Glory road, p.13
Glory Road, page 13
More than that he would not say, and his visitors at length took their leave, well fed but somewhat puzzled. After they left, Burnside wrote a document which was to be the vehicle of the promised astonishment. It bore the heading, "General Order Number 8," and it contained the substance of his confused analysis of the disaster at Fredericksburg, together with an expression of his dim feeling that he who had not deserved high command had at least deserved better subordinates than he had been given. Brooding upon these things, he had distilled a bitter fury, the exquisite rage of pure impotence, and he gave full vent to it.
When fury and rage are turned loose they have to have a target, and Burnside's target was principally Joe Hooker.
General Order Number 8 had a great deal to say about Hooker, most of it quite true. It alleged that he habitually uttered "unjust and unnecessary criticisms of the actions of his superior officers," that he tried "to create distrust" in the minds of fellow officers, that he said and wrote things designed to create false impressions, and that he was much given to "speaking in disparaging terms of other officers." It climaxed these variously phrased allegations by asserting that, as a man unfit to hold an important commission, Hooker "is hereby dismissed the service of the United States."
Almost by afterthought, as if he had suddenly realized that it took authority higher than that of an army commander to cashier a general, Burnside added that this order was issued "subject to the approval of the President of the United States."
Having unburdened himself about Hooker, Burnside then went on, apparently, to take in everybody else whose habits or actions had bothered him.
A second paragraph announced that Brigadier General W. T. H. Brooks, a division commander in the VI Corps, had been complaining of the policy of the government and had been using language tending to demoralize his command. Brooks, like Hooker, was dismissed from the service—subject, again, to the approval of the President.
A third paragraph took care of General Newton and General Cochrane, who had made that hurried end-of-the-year trip to Washington with a tale to tell, and whose identities had at last become known to Burnside. "For going to the President of the United States with criticisms of the plans of their commanding officer," these two were to meet the fate of Hooker and Brooks.
A final paragraph wrapped up the odds and ends. It undertook to relieve certain officers from duty, "it being evident that they can be of no further service to this army." Among them were the recent luncheon guests, Franklin and Smith. Franklin, Burnside felt, had done less than he might have done in the attack at Hamilton's Crossing, and Smith—blameless enough so far as Fredericksburg went— lacked faith in the success of an overland move toward Richmond; they must go, along with Franklin's assistant adjutant general, a Lieutenant Colonel Taylor. Burnside was swinging blindly by now.
Into this proscription list he put one of his own favorites, Brigadier General Ferrero of the IX Corps; someone had told him that Ferrero had recently overstayed a leave of absence. He also got Cochrane into this list of those who were to suffer the lesser punishment of losing their commands but not their commissions—apparently forgetting that a few sentences earlier he had ordered him cashiered outright.4
With all of this committed to writing, Burnside took off for Washington to show it to the President and, if possible, to get his approval. There was no way to undo defeat. The Angel of the Resurrection could not be summoned down to the ghastly field below Marye's Heights to restore the fallen to life, but it might at least be possible to revive the modest self-esteem of the commanding general. If this army's great handicap had been a clogging of the channels of command by enmity and distrust toward the commander, here was a purge to set everything straight. If nothing else could be said for it, the paper would at least make interesting reading for all ranks. As Burnside had promised his guests at luncheon, it was a stunner.
It was not, in the end, anything more than that. Like most presidents, Lincoln was forever being given dramatic compositions by men in high positions with the assurance that his signature at the foot of the paper, his nod of approval to the man who had written it, would solve everything and enable him to sleep quietly of nights. Seward had offered to run the White House for him back in the early days when the war was hardly begun, presenting him with a cunning letter which survives as a historical curio. A year later General McClellan had written down his own solution for the nation's ills and had handed it to the President in order that the country might be saved. Now Burnside, and this; while the army sickened in a dirty camp by the cold river and by every sign an army can give indicated that it had at last made up its mind about things.
Lincoln presumably could read the signs. They had rarely been any worse.
General Hooker himself, focusing the sharpest of eyes upon the opportunities which defeat and disaster were opening for an energetic man at the top of the heap, was contemptuously telling a New York Times correspondent that President and Administration were "played out" and that there ought to be a dictator. General Howard, pious soldier and unyielding anti-slavery man, was noting that he had just been obliged to bring to trial two officers "for disloyal language directed against the President and the general commanding." He stopped their mouths, but he wrote that "discontent had taken deep root" and he himself felt "a want of confidence in the army itself."5 And just when Burnside was writing his screed, German-born Carl Schurz, a devoted but slightly inexpert major general in the XI Corps, was saying in a letter to Lincoln:
"I am convinced that the spirit of the men is systematically demoralized and the confidence in their chief systematically broken by several of the commanding generals. I have heard generals, subordinate officers, and men say that they expect to be whipped anyhow, that 'all these fatigues and hardships are for nothing, and that they might as well go home.' Add to this that the immense army is closely packed together in the mud, that sickness is spreading at a frightful rate, that in consequence of all these causes of discouragement desertion increases every day—and you will not be surprised if you see the army melt away with distressing rapidity."8
But those, after all, were the comments of the generals—three generals as completely dissimilar, by the way, as could be found in all the army—and generals are often mistaken about what their men are thinking. The really ominous signs in those days were coming from the enlisted men themselves, and it was what the men were doing, not what they were saying, that was ominous.
They were not, as a matter of fact, saying anything at all, which in some ways was the worst sign of the lot.
There had been a big review of the II Corps not long since, and Burnside and Sumner had ridden down the lines together, gold-braided staff officers clanking at their heels. Ordinarily this would have brought cheers, regardless of the identity or personal popularity of the generals; the men liked to cheer at such times and were quite ready to accept any decent excuse to start. But this time a sullen, unnatural silence lay across the field. White-haired old Sumner was outraged. Some sort of cheer at a review was as much the commanding general's due as a salute, and this was shameful flouting of military etiquette. He told General Couch, commander of the corps, to make the men do their duty.
So, on order, corps and division and brigade commanders and their aides rode up and down the lines, swinging their hats and swords and earnestly calling for three cheers. Not a cheer did they get. The silence lay unbroken upon the wintry field save for their own piping exhortations and, here and there, a single derisive cry. in response: as embarrassing a moment, one would suppose, as a commanding general could well experience.7
They had made up their minds about things, those soldiers, and they were expressing themselves unmistakably. They were saying nothing where normally they would have been noisy. Also, in steadily increasing numbers, they were simply laying down their weapons and going home, quietly piling up the enlisted man's ultimate vote of no confidence in the war and in the men who were running it.
A veteran in the Iron Brigade wrote that desertions from the Army of the Potomac after the mud march were averaging two hundred a day, stimulated to some extent, no doubt, by a flood of letters from anti-war people in the North, who seemed to be engaged in an organized letter-writing campaign to encourage desertion. If a soldier yielded to such pleas, things were usually made as easy for him as possible. His best course was simply to write to his family or to his friends, saying that he wanted to come home. They would send to him by express a box containing civilian clothing. (Such boxes were coming in that winter almost literally in carload lots.) The soldier would put on the civilian clothing, slip quietly out of camp, and, usually, that would be that.8
In Washington the provost marshal had his patrols watching every road and every bridge, for the tide of deserters was flowing north in full spate. Detachments of troops held all three of the bridges over the Potomac—Chain Bridge, well upstream, Aqueduct Bridge at Georgetown, and Long Bridge at the foot of Seventh Street. A string of pickets guarded every road leading from the city to the open country, and there was an especially heavy guard over the Anacostia Bridge near the navy yard. This bridge led to roads for Baltimore and Annapolis, gave access to other roads leading to the shore of Chesapeake Bay, and communicated also with the road south via Port Tobacco, which was the principal route for contraband trade with the South. Cavalry patrolled all of the country roads near Washington, and there was a navy patrol along the water front. Provost guards were stationed at every dock and pier and rode the ferries to Alexandria. A chain of pickets surrounded Baltimore.9
Every train that left Washington bound north was examined by the provost guard as it pulled out of the station. In addition, other guards came aboard to search the cars afresh when the train reached Annapolis Junction, twenty-five miles out. Enlisted men legitimately traveling north on furlough were infuriated by all of this, especially since part of the function of the provost guards seemed to be to keep private soldiers out of the first-class carriages. "This is what makes a soldier hate himself and all others, for he thinks a dog is thought more of than he is," wrote a Michigan veteran savagely. Not until one passed Harrisburg, said this soldier, did he escape from the interfering vigilance of the guards.10
Yet all of this did very little good. There were many ways by which a soldier who wanted to desert could be helped on his way. The Confederates circulated handbills through the Federal camps, offering free transportation to practically any spot on earth to all who would come through the Rebel lines and give themselves up. Many men accepted these offers. A few—foreign-born mechanics and artisans, for the most part—tried to remain in the South and earn a living, their skills being in much demand. More often, the men who surrendered simply gave their paroles as prisoners of war and presently were shipped back through the lines to Annapolis, where the Federals maintained a camp for paroled men who were awaiting formal exchange.
In theory a soldier at this camp stayed there until he had been exchanged (on paper) for some paroled Confederate, whereupon he went back to duty with his regiment. In actual practice, however, paroled men tended to consider themselves more or less out of the war for keeps, and at times it was almost impossible even to keep them in camp, to say nothing of getting them back to their outfits. In mid-January 1863 the commander of the Annapolis camp estimated that fully three fourths of his men were arrant shirkers, and said that there were not five hundred men in his camp who either knew or cared what army corps they belonged to. He added: "If the men in my camp were a sample of our army we would have nothing but a mob of stragglers and cowards."11
Permitting oneself to be captured in order to get a parole, and thus a chance to slide out of the war sideways, had by this time become a widespread evil fully recognized by army authorities. Many men got to the parole camps without bothering to go through the formality of first being captured by the Rebels. There was a thriving trade in forged parole certificates. A man who got one would straggle off, present himself at the parole camp, and either old-soldier it there or take the first chance to set out for home. Or if he preferred he would simply wander north at once, counting on his parole paper to serve for a pass whenever the provost guard might halt him.12
Extensive as this practice was, however, most of the men who deserted used other means. There was an "underground railway" operating between Alexandria and Baltimore, its object being to get soldiers past the guards and pickets around Washington. It appears to have been operated by Confederate sympathizers, motivated either by Southern patriotism or by a desire to earn an honest dollar. Its agents would take a deserter at Alexandria, smuggle him across the Potomac, and get him over to the Leonardtown road, where he would be hidden until a little group of fugitives had been collected. The men were then taken across country by way of Upper Marlboro to Fair Haven on the Chesapeake shore, where a steamer would put in to take them to Baltimore. On the boat the men would be given civilian clothing, if they did not already possess it, and would be told how to make their way north out of Baltimore.13
Alexandria, to be sure, was a good many miles upstream from the army's camps. But Burnside's administration was never able to keep the men in camp, not even though Burnside's provost marshal, annoyed by "the alarming frequency of desertion from this army," had ordered corps and division commanders to redouble their vigilance, to patrol the immediate vicinity of their camps with infantry, and to maintain cavalry on the roads farther out, arresting everybody who lacked a pass. This was of slight effect. Deserters usually followed the roads that led via Aquia Creek through Dumfries and Occoquan, riding in the wagons of sutlers, army traders, farmers, or others, which were allowed to travel the muddy roads without much examination. Sometimes the men passed themselves off as details sent out to repair the telegraph lines, which was fairly easy to do since most patrols knew nothing whatever about the electric telegraph and could easily be made to believe that it took huge gangs to keep the lines in order.14
But even this represented more trouble than was really necessary. The principal thing was to get across the Potomac into Maryland, for the contraband trade between North and South had such well-established routes through places like Leonardtown and Port Tobacco and passed through an area so strongly Southern in its sympathies that a deserter could usually count on getting north safely once he was over the river. Crossing was not too hard. Navy patrolled the river, but it was easy to hide rowboats along the shore and easy to slide across in them on dark nights. One naval officer frankly told the army people that the only way to stop the transriver traffic in deserters would be to break up all the rowboats between Aquia Creek and Washington, which clearly would be impractical.15
Now and then the army would load a regiment or so on a steamboat and, under navy convoy, cruise down to the "northern neck," the long peninsula between the Potomac and the Rappahannock southeast of Fredericksburg, in an attempt to break up the bases for the contraband trade. These attempts never amounted to very much, except, as one officer noted, that the pillage and freebooting indulged in by the troops probably confirmed the inhabitants in their disunionist leanings. The creeks and inlets which were the centers for this traffic were very shallow, and the steamers usually ran aground.
Both army and navy kept details on the Maryland side of the Potomac, and each service insisted that the other was muffing its opportunities. According to the navy, the army details there were rowdy, undisciplined, drunken, and insubordinate; army replied that the navy folk showed altogether too much friendship for local secessionists. Both services agreed that there was an immense traffic in contraband goods and spies back and forth between Virginia and Maryland. There was a regular mail and express route north from Richmond via Warsaw Courthouse and Leonardtown to Washington, with two scheduled deliveries a week and an established ferry service, and boss traders were growing rich by it. Cavalry went downstream and raided a ferry point on the Virginia shore, seizing coffee and sugar and tobacco and "nearly fifty barrels of villainous whisky" but causing the smugglers only momentary inconvenience. One Federal officer who had tried in vain to tighten the controls reported that "blockade running and dealing in contraband articles have become professions."16
So here was a veritable Yukon Trail running wide open not twenty-five miles away from the chief supply line of the nation's principal army, crossing deep rivers which were under steady navy patrol, and using highways which were fully controlled by Yankee cavalry and infantry. There are probably several explanations, including the fact that Americans of every generation seem to have a positive genius for smuggling, but the principal one appears to be that Burnside's army was just naturally the kind of army to which things like this were bound to happen. Operating deep in hostile territory, it was going to be run dizzy by enemy agents stealing its secrets and sending them south and stealing its soldiers and sending them north, and its high command simply was not going to know how to stop it.
By the end of January 1863, desertions from the Army of the Potomac totaled 85,123.17
A startling figure, which does not quite mean what it appears to mean.
It does not, for instance, mean that 85,000 men had willfully laid down their weapons and gone home. Heavy as desertions had been, they had not been that heavy. Most of the men who were on the army's rolls but not with the army had not so much run away as drifted away. They had been sloughed off by the army's own inefficiency. With many of them there probably had never been a conscious decision to desert, a moment when the soldier in his own mind ceased to be a soldier temporarily absent and became instead a civilian who was never going to go back unless somebody came and got him.
The hospital system, for instance, was practically guaranteed to leak men back into civil life, and to do it in such a way that the leaks could not easily be plugged. By a freak of chance this was so because the army had been making an honest and generally successful effort to give its men better medical care than any soldiers on earth had ever had before.
