This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [52]
What the Westerners were beginning to run up against, indeed, was the inexorable fact that the Negro was going to have a controlling effect on this war for union … simply because he was there. His presence, ultimately, had been the cause of the war; the war could not be fought and won without taking him into account; when the settlement finally took place, he would have to be in it.
On the day after Bull Run, Congress had solemnly decreed that the war was not being fought to disturb “the established institutions of the states,” and the radical Republicans had not ventured to object; yet the solemn resolve was becoming a dead letter, for the established institution which the resolution had been designed to protect was being disturbed more and more every day and there was no way to avoid disturbing it. Freedom and union were bound up together, whether man wished it so or not; and freedom was not a word that could ever be used in a limited sense. It was an idea, not a word, and there was no way to keep the people who wanted freedom the most from absorbing the idea.
If it did nothing else, slavery gave Union soldiers the notion that when they were in slave territory they were in land that somehow was foreign. This was as true in the Army of the Potomac as in Kentucky and Missouri. Private Chase of the 1st Massachusetts Artillery — a man who worshiped McClellan and who did not believe that abolition had any rightful part in this war — was writing home at this time that Virginia was a fine country in which, if there was no war, he would like to live. Yet he felt compelled to add: “I think if they could have a lot of New England farmers settle here they could show them how to raise a heap of stuff.” The war, he admitted, was ravaging the Virginia countryside fearfully, but perhaps that was all for the best: “I hope when it is done it will be a permanent thing and the Question settled that there is such a thing as Union.”7
McClellan himself — McClellan, who went by the book of Napoleon and saw all the rebellion as something formalized, to be settled by professionals who went by the old chivalric tradition — was beginning to learn this fall that this war could not be fought without some reference to the slavery issue. He was learning it just now in a very hard way, by means of a lost battle in which men were killed, by which bright reputations could be tarnished.
McClellan had troops occupying the Maryland country along the upper Potomac, northwest of Washington, with Confederates in unknown strength across the river. Late in October he got word that Confederate troops in Leesburg, Virginia, were making ominous moves, and he ordered a Union force to scout across the river, feel them out, and see what was developing. His orders went down to a division commander, Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, and Stone had a few regiments go over the river at Harrison’s Island, scale the muddy heights at Ball’s Bluff, and on October 21, 1861, perform the maneuver known to military men as a reconnaissance in force.
General Stone’s detachment went over under command of Colonel Edward D. Baker, the same who had orated gloriously in springtime New York, calling for bold and determined war and scoffing at battle deaths as matters of small account. On the fringe of a wood atop the