CHAPTER IX

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THE FIRST WEEK OF JULY--A CHAPTER THAT SHOULD ONLY BE READ BY THOSE WHO THINK--THE DESPAIR OF THE SEVEN DAYS BATTLES--SHOULDER-STRAPS AND STAY-AT-HOME SOLDIERS--AN INCIDENT OF THE SECOND.

The first week of July, eighteen hundred and sixty-two. What a time it was!--and who that took part in it, in any portion of the loyal States to which the telegraph and the newspaper had reached, can ever forget it? Everything was hopeless, blank despair--dull, dead desolation. Not even the fatal Monday following the defeat of Bull Run, when we believed that all our New York troops had been cut to pieces or fled ingloriously, produced the same total discouragement in the great city. Bull Run was our first signal reverse--the first blow from the rod of national chastisement, that was afterwards to cut so deeply. Though that stroke pained, it also fired and awakened; and repeated blows had not yet produced that weakness and exhaustion so difficult to arouse to any further effort. And we had not, at the same time, passed through the repeated disasters of the few months following, which stunned and hardened while they pained. We were quite unprepared for the disaster, coming as it did after several months of continued comparative victory (the Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland period of the Lincoln Empire, if it has had one); and the country felt it most keenly.

The heart of the nation had been bound up in McClellan. The confidence and love reposed in him may have been man-worship, without ground or reason, but it was no less real and positive. While in the Command-in-Chief, everything had gone well, and the Butler and Burnside expeditions, the two great successes of the war, had been planned and executed. On the Army of the Potomac the people had looked as the bulwark of the country--the central force that should in good time take Richmond and give the last blow to the rebellion. The miserable bickering and paltry fears which had detached McDowell's division from the grand army, to defend Washington when never threatened, had been comparatively unknown or little understood. Many and disastrous months were yet to elapse, before the letters of the Orleans Princes could tear away the curtain of mystery and show the official action in its naked deformity of malice and misjudgment. McClellan had left Manassas with a gallant army of immense force, whose numbers had no doubt been all the while exaggerated to the popular ear. They had proved themselves soldiers and heroes, and had won whenever and wherever brought to the test. The young commander had had the Command-in-Chief taken from him, at the moment when he first moved forward; but it was believed that the change had been made with his consent if not at his own request, so that he might be the more unhampered in the field. We did not know the chain which had been cruelly locked around his strong limbs, and which he had been dragging through every mile of that long march. He had complained, it is true, from Williamsburgh, of the insufficiency of his force for the great end in view; but he was known to be a cautious man, and when he had won Williamsburgh, forced the evacuation of Yorktown and afterwards won Fair Oaks, all fears for him and for the army had been gradually dismissed.

He had been set down to win--to take Richmond: that had formed the great culmination of the programme--the red fire and flourish of trumpets on which the curtain of the rebellion was to go down. If any one had spoken disapprovingly or doubtfully of his long delay in the swamps of the Chickahominy, the reply had been: "Wait patiently! McClellan is slow, but sure. He will take Richmond before he ends the campaign, and that is enough!" Such had been public confidence--the confidence of a public who perhaps did not know the General, but who certainly did not know the government directing and overruling his every action. At last even the time of the great capture had been fixed. Officers leaving on short furlough had been admonished to return quickly, "if they expected to take part in the capture of Richmond." What else could this mean, than confidence on the part of the commanding general, that the approaches to the rebel capital had been made sufficiently close to ensure its capture, and that the prize was at length in his grasp? Then the Fourth of July had been seized upon as the auspicious period, and the whole country had grown ready to celebrate the National Anniversary in the loyal cities, simultaneously with the shouts and bonfires of the Union Army that should then be treading the streets of the conquered capital and opening the prison-doors of the loyal men who had been suffering and starving in the tobacco-warehouses.

Such had been the supposed aspect of affairs in the field, up to the last week of June, and young orators preparing their Fourth of July orations had introduced rounded periods referring to the added glory of the day and the new laurels wreathing the brows of the Union commanders. Those who contemplated speaking on the great day, and had not made any allusion to the fall of Richmond in their prepared orations, had already seen cause to repent the omission. One, who had incautiously mentioned in a city passenger-car that "he hoped Richmond would not be taken until after the Fourth," and who had lacked time to give as a reason that "if it should be taken before, he would be obliged to write his oration all over again"--had been assaulted for the offensive expression, and only escaped after a hard fight, with a black eye and a sense of damaged personal dignity. It had been settled that Richmond was to be in possession of the Union troops on the Fourth--wo to him who doubted it!

Hark! was there muttering thunder in the heavens?--thunder from a sky hitherto all bright blue? Business men, going down town on the morning of the twenty-eighth of June, found that "fighting had commenced before Richmond," and that "McClellan was changing his front." That "change of front" looked ominous. A few read the secret at once--that heavy reinforcements had come into Richmond from the half-disbanded rebel army Halleck had checked but not defeated at Corinth; and coupled with strange rumors of this came hints about "Stonewall Jackson," which indicated to the same persons that that rebel officer had advanced from the North-west and made an attempt to take McClellan's right wing in flank, necessitating a retrograde movement of that wing to bring him in front. Still, confidence was not lost, in McClellan or in the army. While his right wing fell back before an attack in force, his left might swing in towards Richmond and even take the city--who could say?

Then the telegraph closed down, and the morning papers contained "no later intelligence" from the field before Richmond. This was "the feather that broke the camel's back" of the national spirit. The government had no confidence in the people--it dared not trust them with the truth--it dared conceal! Our army was being cut to pieces, and we were permitted to know nothing of the calamity except the dreadful fact. No development could have been so injurious as this concealment--no stroke at the national confidence so deadly as the want of reliance shown by the government censors. The nation's heart went down beneath the blow: to this day[6] it has never risen to the same proud and courageous determination shown through all previous disasters.

[Footnote 6: January, 1863.]

It is said to be a terrible spectacle when a strong man weeps--a thousand times more terrible than the grief of the softer sex and the gentler nature, because it is evident what must have been the blow inflicted and what the struggle before the pent waters burst forth. But even the strong man's grief is tame compared to the spectacle of the grief of a _nation_--that aggregation of strong men and of vital interests. When the very sky seems dimmed and the bright sunshine a mockery. When the foot falls without energy and the voice breaks forth without emphasis. When men, who meet on the corners of streets, clasp hands in silence or only speak in low and broken words. When the silver moonlight seems to be shining upon nothing else than new-made graves. When the sound of revelry from ball-rooms jars upon the heart until it creates deadly sickness; and the glare of lights from places of public amusement seems to be an indecorum like a waltz at a funeral. When a uniform in the street is a reproach and a horror; and the music of the band to which soldiers tramp, sounds like nothing but the "Dead March in Saul." When business is impossible, and idleness an agony. When the old flag is looked up to without pride, and the very pulses of patriotism seem dead because they have no hope to keep them in motion. When all is darkness--all discouragement--all shame--all despair. These are the tears of a broad land--this is the spectacle we witness when a nation weeps. The loyal men of this generation have wept more bitterly and sorely, within the past two years, than those wept who saw the armies of the Revolution starved and outnumbered--who pined in the Prison-Ships and tracked the bloody snow at Valley Forge. God forgive those who have wrung these tears--whatever the ultraism they may represent! The people they have outraged will not forgive until a terrible vengeance is taken.

The first days of July, when fell the President's fifth proclamation, calling for "three hundred thousand more." If ever a cry of despair burst out from an overcharged heart, it went up to heaven from the whole land at that moment. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the depopulated city and the desolated village. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the father with one son remaining of his six brave boys; "Have I yet more to give?" echoed the widow whose last stay was to be taken from her; and "Have I yet more to give?" re-echoed the wife as she buckled the sword or the bayonet-sheath on the side of her husband and sent him forth as one more sacrifice to the insatiate demons of Ambition and Mismanagement. Have not the days following Manassas, and the Seven Days before Richmond, and Fredericksburgh, been hours in a national Gethsemane? And has not the hand been almost excusable, lifted in the prayer: "Father of Nations!--if it be possible let this cup pass from us!" And yet the cup has not passed--we have been draining it to the very dregs!

The introduction of this chapter, which does not in the least advance the action of the story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background of current events, certainly--without a knowledge of which their

## actions might be altogether unaccountable. And general as may be a

feeling to-day, it must be caught and put upon record to-morrow, or the very persons who held it most deeply will forget it by the third day. Ten years hence--perhaps a year hence--the bitter humiliation through which the country has been passing between the opening of 1861 and the opening of 1863, will be almost entirely forgotten in after glory or after shame. A few will remember, but faintly and dimly, as the old veterans of the Revolution remembered in their tottering age the conflicts through which they had passed in youth, beside Washington or with Mad Anthony. A few will remember something of the truth, but only as veteran play-goers remember a performance at the Old Park in its palmy days--a Cooper or a Power prominent, but all the other actors lost in the mists of time.

When Thomas Wilson left the field of Brandywine, after that disastrous defeat, and with a bullet-hole through his neck, narrowly missing the jugular, which had been received in aiding to rescue and bear off the wounded Lafayette,--that battle-scene was so imprinted on his mind that he believed he could ever afterwards, to his dying day, recall the position of every squadron, and even the place of every rock and tree beside which he had fought; and yet when he saw him, more than half a century afterwards, hobbling along on his stout hickory cane to the place where he was to draw the scant pittance afforded him by a nation grudging in its gratitude--he remembered Lafayette and that he was wounded in helping to bear him off--nothing more. No doubt John Wilson, grandson of the old man, wounded in the assault at Fredericksburgh, came away from that murderous field with the same impression of the eternity of his own memory; but he will forget all except the very event of the

## action, like his grandsire. And yesterday evening, coming out from among

the plaudits of the crowd that had been paying honor to the wonderful renderings of Couldock and Davidge in the "Chimney-Corner," Wetmore, the critic and habitue, did not even bring away a play-bill. That little domestic scene was so daguerreotyped upon his memory that he should never forget one detail of cast or incident--never! And yet five years hence, Wetmore will turn to some companion of the present and say: "Ah, confound it--I cannot remember! Who _was_ it that played with Couldock at the Winter Garden, in the--the--there, hang me if I have not even forgotten the name of the piece!--that capital little Robson domestic drama--the--the--the 'Chimney Corner'?"

So much by way of explanation, if not of apology, for catching the colors of the background of general feeling at the particular period of this story, before they have time to fade. And yet a few more words with reference to that general feeling, as it took particular directions.

"Vox populi, vox Dei" is a motto so often falsified, at least in appearance, that the world has come to place but little reliance upon it; and yet it is as true to-day as when the old Latin maximist first penned it, with the plurality of the gods of his dependence fully manifest in the original "Dii" or "Deis." The people do not often err materially or long. They may throne a wooden god or a baboon for a short moment, but that moment soon passes. As a political body no demagogue with words supplying the place of brains, can long override them; and as an army they never make a favorite of a fool or a coward. The American people did not err for a moment as to where the responsibility of the sad check to the army of the Potomac did _not_ belong; and they erred but little in their calculation of where it _did_. The army was brave--its leader was both careful and capable--the very man for the place: that they knew intuitively. They doubted the existence of brains at Washington, and of loyalty in many of those who had been urging "forward movements" without sufficient force or proper preparation; and they have already been fully justified in the doubt.

But the people saw something more--execrated it, howled against it, spat upon it; and after the Seven Days before Richmond, their abhorrence culminated. That terrible something was _absenteeism_. Thousands and tens of thousands who should have been in their places in the army, were shamelessly absent when their brothers-in-arms were being sacrificed from their very want of numbers. Wounded soldiers who had come home on furlough, and afterwards recovered, had never rejoined their commands; and in spite of the calls of McClellan no steps had been taken to force them back into the ranks. The Provost Marshals were too busy looking for summer-boarders at Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren, to think of their obvious duty of protecting the armies of the Union against indolence and desertion! A still more serious defection existed among the officers--those who had been awhile in the service, and those who had merely entered it in _pretence_. Half the New York regiments, especially, had originally been officered by men who had no intention of fighting, and who merely took commissions and spent a few weeks in camp or in the field of inactive operations, in order that they might have "Colonel," "Major," or "Captain" attached to their names, and be ready to make more successful plunges into the flesh-pots of well-paid offices, on the plea that they had been "patriots" and "served the country" in its need. Hundreds had come home, leaving their commands half-officered, on one pretext or another, and their leaves-of-absence obtained by more or less of political influence or favoritism. They never intended to go back; for were not the elections coming within a few months? and was it not necessary to plough the political field with those very harmless swords in order to raise a fall crop of offices?

Then the other class--those who had never intended to go at all--those who had no heart in the cause, from the first, and who had merely assumed the regulation uniform to feed _vanity_ or the _pocket_. The former, to strut Broadway in unimpeachable blue-and-gold, be called by military titles, lounge at the theatres or create sensations at the watering-places, confident of being able to escape, on some pretext, before their commands (if they had any) should leave for the seat of war. The latter, to find profitable employment in raising companies, regiments or brigades, for Staten Island, East New York or the Red House, drawing pay and subsistence for twice or three times the number ever in camp, and coolly pocketing the difference! It is idle to talk, as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to go to protest,--it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal heartlessness: the men who could thus trade--the men who _have_ thus traded, during the whole war--on the public patriotism and the public necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition, following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills--if there was not a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.[7]

[Footnote 7: January 17th, 1863.]

The public disgust at these "shoulder-straps" of both classes culminated during the first week of July. It might be unpatriotic and even cowardly to make no movement towards joining the Army of the Union: it was base and utterly contemptible to make such a movement merely as an injurious sham. So thought the people--seeing in this _desire of military reputation and profit without service or sacrifice_, the worm gnawing at the very heart of the republic. "If they are not soldiers, why do they wear these trappings of the battle-field?" asked the public. "If they are soldiers, why are they loitering here when their comrades are being overpowered and slaughtered?" Alas! the question has been continually asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped, strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle. God help us!--Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away to admiring audiences during _our_ conflagration!

Is this to be a wholesale attack, then, on our national courage? Had we no brave men, then, that only these apologies for men are exhibited? Yes!--thousand upon thousand of brave men, and hundred upon hundred of brave officers--the world over no better or truer! But they were, as they _are_, the men of action, not of _show_, or at least not of show _alone_.

One incident of the morning of the Second of July, when the Seven Days Battles were yet in progress before Richmond, will at once supply a few figures for this background, and an illustration of the public feeling for the soldiers of the little army of action and the great army of sham!

A few words had been permitted by the telegraph-censors to come through, and they had arrived too late for the morning papers. They were consequently bulletined. They gave some hint of the abandonment of the White House and the severe fighting which followed that movement, on Saturday and Sunday. They were not hopeful--they were discouraging--much worse, as it afterwards appeared, than the truth demanded; and the knit brows and set teeth of the readers did not show any symptoms of improvement under the new revelation.

A considerable group of men were standing about the "World" bulletin, stopping, reading and passing on--all the more slowly because the shade of the high building was refreshing in that hot, blinding, cloudless July morning sun. A group of politicians who had read the bulletins and taken their second breakfast at Crook and Duff's, were digesting the one and picking their teeth from the fragments of the other, before the door of that unaccountably-popular establishment, on the block above. Over the street from the "World" corner, at the Park fence, a dozen or two of invalid soldiers, with jaundiced faces and shabby uniforms, who had arrived by steamer from the South the day before and taken up their temporary abode in the dirty Barracks,--were standing lounging and listening to what was read from the bulletin; while a sentinel paraded up and down the walk, outside, to prevent escapes that did not seem over-probable. Voices were a little high, though not in disagreement, among the group at the corner--for they were discussing the very subject noted--that of _absenteeism and military sham_.

At that moment a good-looking young officer in spotless full uniform, with his cap so natty that the rain could never have been allowed to fall upon it, with his hair curled and his moustache trim as if he had been intended for any other description of "ball" than one met on the field of battle, and with a Captain's double-bars on his shoulder,--came across the Park from the direction of Broadway, over to the Beekman Street corner, as if to pass down that street. Some of the talkers noticed him, and connected him and his class a little injuriously with the events of the day. Just as he passed the corner, brushing very near some of the talkers and casting a hurried glance at the bulletin-board--one of the crowd, a rough fellow who might have belonged to the set who growled and hooted Coriolanus out of Rome,--broke out with:--

"There goes one of them, now!"

"Yes," muttered another, almost in front of the officer. "D--n 'em all! Much good those shiny uniforms are doing the country!"

The officer, who must have heard the words and known that they were intended for his ears, paid no attention and was passing on--the part of prudence and propriety, beyond a doubt. But one of the crowd was not satisfied. He must make wrong of the right (a thing very common in all causes) and the insult a personal one.

"See here!" and he laid his hand on the officer's arm, detaining him, but not roughly. "Do you see what there is on that bulletin?"

"I see!" said the Captain.

"Yes, they are cutting our boys all to pieces down there!" went on the aggrieved citizen.

"Well?" again said the officer, apparently neither angry nor frightened.

"Well!" spoke the other, repeating his word, but a little abashed by the calmness of the officer, whose arm he had let go the moment he turned to speak to him. "Well!--perhaps it is none of my business, you know--but why the d--l don't you fellows who have such handsome uniforms, and commissions, and all that sort of thing, go down and help?"

"Humph!" said the Captain, still with no symptom of being abashed or angry. "Perhaps it _would_ be as well, for all of us who _could_."

"Oh, you can't go, eh?" said another member of the assemblage, in a sneering tone.

"Not _yet_!" was the reply of the officer.

"I thought not!" said the man who had first addressed him.

"See here, boys!" said the Captain, "haven't you made a mistake in your man? I hate a stay-at-home soldier, quite as much as you."

"Why don't you go, then?" one of the others again interrupted.

"I have _been_, and I am _going again_!" said the Captain, emphatically. "I see what is the matter. I have just put on a new uniform, and you think that looks suspicious. So it does, I suppose; but my old one has been through six pitched battles and looks rough enough to suit you."

"The d--l it has!" said the man who had addressed him. "Really, Captain, I beg your pardon!"

"Never mind that!" said the Captain. "You will probably hit the right man next time, and the quicker you shame the make-believes into doing something or pulling off their uniforms, the better. McClellan wants us all--"

"McClellan's the boy!" broke out a voice.

"You are right--'Little Mac's' the boy!" said the Captain. "He wants us all. The doctor told me this morning that I might go back, and I am going to-morrow."

"The doctor?--then you have been sick or wounded! What a fool I have been making of myself!" said the first speaker, generous as rough.

"A little!" answered the Captain, and by a dexterous movement he flung back his coat, threw open his collar and bared his neck almost to the shoulder. The whole top of the shoulder seemed to have been shot away, and the blade broken, by a ball that had struck him there and ploughed through into the neck; and the yet imperfectly healed flesh lay in torn ridges of ghastly disfigurement. Thousands of men have died from wounds of not half the apparent consequence; and yet the wearer of this was the smiling and even-tempered man of the new uniform--going back to-morrow! The world has not lost all its heroes yet; and some of them have the same fancy for a clean shirt and spotless broadcloth, when attainable, as Murat displayed for a velvet cloak, or white plume and plenty of gold embroidery on his trousers, when making the most reckless of charges at the head of the most dashing cavalry in the world. "That," said the Captain, closing up the wound as rapidly as he had opened it, but not before a general shudder had run through the crowd at its ghastly character--"that I got at Fair Oaks, three weeks ago last Sunday. How do you like it? Am I going back soon enough? Good morning, boys!"

"And your name?" asked the man who had stopped him, as he attempted to pass on. "Who are you?--Do tell us."

"Nobody that you would know," said the Captain. "My name is D----, and I belong to the Sickles Brigade."

He passed on, hurriedly, down Beekman Street, as if "Little Mac" had sent for him and he had been wasting time in going; but the cheer that went after him was joined in by the invalids at the Park fence, who had caught a part of the dialogue; and the people in the "World" office looked up from their account books, wondering what was the matter in the street; while the politicians in front of Crook and Duff's, among whom were some of the City Fathers and their backers and bottle-holders, losing the other part of the affair and only hearing the shouts, wondered whether some new notability had not just arrived at the Astor House, who could be turned to profitable use in the way of a reception in the Governor's Room, a few "Committees," gloves, carriages from Van Ranst and a dinner or two all around--of course at the expense of the economically-managed city treasury.

And this closes a chapter which has made no direct progress whatever in following the leading characters of this story, who must now be again taken up in their order.

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