After Burnside left the White House the President tried desperately to get a little help out of Halleck. Brushing aside the question of resignations, Lincoln put it up to Halleck bluntly: Burnside wanted to renew the offensive, but his top commanders disagreed, and wasn't this a spot where the general-in-chief ought to go into action? Lincoln wanted Halleck to go down to Fredericksburg, look the ground over, talk with the various generals, and then either tell Burnside to go ahead or have him call the whole thing off. With that tartness that he could use when he had to, Lincoln told Halleck: "If in such a difficulty as this you do not help, you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance."
This hurt Halleck's feelings. He wrote to Stanton, offering his resignation, and the sounds of his grief reached the White House. In the files Lincoln's letter to him acquired the notation in Lincoln's handwriting, "Withdrawn, because considered harsh by General Halleck." More than this Halleck did not do, until a few days later he got a letter from Burnside stating that officer's belief that he was entitled at least to some general directions as to the advisability of crossing the Rappahannock. This finally roused Halleck a little, and on January 7 he wrote to Burnside saying in effect that he had always been in favor of a forward movement, that the object was to defeat Lee's army rather than to capture Richmond, and that since Lee's army lay beyond the river it would be necessary for Burnside to cross the river if he proposed to fight. The big idea, Halleck went on solemnly, was "to injure him all you can with the least injury to yourself." But Halleck made it clear that it was entirely up to Burnside to decide when, where, and how to get across the river.
Beyond this Halleck would not go. With the whole machinery of government thrown into action, he had at last been put on record as believing that the commander of the army ought to do something. If between the army commander and the generals who would have to make his strategy effective there was such paralyzing doubt and distrust that any campaign was foredoomed to failure, Halleck was going to keep his hands out of the whole mess. Lincoln had brought him to Washington to handle just such tangles as this, but when Halleck had told the army commander that in any fight it was advisable to inflict more injury than he received, he had reached his limit. Lincoln dropped Burnside a line saying that he had seen Halleck's letter and that he endorsed the idea of a forward movement, although Burnside must understand that the government was not trying to drive him. Meanwhile, Lincoln did not see how it would help any just now to accept Burnside's resignation. Burnside would have to take it from there and do the best he could with it.
21
This Burnside would do. His soldiers and the country might have been better off if Burnside had been more of a quitter, but that was one defect which he lacked. He had a responsibility which he knew was too big for him, but as long as he had it he would go ahead with it. The man seems to have felt the lonely isolation of his position very keenly. General Baldy Smith dropped in on him one evening, and Burnside was very frank about it. Everybody he ever talked to, said Burnside, had some personal interest to serve. The commander of the army could never be sure that what was said to him was motivated by either loyalty or friendship. Therefore, Burnside continued, it was his custom every night, after everything had quieted down, to send for Robert and have a long talk with him.
Robert was an aged and devoted colored servant who had been with Burnside for many years and who had charge of the cooking at army headquarters. Every night in the big Virginia mansion which had been taken over for army headquarters, with the trim patrols from the crack cavalry squadron which acted as headquarters guard standing on the alert outside, and the dapper staff officers in sashes and epaulets ornamenting the anterooms within, Robert and the general sat down by the fire for a long talk. Only then, said Burnside, could he feel that he was talking with someone who really had his interests at heart. And Baldy Smith wondered irreverently if that was how the Fredericksburg battle plan had been drawn up.
22
2. The Fools That Bring Disaster
The authorities had not said anything about going into winter quarters, because there was this plan of Burnside's for a winter campaign, and sooner or later something was likely to come of it. But the soldiers figured that nothing more was going to happen until spring, which was quite reasonable of them, and in the five weeks that followed the battle of Fredericksburg they went to work to provide themselves with all-weather houses in place of the pup tents that were government issue for times like these.
This army carried thousands of axes in its wagons, and the soldiers took them and swarmed over the hills and ravines that bordered the Rappahannock, felling trees and trimming them into logs, until the land for miles around was bleak and naked under the January sky.
1
It would appear that some of the men were handy with axes and that some of them were not. There is a reminiscence in one of the old books about a regiment of backwoodsmen from Wisconsin which watched one day while a detail of city-bred New Yorkers labored mightily to cut up a pile of logs into ties for Colonel Haupt's railroad. The Wisconsin men stood it as long as they could, and finally they sent over a delegation: Give us those axes before somebody kills himself, and we'll cut the ties!
2
Every regiment took its turn with the axes, and not long after the first of the year the great sprawling camp of the army began to look like a crude but permanent city. The log-and-canvas huts which covered hills and plains were ranged in orderly fashion along company and regimental streets, with broad main-traffic arteries going past division and corps headquarters. The city even had its own barren parks—open fields, the earth packed down like concrete, where brigade and battalion drills were held. A few genuine civilian houses survived here and there, serving as quarters for high-ranking officers and their staffs. Most of the houses were simply torn down for their lumber.
The huts in which the army lived were much of a pattern. The usual course was for four men to club together to make and occupy one hut. They would lay up pine logs to a height of three or four feet, in a rectangle twelve feet long by a little more than six feet wide, and there would be a ridgepole running from end to end of the enclosure six feet off the ground. Four shelter-tent halves (each of which measured approximately six feet by four) were then buttoned together, thrown over the ridgepole, and brought down to the logs at the sides and made secure. The logs were carefully chinked with mud, and the gable ends were filled with whatever was available—with woodwork if the men could shape it easily, with extra shelter tents if such could be stolen, sometimes with rubber blankets if the men happened to own them. A door was cut in one end and a fireplace was built beside it with a mud-and-stick chimney which usually was somewhat defective. (A favorite trick at night, one soldier remembered, was to lay a flat board across the top of the nearest smoking chimney and then run before the resulting smudge sent the occupants out looking for a fight.) At the far end of the hut there generally would be two double bunks running from wall to wall. The theory was that two men sleeping together and sharing their blankets could keep warmer than if each man had a bunk to himself.
Styles in bunks varied, however. A New York soldier wrote that in his outfit the men took planks and made oblong frames on the ground inside their hut, "like onion beds in a garden," filling the frames with dead leaves or pine boughs. If the planks were wide enough to make the bed-place fairly deep, and if enough leaves or boughs were gathered, he said, the bed was as snug as anyone could wish. A Massachusetts soldier remarked that on cold nights the rookie would put on all of his clothing, overcoat included, before he went to bed, but that the old-timer would undress and then use his discarded clothing as extra covers on top of his blankets. It was much warmer that way, the veteran said.
8
But even though its camp was snug enough, this army was very dispirited as the new year began. It was not well, for one thing. There was much sickness and there were many deaths, and never a day passed without the soun
d of firing squads discharging t
heir farewell volleys over new graves in the cheerless hills.
The rooki
e regiments in particular lost men from disease, but there were deaths among the veteran regiments too, and it seemed that these losses somehow were much more depressing than the deaths that occurred in battle. One soldier wrote that death in a military camp was just as moving, and caused just as much grief to be felt and shown, as death in time of peace in one's own home town.
4
These young men were far from their families, and if they had the rude strength of youth, they also had youth's terrible capacity for loneliness, and when a man fell ill that loneliness took hold of him very hard. Then his comrades did their best to take a little of his loneliness away by visiting his sickbed, bringing him camp gossip and any dainties which they might have, writing letters for him and showing other little attentions. If he died, they inherited his loneliness (it would be quite unendurable to suppose that he took it with him) and the mourners who went about the streets of this military city were desperately unhappy.
Yet death and loneliness visit the camp of a victorious army of high morale also. Men fell ill and died that winter, aad were sincerely mourned, among the high-spirited Confederates across the river, and yet no Southerner remembered the winter afterward as a time of unrelieved gloom. The trouble on the Yankee side of the river was that there did not appear to be any sensible reason for anything. There had been many deaths and it looked as if they had all been wasted. It was as certain as anything could be that there would be more deaths in future, and it seemed likely that they would be wasted too. The soldiers were left with nothing to believe in. A thoughtful chaplain recorded:
"The phrensy of soldiers rushing during an engagement to glory or death has, as our boys amusingly affirm,
been played out.
Our battle-worn veterans go into danger, when ordered, remain as a stern duty so long as directed, and leave as soon as honor and duty allow. Camp followers, and one third of our armies may now be classed in that category, keep out of the range of shell and minnie." When illustrated magazines came to camp, the padre continued, the soldiers would look at the pictures showing mounted officers with drawn swords nobly leading their heroic troops into action and would jeer loudly and repeat: "All played out!"
5
The eminent Bostonian cavalryman, Major Higginson, wrote that "stupidity and wickedness" ruled the army, and concluded: "We are getting on to perdition. If the people at home do not take the mismanagement of this war and this government to heart, we shall have a disgraceful peace before summer." A less distinguished Bay Stater in the 33rd Massachusetts wrote that "our poppycorn generals kill men as Herod killed the innocents," and even
stout-hearted
Major Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote home that "this army seems to be overburdened with second-rate men in high positions, from General Burnside down. . . . This winter is, indeed, the Valley Forge of the war."
6
William Thompson Lusk, a former medical student who was gloomily serving in the 79th New York, gave way to despairing anger in a letter which indicates that President Lincoln himself was not out of the reach of a soldier's resentment just then:
"Alas my poor country! It has strong limbs to march and meet the foe, stout arms to strike heavy blows, brave hearts to dare—but the brains, the brains—have we no brains to use the arms and limbs and eager hearts with cunning? Perhaps Old Abe has some funny story to tell, appropriate to the occasion." A week later this same soldier wrote, in another letter: "Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak.
...
I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us."
7
Thus the army, apparently. And yet there are few ventures which offer as many chances for error as this business of trying to determine exactly how an army feels and what it proposes to do about it. Private soldiers have hidden emotional reserves which neither they nor anyone else can bring out for inspection and analysis, and the very men who declare that loyalty is for fools and courage a delusion may be precisely the ones who, when ordered, will lift a cheer and tramp across a fire-blasted meadow to attack a stone wall which they know full well is death to approach. They can sometimes take a good deal more than one thinks, and when they finally approach the point at which they will flatly refuse to take any more they are not likely to do very much talking about it. The thing to watch then is what they do and what they fail to do, and not what they say.
In this, oddly enough, the private soldier most closely resembles the private civilian, which indeed he is in another incarnation. Those who fancy that he would not go anywhere if they themselves were not there, heaven-sent, to lead and inspire him, can do a great deal of fruitless worrying about him, and early in this winter of 1863 this worrying was reaching its high point for the whole war.
Among those who worried was the Union quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs, a grave and estimable man who deserves just a little better of posterity than he seems likely ever to get. Meigs had a hard job to do and he did it extremely well, and yet he is remembered today principally because an impish Confederate cavalryman hung the barb of a practical joke upon him. Confederate cavalry raided deep behind the Yankee lines that winter and seized a telegraph office, from which there presently came a dispatch to General Meigs in his office at Washington protesting bitterly about the poor quality of the mules which the Confederacy was getting via its captures of Yankee wagon trains. The wire was signed with the mighty name of Jeb Stuart, which has kept it from being forgotten, and it tends to be the only thing one thinks about when Meigs's name comes up.