This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [155]
During the fight at the Big Black a self-important staff officer from Banks’s army came riding up to Grant, all in a lather, bearing a dispatch from Halleck — at last! — sharply ordering Grant to stay in Grand Gulf, abstain from adventures, and wait until Banks was ready to move. Grant tore the dispatch up, the staff officer began to sputter angrily, and then Grant heard cheering, saw that his men had broken the Confederate line, and rode off to see about it. Recalling the business twenty years later, Grant said that the officer was still protesting when he rode off; and he added dryly that as far as he could remember he never saw him again in all his life.17
Chapter Nine
THE TREES AND THE RIVER
1. Final Miscalculation
JOE HOOKER was another man who had a river to cross. The Rappahannock was not a coiled tawny flood running through bottomless swamps; with daring and good management the crossing could be made whenever he chose. As with Grant, the real tests would come afterward — cruel test of battle for the troops, searching test of lonely responsibility for the general.
He could count on the troops. The Army of the Potomac had been tried in fire. It had learned war in the Seven Days’, at Second Bull Run, at Antietam, and at Fredericksburg; it had known great discouragement and swift revival, acquiring a sinewy elasticity thereby, and its volunteers had lost just enough of their innocence to reach a sharp fighting edge. They could do just about anything their commander asked them to do; if he could use them to their full potential, they might win the war.
The question mark was Hooker himself. He was slim and handsome, with rosy cheeks and cold eyes, a hard-drinking, hard-living man with some coarseness of fiber. At his headquarters there was a glitter of arrogance, and in his speech in this spring of 1863 there was a contemptuous confidence in victory, a glib preacceptance of triumph that might just possibly hide a deep inner uncertainty.
Hooker led more than one hundred and twenty thousand men — battle-tested and well drilled, equipped with everything a rich government could provide. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which he was about to fight, seemed badly overmatched. Lee had had to detach Longstreet and most of Longstreet’s corps to accomplish some food-gathering and Yankee-repelling mission in the watery flat country back of Norfolk, far below Richmond. As April ended, Lee’s army contained no more than half as many men as Hooker’s — men more poorly clad, more poorly fed, and less well equipped. By any test the Federals seemed to have all of the advantages.
Yet there would be a test that would go beyond a counting of battalions and a weighing of metal. What really lay ahead, as the serpentine body of the Army of the Potomac moved out of its camps and flowed purposefully down to the river crossings — while the bands played, and the endless length of the artillery columns jolted over the uneven roads, and new blossoms and young leaves touched the bleak woods with delicate color — what would matter the most in all of this would be the result of a searching inquiry into the character of two men — two men, in all of these scores of armed thousands — Lee and Hooker. These two men would not see each other. In all the wild battle shock of colliding armies they would not come within miles of each other. Yet they were the real antagonists. More than any other campaign in the Civil War, the campaign that began when Hooker put his army in motion at the end of April would depend on the stamina of the rival commanders.
It would be a moral issue, finally — a test of inner integrity and manhood. In this test Hooker would be so badly overmatched that it would be no contest.
Hooker’s plans were excellent, and so was his execution of them … up to the moment of testing.
He was far too intelligent to cross at Fredericksburg, as Burnside had done, and so commit his army to the impossible task of driving Lee’s army from its impregnable trenches. Instead he would go far up the river,