A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [245]
Shortly after Hooker’s departure, Chancellor House went up in flames.20.1 Lee trotted up to the burning house as Confederates came running toward him, cheering and shouting wildly. Behind them the Wilderness had been transformed into a roaring furnace, trapping the lost and wounded. Men closest to the conflagration could see figures waving in the inferno. Union and Confederate soldiers braved the searing heat to pull out anyone they could. Two enemies fought together to rescue a trapped youth: “The fire was all around him,” recalled the Federal soldier. They could see his face: “His eyes were big and blue, and his hair like raw silk surrounded by a wreath of fire.” In vain, they burned their hands trying to reach him. “I heard him scream, ‘Oh Mother, O God.’ It left me trembling all over, like a leaf.” The defeated rescuers fled the forest. Although it was agony to open their fingers, “me and them rebs tried to shake hands.”8
There was no cathartic pain for Henry Hore. On the night of the fourth, taking advantage of the full moon, he led a burial party to look for Hansard’s body. They found him lying next to the dead rebel. Hore dug a grave and buried Hansard, but he deliberately left the Confederate raider to rot out in the open. “My dear Cousin you must think me quite savage,” he wrote afterward in the bleak surroundings of a dark, filthy barn, “but the carnage of this frightful war and the horrid sights I see every day made me indifferent to human life. At one time I should have never thought of killing anyone, but now can shoot a man without a shake of my hand. I think I am writing to you more as if you were a hard hearted man than a very pretty girl.”
On May 5 the balmy weather was replaced by lashing wind and rain. The Confederate commanders informed Lee that another attack was beyond their men’s strength. The storm provided the Union army with perfect cover as it slowly crawled back over the Rappahannock River. Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s cavalry regiment was on the other side, part of the skeleton force of mounted troops Hooker had kept behind. He initially discounted the tales from the abject stragglers who stopped to ask for food or shelter, but “in the afternoon came the crusher,” he told his father. They received the order to saddle up and return to their old camp. They found it “deserted, burned up, filthy, and surrounded with dead horses. We tied up our horses and stood dismally round in the pouring rain.”9
Henry Hore arrived at Fortress Monroe on Hampton Roads a few days later, on May 9, a young man no longer.10 The magnitude of Hooker’s defeat was numbing: 17,000 casualties to Lee’s 13,000, without gaining the slightest moral or tactical advantage. Lincoln was horror-struck when he read the telegram, exclaiming, “My God, my God, what will the country say?” The press was predictably harsh: “Everybody feels,” wrote Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, and a close friend of the president’s, “that the war is drawing to a disastrous and disgraceful termination.”11 The New York World railed that the “gallant Army of the Potomac” had been “marched to fruitless slaughter” by “an imbecile department and led by an incompetent general.”12
The country’s frustration with its leaders made the gratitude felt toward the volunteers all the deeper and more profound. A flotilla of boats swarmed the troopship carrying the 9th New York Volunteers as it approached the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan. Thousands of well-wishers lined the pier, throwing flowers and waving flags, and a military band escorted the soldiers along Broadway to Union Square. The men were still wearing their filthy uniforms from the siege at Suffolk, but their disheveled appearance seemed to delight the crowds. This was the enthusiastic reception that the seven hundred survivors of the regiment had been imagining for weeks. On May 20, 1863, George Henry Herbert