by Bruce Catton
In their sister regiment, Colonel Lee's 20th, it was discovered that city-bred Bay Staters had got a long way from the old tradition of the minuteman with his ever-ready rifle. The regiment was turned out for target practice and the colonel found that most of the boys simply pointed their rifles in the general direction of the target, shut both eyes tightly, and hauled back on the trigger. This had to be fixed, and was. . . . The artillery needed teaching too. Here and there, on hills commanding the river, was a battery posted to foil Rebel cavalry, which was believed to be exceedingly daring and dangerous, and the battery commanders took alarm easily, smiting the Virginia hills and fields with solid shot whenever anything suspicious appeared. It is recorded that one battery gleefully reported that it had bombarded and gloriously routed a whole regiment of Rebel cavalry, only to find a bit later that it had been disrupting a colored funeral procession.
There were practice marches to be made, too, by troops which were full of enthusiasm for war but which did not quite see the point of some of war's training-camp maneuvers. The 55th New York, for instance, a regiment composed largely of Frenchmen recruited on Manhattan Island, with non-coms who had served in the French Army, had a comfortable camp at Tennallytown, on the edge of Washington, and hiked far upriver in a cold, drizzling rain. The regiment countermarched, at last, and finally took position on a comfortless hilltop in plain sight of its own snug camp, which was no more than a mile away; and here, with the rain coming down harder and colder, the men were ordered to bivouac for the night. They muttered angrily: What point in sleeping here, shelterless, in the rain, when they could regain their own camp in another half-hour? A sergeant, veteran of the Crimea and Algiers, ruffled his Gallic mustachios and spoke soothingly. "Bah!" he said. "This is but to season the conscripts. We shall see many worse days than this." (He was quite right about seeing worse days; the 55th New York was to get so badly shot up that within a year it had to lose its independent existence and be consolidated with another regiment.)3
So the boys learned the ways of soldiering, and bumped against the hard edges of the slavery problem, and enjoyed the lovely landscape and the good weather and the relatively harmless thrills of long-range picket firing at Johnny Reb. The New Englanders discovered that the 1st Minnesota, posted near them along the river, made good neighbors; the Minnesota regiment had several companies of lumberjacks from the north woods and the lumberjacks were mostly recent migrants from the forests of Maine, so that the outfit had something of a down-East flavor. The Minnesotans were enjoying the war at the moment; had built bake ovens so that they could have soft bread instead of hardtack, bought fruit and sweet potatoes from the Maryland farmers, and wrote home that they were living "like princes and fighting cocks." Their picket post was on a tree-shaded hill overlooking the Potomac, and they got rope and put up a swing there and swung in it while keeping an eye open for invaders, and made friends, long-range, with the Rebels on the opposite shore. Their colonel, just then, was a man with the surpassingly warlike name of
Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana, soon to be promoted to a brigadier's commission.4
The 20th Massachusetts considered itself tolerably well seasoned. It could laugh, in mid-October, at its greenhorn nervousness of early September, when it marched up from Washington, bivouacked dead-tired in the dark, and sprang to arms in a wild panic because of a sudden, unearthly noise that shattered the midnight stillness: the braying of teams of army mules tethered in the next field. Colonel Lee was happily writing to Governor Andrew that General Stone (whatever his defects might be on the slavery issue) had promised the 20th that "we would not be deprived of our due share of active service." He related, too, the great pride the regiment felt in the fine equipment its state had provided. The general had asked if the regiment had everything it needed, and Colonel Lee had replied: "My regiment, sir, came from Massachusetts!" The governor could take a bow on that one; right after Fort Sumter he had sent an agent to England to buy arms, and the 20th had been equipped from the start with Enfield rifles, the regulation British army musket.5
Along toward the end of October the general was able to make good his promise to the 20th Massachusetts. A colored teamster who had deserted the 13th Mississippi at Leesburg was brought into camp with a tale to tell, which was that the Confederates at Leesburg had sent all their baggage back to Joe Johnston's lines at Manassas and expected to retreat very soon, fearing that the Yankees over in Maryland heavily outnumbered them and planned aggression. Right at this time McClellan sent a division up the river on the Virginia side, halting it at Dranesville, a village some ten miles southeast of Leesburg, to see what the Rebels might be up to; and to General Stone he sent word of this move, suggesting that the general might make a small reconnaissance of his own. The suggestion was a bit vague, and General Stone interpreted it liberally; crossed a regiment or two at Edwards' Ferry and sent others three miles upstream to make a crossing at Harrison's Island, figuring that a slight demonstration there might make the enemy evacuate Leesburg.
The 20th Massachusetts thus found itself making a night march, and at midnight it was down on the bank of the dark river, the men waiting their turn to get into three small boats to be ferried over the water. There was much confusion and waiting; nobody in particular seemed to be in charge of anything, and the boats were ridiculously inadequate, having a combined capacity of only twenty-five men. But by the time the sky was beginning to get light in the east, most of the 20th was roosting on the flat, uninteresting length of Harrison's Island, peering at the 150-yard channel that separated the island from the Virginia shore. There was a high, wooded bluff over there—Ball's Bluff, it was called—and the boys of the 20th learned that five companies of the 15th Massachusetts had crossed the evening before and were up to something beyond the rim of the hill. At dawn two companies of the 20th, accompanied by Colonel Lee himself, went across, found their way up the bluff by a roundabout cow path, and joined the 15th in an open glade on the heights. During the morning the rest of the regiment joined them.
Nothing much appeared to be happening, nor did there seem to be any especial point to the proceedings. Colonel Charles Devens, the Boston lawyer who had become colonel of the 15th and who was ultimately to develop into quite a soldier, had taken a few of his men nearly to Leesburg, in the early dawn, without discovering any Rebel camp. Then, a little later, he had brushed into some Confederate outposts, and there had been a desultory exchange of random shots. Now he was back in the glade, reinforcements were coming up, and it looked as if there might be a fight sooner or later. The Confederates were off in the woods; nobody knew just where they were or how strong they were, but the pickets were doing a little shooting. Devens had sent back all the news he had to General Stone, who had messaged him to hang on: he was sending Colonel Edward D. Baker over to take charge, with additional troops.
Presently Colonel Baker appeared. He was a man of some fame, with a streak of romance in him, an intimate friend of President Lincoln, a man who had roamed to far places and loved the swing of poetry and the ring of great words. A veteran of the Mexican War, he had gone to California and had become a man of considerable note in gold-rush San Francisco. In 1860 he had moved to Oregon, winning election there to the United States Senate, and he had introduced Lincoln to the crowd at the inauguration ceremonies in March, riding with him in his carriage as his chosen companion. He told the Senate that spring: "I want sudden, bold, forward, determined war," and he set out to get it personally, raising and becoming colonel of the 71st Pennsylvania—a Philadelphia regiment which, as compliment to its colonel, was then known as "the California regiment," although Baker by now was officially an Oregonian. He went off to war gaily, and to a friend he quoted: "Press where ye see my white plume shine amidst the ranks of war." Now he was here on Ball's Bluff in charge of an advance against the enemy. He had been delayed getting here; bringing his regiment up on the Maryland side, he had been dismayed by the lack of boats and had spent an hour or more getting an old flatboat o
ut of the canal, nearby, into the river so that more men could be carried. He had a couple of guns coming up, and he was ready for a fight.
The fight was beginning to develop. The Confederates were gathering in the surrounding woods in some strength, and when Baker came up to the 20th Massachusetts he shook Colonel Lee's hand and said briskly, "I congratulate you, sir, on the prospect of a battle." Turning to the soldiers, he called out, "Boys, you want to fight, don't you?" Quite sincerely the boys cheered, and yelled that they did. Baker hurried back to the edge of the bluff, where there was a great deal of trouble getting the guns up, and the boys of the 20th peeled off their overcoats—fancy gray coats with brilliant linings of red silk: the Bay State had equipped them nobly—and hung them on the trees and got ready to fight. From the woods in front of them there came a ragged volley, which hurt no one—in the uncertain shadows the Rebels seem to have mistaken the line of hanging overcoats for soldiers, and the empty coats were liberally peppered. Then there began a noisy uproar of earnest file firing and the battle was on; the heavy smoke drifted across the little clearing like a rank fog, and the 20th Massachusetts began to fire back. Men were hit now, and there was a high nervous tension in this green regiment. The Rebels began to be visible through the trees and the smoke. A Massachusetts private saw a Confederate officer on a big horse and drew a bead on him. Unaccountably, when he tried to pull the trigger nothing happened. He lowered his musket and stared stupidly at his right hand; the trigger finger had been neatly removed by a bullet, and he had not even felt it. Off to the left the two guns were finally put into position and began to bang.
Colonel Baker went back to the edge of the bluff. His own regiment had come up and was in line, and another one was scrambling up—the 42nd New York, widely known as the Tammany Regiment, led by Colonel Milton Cogswell. Baker waved to him and came close enough to sing out an adaptation of a couple of lines from Scott's Ladyof the Lake—
"One blast upon your bugle horn Is worth a thousand men"—
and asked Cogswell how he liked the looks of things. Cogswell, who was a West Pointer, didn't like it much. The confusion around the river crossing seemed inexcusable, with no one in charge of the boats and no sort of order being maintained; a knack for quoting poetry while under fire seemed a poor substitute for executive ability, and it struck him that the force on the bluff was in a desperately bad spot, with the Confederates shooting down at them from higher ground in the woods and with no intelligent plan of battle being followed. The two guns were silent, sharpshooters having knocked off the gunners; Colonel Lee himself was helping with the loading for a time. On its final discharge one gun recoiled back to the edge of the bluff and toppled over. Baker hurried to the right of the line, exhorting everyone to hold on. A swift mental calculation had shown him that with the few boats available it would take three hours to get everybody back across the river, and it seemed better to stay and fight. Nobody knows what sort of tactics he might have devised to continue the battle, because just at that moment he fell dead with a Rebel bullet in his heart.
After that everything began to go to pieces. Cogswell led an abortive assault off to the left, in an attempt to cut an opening so that the command could go downstream on the Virginia side to join the troops that had crossed at Edwards' Ferry. The assault crumbled almost before it began, and there was nothing left but to try to get down the bluff and cross the river.
So there was a wild scramble down the steep hill in the dusk, with exultant Confederates following closely to the brow of the hill and shooting down at the fugitives. The 15th Massachusetts held them off for a while with a skirmish line, but finally they had to go, and a detachment from the Tammany Regiment which tried to take their place fared no better. Pretty soon everyone was on the beach, and it was almost dark, and musket fire was coming down heavily from the bluff, and there were only four boats—two of them the merest skiffs—to carry upward of a thousand men across a wide river. The big flatboat that Colonel Baker had horsed out of the canal earlier in the day was loaded down until it was almost awash, and then it set out, with men standing on each side to pole it along.
Rifle fire followed it—so many bullets were splashing in the water, a soldier wrote, that the river was "as white as in a great hail storm" —and presently a couple of the men who were poling were shot and fell heavily on the gunwale, tilting the overloaded boat so that water came rushing over the side and it capsized. Thirty or forty men were drowned, and the boat floated away in the darkness, bottom-side up. The two skiffs disappeared and were seen no more. The one remaining craft, a sheet-metal lifeboat, was punctured by bullets and sank in midstream, and all hands were marooned. A few men found a neck-deep ford to Harrison's Island and made their escape that way. Others took off their clothing and swam, an officer warning them to throw their rifles into the river so that the Rebels couldn't have them. The rest were taken prisoner.
Next day, when what was left of the command assembled on the Maryland side and counted noses, they found that more than nine hundred men had been lost—some two hundred or more shot, the remainder captured. Colonel Lee, Colonel Cogswell, and the major of the 20th Massachusetts, Paul Joseph Revere, descendant of the Revolutionary rider, went off to Libby Prison in Richmond. Among the wounded left on the Virginia shore was a young first lieutenant of the 20th's Company A, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. And Colonel Baker, the friend of Abraham Lincoln and the hero of the United States Senate, was dead.
Which meant that there was going to be a post-mortem, and a big one. If the nation had known as much then as it knew two years later about war and loss and the mischances of the battlefield, the dark little tragedy might not have aroused such an uproar. But the war was still new, and Baker's death meant that a bright flame had suddenly been snuffed out, and the confusion and mishandling that had caused the defeat seemed to cry aloud for investigation. This was no Bull Run, where defeat had obviously been due to the greenness of the troops. The men who fought here had fought well enough, but it was inescapably clear that there had not been any very good reason for their crossing the river in the first place, and that, once they had gone across, no one had known what to do with them. Baker was dead, and his own brave but incompetent efforts were not to be criticized, but there was angry criticism and to spare piling up for somebody.
Somehow the spotlight stayed on this affair. The papers told how Colonel Devens paraded what was left of the 15th Massachusetts a few days after the fight and gave them a brief pep talk, asking them if they were ready to meet their "traitorous foes" once more: "Would you go next week? Would you go tomorrow? Would you go at this moment?" To which, of course, the emotional youngsters replied with a wild shout of "Yes!"6 From beyond the enemy lines it was reported that the Confederates had said that fewer of the Massachusetts officers would have been killed had they not been too proud to surrender—which inspired Union Brigadier General Lander, a regular-army officer to whose brigade the Massachusetts regiments actually belonged, to write a poem, beginning:
Aye, deem us proud, for we are more Than proud of all our mighty dead . . .
It went on for eight full stanzas. The anthologies no longer carry it, but it must come close to winning the distinction of being the best threnody ever written by a brigadier general in the United States Army; and it drew plenty of attention at the time.
Furthermore, public attention was painfully focused on Colonel Lee and Major Revere. The United States Navy had just captured a Confederate privateer, and it was announced that since the Confederacy was not a legitimate nation her so-called privateersmen were in fact pirates and would be hanged as such; and the government at Richmond promptly replied that if these privateers were hanged an equal number of Federal army officers, chosen by lot from among the prisoners at Richmond, would be hanged in reprisal. The lot fell on Lee and Revere, among others, and they were lodged in condemned cells. A captured sergeant from the 20th Massachusetts talked to Lee just before he was locked up: did the colonel have any message for his ol
d regiment? Colonel Lee was reputed to be the oldest officer in the army, except for General Sumner, and he was deeply affected by emotion. "Tell the men—" he began. He stopped and cleared his throat heavily; when emotion takes an old soldier it usually takes him hard. "Tell the men their colonel died like a brave man." The message got back and was printed. Agonized attention fell on the officers waiting for death—until at last the Lincoln administration decided that nothing was to be gained by getting into a hanging contest with Jefferson Davis, and let it be known that the privateersmen would be treated as regular prisoners of war, after all. In time Lee and Revere were exchanged and came north, and Lee later became a brigadier.
But if concern over the possible hanging of prisoners was ended, there was no quick ending for the concern over the tragedy of Ball's Bluff. The state of Massachusetts had seen her sons sacrificed to no purpose and had influential spokesmen in Washington; also, the state of Massachusetts—through her governor and her senior senator —had already had trouble with this General Stone who was responsible for the whole Ball's Bluff business in the first place. Stone was a pro-slavery man—or at least he was not anti-slavery, and that might be much the same thing—and there were queer stories afloat. He went out of his way to protect Rebel property—Rebel property, the property of men who were trying to destroy the government. There had been flags of truce between his headquarters and Confederate headquarters across the river. Mysterious messengers had been seen going and coming; there was a question about passes that had been issued, allowing Southern sympathizers to go through the lines: was not this general actually in league with rebellion? Might it not be that the regiments sent across the river into a deadly trap had been designedly sacrificed? Should not Congress look into it: Congress, whose own hero had been slain in this affair? Should not Congress be alert to make sure that there was no sympathy with treason in high places in the army?