The military censorship was suppressing the news of the losses at Fredericksburg; but the War Department was actually uninformed of the outcome of the engagement. From early morning until night, the President sat in suspense in the telegraph office. Burnside, with every one of his generals opposed to him, wanted to renew the assault. The uncertainty at the War Department lasted until the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The border town of Washington had access to firsthand information. On Sunday night, a steamer-load of officers and soldiers arrived from Aquia Creek—men who had been slightly wounded in the battle, who were able to walk, who were able to tell of the hopeless courage and the slaughter of the repeated assaults which Burnside had ordered on the Fredericksburg fortifications. That same evening, the correspondent, Henry Villard, reached Washington from the front. The censor refused to pass his dispatch to the New York Tribune, which Villard then represented. He sent it off by messenger on the night train, but the Tribune, in advance of confirmation, was afraid to print the full story, which told of the blundering command and the perilous situation of the army. Villard’s beat was wasted—a fate which frequently overtook early reports of bad news during the war. When his story was written, Villard went into Willard’s to get some supper, and, meeting Senator Henry Wilson, told him that Burnside was defeated. Wilson hurried to the White House. A little before ten o’clock, he came to the Tribune office to take Villard to the President. Still in his soiled campaign clothes, the young correspondent answered Lincoln’s anxious questions. He spoke of disaster to the army, if the attack were renewed. “I hope it is not so bad as all that,” the President said with a sad smile. Senator Wilson was pleased that Villard had spoken so frankly, and, though his report did not cause the Government to take action, Villard felt proud that he had performed a patriotic duty.
From the accounts of eyewitnesses, the Washington newspapers on Monday began to rumor defeat and fearful losses. On Tuesday, the whole Union learned that the battle of Fredericksburg had been a costly proof of Burnside’s incapacity for high command. More than twelve thousand Federal soldiers had been killed and wounded, and the Army of the Potomac had staggered back across the Rappahannock in retreat.
The Senate met, but had no heart to do business, and adjourned. The Republicans gathered in caucus, to air, apart from the Democrats, their criticisms of Lincoln and his Cabinet. At the wharves, the stir of trade ceased, as out of the Potomac mist moved the white and silent transports. Thousand after thousand, men littered the landings, like spoiled freight. First, the lesser injuries arrived; then, the more serious; at length, the frightful cases, the thigh amputations and the belly wounds.
At dawn, in the hospital lodged in the unsavory old Union Hotel in Georgetown, Miss Louisa M. Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, was aroused by a thundering knock. “They’ve come! they’ve come! hurry up, ladies—you’re wanted.” From the window, she saw forty wagons like market carts lining the dusky street. It was the moment for which, in her three days’ experience as an army nurse, she had longed. She had a romantic taste for heroism and “ghastliness“; and under her stout bodice beat a rebellious heart that longed for life and freedom. But, looking down at the sights before the hotel door, she wished for a moment that she were safe at home in Concord again.
In the damp corridors, the smell of wounds began to mingle with the odors of the kitchens, the washrooms and the stables. Some of the arriving guests stumbled in on rude crutches, while others were carried in men’s arms or on stretchers. They sat along the wall or lay on the floor of the main hall of the hotel, until the formalities of registration were accomplished and they were assigned to beds. Through coal hods, water pails, and teapots, Miss Alcott made her way downstairs, to her post in Ward Number One. The ancient label, “Ballroom,” was fastened on the door.
Forty beds had been prepared in that room. On many of them, men were lying in their dirty clothes. “Round the great stove was gathered the dreariest group I ever saw—ragged, gaunt and pale, mud to the knees, with bloody bandages untouched since put on days before; many bundled up in blankets, coats being lost or useless; and all wearing that disheartened look which proclaimed defeat, more plainly than any telegram of the Burnside blunder.” So Louisa Alcott took in the scene, as a nurse briskly put into her hands a basin and sponge, towels and a block of brown soap. It dawned on Louisa that she was expected to wash these soldiers. She was flabbergasted, but she was an intrepid woman, and could take a joke on herself. “I drowned my scruples in my wash-bowl,” she wrote, “clutched my soap manfully, and, assuming a business-like air, made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw. . . .” He was old and Irish, and soon they were both laughing. Louisa scrubbed with a good will after that: faces and necks and ears, breasts and shoulders and feet. The male attendants finished them off, and put them into bed.
The trays of bread, meat, soup and coffee were carried in. There was plenty of everything; for the matron was a motherly woman, and a shortage of food was not among this hospital’s deficiencies. When the dishes were cleared away, the dressings began. The surgeon whom Miss Alcott assisted was an expert. “He had served in the Crimea, and seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment; and, turning up his cuffs, whipped out a very unpleasant looking housewife, cutting, sawing, patching and piecing, with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress. . . .” The men, revived by rest and food, had begun to talk, but now the ballroom grew quiet. Amputations had been put off until the following day, and no ether was thought necessary. As the surgeons probed and sliced, sweat stood on the men’s foreheads and the beds shook with their agony. One or two Irishmen cursed, or “ordered the Virgin to stand by them.” For the most part, the silence was broken only by the doctors’ low requests for roller bandages, instruments or plaster.
Louisa Alcott had begun to be known as a writer of tales and poems. She had had no training as a nurse and these were the first wounds she had ever seen; but she possessed the qualifications which found favor with Miss Dix. She was thirty, strong and plain—a big, bashful woman, with dark eyes, and a yard and a half of brown hair bundled up in braids at the back of her head. Like the other inexperienced nurses, she was given to shedding tears, smoothing brows, singing lullabies and laying nosegays on pillows. But, if she was sentimental, she was also very jolly. There was something comical about “topsey-turvey Louisa,” armed with a bottle of lavender water, with which to besprinkle herself and the premises in a detestation of bad smells. She was the enemy of blue devils. She joked and gossiped, played games and recited bits from Dickens. Soon she was promoted to the post of night nurse, in charge of her ward in the lonely hours after the ringing of the nine o’clock bell, when the gas was turned low and the day nurses went off duty.
Nursing the soldiers was Miss Alcott’s great adventure. All night, she hovered “like a massive cherubim, in a red rigolette, over the slumbering sons of man.” Sometimes, hurried steps sounded overhead. Surgeons passed up, or men carried down a stretcher, whose occupant’s face was covered. Outside, the cold moonlight fell on the silent figures of the sentinels.
In this strange world where men clung to her for help and comfort, Louisa felt her generous heart expanding with affection for them all. Some she even kissed good-by—“well, why not?“—when they went off to regiment or convalescent camp. She noticed that John, a tall, noble-looking blacksmith, with a hole in his lung, used to watch her with a satisfied expression in his fine eyes. Sometimes, as she tidied the table by his bed, she felt him touch her gown. On the night that John was dying, she sat by his bed, holding his hand. Next morning, the watchman had to help her unlock the rigid fingers.
Miss Alcott cherished dreams of going to the front. She might have had a career like that of Clara Barton, who had crossed the swaying pontoon bridge to Fredericksburg under fire, and had a piece of her skirt shot away, as she stepped down. But in January, Louisa fell ill. Nights of wandering from the overheated ward to the freezing
halls had given her a bad cough. The sparse vegetarian fare on which Bronson Alcott had nurtured his children had been poor preparation for a diet of fried army beef. She had been little more than a month in the Union Hotel Hospital when they sent for her father. Miss Dix overwhelmed her with gifts: a basket full of bottles of wine, tea, medicine and cologne; a blanket and pillow; a fan and a Testament. Burning with fever, her great adventure over, Louisa suffered Bronson Alcott to lead her back to Concord. In the delirium of typhoid, she fancied that she had married a stout, handsome Spaniard in black velvet, with very soft hands.
After Fredericksburg, Burnside came to Washington in anguish of mind. He took on himself the full blame for his ill-judged attack; yet the responsibility fell heavily on the administration. Many believed that Burnside was a scapegoat, that his manly and disarming attitude had been assumed to protect the Government. The want of faith which had long been in evidence in Washington had crept insidiously throughout the country. In State after State, the autumn elections of 1862 had gone against the Republicans. The new disaster brought the administration, not only a fear of foreign intervention, but a dread that the Union was losing heart. The Cabinet appeared to be crumbling, as the press announced that Seward and Chase had both resigned.
The crisis was averted, and the two eminent secretaries still sat in the Cabinet meetings. Caleb B. Smith betook himself home to Indiana, attracting little attention by exchanging the post of Secretary of the Interior for that of judge of the circuit court. Before leaving Washington, Mrs. Smith, “a truly philanthropic lady,” took charge of organizing the Christmas dinners for the soldiers in the hospitals. Evergreens hung in the wards, and a long train of ambulances and wagons was loaded with the provisions donated by Mrs. Lincoln.
The burden of gloom and suffering dulled the holiday season. The only diversion was the fire at Ford’s Athenaeum on Tenth Street. Flaming high in a stormy sky, the conflagration illuminated the city. A gentleman claimed that he had read a newspaper on Capitol Hill by the light. Stanton had provided Washington with its first steam fire engine, with a crew of experienced men, but it bogged in the mud at the Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and the theatre burned to ruins. Fear of a raid of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry rose and died with the dying year; and the eggnogs of 1863 were swallowed with little merriment.
Burnside had come again to Washington, in consternation at a telegram from the President, advising him that there was a good reason for him not to order a movement without advising the Government. Recently, two brigadiers of the Army of the Potomac had obtained an interview with Lincoln—John Newton, a loyal Army officer from Virginia, who had worked on the fortifications, and John Cochrane, a former New York congressman. They had alarmed the President with stories of the demoralization of the troops. Lincoln repeated their report to Burnside, without mentioning the names of the two brigadiers. Burnside said that they should have been dismissed from the service, and Halleck agreed with him. Opposed by all his general officers in his desire to make another advance, convinced that neither Stanton nor Halleck had the confidence of the army or the country, Burnside was ready to resign. The command of the Army of the Potomac had unbalanced him, as well as McClellan, but Burnside’s obsession took the form, not of procrastinating and blaming the Government, but of planning to move his army at all hazards. At Fredericksburg, he had ordered Hooker, over that officer’s protests, to continue useless and costly assaults. Franklin was coming to the conclusion that Burnside was losing his mind.
The official New Year’s festivities at the White House took place in the midst of grave and painful perplexity. At noon, after the official calls, the gates were flung open, and the scuffle of the public reception began. In struggling installments, the crowd was admitted to the mansion, whose elegant carpets had been covered to protect them from the mud. In the midst of the melee in the Blue Room, Lincoln stood serene, but his eyes often looked over the heads of the greeters, as though they were fixed on something far away. He had a proclamation to sign, after the crowd was gone.
Vainly, the President tried to induce Halleck to go to Burnside’s headquarters at Falmouth on the Rappahannock, to investigate and give the deciding judgment. Halleck was miffed at the tone of Lincoln’s letter, which implied that he had failed in the discharge of his duties. He instantly offered to resign. The President withdrew the letter. Nothing was decided, and Burnside went back to his mutinous army at Falmouth. The soldiers, since Fredericksburg, had lost all confidence in their commander, and believed him marked for failure in any undertaking.
The Monitor floundered, and went down off Hatteras. From the Army of the Cumberland came word of a severe engagement at Murfreesboro', Tennessee. The Federal commander, General William S. Rosecrans, a former Army lieutenant of engineers who had won reputation in the fighting in the West, claimed a victory and was hailed as a hero; but the tale of dead and wounded silenced the brief clamor of rejoicing. The port of Galveston, which had been taken by the Federals, was recaptured by Confederate forces. Soon from the Mississippi the disheartening news was heard that Grant’s expedition against Vicksburg had failed.
McClellan arrived in Washington to give testimony before the Fitz-John Porter court-martial. Such crowds turned out to see him that it was difficult for him to pass from the courtroom to his hotel. The most popular song in the capital was “McClellan Again at the Head of his Men.” When it was sung in the music halls, every blue-coat in the audience sprang to his feet, with three times three and a tiger.
Desertions in the Army of the Potomac occurred at the rate of about two hundred a day. Many resulted from loss of morale and discontent over the Government’s delay in paying the troops. Other deserters belonged to a new class of soldiers, who had never had any morale to lose—the bounty jumpers, who had enlisted with the intention of seizing the first opportunity to run away, after pocketing the large State and local bonuses. In the face of all the disaffection, Burnside stubbornly persisted in a plan he had formed to cross the Rappahannock a few miles below Fredericksburg. The march began in a deluge of rain. The army—men, guns, wagons—stuck fast in the glutinous mud; and, as it struggled back into camp, Burnside’s reputation petered out to the sound of the nation’s bitter laughter. In agitation, Burnside journeyed again to Washington, with his resignation in his pocket. As an alternative, he had prepared an order dismissing the antagonistic generals of his command. It was a sweeping list—Hooker, Franklin, Newton, Cochrane, Baldy Smith, Sturgis and others. Lincoln accepted Burnside’s resignation. Late in January, the Chase interests had their way, and Hooker was placed in command of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker had been one of Burnside’s loudest critics, and he had voiced hostility to the Government, too, and talked of military dictatorship.
Two competent generals, outranking Hooker, were relieved. Washington would not see again the good old soldier, Edwin Sumner. He died on his way to take command of the Department of Missouri. McClellan’s friend, Franklin, whom Burnside accused of disobedience of orders at Fredericksburg, was severely censured by the Committee on the Conduct of the War. After months of waiting, Franklin would return to active service on the Southern coast, but he would not again receive a command commensurate with his abilities.
While the blond war god, Hooker, rode out on his milk-white horse, and the heart of the Union rose again with the rise of a new hero, a big, blowzy fellow in a gray suit was beginning to be known in the streets and the hospital wards of Washington. He had been one of a crowd of anxious people who rushed to the capital after Fredericksburg, as after every great battle of the Army of the Potomac. His brother, an officer in the Fifty-first New York, had been wounded, and he was seeking word of him. After a reassuring visit to Falmouth, he returned to linger in Washington, looking for an office. His life had given him a varied experience, though he had not made much of a success of anything. He had been a carpenter, a printer and a schoolteacher, as well as a newspaper editor and contributor. He had also published a thin, quarto volume of unconventional
verses, called Leaves of Grass. It had not sold well, and was said to be vulgar.
Even in the heterogeneous company of the capital, Walt Whitman had no counterpart. His scarlet face, bushy beard and widebrimmed sombrero gave him a delusively robust and rural aspect which caused one politician to tell him that he looked like an old Southern planter. Whitman’s home was in Brooklyn, and he loved the life of cities. Though he was stout and gray and slow-moving, with opaque, heavy-lidded eyes, he was only forty-three years old. A friend compared him to “some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand laborer of one kind or another . . .” The word grand, with its hint of apotheosis, betrays that the resemblance is not to be taken quite literally. In his youth, Walt had been a dandy. His rough garments were carefully selected. He never wore a tie; but his spotless shirt, with its open collar was Byronic rather than proletarian. There was a queer daintiness about this big, bluff man. He looked as though he had just taken a bath. He wore a flower or a green sprig in the lapel of his coat. His flesh was soft and rosy, like a woman’s.
Whitman had letters to important personages, but he did not find it easy to get a clerkship. While he waited, he lived in a miserable room in a tenement across from the Chase mansion, earning a little money by “hacking on the press,” and by copying in the Paymaster General’s office for a couple of hours each day. On the corner, by the big, five-story house at Fifteenth and F Streets, pale and tattered soldiers were always waiting. The paymaster’s office was at the top of the building; and cripples often labored in, faint from the long climb, only to find that there was some hitch in their papers and they could not get their money. It hurt Whitman, watching them from his desk by the window, to see their disappointment. In his strolls about Washington, he was impressed by the low, white buildings that housed thousands of suffering men. Soon, he started to visit the hospitals, to talk with the soldiers and give them little presents.
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