This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [137]
As all of this happened, the Army of the Potomac began to cheer again. Hooker would stage enormous reviews, with whole army corps marching back and forth on the dusty plains above the river; sometimes President Lincoln would be there, listening with a faint sense of unease to Hooker’s boasts that this was “the finest army on the planet” and that the question was not whether the army would capture Richmond but simply when. There was a great jubilant shouting when Hooker rode along the lines. The man had an air; he saw to it that his staff and escort were well mounted and neatly garbed, and to men who thought themselves disillusioned about war he brought back an enduring touch of the color and flashing gaiety of war’s romance. He made army life exciting, and under the excitement he infused a sense of great power and growing strength.
The careful, cautious soldiers were being weeded out. McClellan was gone, the cries of the soldiers who adored him still echoing in his ears, and the kind of war he was able to fight was gone forever. Buell was gone, as well, his kind of war also done for; and the War Department was bearing down brutally to prove to reluctant officers that the day of hard war had arrived. Fitz-John Porter who had led McClellan’s V Corps so ably on the peninsula, had been cashiered, convicted by court-martial of refusing to carry out John Pope’s orders at Second Bull Run. The facts that his conviction and sentence were outrageously unjust and that Pope had in his befuddlement issued impossible orders were beside the point; Porter was simply a victim, beheaded to show the career soldiers that the administration was very much in earnest. Ruthlessly trampling a man underfoot, the administration was also trampling down (as one combat veteran put it) “the damnable heresy that a man can be a friend to the government and yet throw every clog in the way of the administration and prosecution of the war.”13
2. Stalemate in the Swamps
The great river which western men believed to be the sign and symbol of the nation’s destined unity came down from the north with silent power and without haste. It brimmed over its banks, creating ponds and bayous and meaningless tangled waterways all over the flat country on either side; it spun great lazy loops and curves far to the right and the left, and it was swollen now from incessant rains, tearing at its neglected levees as if it might yet flood the war itself out of its broad valley. It was brown with silt; a steamboat captain assured gaping Illinois recruits that if a man drank Mississippi River water for as much as a week “he will have a sandbar in him a mile long.”1
Half of the country seemed to be under water, a primeval swamp that nevertheless was a settled land with farms, villages, and here and there the bottomless trace of a muddy road. Below the horizon, out of sight except to the patrols and scouts, rose the great land mass where Vicksburg had been built. Its massive bluffs faced the river and swung northeast just below the mouth of the Yazoo, and with entrenchments and heavy guns and an endless chain of rifle pits the Confederacy had made here a stronghold which was the proud and arrogant reminder of the division that had come upon the nation.
One great stretch of the river the Confederacy still controlled — the part that lay between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, a Louisiana town just north of Yankee-held Baton Rouge. This piece of the river, measured along its innumerable curves and bends, was perhaps two hundred miles in length, and as long as it was held the Confederacy was still a united nation.