But Pickett’s charge failed. Lee, astride Traveller, found Pickett in the midst of the carnage.
“General Pickett,” he said, “place your division in the rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.”
“General Lee,” Pickett replied, “I have no division now.”
Lee seldom spoke of his invasion of the North in the months and years that followed. But he once speculated on the effect which Jackson’s death had on the outcome. “If I had had Stonewall Jackson with me,” he said, “so far as man can see, I should have won the battle of Gettysburg.”
Washington, July 1863
WALT WHITMAN was walking up Pennsylvania Avenue with bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup in his satchel. He was on his way to the Armory Hospital to bring refreshment to convalescent soldiers. He saw the tidings posted outside a newspaper office:
Glorious Victory for the Union Army!
Whitman was at first jubilant, but afterwards, when he learned the quantity of blood that had been spilled at Gettysburg, he was somber. Seven thousand men perished in the decisive battle of the Civil War. Tens of thousands more were wounded.
“I say stop this war, this horrible massacre of men!” he cried out.
Whitman had come to Washington the previous December in search of his brother, George, of the 51st New York Volunteers, who had been wounded in the bloodbath at Fredericksburg, where the Union commander, Ambrose Burnside, sent thousands of Union troops forward in a futile attempt to take the well-entrenched Confederate positions on Mayre’s Heights, to the west of the town. (“If there is a worse place than Hell,” Lincoln said after he learned of the débâcle, “I am in it.”) Whitman found his brother at Falmouth, alive and only slightly hurt. Afterwards he returned to Washington, where he took a room in a lodging house. He hoped to find work in one of the government departments. But although he had obtained, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, letters of recommendation, no job was forthcoming.
Whitman remained in the capital, earning a living as a copyist, and in his spare time nursing wounded soldiers. By far the worst cases he encountered were those in the Armory Hospital. “I am very familiar with this hospital,” Whitman said, “have spent many days & nights in it—have slept in it often—have seen many die here.” In the hospital he tended his “boys,” as he called them. He was pierced to the marrow by their courage, as well as by the “shining beauty” of their hair, “dampened with clots of blood.” “Poor fellows . . . too young they are, lying there with their pale faces and that mute look in their eyes. O how one gets to love them. . . .”
As much as the soldiers, President Lincoln cast a spell over Whitman. The poet liked to study the President’s face on summer afternoons, when Lincoln went out on horseback or for a drive in his barouche. “I see the President nearly every day,” he said. “We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.” The President’s face, he said, was that of “a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” Whitman told his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, that he thought Lincoln “a pretty big President—I realize here in Washington that it has been a big thing to have just kept the United States from being thrown down and having its throat cut.”
The President himself, riding out in the capital, could not have named the man with the florid face and baggy trousers who gazed at him in the street. Yet he knew him. His law partner, William Herndon, had a few years before purchased Leaves of Grass. One day, in the law office in Springfield, Lincoln took up the book. He read the poetry silently at first, afterwards aloud. “Time and again,” one of the clerks in the office recalled, “when Lincoln came in, or was leaving, he would pick [the book] up, as if to glance at it for only a moment, but instead he would often settle down in a chair and never stop reading aloud such verses or pages as he fancied.”
Whitman was the strangest of the prophets who arose at this time to interpret the meaning of the American free state. He professed himself a seer, a saviour, a demiurge: a revealer of mysteries, a sexual healer, a not minor divinity. He was the oracle who, through his “prophetic screams,” would give the United States a “translucent mould” in which it could realize its poetry.
I speak the password primeval. . . I give the sign of democracy. . . .
Whitman’s inspiration was not classic; there was in him nothing of the Greek instinct of compression, or tendency to purity of form. But he had done what no one else had yet been able to do.
He had found poetry in the American free state.
Everyone knew that the American free state was destitute of poetry. A “great void exists in the civilization over there,” Matthew Arnold said. There was in America, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong,” only a “commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” America, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, was “formless,” and had “no terrible & no beautiful condensation.” A democratic state, Alexis de Tocqueville maintained, was bound to be “less brilliant, less glorious” than an aristocratic one: aristocracy, he concluded, was “much more favorable to poetry.”
To the contrary, Whitman argued, America, too, possessed poetry; it lay in its citizens. There was no need to go to the troubadours of feudalism for an inspiration, or to Wagner or Walter Scott. Coercion had no monopoly of beauty. “Nature’s cunningest work,” Whitman said, was “the human frame, form and face.” He was drawn to a variety of performance art, then popular in America, in which women known as “model artists” enacted tableaux vivants. Lady Godiva on her horse and Venus in her shell were among the “poses plastiques” they adopted. Whitman applied the lesson in his poetry. The experiment which Manet had commenced in oils he undertook in verse. In Leaves of Grass he portrayed “superb persons”—omnibus drivers, Brooklyn boys, clam-diggers, Indian girls, mothers of children, emptiers of privies, kept women, slaves, trappers, flatboatmen. Leaves of Grass uncovers a democratic dance . . . the butcher-boy sharpening his knife . . . the carpenter dressing his plank . . . the Yankee girl working her sewing machine.
I hear America singing. . .
The bodies and souls of Americans, Whitman said, were “unrhymed poetry,” the constituent parts of what was “essentially the greatest poem,” the United States themselves. For he had penetrated “the broadcloth and gingham”; had beheld the primal American, “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”
If Whitman was right, Arnold and Tocqueville were wrong. America, the prototype of the free state, did possess poetry, culture, a distinction of spirit. Well might Lincoln have found Leaves of Grass suggestive; for he too was in quest of an American poetry. More than ever the President sought, in the aftermath of Gettysburg, the clue that might enable him to thread the labyrinth of his revolution.
Chapter 17
DUST UNTO DUST
Schleswig, London, Berlin, and Copenhagen, February-April 1864
A COATING OF SNOW lay on the ground as Prussian troops crossed the border of Schleswig. Not since the conquest of Silesia by Frederick the Great more than a century before had a Prussian army traversed a peaceful frontier intent on spoliation and conquest. In the dim light of a Baltic dawn the Danish dragoons who guarded the bridges of the Eider beheld with dread the approaching eagle standards. They fired a few ineffectual shots at Bismarck’s brigades and retired.
The invasion of Schleswig had begun. As the sun rose over the frigid landscape of Jutland, massive columns of Prussian infantry could be seen advancing north from Kiel. The roads were crowded with artillery caissons, baggage wagons, and commissariat carts. In spite of the bitter cold, the Prussian soldiers were in high spirits. “Hurrah for Schleswig-Holstein!” they shouted, and they sang the anthem of Prussia, “Ich bin eine Preusse” (“I am a Prussian! See my colors gleaming . . .”).
The Prussians advanced on a pretext: to rescue their fellow Germans in Schleswig and
Holstein from the yoke of the Danes, who had imposed a new constitution on the duchies. Bismarck had, at last, found a field on which to shed blood and brandish iron. He cared nothing for the justice of the cause; he had himself ridiculed those Germans who cried tyranny whenever a drunken Teuton in Holstein was handled roughly by a Danish magistrate. No matter; the Schleswig-Holstein question had inflamed the patriotism of millions of Germans, and Bismarck had for some time believed that romantic nationalism was the instrument on which the free state would be broken in Germany.
Marching beside the Prussians were Austrian troops whom Franz Josef had summoned from the far-flung provinces of his Empire in the hope of retrieving his dynasty’s prestige north of the Danube. Bismarck, having failed to humble Austria, was willing to use her. Recruits from Hungary, Croatia, and the Tyrol chattered and sang in such a diversity of accents and dialects as might have perplexed the most learned philologist. But the warriors of the Habsburgs lacked the fiery enthusiasm of the soldiers who marched beneath the black-and-white standards of the Hohenzollerns. To the higher inspirations of German nationalism the Austrians were insensible. Few of them spoke the language of Goethe. Fewer still professed the faith of Luther. Scarcely any cared whether the German-speaking peoples of Schleswig and Holstein were governed by Teutons or by Scandinavians.
A fortnight before the invasion of Schleswig, Austrian and Prussian diplomats at Copenhagen had delivered to Chamberlain Van Quaade, the Danish Foreign Minister, an ultimatum demanding the repeal of the new constitution which Denmark had imposed on the duchies in an attempt to bind them more closely to Copenhagen. Van Quaade referred the ultimatum to King Christian IX. The King, who had ascended the throne upon the death of Frederick VII in November, was not eager to open his reign with a display of weakness. The reply he instructed his diplomats to make, though it was couched in conciliatory language, stated that it was impossible for him to comply with the German demands. The new constitution would remain in force.
King Christian was a spare man with a sharp face and a slender hope that England would help him to resist the Germans. Princess Alexandra, his second child, had, the previous winter, wed Edward Albert, Prince of Wales, presumptive heir to the throne of England. (Christian’s younger daughter, the sixteen-year-old Princess Dagmar, was as yet unmarried; she would however soon be betrothed to the Tsarevitch Nicholas, “Niks,” the eldest son of Tsar Alexander.) Christian did not rely solely on the compassion of his daughter’s relations: he had another, weightier reason for supposing that England might assist him in opposing the Germans. A dozen years before, a treaty had been solemnly subscribed by the great powers, and by this instrument the Concert of Europe pledged itself to respect the unity and integrity of Denmark.
At Pembroke Lodge, his suburban haven overlooking the Thames, Lord John Russell fretted. He dispatched Lord Wodehouse to Copenhagen in an effort to persuade the Danes to reduce the size of their army and withdraw their controversial constitution.19 He also issued a diplomatic note menacing the Germans with the risks they ran in undertaking a campaign of conquest against the Danes.
When, in spite of these efforts, the Germans resorted to arms, Russell pressed his colleagues in the Cabinet to offer naval and military assistance to Denmark. But Lord Palmerston, he found, was cool to the idea of intervention. As he neared the end of his eightieth year, the Prime Minister was at last beginning to show his age. He suffered from gout and sleeplessness. His eyesight was failing. His mind, however, was singularly lucid. As he revolved in his mind the difficulties of intervention in the Danish conflict, Palmerston conceived that they were not such as a prudent minister could disregard. “I doubt,” he wrote to Russell from Cambridge House, “whether the Cabinet or the country are yet prepared for active interference.” He had recently rejected Gladstone’s and Louis-Napoleon’s appeals to intervene in Lincoln’s revolution, in large part because Tsar Alexander was hostile to the idea. A new crisis had now arisen; but to the Prime Minister, a cautious man masquerading as a buccaneer, the fjords of the Baltic appeared no more inviting than the tidal waters of the Chesapeake. “I believe Palmerston has no wish to go to war at all,” Queen Victoria told Russell.
Soon, however, the old man’s pugnacious spirit began to revive. Accounts of German armies on the march in Jutland infuriated him; his Anglo-Irish blood was up. But Palmerston could not carry the Cabinet. When his colleagues declined to send in the Channel Fleet, he lamented their “timidity and weakness.” On his own initiative he summoned the Austrian Ambassador, Count Apponyi, to Downing Street and warned him that the Germans were playing a dangerous game.
Bismarck was unimpressed by Palmerston’s whirling words. He had made his own calculations and concluded that England would not go to war for the sake of the Treaty of 1852. “England is excessively noisy,” he believed, “but will not fight.” This confidence was not misplaced. Not only was a majority of the English Cabinet averse to war over Denmark, so, too, was the English Queen. “With regard to this sad S. Holstein question,” Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky, the Crown Princess of Prussia, “my heart and sympathies are all German.” Her daughter-in-law, Princess Alexandra, was Danish; but her departed husband, Prince Albert, was German.
While the Queen and her ministers dithered, Bismarck’s brigades advanced. They carried the day at Missunde and Sankelmarkt, and the corpses of Danish officers were laid on the dusty pavement of Ulkeböl. The hope of many a Danish family perished on the ramparts of Dybböl, and in Copenhagen many a noble house went dark. Callers were politely informed (under the most trying circumstances the courtesy of the Danes never failed) that the inmates were in mourning; and an observer might detect, in so many pairs of steel-gray eyes, traces of stifled tears. The dirges of military bands sounded in the streets, and the red-and-white banners of Denmark, which had been set out in the first ebullition of patriotic enthusiasm, were covered with crêpe. Children with flaxen hair followed their fathers’ coffins to forlorn little churchyards, where clergymen in limp gowns and starched ruffs pronounced the words, “dust unto dust,” as caskets were lowered into the earth.
Pennsylvania and Virginia, July 1863-January 1864
Amid the ridges and round tops of Gettysburg, between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Hill, the Cause of the South, too, was laid in its death shroud. Yet the Cause, having died, was reborn. Mary Chesnut witnessed its death and experienced its mysterious regeneration. She learned of the failure of Lee’s invasion of the North at Richmond, where her husband had been made an aide-de-camp to President Davis. In that unhappy capital, where factious cabinet secretaries and contumacious senators harangued and intrigued over a disintegrating empire, she became convinced of the futility of Southern exertion. The Cause had ceased to be real, but it did not cease to be holy. Turning away from the coercive philosophy of the Fire Eaters, Mary Chesnut continued to cherish the dream of aristocracy which it inspired. In the darkest days of 1863 she continued to revere the confessors, the martyrs, the apostolic succession of heroes who labored to defend the ethereal vision.
Her young friend, Dr. John Darby, an army surgeon, introduced her to John Bell Hood himself, the commander of the 4th Texas. Hood was at this time in the meridian splendor of his fame. Thirty-two years old, “Sam” Hood—his West Point comrades still called him by his Academy nickname—was among the South’s anointed ones. He had been consecrated by Stonewall Jackson himself, and he was now a general of the army. He “won his three stars &c under Stonewall’s eyes,” Mary Chesnut wrote, and was promoted “by Stonewall’s request.” He was tall, thin, and shy, with blue eyes, light hair, and an appearance of awkward strength. Mary Chesnut looked at his “sad Quixote face” and thought him a sword-bearing mystic, reviving, by an improbable atavism, the prophetic militancy of a Templar knight. Hood’s face was “the face of an old crusader who believed in his cause, his cross, his crown.” Mary Chesnut’s friend, Colonel Venable, had seen Hood in battle, in “the hottest of the fight.” “The man was transfigured. . . . The fierce
light of his eyes—I can never forget.”
In the light of such eyes the mythology of the Lost Cause began to take shape.
Mary Chesnut came to know Hood well. She had taken into her rooms in Richmond the Preston sisters, Buck and her sister Mary. General Hood, enchanted by the beauty of the young ladies, invited them to join him in a picnic at Drewry’s Bluff, six miles below Richmond. (In 1862 Confederate batteries on the Bluff had prevented Union gunboats from sailing up the James to batter the Southern capital.) Here the Texas Brigade had fixed its camp. There was to be turkey, chicken, and buffalos’ tongues; dancing was also mentioned. But the next morning, just as the ladies were about to step into the carriage, Dr. Darby came striding up, his clanking cavalry spurs sounding a note of despair. “Stop!” he cried. “It’s all up. We are ordered back to the Rappahannock. The Brigade is marching through Richmond now.” He suggested, however, that they might watch the brigade as it passed along the turnpike. They at once set off. They reached the turnpike and, standing on the sidewalk, watched a great army march by.
They were accustomed to seeing soldiers beautifully turned out in fresh uniforms. Now they saw only shabbiness. “Such rags and tags— nothing alike—most garments and arms taken from the enemy—such shoes!” Girt round with pots and pans, the motley troops marched with bread and bacon stuck on the ends of their bayonets.
“Oh, our brave boys!” Buck Preston groaned.
Just then General Hood came galloping up. The men of the Texas Brigade might have marched to the tune of their favorite song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” but Hood himself had his eye on a Carolina blossom. Standing on the curb, Buck’s sister, Mary, presented him with a garland of flowers. Hood, taking a Bible from his pocket, pressed one of the petals into its pages. With mirth in her eyes the young lady suggested that the book appeared not previously to have been opened.
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