The high command, of course, was of several minds. Burnside was toying with ideas of feints downstream to draw off the bulk of Lee's strength, feints upstream to draw it in the opposite direction, feints right here to make possible an unopposed crossing elsewhere. Exactly what all of this would amount to was never clear, but the ideas were at least stirring in his mind. Sumner, who had the great virtue of loyalty, stoutly supported Burnside's plan even though he did not quite understand it. Joe Hooker had more than enough military intelligence to perceive the folly of an attempt to force a crossing here, and he left none of the army's ranking commanders in doubt about his feelings. Nor, for that matter, did he leave Washington in doubt. As early as November 19 he had sent a private letter to Secretary Stanton, putting on record his own criticism of his commanding officer. When Hooker wrote he had just come up behind Sumner, and he had his two army corps camped close to United States Ford on the Rappahannock. He told Stanton that, boats or no boats, he ought to be allowed to take his men across the river and go driving south without worrying about pontoon bridges or anything else. He could live off the country; he would be entering, he said, a rich agricultural district unspoiled by war, and the foraging would be good. In general, he could smash things up so thoroughly that the enemy would have to hurry back to protect Richmond and would not be able to defend the Rappahannock crossings here or anywhere else.
14
In many ways Hooker's idea was perfectly sound. But Hooker-was Hooker; strange mixture of the conniver and the sincere patriot. In sending to the Secretary of War a pointed criticism of his own commander, he was violating both military law and military etiquette, not to mention the canons of ordinary civilized behavior. And since there was obviously no chance whatever that the Secretary of War, getting Hooker's letter, would promptly reverse Burnside and order the movement which Hooker suggested, what Hooker was really trying to do with all of this irregularity was to get his own lightness and Burnside's wrongness on record in advance of the catastrophe which Hooker scented on the wind. Burnside, Hooker felt, was not going to last long. After Burnside?
Yet the important thing about this army was never the rivalry of its generals, nor, for that matter, the generals themselves. For this was an army that had to operate strictly on its own. From beginning to end, at one level or another, its command was either erratic or beset with slackness and incompetence. Something like this business of the pontoons was always happening, something was always going irretrievably wrong, owing less to any single shortcoming than to a general failure on the part of someone in shoulder straps. It is impossible to disagree with the historian who remarked that the army was cursed "by a line of brave and patriotic officers whom some good fairy ought to have knocked on the head."
15
What the army finally was to do, if indeed it was to do anything, would at last depend almost entirely on the men in the ranks. Individual leaders who were worthy of them, these men did indeed have here and there, at varying levels of command from company to army corps. But leadership which, as a whole, came even close to being good enough for them —that, from the day the war began to the day it ended, these men never got.
In addition, they had suffered lately a psychic wound, having lost McClellan, the one commander for whom they felt affection and with whom they felt at ease. They had no light to follow now but the light they might find in their own spirits, and that light was guttering very low as they waited by the riverbank with the weather growing colder and the muddy bivouac becoming more and more cheerless. It seems that they began to get a premonition of disaster, a premonition that was less the result of a conscious appraisal of their chances than the product of many small failures and minor irritants, aggravated by the fact that the indecision at general headquarters was too obvious for the most heedless private to miss. They had cheers for Old Burny when they saw him by the roadside, but the cheers were growing perfunctory. The soldiers were a glum crowd now and they rarely felt like cheering anyone.
For one thing, they had not been paid for months. For another, in this movement down from Warrenton a great many units had somehow been marched away from their equipment and were now enduring the sleet and snow without tents or blankets. For still another, the quality and quantity of the rations were visibly deteriorating. Fights broke out as regiments which the commissaries had missed tried to raid the supplies of better-nourished outfits. A diarist in the 9th Massachusetts recalled later: "Never were we any worse off for supplies." A veteran in the 22nd Massachusetts wrote feelingly of their bivouac, from which 588 men of the regiment were absent because of sickness: "This plain became a wallow-hole; the clay surface freezing at night and thawing by day, trampled by thousands of men, made a vast sea of mud.
...
It had to be scraped and washed off to prevent our tents from becoming hog pens." The rookie
146th New York, which had just joined up, learned that army life was not quite as it had been imagined, and its historian recalled: "Many of the older regiments around us were tired of the service and anxious to return home, and the infection spread among the new regiments."
16
Often enough, spirits went up or down with the quality of the food. For six mortal weeks the 79th New York had had nothing to eat but hardtack and salt meat. One day, by great good luck, a captain in this regiment got some potatoes.
He sliced them
and fried a huge panful and sat down with his tent mate, the regimental chaplain, to eat them. In blissful silence the two men ate fried potatoes, emptying the pan to the last crinkly slice, carefully dividing and eating that, and then leaning back to light their pipes, feeling that life might be joyous after all. The chaplain had said grace over their meal, and after that the two had spoken not a word; but at last the captain took his pipe from his mouth and said gravely: "Chaplain, Jiose potatoes needed
salt."
The chaplain thought it over, then nodded judicially, and the two men resumed their contented silent smoking.
17
However, it is quite clear that, taking the army as a whole, something more was wrong than a mere shortage of rations. What was going on was not just the normal grousing of soldiers who have begun to see that war is not quite as much fun as they had expected it to be. This army was beginning to understand its own handicaps, and it was beginning to lose confidence. Most of the rank and file knew no more about what the high command had in mind than the rank and file usually knows, but the rank and file was not in the least stupid and it could read the omens as well as anybody. What lay back of these myriad complaints about mud, bad food, and poor leadership comes out in a letter written just at this time by one soldier who happened to be completely articulate—Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., of the 20th Massachusetts, a twice-wounded man of proven valor from a stout, battle-tried regiment. On November 19 Holmes wrote:
"I've pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence & I am almost ready to hope spring will see an end. . . . The army is tired with its hard and its tenible experience & still more with its mismanagement & I think before long the majority will say that we are vainly working to effect what never happens-the subjugation (for that is it) of a great civilized nation. We shan't do it-at least the army can't."
18
What Holmes could put into words in a letter to his own kin, other soldiers could only think-or, more likely, feel, leaving the thought unformulated and being conscious only of a deep depression. Yet the depression and what lay back of it were hidden if possible. Like the two officers who found uplift in a pan of fried potatoes, the soldiers kept their spirits up with such devices as were available, which included, for the men on picket duty along the river, the exchange of not wholly ill-natured insults with the Confederate pickets across the river. As, for instance:
"Oh, Yank! How did you like Bull Run?"
"Better bury your dead on South Mountain."
"What do you think of the New York election?" (Democrats had just made Horatio Seymour, suspected of strong Copperhead tendencies, governor of New York, roundly defeating the Unionist candidate, General James Wadsworth, and the Confederates were inclined to make much of it.)
"What do
you
think of Ben Butler?"
"Oh, the Louisiana Tigers will bring him to Richmond."
"The Louisiana Tigers? There's none of them left—the last died running."
18
And so on, very like the catcalling of schoolboy gangs on the playground, except that these gangs unaccountably carried rifles and might at any moment quit yelling and start shooting at each other. The exchange had a sharp edge now and then. The whole army chuckled over the answer one brash Federal got when, observing that the Confederate on the opposite bank was exceedingly ragged, he called across to know if Rebels did not have any decent clothes. The Reb looked him over for a minute, then called back: "We-uns don't put on our good clothes to butcher hogs."
But whether it approached the event with grousing, with despairing letters home, or with jeers at the enemy's pickets, the army knew that it was drifting steadily toward a battle. It drifted with fatalism. In fact, so contradictory is the spirit of man that the soldiers even displayed a febrile enthusiasm, for although all the signs were bad, yet action was action, the battle might possibly be won, and a great battle won would bring the war near an end. A newspaper correspondent in early December wrote that "the Army of the Potomac never felt better" than it did when the long blue columns at last began to draw out of the scattered camps and head toward the banks of the deep unbridged river.
20
For Burnside, after sitting there bemused for three weeks, had finally come to a decision. It seemed to him now that the enemy would be more surprised by a crossing right at Fredericksburg than by a crossing at any other place, and in a way he was right. Probably nothing in all the war surprised Lee quite as much as the discovery that his enemy would move up for a frontal assault at Fredericksburg, although this was not a surprise that gave the Federals any military advantage. In any case, on December 9 Burnside called the Grand Division commanders to headquarters and instructed them to have their commands ready to move at daylight of December 11, each man carrying three days' rations and sixty rounds of ammunition, battery and ammunition wagons to carry three days' forage for their horses. To Major Spaulding, Burnside sent word to stand by: the army was at last ready to use those pontoons.
There is record of a party given by officers of a New England regiment in a riverside hut the night the orders came out. Some twenty men who had no illusions about the kind of reception they were going to get when they crossed the river met to sing songs and to drink whisky punch. At the end, just before the party broke up, someone lifted his glass and cried: "To the health of Little Mac!"
The hut rocked with cheers and the glasses v/ent bottoms up, and a man who was present wrote that the soldiers were sustained that night by a positive faith that McClellan would yet return and lead the army to victory.
21
With that faith, or such other faith as they could muster, the men marched up to the river. As the 16th Maine marched through deserted camps the men could hear the high soft voice of a contraband camp servant lifted in the song, "Jordan Water, Rise over Me."
22
3. Big Stars Are Busting
It was three o'clock on a cold December morning, and there was a heavy wet fog along the river and many strange noises in the night: a creaking and a thumping and a scrabbling, the sound of wagons and horses and men getting great hollow weights down a steep bumpy road where no one could see three feet beyond the end of his nose. There was this river, and beyond it there was a silent lifeless town, and beyond the town there was an open plain bordered by low hills, and in this bleak three-in-the-morning chill all of these lay invisible, and the shadow of death rested upon them and could be felt there in the dark by the riverside. The 50th New York Engineers were going to throw pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock to Fredericksburg.
Major Spaulding had his orders, and he was building three bridges: one of them opposite the dock at the lower end of town, where steamboats used to receive passengers and freight in the days when Fredericksburg had a normal life to live, and the other two a bit farther upstream, opposite the center of town. He had chosen his spots by daylight, and now the men were extending the bridges into a void, building for a farther shore which they had to take on faith, anchoring their scows in the chuckling black water and binding them together with long timbers and fastening planking on top of the timbers, trying to do it silently, but knowing perfectly well that whatever faith might say about the farther shore there were alert enemies over there somewhere, hearing these sounds and cannily interpreting them and preparing to act as soon as the light should come. For a few hours the darkness was a protecting cloak.
The darkness did not last nearly long enough. By six o'clock it had thinned, and although the fog remained there was a dim gray light along the river. From the Confederate side there came a measured boom-boom of two fieldpieces, the signal by which the Rebel commander on the water front notified his army that the Yankees were coming across. Presently the engineers could see the water-front buildings of Fredericksburg in the mist not far off. There were many Confederates hidden in and about those buildings, and as the slow light grew these looked at the bridgebuilders over the sights of their rifles. There was a crackling snap-snap of infantry fire all along the water front, and the engineers ran back off their half-finished bridges to take cover, leaving dead and wounded men along the wet planking.