McCook, Alexander’s brother, was not fortunate enough to survive the fighting, dying a controversial death. Laid low by illness, he nonetheless was on a scouting foray in a horse-drawn ambulance when, accosted by a band of Southern irregulars near Decherd, Tennessee, he was shot while on his sick bed, it is said. Fatally injured, he died the next day. Many of his Northern countrymen felt his death was outright murder rather than an act of war.
Others among the Fighting McCooks of Ohio included Cousin Edward, fourth Union general in the clan and still another veteran of service with Sherman and U. S. Grant in the war’s west. Also an attorney before the war, Edward McCook took part in George Stoneman’s raid into the Atlanta area, his command taking significant casualties before returning to Union lines. He also joined in James Wilson’s 1864 raid into Georgia and Alabama that resulted in the capture of Selma.
A war survivor, Edward McCook later served as governor of the Colorado Territory and as an envoy to the future state of Hawaii. He built a postwar fortune in business ventures that included “telephone companies in Europe,” noted Stewart Sifakis in his Who Was Who in the Civil War.
There also was Cousin Anson—a brigadier general as well. As an officer in the 2nd Ohio, he traveled east to fight at First Bull Run (a battle proving fatal to another cousin in the same regiment, probably Private David McCook, a hospital guard), then returned to the western theater, where he served quite honorably at Perryville, Murfreesboro, Tullahoma, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. Late in the war he commanded a newly formed regiment back east in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. A war survivor also, he returned to the practice of law and served as a Republican congressman.
The only known sailor among all the McCooks of Ohio was Roderick, born in 1839 and an Annapolis graduate. He served as a line officer in the Atlantic Blockading Squadron and commanded a battery in the naval assault of 1862 against New Bern, North Carolina. Near war’s end, he also took part in the Union’s amphibious operations against Fort Fisher at the mouth of the Cape Fear
River in North Carolina. Illness then forced him to accept a postwar naval career of lighthouse duty.
Sidling Down to Richmond
“I FEEL AS CERTAIN OF CRUSHING LEE AS I DO OF DYING,” ULYSSES S. GRANT IS SAID to have declared in those dark days of 1864 when his strategy of bludgeoning Robert E. Lee into submission was taking terrible toll of Grant’s own forces.
Not only were the casualties cause for vilification in the North, behind Grant’s back, but in Lee he faced a legend pumped larger than life by even the Northern press. And yet the dogged, newly emplaced commander of the Union armies was undismayed.
As a fellow West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican War, Grant felt it was to his advantage to have known Lee the man and U.S. Army officer before they were fated to become enemies locked in titanic struggle.
“The natural disposition of most people,” wrote Grant later, “is to clothe a commander of a large army whom they do not know with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army, for instance, and most of the press of the country clothed General Lee with just such qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this.”
Refusing to bow to Lee the legend, Grant slipped and sidled in one lateral move after another in the spring of 1864, from one costly battle to another— from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor, and finally to Petersburg. “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” he said at one point. He settled in the end for his siege of Petersburg, the vital rail hub just below Richmond, a siege that lasted until early 1865—followed quickly by Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
If Grant thought Lee was “mortal,” he also viewed the Confederate strategist as “a large, austere man, and I judge difficult of approach to his subordinates.” In the “sidling” campaign of 1864 marked by staggering Union casualties, Grant felt his “austere” opponent actually enjoyed certain advantages.
The Union might have had superior numbers, but Lee was defending a familiar countryside: “Every stream, every road, every obstacle to the movement of troops and every natural defense was familiar to him and his army.” Lee also had the support of local citizens who furnished “accurate reports of our every move.” And Lee had “a railroad at his back” and needed no rear guard.
So towering was Lee’s reputation when Grant came from the West to take over the war effort, Grant noted also, “It was not an uncommon thing for my staff officers to hear from Eastern officers, ‘Well, Grant has never met Bobby Lee yet.’”
But then Grant did, and even the ordinary soldier of the South could see the difference.
“Surprise and disappointment were the prevailing emotions,” recalled one Confederate veteran of Grant’s “sidling” campaign in 1864, “when we discovered after the contest in the Wilderness, that General Grant was not going to retire behind the river and permit General Lee to carry on a campaign against Washington the usual way, but was moving to the Spotsylvania position instead.”
Usually, added Sergeant Major George Cary Eggleston of Lampkin’s Virginia Battery, the Union fought a battle, retired, obtained a new commander, then had to deal with a fresh Confederate offensive. Not so with Grant, who simply shifted position and spoiled to fight again.
By the time of Cold Harbor, “we had begun to understand what our new adversary meant…[that] the era of experimental campaigns against us was over; that Grant was not going to retreat; that he was not to be removed from command because he had failed to break Lee’s resistance; and that the policy of pounding had begun, and would continue until our strength would be utterly worn away.”
In short, added onlooker-participant Eggleston, “He intended to continue the plodding work till the task should be accomplished, wasting very little time or strength in efforts to make a brilliant display of generalship in a contest of strategic wits with Lee.”
Eggleston had it exactly right. In what some consider the first display of modern—or total war—Grant employed overwhelming resources to wear Lee down, press home his final campaign, and, within the year, win the war for the North. Or, as Lincoln would say, for an undivided Union.
Later, though, whatever he thought of Lee as man or legend, it would largely be Grant’s intervention that would derail a move to try Lee for treason.
Friendly Boost Given
FEW REPORTERS COULD EVER CLAIM SUCH A HELPFUL SOURCE, A FRIEND IN COURT, as the contact that Harry E. Wing developed inside the Lincoln administration.
Wing, a law school graduate, had served as a color corporal with the 27th Connecticut from September 1862 until the end of that year, when a wound suffered at Fredericksburg drummed him out of the Union Army. He had previously reported for the New Haven Palladium, and now, taking up residence in Washington, he began reporting on capital affairs, first for the Norwich Bulletin (also in Connecticut) and then for the New York Tribune.
He wanted action, however, and he persuaded the Tribune to assign him as a courier for the paper’s reporters accompanying the Federal Army of the Potomac. That job led quickly to new status as a war correspondent, but he still was the “new boy” of the crowd at the time of the great Battle of the Wilderness in the spring of 1864. As low man on the seniority list, he carried the pooled dispatches back to the nearest telegraph station, and that journey took him through the war-torn territory of northern Virginia, which was subject to the unpredictable meanderings of John S. Mosby’s guerrilla band.
Indeed, Wing was chased by Rebs of some kind, then held up by Confederate cavalrymen before finally reaching a Union camp boasting a telegraph unit. It was restricted for military use, but Wing managed to inform Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that he had the first news from the first day of battle at the Wilderness.
Stanton of course wanted to see the story, but Wing kept insisting it should go out to his newspaper as well. Never one to sit on his temper, Stanton ordered Wing arrested. It was at this stage that word of the tempest reached Abraham Lincoln in the White House.
Far more agreeable, he not only overruled Stanton, but he sent a train for reporter Wing. The two met at 2:00 a.m. in the White House, with Wing providing a full verbal report of all that he had seen and heard during the crucial day of battle. Lincoln was moved to kiss the journalist when he also conveyed a personal message from U. S. Grant (just beginning his ultimately successful “sidling” campaign of 1864 against Robert E. Lee) that there was no reason to turn back despite the heavy Union casualties.
Lincoln now told Wing to allow the Associated Press to share in the story, the only account of the battle to reach official Washington so far. Still Wing’s friend in court, Abe Lincoln also furnished the reporter with an escort allowing him to retrieve a horse he had hidden in a thicket while escaping from Confederate raiders. Wing remained a war correspondent until Appomattox, then became co-publisher of the Litchfield (Connecticut) Enquirer and, later in life, a minister.
“Down, You Fool!”
FOR SUPREME COURT JUSTICE OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR., SEPTEMBER 13 WAS the day on which for many years he made an annual pilgrimage. Every year he left his workplace, the nation’s highest court, to trek to Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac. The date was a birthday, and the man he came to memorialize with flowers in hand was his divisional commander at one point during the Civil War, Major General John Sedgwick.
Appointed to his bench seat in 1902, Holmes served until retirement in 1932 and died in 1935. Holmes today is recalled as a creature of the twentieth century. We tend to forget that he was born in 1841, that he was in his twenties during the Civil War, and that he indeed did serve in the war.
Not only did he serve, but he fought at Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville; he was wounded three times and at Antietam left for dead. His father, the famous New England author-poet, then published the personal story (“My Hunt After ‘The Captain’”) of searching out his badly wounded son after receiving word that he had been shot in the
neck. Young Captain Holmes had been taken into a home in Hagerstown, Maryland, for his immediate care and treatment, and several days passed before his father, a doctor, finally tracked him down on a train bound for Philadelphia— obviously, much recovered.
Fairly famous in those days were their greetings, one to another:
“How are you, Boy?”
“How are you, Dad?”
In his article for the Atlantic in December 1862, the elder Holmes was moved to point out how careful people of their time and social status were to hide strong personal emotion. “Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses,” wrote the Boston Brahmin.
His son, the young captain, was back in the field in short time; eventually he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. At the Battle of Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, he was wounded one more time—a nick in his heel that kept him from remaining with his 20th Massachusetts Regiment. Still recuperating, he was assigned duty as aide to Union General Horatio Wright, who in the spring of 1864 was in command of the 6th Corps as Ulysses S. Grant moved into position to squeeze both Petersburg and nearby Richmond in an inescapable vice.
While Grant was busy in that regard, however, and while Sherman marched on Atlanta in July, Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Early made his sudden dash with twelve thousand troops from the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland and drew up before Fort Stevens, a back door to Washington itself.
Since the nation’s capital was lightly defended at best, Wright’s 6th Corps hustled back from the Union lines outside Petersburg, traveling up the Potomac River by steamboat, and disembarking to a personal welcome by Abraham Lincoln himself. With Wright and his 6th Corps was the young Colonel Holmes. When Lincoln then visited Fort Stevens to see the front lines for himself, there was young Holmes again, assigned to escort the president. And when Lincoln impulsively stood up, his signatory top hat such an obvious target, shots rang out and Confederate rounds whizzed close by. The future Supreme Court justice wasted no time and minced no words as he pulled Lincoln down, while blurting, “Get down, you fool!”
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