Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [12]
Incredibly, Marshall believed everything Garfield wanted him to, and more. When Garfield’s first detachment attacked, the Confederates, as expected, confidently rushed to meet them. Then a second force fell upon the rebels from a different direction, throwing them into disarray and confusion. Just as they were beginning to figure out how to fight on two fronts, Garfield attacked on a third. “The [Confederate] regiment and battery were hurried frantically from one road to another,” recalled a young private, “as the point of attack seemed to be changed.” Finally, convinced that a “mighty army”—a force of four thousand men with “five full regiments of infantry, 200 cavalry, and two batteries of artillery”—had surrounded him, Marshall ordered his men to retreat, leaving Kentucky solidly in Union hands.
Although the Battle of Middle Creek made Garfield famous, and resulted in his swift promotion to brigadier general, he would always remember the battle less for its triumph than for its tremendous loss. When the fighting had ended, when his gamble had paid off and the 42nd stood victorious, Garfield learned the truth about war. Stepping into a clearing, he saw what at first he took to be soldiers sleeping, “resting there after the fatigue of a long day’s march.” He would never forget how they looked, scattered over the “dewy meadow in different shapes of sleep.” However, just as quickly as the impression of peace and tranquillity had formed in his mind, it was replaced by the sickening realization that the young men before him were not resting but dead. His own clever plan, moreover, was responsible for this carnage. It was in that moment, Garfield would later tell a friend, that “something went out of him … that never came back; the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”
As painful as it was for Garfield to witness the death of his young soldiers, he remained firmly committed to the war, determined that it would end in Confederate defeat. “By thundering volley, must this rebellion be met,” he wrote, “and by such means alone.” For Garfield, however, the Civil War was about more than putting down a rebellion or even preventing the country from being torn in two. It was about emancipation.
Throughout his life, Garfield had been an ardent abolitionist. As a young man, he had written feverishly in his diary that he felt “like throwing the whole current of my life into the work of opposing this giant evil.” In an attempt to help a runaway slave, he had given him what little money he could spare and urged him to “trust to God and his muscle.” In the darkest days of the Civil War, he had wondered if the war itself was God’s punishment for the horrors of slavery. “For what else are we so fearfully scourged and defeated?” he had asked.
Although Garfield had chosen a life of calm, rational thought, when it came to abolition he freely admitted that he had “never been anything else than radical.” He found it difficult to condemn even the most violent abolitionists, men like John Brown whose hatred of slavery allowed for any means of destroying it. In 1856, Brown had planned and participated in the brutal slaying of five proslavery activists near the Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. Three years later, he raided the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in a desperate attempt to form an “army of emancipation.”
Garfield had felt a profound sense of loss when, in 1859, he learned that Brown was to be hanged. “A dark day for our country,” he wrote in his diary. “John Brown is to