This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [115]
Rosecrans was a genial, likable sort; a West Pointer who was a little more excitable than a general ought to be but who was never in the least afraid of a fight. An Ohioan in his mid-forties, he had taught at West Point, had left the army to make money in business, and had come back in the spring of 1861 as captain of engineers; it was remembered that he had helped McClellan lay out Ohio’s first camp for recruits back when the war was young. He was a devout Roman Catholic, brother to the Bishop of Cincinnati, and although Ohio Democrats offered to back him for office — even for the presidency — he steadfastly refused to mix politics with military matters.
At Corinth his troops put up an enormous fight. Van Dorn massed his assaulting column and drove it in over a partly cleared field littered with stumps and fallen timber. It broke the Union advance line and came to close quarters around a strong point called Battery Robinet, where men fired so fast that their muskets became too hot to handle and too foul with burned powder to be reloaded. Ohioans and Texans fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed muskets and fists, until at last the steam went out of the attack and Van Dorn’s men ran back, leaving the field strewn with broken bodies. That evening, October 4, the Confederate army drew off in retreat, and fiery Rosecrans visited Battery Robinet, bared his head, and told his soldiers: “I stand in the presence of brave men, and I take off my hat to you.”
Not far away, Union stretcher-bearers picked up a wounded Rebel officer, shot down near high-tide mark of the assault on the battery. As they did what they could to make him comfortable he told them: “You licked us good today, but we gave you the best we had in the ranch.”8
In a sense he was speaking for the whole Confederacy.
Terrible battles and dramatic counterstrokes lay ahead, but the South had just made its supreme effort. It had mounted an offensive that went all across the board — a co-ordinated attempt by three armies to win final control of the war, to prevent the inexorable invasion that would desolate southern farms and towns and ruin the proud, static, dream-possessed society that had supposed it could live on in a world of infinite change. It had given the best there was in the ranch, but it had been licked, and now there was a new war to fight; a war that must finally turn into a grim, all but hopeless fight to stave off disaster.
The Federals would pick up now where they had left off last spring, the initiative once more in their hands. They would have some different generals, however. After Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville, the area in which men like McClellan and Buell could be used narrowed to the vanishing point. General Halleck and Senator Sherman had said it: nations in revolution used up their generals pitilessly. This nation was in revolution now; it would do the same.
So Buell was removed, and Rosecrans took his place, the administration being impressed by his avoidance of politics and his uncomplicated willingness to fight. (Grant was not as pleased with him as Halleck and Lincoln were. He felt that Rosecrans should have followed up his Corinth victory by destroying Van Dorn’s army; any battle that left the enemy with any appreciable number of survivors was apt to strike Grant as imperfect.) And McClellan was removed, taking his farewell from the Army of the Potomac amid hysterical cheers, the men lamenting his departure so bitterly that timid folk in Washington worried needlessly, lest the army mutiny and depose the government. McClellan went home, out of the war forever. Bumbling, well-intentioned Burnside took his place, and the Army of the Potomac gloomily began to move down the Rappahannock River toward a sleepy little city named Fredericksburg.