A Republic in the Ranks by Zachery A. Fry

Author:Zachery A. Fry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

What the Sentiment of the Army Really Is

Capt. George A. Wilbur crossed the dangerous stretch of Virginia countryside between the lines at Petersburg with a flag of truce in hand, hailing the enemy to help locate a Vermont officer killed days earlier. A Rebel obliged, found the body, and then asked Wilbur the question on everyone’s mind in the trenches: would the North choose George McClellan to be the seventeenth president? No, the Union captain responded. Lincoln would doubtless be reelected “if the people of the North will be true to their country, to themselves, and to their God.” The single abiding prayer of the Army of the Potomac, he insisted, was that “loyal men will vote for a loyal man.”1

The army that voted in 1864 was not the same army that had fought against Confederates and Copperheads in 1863. Mounting casualty lists, especially in the junior officer corps, combined with the steady stream of new recruits permanently changed the army’s composition. When McClellan tacitly allowed the controversial Democratic peace platform by agreeing to serve as the party’s standard bearer, the army’s politically aware ranks reacted with spite. Little Mac had finally sold his soul to the devil, they insisted. Meanwhile, demobilized veterans at home sparred against each other in political clubs, vying for the right to prove the “true” meaning of loyalty. When it came time to vote, the results from reenlisted ranks at the front showed how completely Republican junior officers had inspired the army. Although recruits and draftees complicated the picture, the army’s veteran core resoundingly rejected its once beloved commander.

———

Fifty thousand men who crossed the Rapidan River on May 4, 1864, to begin Grant’s Overland Campaign would be casualties by the first week of June. In six weeks of relentless combat north of Richmond, the Army of the Potomac faced its sternest test of the war, all but destroying the old ranks of battle-hardened, politically educated veterans and replacing them with thousands of fresh-faced novices to the war’s reality. By November, with the war still not won, everything Republican junior officers had done to transform the army into a political movement stood in doubt.

Beginning on May 5, Meade’s lead columns collided with Lee in the tangled terrain of the Wilderness west of the old Chancellorsville battlefield. Both sides funneled reinforcements into the forbidding forest until a pitched battle rolled back and forth through miles of burning underbrush. By nightfall on the sixth, the flicker of carnage illuminated an exhausted Union line desperately clinging to the old Brock Road, the only useable avenue leading toward Richmond. Many of those fortunate enough to survive the bloodshed could well remember the trouncing of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Meade’s timidity in northern Virginia the previous autumn, and they expected a withdraw to regroup and lick their wounds. Instead, early on the morning of May 7, Grant roused the battle-scarred Army of the Potomac and led it south toward Spotsylvania Court House.2

Lee’s own bloodied army rallied and edged out Grant’s march, arriving at the critical crossroads at Spotsylvania by May 8 to erect impregnable earthworks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.