v1.1.2 / chapter 40 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* New Year's 1863 began with the Union war effort bogged down, and Federal initiative was further blunted by small but embarrassing military defeats in the West and at Charleston, South Carolina. In Virginia, the unlucky Ambrose Burnside followed up the disaster at Fredericksburg in December with a miserable, muddy flop of an offensive in January. The end result was that Burnside left command of the Army of the Potomac, to be replaced by Joe Hooker.
* If President Lincoln had cause for cautious optimism at the beginning of 1862, the arrival of 1863 must have certainly seemed much more bleak and unpromising. In late spring of 1862, the Union, despite political divisions, confusion in the military command, and the shocking bloodletting at Shiloh, had seemed poised to seize Richmond and gain a chokehold on the rebellion. By fall, it seemed instead that the Union was on the edge of defeat, with rebel forces driving up into Maryland and Kentucky. The fact that both these offensives had failed was a cause for relief but not rejoicing. The Federals had lost the initiative and their attempts to regain it had proved bloody and inconclusive, amounting to a spectacular defeat at Fredericksburg, and the hardest sort of victory at Murfreesboro. Lincoln still was not able to find generals who where willing and able to crush the Confederate forces in battle. Without such leaders, the Union could not hope to win the war.
Until then, Lincoln had to be patient. However badly the game was going, he knew he still held the ace cards. On its own, the Confederacy could never match Union resources; the blockade increasingly choked off the import of weapons and other materials; and Lincoln's shrewd manipulation of the South's confused entanglement with slavery had crushed any Confederate hope of obtaining powerful foreign allies. The odds heavily favored the Union, and as time passed the odds would continue to tip in the Union's favor.
* The first serious order of business President Lincoln had to attend to on 1 January 1862 was to chat with General Ambrose Burnside. Burnside wished to see the President to find out why Lincoln had a few days earlier so mysteriously ordered the general to stop his offensive operations in Virginia, without providing a word of explanation.
Lincoln told Burnside about the two brigadiers who had visited his office and of the stories they had told about demoralization in the Army of the Potomac. To no surprise, Burnside reacted angrily, demanding the two men's names. The President refused the request as gracefully as he could. Burnside then grew depressed and suggested that it might be best if he returned to civilian life. The President encouraged him to stay on. Burnside then abruptly became very hot and suggested that if the Army of the Potomac had little faith in him, they had less in General Halleck and Secretary of War Stanton and that both men should be removed. It is a testimony to Lincoln's "people skills" that he not only managed to keep his head in this uncomfortable confrontation, but even managed to calm Burnside down enough so that the general left the meeting feeling reasonably assured.
Lincoln, confronted with a quarrelsome army, needed to get the facts, and so he wrote a letter to General Halleck suggesting that Halleck go down to Falmouth and investigate. The letter was sharp in tone, since the fact that the President had to suggest such a thing in the first place reflected badly on Halleck's initiative. The letter ended: "If in such a difficulty as this you do not help, you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance. Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this."
The President then dressed formally and went downstairs for the customary New Year's reception at the White House. He gave the letter to Secretary Stanton to hand to Halleck when he arrived, and then went through the labor of greeting important guests and shaking their hands for a good three hours. His social duties complete, he went back upstairs for another task that he had given himself for New Year's Day: signing the Emancipation Proclamation.
The abolitionists in Congress had been very concerned about this matter. The announcement of the Proclamation had aroused much controversy and criticism, and since that time Lincoln had been very quiet about it. He had been so quiet, in fact, that on 28 December, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a hero to the abolition faction who still bore the scars from where Bully Brooks had struck him with his cane, to see if the President was trying to pocket the issue and let it die.
Sumner needn't have worried. Having put matters in motion, Lincoln was simply letting them roll quietly to their planned conclusion, and the Senator found the President writing out a final draft of the document. He told his visitor that he "would not stop the Proclamation if I could, and could not if I would." The Confederacy, to no one's surprise, had not returned to the Union. Their time of grace was over and they would now be given notice of the consequences.
In fact, the final draft was stronger in tone: although a clause had been added to ask slaves to "restrain from all violence" -- a concession to loud cries of Confederates that the Lincoln Administration was trying to provoke a slave uprising -- it sanctioned the recruitment of black soldiers and sailors into the Union's military forces. To be sure, the Second Confiscation Act of July 1862 had authorized this in general terms and the Union had been enlisting blacks for months before the proclamation was signed, but the endorsement gave no doubt that arming black men was now a matter of official Union policy at the highest levels. Freeing the slave was bad enough to Southerners; giving freed slaves guns to fight the slave power was twisting the knife.
As Lincoln picked up the pen on New Year's Day to sign the proclamation, he hesitated, not because he was worried he was doing the right thing, but because he had shaken the hands of about a thousand people and his own hand was very stiff and sore. He feared his signature would appear "tremulous" to later observers. But he went ahead and signed anyway, writing out his name in full as carefully as he could. Secretary of State Seward then added his name, a seal was applied to the paper, and it was then placed in the State Department files. Years later, it would be destroyed in a fire.
Later that busy day, Lincoln got back a reply from General Halleck. The general had been shocked and very distressed by the President's letter. Halleck went straight to his office, wrote a resignation, and sent it back to the Commander-In-Chief through War Secretary Stanton. The response was disappointing, but Lincoln thought Halleck a good administrator and an excellent source of advice on the details of military matters, though his knowledge was more academic than practical. Lincoln withdrew the letter. Halleck, pacified, agreed to stay on. Professional military men like McClellan had snickered at the President's amateurish attempts to construct military strategy, but however painfully awkward at such matters Lincoln might be, the generals' own refusal to take responsibility left the President with no choice but to call the shots.
* On 5 January 1863, Jefferson Davis returned to his home in Richmond, completing the tour of the West he had begun on 10 December. He was tired and simply wanted to be home with his family. Though cold in his public demeanor, Davis was loving to his wife and children and enjoyed his home life. However, the public would not let him be. A crowd and a band showed up to serenade him and he was obligated to speak to them.
Although weary, Davis had done much speaking in the last month and had plenty of material to draw from. He began by praising the noble history of the people of Virginia and then moved on to pour contempt on the enemy, calling them "the off-scourings of the earth", ranking at the top of their crimes the evil Emancipation Proclamation, which he proclaimed an encouragement for the slaves to rise and kill their superiors. He continued in this vein, accusing the Northerners of "every crime which could characterize the course of demons", saying that if Virginians had a choice between union with hyenas or Yankees, they would answer: "Give me the hyenas!" There were cheers and applause. Davis went on to talk of latest attempt by the Federals to take Richmond and observed that hundreds of them had succeeded in getting there, as prisoners of war. The crowd laughed. Then Davis softened his tone, speaking warmly of the citizens and praising their patriotic resolve; and finally he gave them his blessing and said good night.
A week later he addressed the Confederate Congress, attacking the Emancipation Proclamation in detail, describing it as "a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination." He went on to bitterly denounce the author of the document; suggest that captured Union officers be tried as slave-stealers; predict utter calamity as the result of the Proclamation; and state that such an act of desperation underscored the weakness of the Federal war effort.
Davis's critics called such rhetoric bombastic nonsense, an attempt to gloss over the grim circumstances of the Confederacy. Davis was fully aware that conditions were not entirely encouraging. While General Lee had shown his ability to deal with Federal drives into Virginia as long as there were men and bullets to fight with, the defense of the West was so tenuous that it would cave in quickly once the Union decided to put real pressure on it.
The Federal blockade was another worry. It never presented an immediately deadly threat but it never went away, and over the long run it would certainly choke the Confederacy to death. Hopes of foreign assistance had faded out completely. Unless the rebel nation could defeat the North in a decisive battle, defeat the North so badly that the Union had no more nerve for the fight, the outmatched South was not likely to win. Lincoln knew he held the strong hand; Davis knew he held the weak one.
It was wispy little Alec Stephens, the Confederacy's vice-president, who saw one thing very clearly. Though very much unlike his friend Lincoln in personality, he had much the same sense of calculation and knew just as well what the Proclamation meant. What it meant was that slavery could no longer be preserved in a united America. The Emancipation Proclamation was an irreversible decision. No matter how sick everyone was of the fighting, the South could not consent to reunion, and the North would not agree to disunion. There was no option for the foreseeable future other than more war, and though Stephens felt the fighting would "break down in less than a twelvemonth", he had no illusion that would mean any real peace.
* While Texas wasn't at the top of the list of concerns facing Union General Nathaniel Banks at his headquarters in New Orleans, the Lone Star State was important in the minds of other Northerners, most specifically New Englanders with financial interests in the textile mills of their states. The war had greatly reduced their supplies of cotton, and with the proper Yankee know-how a Union-occupied Texas might very well be the place to get all the cotton they needed.
Among Banks' officers was a representative of these gentlemen of commerce, a fellow with the patriotic name of Andrew Jackson Hamilton, a Unionist Texan, who had through the lobbying of his friends received from the War Department the titles of brigadier general and military governor of the state of Texas. This was a bit much since Texas wasn't in Union hands, aside from Galveston Harbor, seized by the US Navy back in October 1862. At Hamilton's urging, Banks agreed to send a Massachusetts regiment to Galveston Island to help back up Federal ambitions in the region, and on 23 December 1862 three advance companies were sent from New Orleans to prepare the way for the rest of their regiment. The advance companies arrived on Christmas Eve and started to build defenses.
Federal plans were now on the very edge of collision with rebel ambitions. Confederate Major General John Magruder, who had been put in command of the defense of Texas back in 10 October, five days after the seizure of Galveston Harbor, had been considering what might be done to take Galveston back from the Yankees and was just about ready to put the machinery in motion to do it.
Magruder, always flamboyant, was basing his plans on sheer audacity since his actual resources were thin. He had about 800 soldiers on hand, mostly survivors of the disastrous New Mexico campaign a year earlier, and a pair of steamships, the side-wheeler BAYOU CITY and smaller stern-wheeler NEPTUNE. Magruder had cotton pales stacked up on the sides of the two steamships as improvised armor. He had a 32 pound (10 kilogram) rifled gun mounted forward on the BAYOU CITY and reinforced the prow of the NEPTUNE with railroad iron to allow the vessel to be used as a ram. This done, he was ready to begin his attack. 300 of his soldiers would go into battle on the two steamships, while the other 500 men would make a ground assault across a bridge to Galveston Island.
The attack jumped off on New Year's Eve 1862, and in the first hours of the new year Magruder's infantry rushed across the bridge, which proved to be unguarded, only to be blocked by the defenses the Massachusetts men had prepared. The Texas men found themselves pinned down under fire. The two rebel steamships then got into the fight. They were faced by five Federal gunboats, mounting a total of 28 guns. The odds did not seem favorable to the rebels, though one of the Federal gunboats, the WESTFIELD, ran aground in the confusion brought on by the approach of the Confederate ships.
The odds didn't seem to get any better when the two rebel steamships engaged the Union gunboat HARRIET LANE. The BAYOU CITY's single gun blew up on its third shot, killing five of her crew, and while the NEPTUNE did succeed in ramming the HARRIET LANE, the NEPTUNE was so badly damaged in doing so that the captain ran the ship aground to keep from sinking. Then the fight began to turn around: the BAYOU CITY came alongside the HARRIET LANE, the rebels boarded the Union vessel, and a bloody close-quarters brawl, the nastiest sort of combat, followed. The Union captain was killed, and his first officer then ran up the white flag.
Now the battle shifted immediately in favor of the Confederates, if more by default than any action of their own. For some unfathomable reason the other three Union gunboats still afloat all ran up the white flag. The captain of the WESTFIELD, after telling his crew to abandon ship, blew her up to prevent her capture, killing himself in the process when the fuze he set proved to be a little shorter than estimated. At this point the Texans under fire on the island rallied for an attack, but the Massachusetts soldiers, discouraged at being deserted by their naval support, surrendered as a group. The captains of the three gunboats then reconsidered, somewhat too late, their decision to surrender, hauled down their white flags, and fled to the sea.
The rebels had taken about 140 casualties while killing, wounding, or capturing 600 Yankees. It was a splendid achievement, creditable to their audacity, if not necessarily competence, and the faint-heartedness of their adversaries. The Union navy came back on 8 January 1863, with six gunboats and the big screw steamer BROOKLYN, withdrawn from blockade duty from Mobile, but kept their distance, and Banks had little further interest in sideshow adventures in Texas. General Hamilton and his backers went to Washington, where they complained bitterly about being "humbugged" by Banks and others.
* Later that month, on 21 January, Magruder put on a repeat performance of his Galveston adventure by falling on Sabine Pass, Louisiana, 80 miles (128 kilometers) to the east, with two cottonclads. The rebels seized two small Federal blockaders before the Union men figured out what was going on. As defeats went, this one was small, involving the loss of about 11 guns and a little over a hundred seamen, but it did nothing to sharpen Federal initiative, which seemed to be stalling or even going into reverse.
The Confederate also scored some small but exhilarating naval victories against Federal blockaders at Charleston. General Beauregard had fitted out two steamers, the PALMETTO STATE and the CHICORA, as ironclad rams and had been waiting for the right moment to put them into action. The PALMETTO STATE mounted one 80 pounder (36 kilogram) rifle forward, a 60 pounder (27 kilogram) rifle aft, and an 8 inch (20.3 centimeter) gun on either side; while the CHICORA mounted two 9 inch (23 centimeter) guns and four 32 pounder (14.5 kilogram) rifles. They were under the command of Confederate Flag Officer Duncan Ingraham.
The two ironclads left dock before dawn on 31 January and moved toward the Union blockading fleet, remaining undetected by the Federals until it was much too late. The PALMETTO STATE rammed the converted 9-gun merchantman USS MERCEDITA and fired into her, while the CHICORA similarly mauled the converted ten-gun sidewheel steamer USS KEYSTONE STATE. The Confederates then withdrew unmolested, leaving their victims afloat but badly damaged.
Beauregard wasn't satisfied to let the Confederate Navy have all the glory. The Federal gunboat USS ISAAC SMITH had been bombarding rebel fortifications on the outer periphery of Charleston's defenses every night, and Beauregard set a trap. He moved up field artillery to command the path the Yankee vessel took. The gunners let the ISAAC SMITH pass on her nightly raid, but when the ship came back they pounded her until the ship's captain, with eight of his crew dead and 17 wounded, hauled down the flag and surrendered. Even as the PALMETTO STATE and CHICORA were returning from their triumphant raid, they were receiving a new addition to their ranks, in the form of a somewhat battered warship that had once been the USS ISAAC SMITH but would soon be the CSS STONO.
When the morning mists faded the Federal vessels ringing the harbor were vanished, gone out to sea in case the rebels were plotting some other trouble for them. Beauregard was justly proud of himself, announcing that he had broken the Federal blockade. In fact, the US Navy was back the next day, having regrouped and presumably learned to be more alert. Despite his pride, Beauregard had no illusions that he had beaten off the blockaders for good. In fact, he took note of the Union naval strength that was accumulating outside the harbor and believed that an all-out assault was likely in the near future.
* If Lieutenant General Theophilus Holmes, commander of the Confederate Department of the Transmississippi in his headquarters at Little Rock, was pleased by Magruder's initiative in Galveston, Holmes soon found his enthusiasm dampened.
William Tecumseh Sherman had handed over command of his forces to John McClernand on 4 January. McClernand promptly named his new command the "Army of the Mississippi". Sherman then said that he had been considering a new venture that offered better prospects for success than had the ill-fated attack on Vicksburg by way of Chicksaw Bayou: reduction of Fort Hindman, also known as Arkansas Post, a Confederate strongpoint on the Arkansas River, about 120 miles (190 kilometers) northwest of Vicksburg.
Fort Hindman wasn't a major strategic objective. It was simply a nuisance, a safe place from which the rebels could harass Federal communications on the Mississippi and its local tributaries; a rebel gunboat operating out of the fort had recently captured a Union supply vessel. For the moment, there seemed nothing better for the Federals to do, taking the fort would be useful, and a little victory might make a favorable impression in the papers and back in the War Department.
The Yankees left Milliken's Bend on 8 January and steamed up the Arkansas River with 30,000 men, and 13 ships -- including three ironclads -- under the command of David Porter. They arrived near the fort the following afternoon. The day after they disembarked, driving off rebels occupying outlying defenses. There were almost 5,000 rebels in Fort Hindman, which mounted a dozen guns, including three 9 inch (22.9 centimeter) Columbiads and an 8 inch (20.3 centimeter) rifle. These guns proved unable to do any real damage to Federal ironclads during the preliminary fighting. At noon on 11 January the Federals attacked in mass, supported by the fire of the gunboats. Although the Confederates put up stiff resistance, inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers, the fire from the gunboats proved decisive, smashing the fort's guns and defenses. White flags quickly appeared, so Sherman went forward to accept Fort Hindman's surrender.
Surrendering turned out to be a complicated process. The fort's commander, Colonel John Dunnington, was an ex-US Navy man and would only surrender to Porter. The rebel officer in charge of the troops, Brigadier General Thomas J. Churchill, later a governor of Arkansas, didn't want to surrender at all, and was loud and angry about the idea. Sherman didn't improve matters much when he asked, in an attempt to be cordial, a Confederate brigade commander from Alabama named Deshler if he was related to a family of Deshlers Sherman had known in Ohio. Deshler angrily denied any relationship to any Northerners, and Sherman responded just as angrily.
This was all just fuss. The fight was over. McClernand's force had suffered over a thousand casualties. Rebel killed and wounded were only about a tenth that, but the Federals took the entire surviving garrison of the fort prisoner. McClernand was delighted: having received his own army, he had now scored his first victory.
* The month of January started out with a Confederate success in the southern end of the Transmississippi, to be followed by a defeat in the center. This defeat was then countered in turn by further rebel successes in the north.
After John Schofield's Army of the Frontier had put Thomas Hindman and his men to flight at Prairie Grove, Arkansas, in December, the Federals had then hounded them down to Van Buren, where they burned the rebels' supplies. Satisfied, Schofield had withdrawn them to Fayetteville, northeast from Prairie Grove and largely Unionist in sentiment, where he intended to sit out the winter. Hindman, however, stubbornly refused to accept he was beaten and sent his cavalry, under Brigadier General John S. Marmaduke, north to raise hell in the Federal rear.
Marmaduke moved out with his men on New Year's Eve. On 8 January 1863, he and his 2,300 troopers attacked Schofield's main supply depot at Springfield, Missouri; struck another Federal installation at Hartville, 45 miles (72 kilometers) to the east, on 11 January; and then rode back home, attacking isolated garrisons on the way, to end their raid on 25 January. There were about 250 casualties on each side from the raid, not counting 300 Yankees that Marmaduke had captured and paroled after taking their cold-weather gear. One rebel commented: "In winter, the overcoat-bearing Federal was esteemed especially for his pelt."
The attacks on Schofield's supply lines left his position in northern Arkansas precarious, and the Confederate raid greatly emboldened rebel guerrillas back in Missouri. Guerrilla bands under leaders like William C. Quantrill, William C. "Bloody Bill" Anderson, George Todd, and David Pool began to attack Union installations in Missouri at every opportunity, taking no prisoners. With Missouri in flames once more, Major General Samuel Curtis, now in command of the department, ordered Schofield to return with his army from Arkansas to deal with the threat in the rear. The battle of Prairie Grove had given the Federals the upper hand in northern Arkansas. Schofield had no intention of giving up what he had gained and protested loudly. On his part, Curtis was just as insistent that Schofield come back to Missouri. The quarrel escalated up the chain of command.
On the balance, then, Theophilus Holmes could take pride in victories in Texas and Missouri, and the fact that the Federals had been thrown into confusion at both flanks of his department. Unfortunately, the position of the rebels in the Transmississippi very tenuous, and Holmes had no reason to believe the victories were anything more than a temporary stay of execution.
* Across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, Virginia, in its camp at Falmouth, the Army of the Potomac had managed to make itself somewhat comfortable. They'd stripped the land of trees for miles around to create neat little huts, no more than small rectangles of wood and mud with a roof made of four joined shelter halves, but reasonably snug accommodations for four men.
The collective mood was still sullen and unhappy, summed up by the universal slogan: "All played out!" Disease was a contributing factor to the bad morale, with military funerals every day. However, pestilence in the camps was nothing new, and the real discouragement was the sense of futility that had grown among an army that less than a year before had been on the edge of winning and since then had seen everything thrown away for nothing.
The grumbling among the officers had been growing ever since the Peninsula campaign. Many of them had resigned in disgust and anger, and those who remained complained bitterly, calling for McClellan's return as devoutly as though for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In fact, it would have been the Third Coming for McClellan, who had already been resurrected once from the political dead. To be resurrected more than once was most unlikely.
* On 5 January, President Lincoln received a message from Ambrose Burnside indicating the general's intention to cross the Rappahannock once more. The message was accompanied by a resignation. Lincoln could either let Burnside do what he intended or let him resign, but he would not yank the rug out from under the general as he had a week earlier. Burnside similarly sent a letter to General Halleck in an attempt to pin him down for some leadership and support. Of course, that didn't work; on 7 January, Burnside got a reply back from Halleck that was phrased in the most vaporous and obscure fashion possible, though it did include a postscript from Lincoln that cautiously approved the movement and rejected, if with no great energy, Burnside's resignation.
Such faint support could not have bolstered Burnside's confidence. The fact that all his generals were against the movement couldn't have helped either. But adversity tended to make Burnside obstinate, and he was determined to press on. He decided to cross the Rappahannock at Banks Ford, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) upstream of Fredericksburg, and by 19 January he was ready to move out.
The grumbling among the disaffected officers had by this time reached the status of an epidemic. An artillery officer visiting Franklin's headquarters that evening found Franklin's staff entirely cynical about the move and complaining about it without restraint. The officer observed that they were following Franklin's example in this behavior, and concluded that Franklin "certainly needs to be broken." He also recorded that Baldy Smith and Joe Hooker were rumored to be "almost as bad".
The next morning, the 20th, the men were lined up in full field gear and read Burnside's general order directing the movement by their officers, which ended with: "The auspicious moment seems to have arrived to strike a great and mortal blow to the rebellion, and to gain that decisive victory which is due to the country." It was a pleasant day for a march until late in the afternoon, when it began to drizzle. Burnside's generals had opposed the movement for a number of reasons, not all of them pertinent, but they had one very important and perfectly legitimate cause for concern: winter weather was unpredictable, and the roads in northern Virginia were not very usable when they were wet.
It seemed as though the rain might pass, but by sundown it was coming down steadily. By the time the light returned in the morning (the term "sunrise" doesn't seem appropriate under the conditions), the countryside was a sea of mud and the rain was falling in sheets. The big wagons carrying pontoon boats sank in the roads and the guns were stuck in turn; a huge traffic jam developed; horses and mules foundered and died; men floundered and had their boots sucked off by the sticky muck. As Burnside rode through the mire with his staff, one teamster called out to him: "General, the auspicious moment has arrived!"
Confronted by bad weather and jeers, Burnside's obstinacy seem to increase still further. He was determined to drive on, though as one soldier put it the task was no longer "how to get forward, but how to get back." The soldiers spent a day that would certainly have to be counted as one of the most miserable they would ever endure in their lives. Burnside at least understood how wretched the men were and ordered that they be issued a ration of whiskey to bolster their spirits.
The Army of the Potomac spent another damp night. The next morning, the 22nd, they got their whiskey ration. It was a staggering blunder. The rations were liberal, the men had empty stomachs, and the results were chaos. For example, a Pennsylvania regiment got into a collective fistfight with a Massachusetts regiment, and when a Maine regiment tried to intervene to stop the fight, the Maine men simply ended up fighting everyone else in a spectacular brawl in the mud. A Pennsylvania major drew his revolver but was fortunately knocked down; had he escalated the squabble into a gunfight, the results might have been total disaster. The rebels, sitting across the river, had front-row seats. The Confederates put up scrawled signs saying THIS WAY TO RICHMOND and BURNSIDE'S ARMY STUCK IN THE MUD. Pickets called across the river to ask the Yankees if they needed any help.
By noon even Burnside had all he could take. He ordered the army back to Falmouth. It was a further exercise in misery, compounded by the fact that before leaving, the men had been ordered to destroy any gear they could not carry with them. They had trashed their improvised tables, chairs, and other conveniences, making their camp substantially less comfortable to return to. Some officers had, fortunately, told their men to ignore the order since they predicted, correctly, that everyone would soon be back.
Not all of them were back soon, or at all. The men straggled back to camp in groups, missing those who had decided they were through with the war and taken off for home, as well as some who, worn out by overwork, starvation, and exposure, simply had laid down along the road and died. Many more would die later, struck down by disease whose normal familiarity was greatly enhanced by the futile "Mud March", as it came to be known, and regimental histories would often contain the dismal remark: DIED AT FALMOUTH.
Despite such misery, or because of it, the soldiers retained a certain core
of humor, shown by the ditty that made the rounds during the Mud March. It
would be remembered as being at least one bright point of humor during the
whole wretched adventure:
Now I lay me down to sleep
In mud that's many fathoms deep.
If I'm not here when you awake
Just hunt me up with an oyster rake.
A staff officer found a company of muddy stragglers on the road one day, so
dirty as to be almost unrecognizable. The staff officer had not made the
march himself and found the condition of these soldiers deplorable. He
indignantly barked at them: "Who are these men?!" A sergeant drew himself
up, probably saluted, and answered with all apparent pride: "Stragglers of
the 17th Maine, sir!"
* It was probably fortunate that the Army of the Potomac's march had bogged down before any fighting started, but the failed march inflamed the dissatisfaction in the ranks and made the unconstructive mentality among the Army of the Potomac's officer corps particularly visible. The artillerist who had noted the complaining among Franklin's staff before the march had found them sitting out the fiasco in a comfortable camp, "doing nothing to help things on, but grumbling and talking in a manner to do all the harm possible."
Joe Hooker was the loudest complainer, telling anyone who wanted to listen that Burnside was an incompetent and that the President and his men were imbeciles, concluding that "nothing would go right until they had a dictator, and the sooner the better." All this got back to Burnside, making him so angry that he completely flew off the handle. On 23 January he wrote up General Order Number 8, a raving document in which he bitterly attacked his own officers, accusing them with good reason of insubordination, and of sabotaging the morale and confidence of the Army of the Potomac. He wanted Hooker, Franklin, Smith, and other officers to be immediately dismissed from the service. The list of candidates included Newton and Cochrane; Burnside had finally checked his records to see which generals had been in Washington on the day the President spoke to the two men.
Burnside at least had the sense to run the document past one of his aides before he published it. The aide, who likely went pale reading it, suggested that the general discuss it with the President first. So Burnside went up to Washington, his humor being made no better by suffering through a mad comedy of errors just trying to get to the Aquia Creek steamship landing. Back in Washington, he presented Lincoln with the document, and a resignation, saying, in effect: IT'S THEM OR ME.
* On 25 January 1863, the War Department announced that General Burnside had resigned from his position on his own request, and that Joe Hooker was now in command of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln issued the order without consulting any of his cabinet beforehand. That might have seemed like a cruel joke, but if it was the President had reason to feel it was on him. The leadership of the Army of the Potomac was in chaos and Lincoln had to accept that he could not fix matters as they were.
Burnside had to go, but the President would not accept his resignation from the Army. Though he had not been a good commander of the Army of the Potomac, it still seemed that he could still render valuable service to the Union in a less demanding role, and so he went on leave until his superiors could figure out what to do with him. The confrontation that led to his replacement was essentially a reasonable judgement on Burnside's part. He had been put into an impossible position against his will, and he had finally forced his superiors to take ownership of the situation. Burnside certainly seemed glad to be relieved of a burden that he hadn't wanted in the first place. With the graciousness that made him so likeable, he told the President: "If Hooker can gain a victory, neither you nor he will be a happier man than I shall be."
Both Franklin and Bull Sumner were relieved of command as well in both cases simply because they were senior to Hooker and that might have led to further command problems. It was still true that Franklin had no good reputation with the administration, and his recent conduct had not won him any favors. He was eventually sent to Louisiana, where he would continue to be a dead weight on the Union cause. Relieving Sumner had been hard, since he was as honest and courageous as they came, and he was assigned to command Union forces in Missouri. Hopefully the upright and uncomplicated Sumner might straighten out the command snarl caused by the squabbling between Schofield and Curtis. Sumner went north on rest leave before going west.
* Given the rash comments Hooker had made, the fact that he had been given the top command of the Army of the Potomac was surprising, but there were valid reasons for the selection.
The first was that he was aggressive. In fact, he was known as "Fighting Joe" Hooker, though this was partly due to a typographical error. During the battles on the Peninsula the previous spring, a reporter had filed a story with his paper that contained a descriptive tag that read "Fighting -- Joe Hooker" -- that had been accidentally printed as "Fighting Joe Hooker". He claimed to hate the nickname, since he felt it made him seem hot-headed and rash, and yet he was fearless and seemed to have a strong desire to come to grips with the enemy.
The second qualification was that Hooker was not a McClellan man; Hooker was really for no one but Joe Hooker. In any case, with no other worthwhile candidates available, he seemed to be the only man around who might be able to do the job, and so he was given it, in effect being told: You claimed you could do a better job, now you get to prove it.
Of course, his loud and foolish remarks had not gone unnoticed at the top, and the next day, 26 January, the President penned a remarkable letter to the new commander of the Army of the Potomac:
BEGIN QUOTE:
General:
I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appears to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skillful soldier, which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm. But I think that during General Burnside's command of the army, you have taken counsel of your ambitions, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer.
I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gains successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticizing their commander, and withholding confidences from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it.
And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.
Yours very truly, A. Lincoln.
END QUOTE
If Hooker was startled by this message, he hid it artfully. He kept the letter in his pocket and read it to a reporter, concluding: "He talks to me like a father. I shall not answer this letter until I have won him a great victory."
He had been given other reasons for circumspection besides a stiff letter. A few days earlier, on 21 January, the court-martial that had been raking Fitz-John Porter over the coals for his failings at Second Manassas had presented its findings to the President, recommending that Porter be sacked. The President approved the decision. The justice of the action was arguable, but it made it clear just who was in charge and what could happen to those who didn't toe the line. Porter made a useful example for other officers who weren't inclined to the get with the program. Porter spent decades trying to clear his name and in 1886, Congress reinstated him as a regular army colonel listed from 1861. He would retire without back pay, but with some regained dignity.
