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

by Henry Morford

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.

[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!