Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

by Henry Morford

The events which had immediately preceded Malvern Hill are too fresh in the minds of the people to need any extended recapitulation. McClellan, deprived of his last hope for the immediate capture of Richmond, by the unexpected strength shown by the Confederates in front and the withdrawal of McDowell under the orders of the government, when within ten miles of effecting a junction with him;—McClellan, his forces sadly thinned by the labors and the diseases incident to the long delay amid the swamps of the Chickahominy; McClellan, driven at last from the possibility of even holding his position, by the arrival at Richmond of a large proportion of the rebel army driven from Corinth by Halleck, and by the movement of Jackson with a body of forty thousand men to take his right wing in flank;—McClellan had abandoned the White House on the Pamunkey River, on Sunday the twenty-ninth of June, after the terrific conflict of the Friday previous, burning the White House itself and immense quantities of stores and supplies that could not be transported, and was now falling back on the line of the James River, where he could meet the protection of the Union gun-boats and safely await the slow coming of those reinforcements with the aid of which he yet made no doubt of being able to take the rebel capital.

To McClellan's army this movement, accompanied with so much haste and such extensive destruction of valuables, necessarily looked more like a disastrous retreat after defeat than it was in reality; and the consequence was such a depression of spirits in many of the corps, as could only have been prevented growing into demoralization by the confidence that every officer and every soldier yet felt in the young commander. To the rebels, knowing the country better than the loyal troops, the movement appeared nearer what it really was, a successful escape from overwhelming difficulties, to a better and more secure position, from which an offensive movement might again be made at an early day, threatening their capital beyond a hope of defence. To them, a prize long watched and supposed to be securely entrapped, was after all escaping to a place of safety; and every Confederate officer and soldier seemed to feel that the Union army must not be allowed to gain the line of the James as an army, if any series of desperate and continued attacks could suffice to destroy it. Never, perhaps, was greater bravery or more indefatigable energy shown in pursuing a beaten but dangerous foe, than was shown on this occasion by Hill, Longstreet and Jackson; and never, certainly, was the doggedly dangerous defence of the tiger slowly retreating to his jungle, more splendidly shown than by McClellan, Hooker, Sumner, Keyes, Heintzelman and the other Union commanders. The conflict of Monday the thirtieth June, at White Oak Swamp, had brought no substantial benefit to the Confederate arms, nor had it in any considerable degree weakened the Union forces; and on the night of that day it became evident to the commanders of both armies that if Tuesday the first of July should pass without a substantial victory gained by the Confederates, the Union troops would gain the shelter of the James and the gun-boats, and the rebel advance be checked effectually.

It was upon the two armies in this position that the night of Monday closed down; and it was upon the two armies with their positions very little changed, that the morning broke on Tuesday, giving light for the double battle, of a whole day's duration, hereafter to be known as that of Malvern Hill.[11]

[11] For the close and accurate description of this battle, the correctness of the technical terms employed, the ground occupied, and some of the very language used,—the writer in this place begs to make his acknowledgments to Mr William H. White, soldier and scholar, a Lieutenant in the Ninth Infantry in the campaign against the city of Mexico, and author of the popular "Sketches of the Mexican War" which have supplied our literature with some of the finest battle-pieces in the language.

Nature has no sympathy with bloodshed and but little with suffering; and it is only when a God puts off mortal existence that the earth is racked with the thunders and the earthquakes of Calvary. The birds sing as sweetly and the sun shines as brightly as usual, on the day when we lay in the earth all that was mortal of one dearer to us than sunshine or bird-music; and the moon does not turn red or veil her light, even in the presence of midnight murder. If the skies weep rain upon Waterloo, it does not fall because the powers in heaven are making lamentation over the slaughter so soon to be accomplished, but because the crops of the Flemish farmers have called up to the skies for moisture.

The sun peeps lovingly down even on many a battle-field, and it kisses the tips of bayonets soon to be wet with the blood of brothers and the blades of swords that are to be hacked and hammered in deadly conflict, just as it might glint upon the polished barrel of the sportsman or flash from the diamond aigrette of the lady riding forth on her white palfrey to catch the breath of early morning. And how man, with the capacity of thought, shrinks and shrivels within himself when he marks the eternity of the course of nature and the very silent scorn bestowed upon him when he is committing crimes or displaying heroisms that make all his little world one overwhelming convulsion! It was the reply of an officer of undaunted bravery, when asked what was the predominant feeling in his mind when he headed the forlorn-hope in one of the desperate assaults that preceded the taking of the City of Mexico: "I think I heard the singing of the birds in the trees, more distinctly than anything else, and I felt a little vexed that they seemed to care nothing about the terrible scrape we were pitching into." And something of the same dissatisfaction, though more tinged with melancholy, has been felt by many who stood beside the closing grave and heard the same bird-music making harsh discord with the rumbling of the clods falling on the lid of the coffin, and who saw the pleasant sunshine tinging the very sods that were in a few moments to form an impassable barrier between the beloved dead and the miserable living.

Nature smiled upon the field of Malvern, on the morning of the First of July, however the powers that wheel the courses of the sun may have frowned behind their battlements at the sacrifice of life then beginning and the fearful passions then being called into more active exertion. A slight mist lay over wood and river, in the very early morning, but the first beams of the sun dispelled it, and the picturesque Virginia landscape was exposed to full view, with its long stretches of hill and plain, its river glimmering in the distance, its patches of corn and tobacco, its scattered and unthrifty farm-houses flanked with their negro quarters, and its long lines of white and sun-baked roads.

At that point on the direct road from Charles City to Richmond, and about four miles from Malvern Hill in a North-west direction, such a scene was presented, half an hour after sunrise, as has seldom been looked upon by mortal eye. The increasing light brought more and more plainly to view the retreating march of the Union forces—unmistakably a retreat and yet quite as unmistakably no panic. Interminable lines of wagons, whose length and number no one can estimate who has not seen a formidable army on the march, rolled on slowly over the white roads, raising clouds of impalpable dust that rose no higher than the wheels and then settled again without obscuring the view. Battery after battery of rifled Parrots, smooth-bores, howitzers and monster siege-guns, rumbled leisurely along the uneven way. Long lines of jaded cavalry tramped wearily and stiffly, the horses with drooping heads and the riders with listless attitudes and loose seats in their saddles which denoted the very extremity of fatigue and exhaustion. Streams of limping, footsore stragglers and slightly-wounded soldiers flanked the roads on either side, trudging along beside the ambulances in which their worse-wounded companions were being carried forward. Mixed in with these were unshorn Confederate prisoners; teamsters whose mules and wagons lay at various points between the Chickahominy and Turkey Bend; and ruined sutlers whose precious captured stores were now giving aid and comfort to the appreciative stomachs of the hungry rebels. The Provost-Marshal's Guard and fatigue-party of Colonel Porter brought up the rear—picking up stragglers; blowing up ammunition that had been left by the way; burning feed and forage; smashing barrels of liquids, of which the apparent wanton waste on the ground would at any other time have almost produced a revolt in the ranks; bending the barrels and throwing into the swamp, of muskets dropped by dead and exhausted soldiers; breaking up and burning abandoned wagons, and destroying knapsacks, blankets, and all such other articles that could be of any possible use to an enemy, as had been left behind by the regiments that had passed on to the James River.

The position at which our point of view is taken, and through which these streams of wagons, guns, horses and men were passing with the appearance of a retreat and yet with the steady regularity of an ordinary march, formed the camping-ground of Genl. Fitz-John Porter's command, lately the right wing but now the rear of the army of the Potomac. The shattered remnants of the corps of that indomitable General, who after services of the first bravery and importance, was so soon afterwards to be placed in an ambiguous position before the country and dismissed from a service which he had illustrated rather than disgraced,—together with portions of those of Sumner, Heintzelman and Keyes, made up his present command and the rear-guard of the army, holding this point on the Richmond and Charles City road. And whatever may have been the merits of other commands embraced in that still vast army, in that of General Porter was certainly included Borne of the best regulars yet spared to the service, and some of the bravest and most efficient volunteer regiments that were ever suddenly formed from the ranks of civil life, to defend the honor of any country. To them the often-misapplied phrase, "war-worn veterans," could now be applied without mockery, for the men and their encampment furniture looked alike worn and jaded, and it was only by their regularity and evident discipline that they could be recognized for what they really were—the most reliable soldiers in the army, and men well worthy of the trust confided to them, of defending the threatened rear and breaking any sudden assault of a foe flushed with success. Those men who stood upon guard at various points of the hasty encampment, may have been faded and ragged in uniform, the arms they bore may have shown hard usage, and their discolored tents showed little of the "pomp and circumstance of glorious war;" but they had full warrant for all this in past services, for not a storm in all the long campaign that they had not breasted, and not a battle of all the long line on the Peninsula in which they had not sown the soil of freedom with sacred seed from their thinned ranks.

A bloodless military pageant may be a splendid spectacle, and hearts may beat high and eyes grow bright when the steady foot-fall of our "household troops" is heard on Broadway, and they file by with rich music, flashing banners and the proud consciousness of a strength that would be terrible if asserted; but what are such feelings to those with which the truly patriotic look upon those who have lost all their glow and gilding in the "baptism of fire," and acquired that sacred squalor springing from active and dangerous service? The faded, coat and cap and the dingy accoutrements are badges of honor, worth a thousand of those new, bright, untried, and incapable of telling or suggesting any heroic story. And if the ranks of a regiment of such men are thin, there is a glorious shadow standing in every vacant place once filled by a gallant soldier; and a voice rings out which gives the same reply to the inquiry after the absent ones, that was so long given in the armies of Napoleon's time to the roll-call which pronounced the name of La Tour d'Auvergne, the "First Soldier of France"—"dead on the field of honor!" Think of it, lady of the agricultural and ornithological bonnet and the irreproachable silks, when the next time in a city railroad car two "soldiers" sit down beside you, and one is a spruce, natty-whiskered, good-looking member of a pet regiment of the N.G.S.N.Y. or the N.Y.S.M., going down to an evening drill and a supper of oysters after it, and the other a hard-featured and weather-beaten discharged soldier from our Southern battle-fields, lame or otherwise, in faded uniform and a shirt not too suggestive of plentiful washerwomen,—think of this, and if you smile bewitchingly upon the one, as is your nature, when he apologizes for accidentally creasing your dress,—do not father up your robes with too much contempt, from contact with the stained garments of the other, who has outraged your amor propre by taking a place beside you; for though you may be merely shunning contact with a vulgar ruffian or a coward who has deserted his colors in the hour of need—you may be insulting a hero.