Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  But there could be no lull. Hooker had Mansfield's corps at his disposal, and when the Rebels drove his men back through the cornfield he sent for it. Old General Mansfield went galloping up to his troops, his hat in his hand, long white hair and beard streaming in the wind. The men in Gordon's brigade jumped up and ran for their rifles as soon as they saw him coming, falling in without waiting for orders, cheering loudly. Something about the old soldier, with his air of competence and his unexpected mixture of stiff military dignity and youthful fire and vigor, had aroused their enthusiasm during the two days he had been with them. Mansfield reined up in front of them, calling:

  "That's right, boys, cheer—we're going to whip them today!" He rode down the line from regiment to regiment, waving his hat and repeating: "Boys, we're going to lick them today!"

  They were a mile and more from the battlefield, and the uproar beat upon their ears as they moved forward. The noise seemed to be coming in great, swinging pulsations, as if whole brigades or divisions were firing successive volleys. The booming of the cannon was continuous, so steady that no individual shots could be heard; and before the field could be seen the men could make out great billowing clouds of smoke drifting up in the windless air. As they got nearer they met wounded men going to the rear—chipper enough, most of them, all things considered, calling out that they "had the Johnnies on the run." Gordon's brigade came out on the ridge near the Miller farm, with the northern border of the cornfield in view. Federal regiments were withdrawing across the hollow, stepping backward, loading and firing as they retreated. One pitiful skeleton of a beaten regiment saw the fresh 27th Indiana coming up behind it. Heedless that they were still under fire, the men shouted with joy, threw caps, knapsacks, and canteens in the air, waving jubilant welcome to the reinforcements; and when the Indiana soldiers came abreast of them the retreating soldiers halted, re-formed ranks, and started back into battle again without orders.

  Mansfield went in at the head of his first brigade, heading straight for the northern part of the East Wood. The situation was not at all clear to him, and he halted the column briefly while he tried to make out what was in front of him. Hooker came cantering up, crying: "The enemy are breaking through my lines—you must hold this wood!" Then Hooker rode away and Mansfield started putting his leading regiments, 10th Maine and 128th Pennsylvania, into line of battle. The East Wood presented almost as ghastly a sight as the cornfield, by now—deed and living bodies everywhere, little groups of men trying to help wounded comrades to the rear, shattered limbs of trees lying on the ground in a tangle, wreckage of artillery equipment strewn about, with unseen Rebels keeping the air alive with bullets, and streaky sheets of acrid smoke lying in the air. Nobody knew whether there were Union troops in front or not. The ground was uneven, crossed with rocky ledges and ridges. Organized bodies of troops could be seen in the distance now and then, but the light was bad and the skirmishers, shooting at everything that moved, did not know whether they were firing at friends or enemies.

  Brigadier General Samuel Crawford made his way through the wood, trying to get his brigade into line: an unusual man, doctor turned soldier, who had taken an unusual route to his general's commission. He had been a regular-army surgeon before the war and was in the Fort Sumter garrison. Back at the beginning of 1861, when Major Anderson moved the garrison from Moultrie to Sumter, all the line officers being busy, the doctor was posted at a loaded columbiad to sink the Confederate guard boat if it tried to interfere. He didn't have to shoot just then, but either that experience or the later bombardment itself apparently inspired him to give up medicine for line command, and when the garrison came north he got a brigadier's star. His brigade had been badly cut to pieces at Cedar Mountain early this summer, when Pope's advance guard had its first meeting with Stonewall Jackson. Since then Crawford had been vainly writing applications to have the brigade withdrawn for reorganization and recruitment, pointing out that his four regiments numbered only 629 men altogether, with so many officers gone that three of the regiments were in command of inexperienced captains. His 28th New York had been consolidated into four companies and was going into action today with sixty-five men. Crawford had got nowhere with his applications, but a couple of days before this battle the high command had given liim three brand-new regiments of Pennsylvania recruits, and with this lopsided command—four understrength regiments of veterans and three big, half-trained regiments of rookies—he was now going into action against Hood and D. H. Hill. Understandably, he was nervous about it.

  Most of the enemy fire seemed to be coming from the cornfield at the western edge of the wood, so Crawford wheeled his regiments in that direction. The Rebel skirmishers were playing Indian again, dodging back from tree to tree and ledge to ledge and firing from behind the piles of cordwood that some thrifty farmer had stacked here and there; but the Maine regiment, the veteran 46th Pennsylvania, and the tiny 28th New York finally got to the edge of the wood, with two of the greenhorn regiments struggling up on their right, and began to fire at moving figures among the shattered cornstalks. Mansfield rode up, worried; he still didn't know where the enemy was, and Hooker had given him the impression that Meade's Pennsylvanians were still in the field. He made the Maine regiment cease firing—"You are firing into our own men"—then put his horse over the fence and rode on ahead to get a better look. Some soldier called out, "Those are Rebels, General!" Mansfield took a last look, said: "Yes—you're right"—and then a volley came out of the cornfield. Mansfield's horse was hit, and when the old man dismounted to clamber over the fence he himself got a bullet in the stomach.

  Some of the rookies from the 125th Pennsylvania picked him up, made a crude litter of muskets, and got him back into the wood, where they laid him down, uncertain what to do next. They had been soldiers for only a month, this was their first battle, and what did one do with a badly wounded major general, anyhow? Three boys from the 10th Maine took over—as veterans, one gathers, they knew a good excuse to get away from the firing line when they saw it—the Pennsylvanians went back to the fence, and the down-Easters tried to lug the general back to the rear. And they found, in the wood, a bewildered contraband who was company cook in one of Hooker's regiments and who, with a clumsy incompetence rare even among company cooks, had chosen this time and place to lose, and then to hunt for, a prized frying pan. The Maine boys seized him that he might make a fourth at carrying the general, who was heavy and helpless. The contraband demurred—he had to find the captain's frying pan, and nothing else mattered—but the soldiers pounded him with their fists, the whine of ricocheting bullets cutting the air all around, shells crashing through the branches overhead, and he gave in at last and poor General Mansfield somehow was got back to a dressing station. There a flurried surgeon pressed a flask of whisky to his mouth, almost strangling him; and, what with the wound and the clumsy handling, the old man presently died. He had had the corps only two days, but he had already made the soldiers like and respect him; it seems likely that he might have made quite a name if he had been spared.8

  But there was no holding up the fight because a general had been killed. Crawford went down, too, with a bad wound, and a colonel took over the brigade, and the veterans and the rookies got into a tremendous fire fight with some of D. H. Hill's men along the east side of the cornfield. Farther west General Gordon drove his brigade in past the Miller farm buildings and over the pitiful human wreckage that littered the ground in front of Battery B. The Rebels in the corner of the cornfield and along the fence on the northern side were not disposed to go away, and the 3rd Wisconsin took a beating when it got up to the fence; but Gordon worked the 2nd Massachusetts around on the right and got an enfilade on the Texans, and the 27th Indiana came up on the other side, and the Confederate line gave way.

  So once more there was a bitter fight in the cornfield, with the Federals coming in from the north and the east; and Hood, as he had foreseen, was compelled to withdraw, with half of his men shot down. As Gordon's lines went
in Hooker got a bullet in the foot and rode to the rear, dripping blood, and command of this part of the battle passed temporarily to Mansfield's senior division commander, General Alpheus S. Williams, who rode about the field with the unlighted stub of a cigar gripped in his teeth and who was called "Pop" by his troops—sure sign that they liked him. The retreating Rebels made a desperate fight of it. One of Crawford's men asserted that "on all other fields, from the beginning to the end of our long service, we never had to face their equals," and the 27th Indiana came to a halt in the middle of the smoky field, standing erect in close order and firing as fast as it could handle its muskets, which finally became too hot to be used. One Hoosier, badly wounded, laid down his rifle and went a few yards to the rear, where he sat down, opened his clothing, and examined his wound. After studying it, he mused aloud: "Well, I guess I'm hurt about as bad as I can be. I believe I'll go back and give 'em some more." So he picked up a discarded musket and returned to the firing line.

  The regiment shot up all its ammunition, a hundred rounds per man, and sent details around the field to loot the cartridge boxes of the dead and wounded. In this fight the 27th lost a good non-com —Corporal Barton W. Mitchell, who had caused the battle in the first place by finding Lee's lost order; he went down with a wound that kept him out of action for months. His company commander, Captain Kopp, to whom he had first taken the lost order, was killed.

  At last the 2nd Massachusetts came in on the right, its colonel jubilantly waving a captured Texas battle flag, and the Confederate defense began to crumble. Crawford's men came out of the East Wood at last, rookies and veterans all yelling and firing as they came, and the Rebels gave way and went back, running south and west across the turnpike and into the West Wood. Once more the cornfield, for whatever it was worth, belonged to the Union. Gordon's and Crawford's men tried to get across the turnpike and pursue, but nobody had ever yet cleaned up on the Rebel strength to the west of this highway—Mansfield had sent a brigade over there when he first took his corps into action, but the regiments had been put in clumsily and had been driven off—and the Federal advance was halted along the rail fence, and that dusty country highway once more became a lane of death.

  Half a mile farther east things were going better. General George Sears Greene, a relative of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, had the rest of Mansfield's troops—a battle-worn division of some seventeen hundred men—and these had cut through the eastern fringe of the East Wood and had gone driving straight for the Dunker church. Some of the Confederates who had been driven out of the cornfield rallied and hit them in the flank as they got past the timber, some of Hill's men gouged at their other flank, and Lee brought reinforcements over from the right of his line to make a stand in front of the church. The Northerners had a hard time of ft for a while, coming under fire from three directions, and when the Confederates came in with a counterattack the outlook was bad; but just in time a Rhode Island battery came galloping up, the infantry broke ranks to let the guns through, and the counterattack was smashed with canister and rifle fire. Then one of Crawford's rookie regiments—125th Pennsylvania, seven hundred strong, a giant of a regiment for that field-came up, separated from its brigade and slightly lost but anxious to get into the nearest fight; and Greene's division ran on past the guns and got into the West Wood around the Dunker church, forming a solid line on the far side of that battle-scarred building. Here was victory, if someone could just bring up reinforcements.

  But the reinforcements didn't show up. This spearhead had got clear through the Confederate line. The high ground around the church, objective of all the morning's fighting, had been seized at last. But Greene had lost a third of his men, more than two hundred of the Pennsylvania straw-feet were down, and the survivors could do no more than hang on where they were, the Rebels keeping them under a steady fire. Completely wrecked, Hooker's army corps was trying to round up its stragglers and reassemble on the hills a mile to the north. The rest of Mansfield's corps was in position around the Miller barnyard and along the western edge of the cornfield, solidly posted but too busy to send any help. Greene's boys had reached the goal, but they couldn't do anything with it now that they had it. The fire that was being played upon their lines was not strong enough to drive them out, but it was too strong to advance against; and off to the southeast they could make out the movement of marching bodies of men, as if heavy Confederate reinforcements were corning up. The right wing of McClellan's army was beaten out, with this one advanced detachment huddling under the trees to mark high tide.

  2. The Heaviest Fire of the War

  It may be that life is not man's most precious possession, after all. Certainly men can be induced to give it away very freely at times, and the terms hardly seem to make sense unless there is something about the whole business that we don't understand. Lives are spent for very insignificant things which benefit the dead not at all—a few rods of ground in a cornfield, for instance, or temporary ownership of a little hill or a piece of windy pasture; and now and then they are simply wasted outright, with nobody gaining anything at all. And we talk glibly about the accidents of battle and the mistakes of generalship without figuring out just which end of the stick the man who died was holding. As, for instance:

  By seven-thirty in the morning a dim sense that something had gone wrong had reached McClellan's headquarters. The signal flags had been wigwagging ever since it was light enough to see them, and at one time McClellan came out of his tent, smiling and saying, "All goes well—Hooker is driving them." But all had not gone well thereafter, and presently white-haired old General Sumner was ordered to take his corps across the creek and get into action. Sumner moved promptly, and before long, from Mr. Pry's yard, McClellan could see the three parallel lines of John Sedgwick's division threading their way up the farther hillsides, heading for the East Wood.

  Sumner rode with Sedgwick, letting the two remaining divisions of his corps follow as best they could. He was strictiy the Indian fighter of the Western plains this morning, putting himself in the front rank of the column of attack, ready for a straight cut-and-thrust onslaught on the Rebel lines. He knew almost nothing about what had happened so far—had the impression, even, that the right wing of the army had gained a victory and that he was being sent in to make it complete. But when he got to the East Wood the omens under the shattered trees were sinister. The place was packed with wounded men, and there were far too many able-bodied soldiers wandering around trying to help them. (One of Sedgwick's colonels wrote sagely: "When good Samaritans so abound it is a strong indication that the discipline of the troops in front is not good and that the battle is not going so as to encourage the half-hearted.")1 And when the division came out on the far side of the wood, facing west, the picture looked even worse. Sumner could see smoke and hear gunfire off to the right, where tenacious Rebels and Northerners still disputed possession of the Miller barnyard and adjacent pastures, and some firing seemed to be going on to the south by the Dunker church; but in front, as far as Sumner could see, there was nothing at all except for the ghastly debris that filled the cornfield. From the sketchy evidence he had, Sumner concluded that two whole army corps had ceased to exist: the right wing of the army was gone, except for scattered fragments, and he had this end of the battle all to himself.

  The plan of attack which he decided on was very simple. If he was now beyond the Federal flank, then he must be beyond the Rebel flank as well: so he would move straight west, at right angles to the earlier lines of attack, advancing until he was in rear of Lee's left. Then he would wheel to his own left and sweep down the ridge behind Lee's line, crumpling the Army of Northern Virginia into McClellan's net. He had Sedgwick form his division in three lines, a brigade to each line, five thousand men altogether, and he started out across the cornfield full of confidence: if Sedgwick's men got into any trouble they could cut their way out, and besides, two other divisions were following.

  Sumner supposed they were following, at any ra
te. They had been told to do so. But he was the cavalry colonel, riding in the front line as he led his men to the charge, not the corps commander staying back to make sure that everybody understood what he was to do and did it; and his second division was even now going astray, swinging about for an attack on the high ground southeast of the Dunker church, half a mile or more away from Sumner's target. The third division had not even started, staff work having been fouled up. Worst of all, Sedgwick's division was formed for a head-on attack and nothing else. The three brigade lines were so close together that maneuvering would be almost impossible, and if the division should be hit in the flanks there would be great trouble.

  The five thousand enlisted men who would have to foot the bill if anything went wrong were not thinking of possible errors in tactics as they moved forward. They were veterans and they were rated with the best troops in the army, but the march so far had been rather unnerving. They had come up through all the backwash of battle, seeing many wounded, hearing many discouraging remarks by demoralized stragglers; they had seen ambulances jolting to the rear from advanced operating stations, carrying men who held the stumps of their amputated limbs erect in a desperate effort to ease the pain of the rough ride. When they formed line at the edge of the wood, even the veteran 19th Massachusetts had been so visibly nervous that its colonel had put the men through the manual of arms for a few minutes to steady their nerves. (This was another of the old fancy-Dan regiments; in the beginning it had elected not merely its officers but its enlisted men as well, just like a club, and when it left Boston in 1861 it had two complete baggage wagons for each company, four for regimental headquarters and four for the commissary—enough, as one member said, for an army corps, by later standards. It had learned much since those days.)