Seizing Destiny: The Army of the Potomac's "Valley Forge" and the Civil War Winter that Saved the Union
384
Seizing Destiny: The Army of the Potomac's "Valley Forge" and the Civil War Winter that Saved the Union
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Overview
Depression. Desertion. Disease. The Army of the Potomac faced a trio of unrelenting enemies during the winter of 1863. Following the catastrophic defeat at the battle of Fredericksburg, the army settled into winter quarters—and despair settled into the army. Morale sank to its lowest level while desertions reached an all-time high. Illness packed the hospitals. Political intrigues, careerist schemes, and harsh winter weather demoralized everyone. Even the army’s livestock suffered, with more than 1,000 horses and mules dying every week.
Then Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, a pugnacious tactician aptly nicknamed “Fighting Joe,” took command of the army. And a remarkable thing happened: A man known for his hardscrabble battlefield tenacity showed an amazing brilliance for organization and leadership. With Chief of Staff Dan Butterfield working alongside him, Hooker rebuilt the army from the bottom up. In addition to instituting logistical, ordnance, and administrative reforms, he insisted on proper troop care, rigorous inspections, and battle drills. Hooker doled out promotions and furloughs by merit, conducted large-scale raids, streamlined the army’s command and control, and fielded a new cavalry corps and military intelligence organization.
Hooker’s war on poor discipline and harsh conditions revitalized a dying army. During this ninety-three-day resurgence, the Army of the Potomac reversed its fortunes and set itself on the path to ultimate victory. Hooker’s achievement represents nothing less than the greatest non-battle turning point since Valley Forge in the American Revolution—through it has long gone unnoticed or underappreciated by modern historians.
Based on soldiers’ records, diaries, and letters, from the lowest private to the highest general, this is the full story of how these citizen-soldiers overcame adversity, seized their destiny, and saved the nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611211573 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Savas Beatie |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Bedraggled Army
Dissatisfaction swept over the Army of the Potomac like a midwinter blizzard. Morale plummeted. Men grew bitter. Hope froze.
The chill was far worse than anything Rufus Dawes had seen back in Wisconsin, and it was only late December. The 24-year-old major of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry, born on the Fourth of July in 1838, had watched conditions worsen ever since the debacle in Fredericksburg earlier in the month. Major General Ambrose E. Burnside had led the army to its most lopsided defeat of the war thus far, and the ill winds began blustering shortly thereafter. The squall hit furiously, almost as soon as the army retreated across the Rappahannock River into Stafford County.
"The army seems to be overburdened with second rate men in high positions, from General Burnside down," Dawes wrote. "Common place and whisky are too much in power for the most hopeful future. This winter is, indeed, the Valley Forge of the war."
Dawes, whose great-grandfather rode with Paul Revere on the famous midnight ride in 1775, wasn't the only Union soldier to allude to the Revolution. "As something of the spirit of '76 still continues to course through your veins, and as the heroic deeds of our ancesters still bring tinges of patriotic pride to your cheeks, whenever recounted, I will beg the liberty of giving you a short chapter clipped from this present age," wrote Nathaniel Weede Brown of the 133rd Pennsylvania Infantry in a letter from "Camp near Fredericksburg." As a "War Democrat," Brown had conflicted feelings. "This rebellion," he wrote, "concocted in iniquity and carried on for no other purpose than for the abolition of slavery and the aggrandizement of partisan spite, has cancelled the lives of thousands, destroyed property to the amount of millions." To Brown, "the butchery and pillage" had just begun. He praised his comrades' bravery in "fighting in a doubtful cause — for no one can tell what we are really fighting for."
President Lincoln did what he could to bolster the army's flagging spirits. "Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, nor the failure other than an accident," he said, but his praise sounded faint. "The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe, and the consummate skill and success with which you crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy, show that you possess all the qualities of a great army . ... Condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded, I congratulate you that the number of both is comparatively so small." Small consolation it seemed.
Ironically, on a December 18th nearly 85 years earlier, Congress had offered praise to another bedraggled American army, calling for a national day of Thanksgiving. General George Washington, leading his ragamuffin band into Valley Forge, paused the army's march in recognition of the honor.
Now, in 1862, the Army of the Potomac headed into its own Valley Forge, although they had no way to know it. Quickly, though, it became a winter of discontent. Army morale plummeted precipitously in the days and weeks after Fredericksburg. Not even Christmas brightened spirits. "We are suffering very much with cold and hunger," wrote Lt. Albert P. Morrow of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry — known as Rush's Lancers — on December 25. "The roads are in such wretched condition that we can't transport supplies and we can't buy a single article in this miserable poverty-stricken country."
Across the North, things looked just as bleak albeit for different reasons. "[The American people] have borne, silently and grimly, imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, the loss of friends and means, almost every suffering which can afflict a brave people," editorialized the venerable Harper's Weekly. "But they cannot be expected to suffer that such massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated." Unseemly as it appeared, the Union was apparently losing.
"In fact the day that McClellan was removed from the command of this Army the death blow of our existence as the finest army that the World ever saw was struck," wrote Maj. Peter Keenan of the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry. "What was once, under that great leader, the 'Grand Army of the Potomac' is today little better that a demoralized and disorganized mass of men."
The army began to hemorrhage more than 200 deserters a day, which immediately sapped the army's strength and will. By month's end, the first 2,000 of at least 25,000 deserters had faded from the front. With Washington access tightly sealed at the Potomac River, most made it only as far as Alexandria, where they huddled around campfires with fellow "skedaddlers." Burnside began the unpleasant but necessary process of rounding them up. On December 24, he issued General Order No. 192. "In order to facilitate the return to duty of officers and men detained at the camp of convalescents, stragglers, &c., near Alexandria," Burnside ordered an assistant provost marshal general to "repair to Alexandria and take charge of all such officers and men in the various camps of that vicinity as are reported 'for duty in the field.'" Each corps sent an officer and armed troops to round up stragglers and ship them to Stafford's Aquia Landing, where the returnees were systematically re-clothed, re-equipped and re-armed. Pointedly, Burnside used Regular Army troops to police up volunteer deserters and stragglers.
Although Burnside's provost marshal force and infantry and cavalry patrols arrested men lacking passes, substantial numbers of men still slipped through. The main desertion path flowed through Aquia-Dumfries-Occoquan. Soldiers walked or caught rides with sutlers, civilians, or fellow soldiers, some of whom brazenly stole wagons. In a common ruse, deserters posed as "telegraph repair work details."
The wounded had a far easier desertion route through the numerous Washington general hospitals. Once sufficiently recovered, a wounded soldier — frequently aided unwittingly by good-hearted U. S. Sanitary or Christian Commission workers or citizens — easily escaped.
For the non-wounded, desertion from the army's sector was best achieved by crossing the Potomac River into southern Maryland. Boats hired by deserters were almost certainly operated by men engaged in covert activities. The Confederate Signal Corps and Secret Service's "Secret Line" operated throughout the war with impunity from Aquia and Potomac Creeks in Stafford all the way up to Maryland. Rebel boatmen were happy to row as many Yankee deserters across the river as possible, probably demanding substantial fees.
Compounding Union problems, Confederate Maj. Gen. James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, who gained lasting fame for his June and October 1862 cavalry raids around Federal armies, launched a large-scale operation to Dumfries and Fairfax Station on December 27-29, 1862. While of little direct threat to the Federal defenses, this revealed the Federal cavalry's continued haplessness. Stuart's ability to raid through and around Union defenses at will frustrated top Union commanders. It also exposed the vulnerability of Aquia Landing, the main Federal logistics center.
By December 30, the army's Quartermaster General, Montgomery C. Meigs, had seen enough and let General Burnside know it. "In my position as Quartermaster-General much is seen that is seen from no other stand-point of the Army," wrote Meigs, who was bureaucratic, patriotic, strategically sound, and naive all at once. "I venture to say a few words to you which neither the newspapers nor, I fear, anybody in your army is likely to utter." Meigs warned the treasury was rapidly depleting, although prices, currency, and credit remained intact. He sensibly worried about horse feed prices: "Hay and oats, two essentials for an army, have risen," but it was "difficult to find men willing to undertake their delivery and the prices are higher than ever before." Meigs feared supplies would run short of fail altogether. "Should this happen," he noted, "your army would be obliged to retire, and the animals would be dispersed in search of food." After repeating his warning that the war's cost was leading to fiscal disaster, Meigs then turned to strategy. "General Halleck tells me that you believe your numbers are greater than the enemy's, and yet the army waits!" he wrote. "Upon the commander, to whom all the glory of success will attach, must rest the responsibility of deciding the plan of campaign."
General Meigs finally arrived at his main point: "Every day weakens your army," he wrote; "every good day lost is a golden opportunity in the career of our country — lost forever. Exhaustion steals over the country. Confidence and hope are dying."
"An Entire Army Struck with Melancholia"
That the Army of the Potomac could be so weakened spoke volumes about the spiritual gangrene that infected it. "An entire army struck with melancholy," said an officer with the 140th New York, writing to his hometown paper in Rochester. "Enthusiasm all evaporated — the army of the Potomac never sings, never shouts, and I wish I could say, never swears."
The army had been significantly bruised — and undoubtedly humiliated — by its loss at Fredericksburg in December, where the 135,000-man army suffered 12,653 casualties — 1,284 killed, 9,600 wounded, 1,769 missing. In the immediate aftermath, with Christmas calling soldiers home, the army was hemorrhaging another 25,000 men.
That still yielded about 97,647 after-battle effectives. By the end of January 1863, army returns showed some 147,144 combat arms troops. Such a number suggests the army was able to replace and regenerate sufficient combat power drawing on the Washington defenses and on the states. It also suggests personnel accountings may have been padded, confused, or concealed. At any rate, there were sufficient men on hand for an "army of quantity" — especially since that army only had to engage an enemy army roughly half its size.
Questions lingered, however, over whether the "army of quantity" was also an "army of quality." Two years of war had seen heavy attrition in most regiments, injuries, deaths and disease that had reduced them, on average, to about 400 men each out of an original 1,000. Many individual companies reported only 25-30 effectives. Units like the 110th Pennsylvania had so few effectives in early January 1863 that it consolidated its companies from eight to four. However, as most army units had fought at least five battles, the survivors at least had substantial combat experience.
The army was also well-armed. Fully 74 percent of its riflemen carried first-class rifles: .58 Caliber Springfield Model 1861 Rifle Muskets [46%]; .577/.58 Caliber Enfield Rifle Muskets [25%]; or comparable weapons [3 %]. However, when cumulative losses necessitated the redistribution of soldiers within a regiment — such as the 110th Pennsylvania, mentioned earlier — it frequently led to bizarre weapons combinations because soldiers typically kept their original weapons. Such hodge-podges were an ordnance sergeant's nightmare. For example, Company A, 46th New York Infantry, had eight different weapons on hand in six different calibers.
Along with their individual armaments, soldiers had the backing of a strong technical specialist infrastructure: administration; ordnance; quartermaster and commissary; signal; and railroad. The army was also backed by the North's extensive technological, economic, transportation, and industrial superiority.
However, crowing about the Union's material superiority as the end-all is woefully simplistic, just as it's equally simplistic to categorically dismiss the quantity and quality of Southern troops' weapons, equipment, and clothing. Antebellum Congresses had chronically ignored military preparedness, thereby creating institutionalized organization and mobilization issues. It wasn't that the United States was wholly unprepared for the Civil War; it was wholly unprepared to fight any war.
Historian Fred A. Shannon, writing in the 1920s, suggested that poor food and supply practices made military life unnecessarily difficult. Shannon emphasized a "shortage of supply, poor methods of distribution, inferior materials and workmanship, and [the soldier's] own improvidence — the latter being largely the result of poor army organization and worse discipline."
Poor leadership and administration brought excessive desertions. Pervasive sickness, aided by indifferent camp sanitation and hygiene, brought unnecessary deaths. It took half the war — until roughly the period of this study — for supplies to reach acceptable levels, although the quality of those supplies never fully made muster. Shoes, overcoats, uniforms, and other equipment were all deficient in quality, and soldiers suffered. Understanding the men in this study depends on clearly recalling all of these dimensions.
The Citizen-Soldiers of the United States
Despite its institutionalized deficiencies, the army possessed substantial war-fighting potential. What it most lacked was a winning combination of fighting leaders and troops who knew how to work together with their combat support and service support in the face of a formidable foe.
Naturally, the army's human element was crucial. It's surprising then, per Shannon, that the common soldier ranked "as the least-considered factor in the prosecution of the Civil War" by the government.
The Army of the Potomac, like all Northern armies, consisted almost completely of citizen-soldiers. As such, the men embodied inherent contradictions: Citizens, as the nation's sovereigns, possessed the power to vote in or vote out their political leaders and vested them with authority to act in their names. They also influenced other voters (e.g., spouses, parents, relatives, friends, etc.). Paradoxically, once in service as soldiers, they became pawns of the political and military leaders to whom they had directly or indirectly granted power.
Early in its history, America had rejected large standing armies in peacetime, so the federal government maintained only a small professional, or "regular," force. Wartime armies, in contrast, consisted of citizen armies comprised of militia (standing reserve forces) and volunteers (forces assembled in emergencies). These elements, when cobbled together, became "the Armies of the United States" for that war. A remarkable aspect of U. S. mobilization was the institutionalized marginalization of professional soldiers, who generally had to resign in order to gain volunteer appointments.
Such disparate and untrained forces required time and experience to come together effectively, and leading such citizen-armies was far more art than science. A commander had to demonstrate sincere respect — even affection — for his subordinates, yet still be able to order them to risk life and limb with reasonably unquestioning attitudes. This delicate balance was best achieved when commanders of good character were trusted by their men with an implicit compact that soldiers' lives would not be unnecessarily risked or wasted. Gaining that trust required time. Until then, wartime officers typically began with comparatively little institutional respect from their subordinates. They had to earn the respect of their troops.
Unfortunately, the United States never had a reliable system for picking or training all of its officers to be those kinds of leaders, so results were uneven and improved only gradually during war. Some historians have gone so far as to rate the process as a "little short of disastrous." In the Civil War, direct or indirect political influence within a state was the surest path to selection and promotion for Union officers — hardly the best process to ensure an army of quality. "It is no less than madness to put an officer at the head of a great Army in the field because some ordinary uninstructed men call him smart," one officer groused.
At their worst, citizen-officers were strutting popinjays and incompetents, appointed through political influence or nepotism, who conducted military affairs from the poorest foundations: arrogance, martinet tendencies, and insecurity. Their military skills and knowledge were suspect, and their decisions were frequently driven by expediency — to gain promotion or curry favor; avoid explanations and accountability; or dominate powerless subordinates. Officers of this ilk relished personal comforts and recreation, and ignored the well-being of their troops. Historically, these officers made military leadership in a democracy more difficult. The crucible of combat tended to clean up mistakes but, unfortunately, at substantial collateral costs. "Led on to slaughter and defeat by drunken and incompetent officers," mourned a Connecticut private, "[the 'soldier of today'] has become disheartened, discouraged, demoralized." One bright spot was that these types of officers usually managed to weasel out of line duty, in a sense self-selecting themselves out.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Seizing Destiny"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Albert Z. Conner, Jr. and Chris Mackowski.
Excerpted by permission of Savas Beatie LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments and Introduction,
Chapter One: The Bedraggled Army,
Chapter Two: The Old Year has Closed,
Chapter Three: Go Forward and Give Us Victories,
Chapter Four: Suffering,
Chapter Five: Great Advances,
Chapter Six: Improving Spirits, Deep Beliefs,
Chapter Seven: Longing for the Spring Campaign,
Chapter Eight: The Finest Army on the Planet,
Chapter Nine: The False Start,
Chapter Ten: The End of the "Valley Forge",
Chapter Eleven: After Chancellorsville,
Epilogue,
Postscript: Posterity and Commemoration,
Appendix 1: After the Army of the Potomac's "Valley Forge",
Appendix 2: The Union Women of "Valley Forge",
Appendix 3: Order of Battle: Army of the Potomac, May 1-6, 1863,
Bibliography,
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