him, and partly the old political truism: You can't beat somebody with nobody. To date, only nobodies had offered themselves against him, men like John Charles Fremont, who was heading a rickety third-party slate. But Butler was a somebody. Soldiers might know him as a cipher, but with abolitionists and bitter-enders he was a mighty hero. He had boundless ambition and a total lack of scruples, and he saw himself as a presidential possibility. If the army suddenly dropped him he would land in the arms of the political extremists. What that would mean, to the war and to the things that would finally come out of the war, was nothing good men could speculate about with easy hearts.

So the truth of the matter probably is that in the infinite, complicated economy of the Civil War it was better to keep Ben Butler a major general, even though soldiers were needlessly killed because of it, than it was to inject him back into the political whirlpool. Washington saw it so, at any rate, and Washington had to balance fearful intangibles when it made its decision. And although there was not, fortunately, anyone else quite like Butler, there were many other cases where similar intangibles had to be balanced—cases where the Administration had to ask, in effect: Where will this man do the least harm—as a general, or as a politician out of control? Often enough the wrong guess was made, but that was the kind of riddle the times were asking.

Halleck understood these matters, and when Grant first began suggesting that it would be easier to win the war with Butler a civilian, Halleck tried to explain to him that political considerations must at times override even the professional judgment of the general in chief. A little earlier, Halleck had frankly confessed in a letter to Sherman that "it seems little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel and Lew Wallace, and yet it seems impossible to prevent it." ¹³ Halleck was right. It was impossible to prevent it. The trouble was that the army had to carry these costly misfits on its shoulders.

But the political generals were only part of the story, as far as the army was concerned. As the army settled into its trenches after four days of battle in front of Petersburg—four days which cost, roughly, as many killed and wounded as had been lost in all twelve days at Cold Harbor—some of its professionals were giving cause for worry.

Meade was on the verge of removing Warren, just when Grant was sending Smith into exile. Warren was increasingly given to broad interpretation and spontaneous revision of his orders, and Meade could hardly fail to note that the all-out attack which he had told Warren to make at dawn on the crucial eighteenth of June had not actually been delivered until 3:30 p.m. At one time Meade had definitely made up his mind to send Warren away, but the trouble was reconciled somehow and by July 1 Assistant Secretary of War Dana wired Stanton that "the difficulty between Meade and Warren has been settled without the extreme remedy which Meade proposed last week." ¹⁴

Meade himself was showing the strain. His temper was always bad, but as June wore on into sultry July and frustration followed frustration he became as savage as a wounded grizzly, and Dana was presently telling Stanton: "I do not think he has a friend in the whole army. No man, no matter what his business or his service, approaches him without being insulted in one way or another, and his own staff officers do not dare speak to him unless first spoken to, for fear of either sneers or curses." Dana added that a change in command seemed probable.¹⁵

There was probably some exaggeration in this. Meade and Grant were never intimates, but in the main they got along well enough. Nevertheless, there was trouble. Meade had handled the Petersburg assaults about as ineptly as they could have been handled, and his angry complaint on the fourth day, that since he had found it impossible to co-ordinate attacks each commander should go ahead and do the best he could on his own hook, went far to merit the comment it got from General Wright—that the different attacks had been ordered "without brains and without generalship."¹⁶ Grant seriously considered taking Meade out of the top spot and sending him up to the Shenandoah Valley, and he appears to have felt that if this happened Hancock was the man to take Meade's place.¹⁷

Yet that would hardly do, either. Hancock's wound still refused to heal. He returned to duty late in June, but a wound which remains open after nearly a year takes something out of a man, and Hancock's great days were over. Like Meade, he was getting irritable, and he was quarreling now with General Gibbon, who had been one of his best friends.¹⁸ Worse yet was the fact that if Hancock was not himself his own immediate command, the famous II Army Corps, was in even worse shape.

The II Corps had been fought out and used up. It had been the most famous corps in the army. It had stormed Bloody Lane at Antietam, it had taken 4,000 casualties at Fredericksburg without flinching, it had beaten back Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and it had broken the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania. But now it was all shot to pieces, and instead of being the army's strongest fighting unit it was the weakest. Nothing but a long period of recruiting, drill, and discipline would bring it up to its old level.

Proof of this came in the latter part of June, shortly before Hancock returned to command, when the corps was sent out to the Jerusalem Plank Road in an effort to extend the army's left. Lee saw the move and sent A. P. Hill's veterans down to meet it, and these men caught the corps off balance, tapped at its flanks, crumpled it up, and sent it flying. The fight had not been a particularly hard one, and comparatively few men were killed or wounded, but the manner of the defeat was eloquent. No fewer than 1,700 men had been taken prisoner —more prisoners than the corps had lost at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville put together—and whole regiments had surrendered without firing a shot. Among these were the remnants of regiments which had once been among the very best in the army. There was the 15th Massachusetts, for instance, which had had more than 300 casualties in the West Wood at Antietam but which, when forced to retreat from that doleful little grove, had proudly brought out not only its own flag but also the flag of a Confederate regiment with which it had come to grips. In this latest fight the 15th surrendered almost entire, flag and all, after no more than a token resistance. Also, the corps had lost four pieces of artillery, and its attempt to retake these guns had been very feeble.¹⁹

What had happened was clear enough. During the last two months almost all of the good men in the corps had been shot. The figures on Gibbon's division tell the story. This division crossed the Rapidan on May 5 with a total of 6,799 men in its three brigades. During May and June it had 7,970 casualties—more men, by a large margin, than the entire number under arms when the campaign began. It had received heavy reinforcements, to be sure, but its losses for the two months amounted to 72 per cent of its original strength plus all of the replacements. It saw forty regimental commanders killed or wounded, and, as Gibbon wrote, the losses showed plainly why it was that "troops which at the commencement of the campaign were equal to almost any undertaking, became toward the end of it unfit for almost any." ²⁰

Gibbon's division had had it worse than the other II Corps divisions, but only a little worse. Altogether, the corps had lost nearly 20,000 men in less than two months. More than a score of its brigadiers had been shot, and approximately a hundred regimental commanders. Naturally, the men who were lost were the best men—the officers who led the way, the enlisted men who ran ahead in a charge and were the last to leave when a position was given up. Numerically, most of the losses had been made good, but the new men were mostly substitutes and bounty jumpers, of whom a II Corps gunner said contemptuously that Lee's veterans could, if they chose, drown the lot by taking bean poles and pushing them into the James River.²¹

. . There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw-pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington's Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who had tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead, or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickory cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed someday and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or at least people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves.

Famous old fighting units ceased to exist. At the end of June Gibbons adjutant published orders consolidating what was left of the once mighty 15th, 19th, and 20th Massachusetts—there were about enough men left to make a slim battalion and thereafter they would serve as a unit, although separate regimental rolls would still be kept. The Philadelphia Brigade was broken up, the men in its five skeleton regiments being parceled out to regiments in other brigades. The survivors were angry, and jeered the next time they saw General Gibbon, and one man in the 106th Pennsylvania lamented that he and his comrades would no longer carry their prized regimental flag, which had been pierced (they had counted carefully) by thirty-nine bullets in its three years of service.²²

The II Corps had been hit the hardest, but nobody had been on a picnic. General Lysander Cutler commanded what had been Wadsworth's division in the V Corps, and when he wrote his report for the campaign he explained why the report was going to be incomplete. Two regiments had been lost by expiration of their terms of service, he wrote, and one whole brigade had been transferred to another division. The regiments which still remained with the division had, when the campaign began, 3,742 enlisted men, and now they had 1,324, and the regiments which had been transferred had suffered in proportion. Furthermore: "The changes in the command have been so frequent, and the losing of nearly every original brigade, regimental and company commander render it impossible to make anything like an accurate report'²³

In the 24th Michigan, which now had fewer than 100 men, there was one company with a total strength of two-one sergeant and one private—and on drill or parade a man remembered that "it afforded amusement to witness the evolutions of this little company." A man in the 12th New Hampshire said that his regiment had been under fire every day, and every night but one, over a period of seventy-two days, and a headquarters clerk in the V Corps wrote the age-old complaint of the soldier: "How often the words cruel war' are uttered, and how glibly people beyond the reach of its influence talk of the misery caused by it . . . but not one-thousandth part of the real misery is even guessed at by those who are not eyewitnesses of its horrors." ²⁴

Many men who had not been hit became unfit for service simply because they were worn out. Colonel Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin, appointed to a board to pass on officers' qualifications, recalled numerous cases of self-inflicted wounds. He remembered one captain whose fertile imagination led him to drink "a decoction of powdered slate pencils in vinegar" in order to unfit himself for further duty, and he reported sadly that "the excitement, exhaustion, hard work and loss of sleep broke down great numbers of men who had received no wounds in battle." Some men, he said, who had been noted for their bravery and leadership when the campaign began, became timorous, unstable, and all but useless toward the end of it. For a time the 150th Pennsylvania contained a unique detachment known as "Company Q," made up of line officers from other regiments who had been court-martialed and broken for cowardice but who were given the chance to serve as private soldiers and, if they could, redeem themselves. Company Q turned out to be a good fighting unit, and most of the men in it ultimately regained their commissions.²⁵

Even the chaplains seemed to be showing the strain, and many of them quietly gravitated toward safe jobs far behind the lines. ("Undue susceptibility to cannon fever," a New England soldier complained, "ought to be regarded as a disqualification.") A surgeon in the 39th Illinois, on duty at a base hospital at Fortress Monroe, felt that the chaplains there were "pharisees who made it a business to pray aloud in public places . . . rotten to the core, not caring half as much for their souls' welfare or anybody else's as for the dollars they received." One chaplain ruined morale in his ward by coming in half a dozen times a day, sitting on the edge of some soldier's cot, and telling the man he looked bad and must prepare to die; a patient threw a plate at him one day and told him to go to the devil. The doctor added stoutly that he himself had "stood beside hundreds of soldiers when dying from disease or wounds, and he has never yet seen one manifest the least fear of death." ²⁶

In the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery it was said that the chaplain got into a poker game one night and cleaned out an entire company, coming into regimental headquarters later to show a fat roll of bills and say, "There is my forenoon's work." An officer remembered seeing some dignified clergymen of the Christian Commission moving up toward the front, carpetbags in hand. They passed some soldiers, one of whom called out: "Hullo! Got any lemons to sell?" Gravely, one of the frock-coated contingent replied: "No, my friend, we belong to the army of the Lord." And from a blue-uniformed officer there came back: "Oh yes—stragglers! stragglers!" ²*

As usual, there were complaints that not all of the goods sent down for Christian and Sanitary Commission workers to distribute to the soldiers ever actually reached the men for whom they were intended. A soldier detailed as hospital orderly said that grafters and scroungers got most of these delicacies: "The articles to be distributed are first turned over to the surgeon in charge, he keeping out enough for himself and assistants, then the cooks take out enough for themselves and friends. The balance, should there be a balance, goes to the soldiers. I know the above to be true from personal observation." ²⁸

Underneath the grousing and the bills of complaint the army was trying to maintain a sense of the continuity of its own experiences and traditions. It had to do this, because actually this simply was not the army it used to be. Something like 100,000 combat men had come down across the Rapidan early in May (the flags were all flying and everything was bright and blowing and the dogwood blossoms lit the shadows in the woods) and 60,000 of them had been shot while many other thousands had been sent home as time-expired veterans, and so much the greater part of the men who had started out were not with the army any more. There were 86,000 men in the ranks at the end of June, and most of them were new men. What those who were gone had left behind them was the confusing raw material out of which a new morale would have to be made.

Always the army reflected the nation, and the nation itself was changing. Like the army, it contained many new people these days. The war had speeded everything up. The immigrant ships were coming faster, there were more factories and slums and farms and towns, and the magical hazy light that came down from the country's past was beginning to cast some unfamiliar shadows. The old unities were gone: unities of blood, of race, of language, of shared ideals and common memories and experiences, the very things which had always seemed essential beneath the word "American." In some mysterious way that nobody quite understood, the army not only mirrored the change but represented the effort to find a new synthesis.

What was going on in front of Petersburg was not the development of a stalemate, or the aimless groping of frozen men stumbling down to the last dead end of a cold trail. What was beginning meant more than what was ending, even though it might be many years before anyone knew just what the beginnings and the endings were. Now and then there was a hint, casually dropped, as the country changed the guard here south of the Appomattox River, and the choking dust hung in dead air under a hot copper sun. The men who followed a misty dream had died of it, but the dream still lived, even though it was taking another form.

There was in the 67th New York Infantry a young German named Sebastian Muller, who got off an immigrant ship in 1860 and walked the streets unable to find work because he could speak no English and because times in this land of promise were harder than he had supposed they would be. The war came and in 1861 a recruiting agent got him, and to his people back in the fatherland Muller wrote: "I am a volunteer soldier in the Army of the United States, to fight the rebels of South America for a sacred thing. All of America has to become free and united and the starry banner has to fly again over the new world. Then we also want to have the slaves freed, the trading of human beings must have an end and every slave should be set free and on his own in time. . . . Evil of all lands, thievery, whoring, lying and deception have to be punished here."

Muller served in the 67th and on June 20, 1864, the regiment's time expired and it was sent back for muster-out. But he had enlisted a couple of months late, and he and a few others were held in service and were transferred to the 65th New York to serve out their time, and two days after the 67th went back home Muller was a picket in an advanced gun pit on the VI Corps front, and a Rebel sniper drew a bead on him and killed him. A German comrade wrote a letter of consolation to Muller's parents: "If a person is meant to die on land, he will not drown. If death on the battlefield is to be his lot, he will not die in the cradle. God's dispositions are wise and his ways are inscrutable." The chaplain added a note saying that Muller had died without pain and had been given "a decent Christian burial." ²⁹ That was that.

In the 19th Massachusetts there was an Irish sergeant named Mike Scannell—the same who won his chevrons by carrying the flag at Cold Harbor—and in the II Corps debacle over by the Jerusalem Plank Road Mike and his flag were out in front and were taken by the Confederates, one of whom came at Mike with leveled bayonet, ordering: "You damned Yankee, give me that flag!" Mike looked at the Southerner and he looked at the bayonet, and he replied:

"Well, it is twenty years since I came to this country, and you are the first man who ever called me a Yankee. You can take the flag, for that compliment." ³⁰

Nothing much had happened. A German who could not tell Virginia from South America had seen a sacred thing in the war and had died for it, and an Irishman after twenty years of rejection had been accepted, at the point of a bayonet but in the language of his time and place, as a full-fledged American.

The synthesis was taking place,,

2. I Know Star-Rise

The ravine was broad and it ran north and south, and along the bottom of it there were a little brook and what remained of the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad. On the western crest, which was the side toward the Rebels, there was a line of Federal entrenchments, and the center of this line was held by the 48th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry.

The trench was high-water mark for the IX Army Corps —the extreme limit of the advance, the place where tired men who had fired all of their ammunition lay in the dark to build little breastworks out of earth scooped up with bayonets, tin plates, and bare hands.

Since the fight the line had been made very strong. There was a deep trench now, with a high parapet on the side toward the Rebels, and out in front there was a cunning tangle of abatis. A quarter of a mile in the rear, on the eastern crest of the ravine, there were gun pits, with artillery placed so that it could knock down any hostile parties that might try to storm the trench. The slope just behind the trench offered protection from Southern fire, and to make traffic toward the rear even safer, there was a deep covered way, which left the trench almost at a right angle, crossed the ravine and ended behind the guns.