Burnside was clearly not equal to the task of commanding such an army in a contest with such an adversary as Robert E. Lee. He had himself passed precisely that judgment upon his own capacities when on three former occasions the command of the Army of the Potomac was offered to him. But now that he had accepted that command and had led to disastrous defeat what somebody at the time characterized as "the finest army on the planet," disappointment and chagrin seem for the moment to have unseated his reason. He refused to recognize the extent of the disaster he had suffered or the conspicuousness and completeness of his defeat. His army was torn and broken as no other great army on either side had been before. It was weary with futile battling, discouraged by a failure that had involved terrible losses, and the fact that it was not demoralized was due only to the splendid courage and devotion of the soldiers themselves. Worse than all it had lost confidence in the capacity of its leader.
Nevertheless Burnside, reckless of any consequences that might follow, was determined that night to renew the battle on the following morning, himself leading his own former corps, the Ninth, in still another desperate attempt to carry Marye's Heights. Earnest protests and persuasions succeeded at last in inducing him to abandon this purpose, and after remaining inactive for a day on the bank of the river, he withdrew his army, under cover of night, to the other side of the river and the fearfully disastrous Fredericksburg campaign was at an end.
Military critics have wondered much that Lee, whose loss in the battle had been only 5,309 men, and whose troops were almost wild with the enthusiasm of victory, permitted his badly beaten adversary to remain unmolested on the southern bank of the stream for twenty-four hours and then quietly to retire. Burnside's position and the condition of his army strongly invited attack. He had a wide and deep river behind him, with only a frail pontoon bridge spanning it. Had he been defeated there by assault on the part of the victors there would have been no way of escape open to him. Destruction or surrender must have followed.
On the other hand, his force still heavily outnumbered Lee's and it was in no way demoralized. Defeated and discouraged as it was its spirit was unbroken, and had Lee left his works and assailed it in the open, the issue of the conflict might have been very uncertain. It is alleged that Lee's lieutenants urged a tempestuous assault, and that Lee's chief reason for rejecting the advice was born of his hope that Burnside would himself on the next day renew the attempt to dislodge the Confederates from their well-nigh impregnable position.
However that may be, Lee did not in fact assume the offensive; Burnside retired during darkness to the farther side of the river and the two armies settled themselves in winter quarters, Lee presently sending large bodies of men to the southwest to reinforce the armies there, where active warfare was in progress, and still more active warfare threatened.
The military operations of the season that thus closed had been in every way remarkable. Four distinct campaigns had been fought, all of them severe, and all marked by brilliant strategy and heroic conduct on the part of the troops on either side. McClellan's siege of Richmond, which had filled the South with gloomy apprehension, had been broken in a series of bloody and impressive battles, and the Army of the Potomac had been forced to withdraw for the defense of Washington.
Pope's campaign with his Army of Virginia had been conspicuously brought to naught by brilliant strategy and desperate fighting.
Lee's invasion of Maryland had for a time reversed the former order of things, putting the Federals on the defensive. It had ended at last in a battle so indecisive that both sides claimed it as a victory. Finally Burnside's well planned but badly executed Fredericksburg campaign had resulted in very conspicuous defeat and failure after one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
The net result of the four campaigns was one of very great advantage to the Confederates. The gloomy apprehension with which they had looked forward to that summer's military operations was changed to exultant joy and confidence as they contemplated the situation when the work of the year was over. They had discovered a commander for whom their adversary had as yet found no match in his mastery of the art of war. They were reinspirited by the results achieved and were full of confidence for the future.
On the other side, the North rejoiced in the splendid fighting quality of the Army of the Potomac, as demonstrated in the Seven Days' battles, at Manassas, at Antietam, and most of all, at Fredericksburg. The danger which at one time seemed so imminently to threaten their capital and the cities farther north, had been averted, and they had confidence that the coming spring would bring results in Virginia as pleasing to them as those that had been achieved by Grant in the west during the year that was coming to an end.
The struggle of the giants had but just begun.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Halleck's Treatment of Grant
When Halleck assumed command at Pittsburg Landing after the battle of Shiloh he seemed intent, not only upon depriving Grant of the privilege of vigorously following up the victory he had won but also upon "snubbing," ignoring and humiliating that successful general in every way possible. If Grant's tremendous and at last successful struggle to force Beauregard back to his defenses at Corinth had been a crime instead of a heroic achievement, his commanding general could scarcely have punished it in more annoying and humiliating ways than he did.
It was a sore affliction to Grant to have command taken from him at the moment when he saw before him a perfect opportunity to pluck the ripe fruits of his obstinate fighting by pressing forward in overwhelming force for the completion of the conquest for which that fighting had provided an easy and certain way. It was still more severely painful to him to sit still and see all the easy possibilities of the situation he had created, deliberately thrown away by martinet incapacity.
To a man like General Grant, simple minded and sincere, a man whose sole ambition was to force the war to a successful conclusion within the briefest possible time, and whose vigor in action seemed to make that result certain with the masterful means now in hand at Pittsburg Landing, this foolish frittering away of the opportunity he had created by his splendid fighting, must have been the most painful of all the punishments which Halleck at that time inflicted upon him for his impertinence in wresting a great victory from a calamitous defeat, before his superior officer could reach the field and reap the credit for himself.
But Halleck had other humiliations in store for his impertinently successful lieutenant the late Galena clerk, and the now admired and applauded officer of volunteers. Grant even yet had no rank in the regular army, and he had ventured to advise the temporary dissolution of the regular army in order that the skill and training of its officers might be utilized – with capacity alone as the test – in making the volunteers, who after all constituted the country's chief reliance for its salvation, as effective in the field as if they had been regulars.
We have seen how, after Grant's conquest of Forts Henry and Donelson, and the complete rupture of the first Confederate line of defense, Halleck forbade him to gather the fruits of his victory, suspended him from command and seemingly threatened him with arrest. After Shiloh it would not have been prudent for Halleck again to suggest the arrest of a general whose name was on every lip as that of the one Federal commander who was capable of winning victories while all others were meeting conspicuous defeats. But Halleck had other arrows in his quiver. He left Grant as nominally his second in command, and, in form at least, assigned him specifically to the command of the right wing of the army. But he proceeded from the beginning to ignore his second in command. He summoned him to none of those councils and consultations to which he invited Grant's own subordinates. Even in the matter of orders to that wing of the army which he had technically placed in Grant's charge, he ignored all the courtesies and flagrantly violated all the usages of war, by sending his commands directly to division generals, instead of sending them through General Grant's headquarters – thus rivaling the discourtesy of Judah P. Benjamin in his dealings with Stonewall Jackson. This left Grant in humiliating ignorance even of the orders issued to divisions which were supposed to be under his command, and for whose movements and conduct he was held responsible. His situation was unendurable, even to a man of his robust habits of mind, and by way of relief he finally asked permission to establish his headquarters as District Commander, at Memphis, a