This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [53]
In an official Washington which still had painful memories of Bull Run, this was exactly the sort of disaster for which somebody was going to be made to sweat; especially so since Baker himself had been a man of considerable political consequence — a close friend of Abraham Lincoln (who had named his second son for him), a leading west-coast Republican, and a member of the United States Senate. House and Senate joined to name a committee to look into the business, and this committee — which before long would become a fearsome Jacobin creation, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War — selected as the chief culprit General Stone, who had not been present at the battle but who seemed to be mostly responsible for the move.
General Stone himself had a certain standing. During the previous winter James Buchanan had commissioned him colonel and had given him responsibility for maintaining order at the inauguration of President Lincoln; an important assignment, as men saw it then, for the capital had been full of rumors about a secessionist attempt to keep the ceremony from taking place. Lincoln knew Stone and trusted him, and Stone enjoyed McClellan’s full confidence, but none of this helped him now. The Joint Committee scented something very fishy about the whole Ball’s Bluff operation; suspected, in fact, that Baker and his command might have been purposely sacrificed by a Federal officer secretly in sympathy with the Confederacy — an officer who, under the circumstances, could not be anyone but General Stone, who had ordered the crossing in the first place. The committee collected a quantity of ominously vague testimony about mysterious flags of truce and the passage of messages back and forth between Union and Confederate commanders along the upper Potomac. It reflected also that during the last couple of months Stone had won a certain unhappy prominence by ordering his men to return to their owners all fugitive slaves who came within his lines; a course of action that had involved him in violent argument with Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts and with that afflicted lion of the anti-slavery cause, Senator Charles Sumner himself. As more and more testimony came in, it seemed clear to the members of the committee that Stone was probably disloyal.
Stone was never actually accused of anything. He was simply wrapped in suspicion; the War Department took note of it, and in time Stone was quietly removed from command and locked up in prison, where he had to stay for quite a number of months. He was released eventually — not exactly cleared, because there had never been any charges that could be either replied to or canceled, but at least released — but his career was ruined.
General Stone had run into very bad luck and had suffered atrocious injustice. Yet what had really wrecked him was not so much the vengeful suspicion of ruthless politicians as the sunken reef of the slavery issue. He had been taught, suddenly and with great brutality, what other soldiers were being permitted to surmise for themselves — that that issue was not going to stay submerged, that it was going to become central, that sooner or later the war was going to adjust itself to it.8
Like the lamented Colonel Baker, the principal men in the Republican party believed in bold and determined war, and it did not seem to them that they had been getting it lately. It had been hard enough for them to keep quiet while McClellan leisurely perfected his army’s organization and training; they found it altogether unendurable when the first aggressive move made by any piece of that army proved to be the halfhearted thrust at Ball’s Bluff, productive of shameful disaster. When the man