The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  “Such a sight I shall never see again,” Colonel Charles Wainwright wrote in his journal. He saw tears; there was hardly a dry eye in the ranks. “Very many of the men wept like children, while others could be seen gazing after him in mute grief, one may almost say despair, as a mourner looks down into the grave of a dearly loved friend.”31

  At 2:00 in the afternoon McClellan paused to share this bittersweet good-bye with Nelly. “I am very well & taking leave of the men,” he wrote her. “I did not know before how much they loved me nor how dear they were to me. Gray haired men came to me with tears streaming down their cheeks. I never before had to exercise so much self control. The scenes of today repay me for all that I have endured.”32

  Whatever they might have thought of McClellan as a general, Wainwright believed that no one who saw him on this day “could help pronouncing him a good and great man: great in soul if not in mind.” And when McClellan rode past the Second Corps and galloped out of their sight for the last time, Francis Walker believed the romance of war was over for the Army of the Potomac.33

  McClellan left the next day believing they had relieved him from command “when the game was in my hands.”34 His onetime West Point classmate, John Gibbon, believed the effect “was that of applying brakes to a lightning express.”35

  The Confederates, who knew him so well, were glad to see him go. “We seemed to understand his limitations and defects of military character,” Henry Kyd Douglas said of him, “and yet we were invariably relieved when he was relieved, for we unquestionably always believed him to be a stronger and more dangerous man than anyone who might be his successor.”36 A Confederate soldier said, “We liked him because he made war like a gentleman: and we loved him for the enemies he had made!”37 Lee worried that one day if they kept making these changes in commanders they might find someone whom he didn’t understand.38

  Lincoln had at last been forced to give up on the auger too dull to dig. It was a pity; he had tried. A friend of both men, who knew them well and liked them equally, believed McClellan was “one of the most excellent and lovable characters I have ever met … patriotic in everything that he did, however he may have erred.”39

  But the Young Napoleon had been a victim of his own paranoia. He had failed to understand the rebel commanders in his front, who were his enemies. Perhaps worse, he had failed to understand Lincoln in his rear, who had been ready to be his friend.

  These failures brought him down, his hope of military glory forever blasted. If McClellan could fail, some of his classmates must have wondered, then who of them could succeed?

  Caught

  in the Rain

  The rain had already been more than slightly overdone along the banks of the Rappahannock River by the early morning of April 15, 1863. It was a damned nuisance, for Major General George Stoneman desperately wished to cross the swollen river and couldn’t.

  When Stoneman went to bed the night before it had been a magnificent evening and his troopers were in high spirits, ready for tomorrow’s grand adventure. Tomorrow was to have brought a crossing of the river and the biggest, most important Union cavalry movement of the war. Instead it had brought rain—torrents of rain. By midmorning, the Union cavalry was awash in water several inches deep. They slogged through it toward the crossings, but the river had risen as if a dam had burst. The fords were swimming. What Stoneman needed was Noah’s ark. There would be no crossing that day, or for many days to come.1

  Brigadier General John Buford gazed out into the pouring rain and thought the land had become a sea. He had never seen anything like it. Rations became waterlogged as soon as they were issued. It was as though nature or something or somebody was doing it to them on purpose, in monstrous combination against their epic advance.2

  Within a few days the mud had become “oceanic,” and the troopers were saying that April deserved “to be classed among the Weeping Sisters.”3 Every rivulet was swimming, the roads were next to impossible for horses or pack mules—forget the heavy stuff, such as artillery and wagons. The only direction of advance seemed to be straight down. The river was out of its banks, and the railroad bridge had been partly carried away. It was one of the most violent rainstorms Stoneman had ever experienced. And more was being carried away than just railroad bridges. His brilliant cavalry movement was awash in the flood.4

  Nothing much surprised the quiet, stolid Stoneman anymore. He had seen just about everything in the way of weather in the nearly two decades since he had left West Point in 1846 and gone for a soldier. But he had a naturally sad-eyed look, and the rain was doing nothing to lighten that.

  His career in the old army had been on the whole distinguished. There had been a glitch here and there, but nothing to permanently mar his record or dim his promise. Despite his quiet ways, he had been considered one of the best company commanders in the crack Second Cavalry Regiment, a highly accomplished officer with a knack for commanding men. Richard W. Johnson, a fellow officer, praised him as “a fine soldier, strict in discipline and exemplary in habits.” Another officer remembered him from his earlier service in the First Dragoons: “Indeed I may say with truth, [he] was the most popular officer in it [the regiment].” He affected a brusque exterior and was a hard disciplinarian, but his soldiers had confidence in him.5

  After Sumter, Stoneman courageously defied Major General David Twiggs when that old campaigner, then in command of U.S. forces in Texas, threw in with the Confederacy. Refusing to surrender his command, Stoneman led it north to fight for the Union. His classmate George McClellan thought well of him, and made him his chief of cavalry in the Peninsula campaign.

  The Union cavalry hadn’t amounted to much in those early days of the war. It was certainly no match for the skilled and hard-riding Confederate cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart. But all that had changed. When Major General Joe Hooker succeeded Ambrose Burnside following the Union calamity at Fredericksburg in the winter just ended, he had taken dramatic steps to make something of the cavalry. He reorganized it into a separate corps, beefed it up to twelve thousand men and thirteen thousand horses, and put Stoneman in command.6 Now, in the spring of 1863, the Union cavalry outnumbered Stuart’s horsemen three to one. No army had ever seen such an impressive array of men and horses. It had to be taken seriously, and so did its commander.

  “Stoneman we believe in,” one of his officers, Captain Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said. “We believe in his judgment, his courage and determination. We know he is ready to shoulder responsibility, that he will take good care of us and won’t get us into places from which he can’t get us out.”7

  Stoneman in 1863 looked much as he had when he and Tom Jackson were the two most reclusive roommates at West Point, except he was nearly two decades older. He was still lithe, severe, gristly, and sanguine—but for those sad, doelike eyes. Perhaps the sad eyes, which one reporter said “flashed even in repose,”8 had to do in part with the painful fact that despite being the Union’s number one cavalryman, he could never seem to sit comfortably in the saddle. It hurt when he rode; he had a devastating case of hemorrhoids.9

  And right now he also had this endless rain.

  Joe Hooker had big plans for Stoneman and his cavalry in the spring campaign he was about to launch against Robert E. Lee. Indeed Stoneman had the most critical role. He would be the first to move. Much was riding on his getting across the Rappahannock. Hooker’s plan was to send the cavalry—virtually all of it—across the upper fords of the river on April 13, two weeks before the projected main offensive. Stoneman would swarm over Lee’s lines of communication between Fredericksburg and Richmond, raiding and raising hell all across the Confederate rear and flank. This theoretically would force Lee to fall back on Richmond, at which point Hooker would pounce across the river on what would then be the rebel rear with the full might of what he called “the finest army on the planet.”10 Lee would be crushed in a vise.

  It was an excellent plan, and its success was riding on Stoneman. The raid in Lee’s rear had
to succeed. Hooker sent Stoneman orders on April 12 full of stirring admonitions. Stoneman was to march at 7:00 A.M. the next day. He was to cross the river with his entire command, less one brigade, and throw his cavalry between Lee and Richmond, “isolating him from his supplies, checking his retreat, and inflicting on him every possible injury which will tend to his discomfiture and defeat.” The raiders were to destroy railroad bridges, trains, cars, storage depots, and telegraph lines. They were to harass the retiring enemy “day and night on the march and in camp unceasingly. If you cannot cut off from his columns large slices … you will not fail to take small ones. Let your watchword be fight, and let all your orders be fight, fight, fight, bearing in mind that time is as valuable to the general as the rebel carcasses.”11 It was an order with “the ring of bright metal in it,” one of Stoneman’s troopers admitted.12

  Stoneman ordered the march to begin the next day. One brigade would cross the night before at about midnight, to clear out enemy resistance across the river. The three divisions would then cross, two at one ford, the third at another.13

  The corps began to move toward the fords as scheduled. It mustered that day 9,895 cavalry, and four batteries of horse artillery with 427 men and twenty-two three-inch rifled guns. The riders were stocked with six days’ rations and five days’ short forage, transported on the horses of the mounted men, on pack mules, and in wagon supply trains that were following the command to the fords. Another 275-wagon supply train was bringing up another three days’ subsistence and three days’ short forage. These were to be issued the night of the fourteenth, just before the crossing.14

  Everything was ready. Stoneman on the afternoon of the fourteenth advised Hooker that his command would be across the river before daylight the next day.15

  Then the rains came, and the advance ground to a waterlogged halt at the river’s edge.

  The waiting troopers knew little of the master strategy of the campaign, only that the crossing had been given up on account of the storm, that they were surrounded by water, that the rain was soaking everything and everybody, and nothing was done all day.

  “What are we waiting for?” Henry Lee Higginson asked himself. For the river to fall, he fancied. But he wasn’t sure; the details of the campaign had been kept secret.16

  It rained the next day, the next, and the next, and the cavalry waited, the army waited, the campaign waited, and the enemy waited—the latter with a wry smile. By now Stoneman’s role in whatever movement Hooker was planning was fully known to Lee as a matter of course. Even the rebel pickets seemed well informed. They sniggered and called over the river, asking what was the matter with the cavalry that it didn’t cross.17

  At first Hooker wasn’t anxious. He still believed on the fifteenth that Stoneman had crossed the river before the deluge. He believed that, even though he could personally see nothing beyond his own doorstep because of the storm. The campaign would not be seriously set back as long as Stoneman had reached his position. But Stoneman hadn’t reached his position, and Hooker soon learned that all the streams were swimming, the mud had halted the artillery, and his spring campaign was on indefinite hold.18

  To Abraham Lincoln in Washington the situation had the ring of depressing familiarity. “The rain and mud, of course, were to be calculated upon,” he wired Hooker. “General S. is not moving rapidly enough to make the expedition come to anything. He has now been out three days, two of which were unusually fair weather, and all three without hinderance from the enemy, and yet he is not 25 miles from where he started.” The president knew what that portended. “I greatly fear,” he said, “it is another failure already.”19

  Hooker was no longer sanguine either. He was upset, but not—at least not yet—with Stoneman. While his cavalry commander’s failure to cross the river and move with the necessary celerity was regrettable, Hooker assured the president he could find nothing in Stoneman’s conduct calling for censure. “We cannot control the elements,” he shrugged.20

  As Stoneman continued to hope for a letup in the weather and for a fordable ford, Hooker went back to the drawing board. The rain had ruined his original strategy, and in fact was ruining all plans. He would have to go ahead without Stoneman. As soon as possible he would march three of his infantry corps upstream beyond the Confederate left and start them across the river. If well masked, this movement would put him on Lee’s flank. To help mask it, he would start one corps across the river at Fredericksburg to attack Lee’s center. Properly executed, these two movements in tandem would catch the Confederates between two grinding forces of infantry, each as large as Lee’s entire army.21

  Despite the unfortunate rain delay, Hooker still planned for Stoneman to hurl his cavalry between Lee and Richmond in consort with the movement of the main army. He was not looking for a moment’s delay. Just as soon as Stoneman was able to cross he wanted him to make his raid; he was still counting on it. He sent Stoneman revised orders: After crossing the Rappahannock and then the Rapidan, he was to subdivide his command and send them on different missions, to meet again later on the line of general operations. They were to “dash off to the right and left, and inflict a vast deal of mischief, and at the same time bewilder the enemy as to the course and intentions of the main body.” He ordered Stoneman to move without artillery if necessary. The important thing was to take the rebels by surprise. “You have officers and men in your command,” he reminded him, “who have been over much of the country in which you’re operating; make use of them. You must move quickly and make long marches.”22

  But still the rain fell.

  It wasn’t until April 27 that it stopped at last, the sun came out, the flood began to recede, and the roads to harden.23 It was about time, thought Charles Francis Adams, Jr. He was sick of running around looking for a ford. He had begun to doubt whether they would ever get across that miserable river.24 On the twenty-eighth they finally did, two weeks late and no longer deluded that they were taking anybody by surprise.25

  When they were across, Stoneman called a midnight meeting of his regimental commanders. He told them they had dropped in that region of country like a shell, and that he intended “to burst it in every direction, expecting each piece or fragment would do as much harm and create nearly as much terror as would result from sending the whole shell, and thus magnify our small force into overwhelming numbers.”26

  “Where then, General?” Lieutenant Colonel Hasbrouck Davis of the Twelfth Illinois Cavalry asked Stoneman at about 3:00 in the morning, seeking specifics.

  “God only knows,” answered Stoneman. “If you succeed in getting down the Peninsula, you had better continue on, if possible, and report to Gen. Rufus King at Yorktown. It will be a tough proposition at best, and I fear you won’t make the trip without some pretty hard fighting.”

  Ten minutes later “boots and saddles” roused them all; Stoneman’s raid was about to begin.27

  Stoneman sent Brigadier General William W. Averell with his division, one brigade, and six pieces of artillery toward Culpeper Court House. Stoneman, with his hemorrhoids, would ride with Brigadier General David McM. Gregg’s division and Brigadier General John Buford’s Reserve Brigade toward Raccoon Ford on the Rapidan. After the Rappahannock there was still one more river to cross.

  At the Rapidan they stripped down to what they could carry on their horses—three days’ subsistence, three days’ short forage, and forty rounds of carbine and twenty rounds of pistol cartridges per trooper. The only things going along that had wheels were the artillery caissons.28 By this time the waterlogged troopers were ready to attack the first thing they saw. David Gregg reported that “every officer and enlisted man of my command seemed to have but one single desire of inflicting the greatest amount of injury upon the enemy without violating any of the recognized rules of civilized warfare.”29

  The first thing they saw was the Virginia countryside. “A very beautiful country indeed …” Henry Lee Higginson noted as they rode along toward Culpeper. “The grass is
wonderfully green, the slopes from hill to valley are beautiful.… The houses are quite fine and very stately.”30 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who as one of the Massachusetts Adamses was accustomed to beautiful country and stately homes, was seeing the same thing his friend Higginson was seeing; but he was unimpressed. “The country looks old, war-worn and wasted.…” he sniffed. “Most of the houses along the road were deserted and apparently had been so for a long time. Some of them were evidently old Virginia plantation houses, and once had been aristocratic and lazy. Now they are pretty thoroughly out of doors.”31

  For the next nine days Stoneman’s cavalry ranged more or less at will behind enemy lines raising havoc, blowing things up, felling trees, rolling logs, jamming fords, cutting transportation lines—ruining anything that might be useful to an enemy—and being themselves exceedingly uncomfortable.32 There was a lot of dozing on the run—“stealing poor sleep,” the troopers called it. They soon ran out of subsistence and had to forage for food, living on anything they could find in the country, cooking it when they had time, eating it raw when they didn’t.33 For most of the time there were no fires, no bugle calls, and all orders were delivered sotto voce.34

  They marched night after night over paths that could hardly be called roads. And it was raining again, drenching them as they rode. It was so dark that Captain J. M. Robertson of the artillery couldn’t see his horse’s ears, and the mud was so deep that his mount could pull its hooves from the sucking muck only with difficulty.35

  For Charles Francis Adams, Jr., being a cavalryman was boiling down to one fundamental thing. “I have but one rule,” he wrote his mother, “a horse must go until he can’t be spurred any further, and then the rider must get another horse as soon as he can seize on one.”36 Confederate Brigadier General W.H.F. (Rooney) Lee, commander of the Confederate cavalry that was trying to deal with this invasion, began to notice that Stoneman was “taking all the horses in his reach.”37