Anglo-American Memories

by George W. Smalley

"Unless,"—I added.

"You need not go on," retorted Hooker. "You must see I cannot move."

It tortured him to think that his morning's work was half thrown away; and that McClellan, with some fourteen thousand fresh troops, was content to see the sun go down on an indecisive day. Into his face, white with the pain which tore at him, came heat and colour and the anger of an indignant soul. The surgeon shook his head, and I said good-bye.

I rode back to headquarters; only to find that the decision had been taken or perhaps that McClellan was incapable of any decision; his mind halting, as usual, between two opinions; and the negative in the end prevailing over the positive. He had an irresistible impulse to do nothing he could leave undone. I asked for General Sedgwick. He had been badly wounded—I think thrice wounded, but had fought on till the third—and been carried off the field. Nobody could tell me where he was. I saw him once again. A Rebel bullet laid him low at Spottsylvania. One of the best generals we had: a man of utterly transparent honesty, simplicity, and truth of character; trusted, beloved, ardently followed by his men; a commander who had done great things and was capable of greater.

Since it was too late to get anything through to New York that night, I wasted some hours in one camp and another. Perhaps they were not wasted. I heard everywhere a chorus of execration. McClellan's name was hardly mentioned without a curse. Not a soldier in the ranks who did not believe it had been possible to drive Lee into and over the Potomac.

At nine o'clock in the evening I started for Frederick, thirty miles away. My horse had two bullets in him, and I had to commandeer another from a colleague, who objected but yielded. I reached Frederick at three in the morning, sleeping in the saddle a good part of the way, as I had been up since four o'clock of the morning before. The telegraph office was closed, and nobody knew where the telegraph clerk lived. I thought it odd that in time of war, and after an important battle, the Government at Washington should have kept open no means of communication with the general commanding; but so it was. Frederick was the nearest and, so far as I knew, the only available telegraph office. There was no field telegraph. The wires were not down, but the operator was sleeping peacefully elsewhere.

He reappeared about seven. I asked him if he would take a message. After some demur he promised to try to get a short one through. I sat down on a log by the door and began to write, giving him sheet after sheet till a column or more had gone, as I supposed, to New York. The Tribune had been notified that a message was coming. But neither my private notice to The Tribune nor my story of the battle was sent to New York. It was sent to the War Office at Washington, and such was the disorder then prevailing that it was the first news, or perhaps only the first coherent account, of the battle which reached the War Office and the President. They kept it to themselves during all that day. At night, in time for next morning's paper, it was released, wired on, and duly appeared in Saturday's Tribune.

I never doubted that when my telegram had once been sent I should find a train to Baltimore. There was none. I saw one official after another. Nobody knew, or nobody would say, when a train would leave. It might go at any moment, or not at all. I tried in vain for a special. There could be no special without military warrant. I wired the War Office and got no answer. It was trying work, for what I had hoped was to reach New York in time for Saturday morning's paper. Finally, I was allowed to travel by a mixed train which arrived in Baltimore some ten minutes before the Washington express for New York came in.

That is all the margin there was. The cars were lighted by oil lamps, dimly burning, one at each end of the car, hung near the ceiling. I had to choose between the chance of wiring a long and as yet unwritten dispatch from Baltimore, and going myself by train. The first word at the telegraph office settled it. They would promise nothing.

So by the light of the one dim oil lamp, above my head, standing, I began a narrative of the battle of Antietam. I wrote with a pencil. It must have been about nine o'clock when I began. I ended as the train rolled into Jersey City by daylight. The office knew that a dispatch was coming, the compositors were waiting, and at six o'clock the worst piece of manuscript the oldest of them had ever seen was put into their hands. But they were good men, and there were proof-readers of genius, and somewhere near the uptown breakfast hour, The Tribune issued an extra with six columns about Antietam.