CHAPTER TWO

A Devotion Almost Idolatry

The town of Harpers Ferry presented a dismal sight to the men of the Fourteenth Connecticut, “a scene of desolation” as Sgt. Maj. Henry P. Goddard remembered it, “having changed hands about a dozen times.”¹ “All the public works and most of the private buildings are a heap of rubbish and cinders,” recalled another member of the regiment.² Hugged by low, craggy mountains and rapid rivers on two sides, the industrial village sat in the crosshairs of Union and Confederate armies as the great campaigns of the eastern theater skirted the lower Shenandoah Valley. On the morning of September 15, 1862, Stonewall Jackson’s Rebels pummeled a garrison of 12,000 Federals into submission there, a Southern victory which rescued Robert E. Lee’s daring Maryland Campaign and set the stage for the war’s bloodiest day seventeen miles to the north along Antietam Creek. After helping fight the Confederates to a standstill on September 17 and forcing them to withdraw into Virginia a day later, the Connecticut men marched south to Harpers Ferry with the rest of the Second Corps in cautious pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia.

One of the first sights to greet Union soldiers as they forded the Potomac River into Harpers Ferry was the forlorn fire engine house outside the old federal armory. There, three years earlier, John Brown’s war against slavery ended in martyrdom. Two soldiers of the Fourteenth recalled visiting this “fort” in the early evening of September 22. Sergeant Major Goddard recorded that Nutmeggers belted out “John’s Brown Soul Is Marching On” when they arrived, and as he sat down to record a letter to his mother that night, he wished “the old hero is where he could hear that and watch the scene.”³ Lt. Samuel W. Fiske, writing home to the Springfield Republican, recalled sleeping on the cold floor of the old fort and felt honored for the opportunity. “The loop-holes through which Brown fired upon his assailants are all built up,” Fiske offered to readers, “but the breaches he made upon the institution and the ideas of the South have been widening ever since.”⁴ Goddard and Fiske were two leaders in the regiment trusted by the men under their command, and their sentiments set an example as the Fourteenth licked its Antietam wounds.

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The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 forged the fragments of Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Army of Virginia and the four existing corps of the Army of the Potomac into a cohesive fighting force under George McClellan. The Ninth Corps arrived from North Carolina to join the Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth Corps of McClellan’s army. Three additional corps, which became the First, Eleventh, and Twelfth, arrived from Pope’s army, recently punished by Lee at Second Bull Run. This new Army of the Potomac marched out from its Washington bivouac after Pope’s defeat to confront Lee’s daring thrust across the Potomac. Striking westward to meet Lee, McClellan discovered a copy of the Confederate leader’s campaign plans outside Frederick on September 13. The next day, after sharp encounters atop South Mountain, three Union corps pushed aside Lee’s rear guard and forced the Confederate main body to rally on the ridges outside Sharpsburg along Antietam Creek.⁵

With his back to the Potomac River, Lee and his outnumbered veterans dared McClellan to attempt a decisive blow. “The Young Napoleon” obliged on the morning of the seventeenth. A full day of indecisive struggle drained both armies until the battle lines at sunset sat practically where they had started the fighting at dawn.⁶ After remaining on the field all day on the eighteenth to tantalize McClellan and prove his Southerners had not been beaten, Lee withdrew across the Potomac to carry on the war in Virginia.

McClellan pronounced Antietam a victory and allowed his ranks to rest. As he repaired the bloodied army, controversies erupted to dominate camp discussion. Numerous units had just joined the Army of the Potomac on the eve of Antietam, fighting alongside McClellan’s Peninsula veterans for the first time. Many were nine-month enlistees from Pennsylvania who filled out the Second and Fifth Corps. Then there was Pope’s army, which, as historian John Matsui observes, exuded a Republican sentiment in high command dramatically different from the Democratic circle ruling the Army of the Potomac. Many of Pope’s officers had been prewar Republicans, and fewer professional West Pointers held command in the Army of Virginia than in McClellan’s force. In addition, common soldiers in Pope’s army had spent months punishing disloyalty among northern Virginia communities and enduring embarrassment at the hands of Confederate forces there.⁷ The Third Wisconsin in Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks’s corps, for instance, spent the autumn of 1861 seizing any newspapermen in Maryland considered “notorious for their enmity to the federal government.”⁸ And as always, Union soldiers encountered the grim reality of slavery, but unlike in McClellan’s army, Pope’s officers often encouraged the seizure of slaves as contraband.

During his brief tenure in northern Virginia, Pope tried to present himself as the western savior who would free soldiers from the shackles of the conciliation policy. He gained notoriety in both McClellan’s army and his own by publishing a bombastic directive for his men to unleash hard war on the property of traitors. Surgeon Alfred Castleman of the Fifth Wisconsin applauded the vigor but rolled his eyes at Pope’s personal egotism and sanctimony. “The ring of General Pope’s order is right, just right; I cannot take one exception,” he noted, “[b]ut the expediency of its coming from General Pope is questionable.”⁹ Lt. John M. Paver of the Fifth Ohio agreed that Pope’s bombastic temperament won him no friends, especially considering that Union and Confederate forces had been ransacking the region for months anyway. “The whole country from the Blue Ridge to the Potomac had been overrun with both armies,” the Buckeye remembered, “and not a living thing or a spear of grass could be found.” In Paver’s estimation, Pope’s cluelessness about how hard the Union forces were already punishing traitors “classified him as a ‘Four-Flusher.’”¹⁰

Pope’s soldiers found among McClellan’s troops a growing number of willing allies in the hunt for disloyalty. Soldiers in the Second Division, Second Corps, had survived Ball’s Bluff a year earlier and watched their old division commander Charles P. Stone face public accusations of treachery for sacrificing his troops there. Marching from Antietam in late September, the division reoccupied Harpers Ferry after its garrison had surrendered to Stonewall Jackson several days earlier. When they learned of Col. Dixon Miles’s actions before his death commanding the outpost during the siege, Second Division soldiers wasted no time surmising Harpers Ferry too had been the victim of treachery in high command. “[Miles] must have been a traitor,” wrote Pvt. John M. Steffan of the Seventy-First Pennsylvania, who heard that when Union defenders had asked Miles for more ammunition, “he would not do it, but ordered them to surrender to the enemy [which they did] with tears in their eyes.”¹¹ Pvt. George W. Beidelman of the Seventy-First agreed, seething, “O that every traitor had been—I don’t know what—before he entered our army, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, to betray us.”¹² These attitudes demonstrated a remarkable willingness to identify treason within the army’s high command, proof that the efforts of Republicans to vilify Democratic generals in the minds of soldiers were paying off.

The greatest controversy for the Army of the Potomac in the weeks immediately after Antietam was Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation, issued on the very day the Fourteenth Connecticut and other units entered John Brown’s Harpers Ferry. The proclamation enacted what McClellan had privately cautioned Lincoln the army would never tolerate: an explicit struggle to free the slaves and revolutionize Southern society. After Antietam, McClellan insisted his army was poorly supplied and too badly battered to resume the offensive immediately, so he gave the Army of the Potomac six weeks of recuperation to mull over this political earthquake.

Junior officers bickered over the ramifications of freeing the slaves. The Buckeye lieutenant who hated General Pope’s bombast so much remembered that his Cincinnati comrades had little patience for Republicans and were “bitterly opposed to the negro’s freedom.”¹³ Some of the harshest opponents of emancipation were the army’s patrician junior officers, representatives of the North’s intelligentsia. Lt. Stephen Minot Weld, scion of a Boston Brahmin clan, opined from the camp of the Eighteenth Massachusetts that abolitionists were conspiring to prolong the sectional strife into a revolution by “making emancipation necessary.” “The expediency of the proclamation at the present time” was folly, he insisted.¹⁴ Charles S. Wainwright, a wealthy New York major in the First Corps artillery, rebuked the idea that soldiers embraced antislavery rhetoric since he did not hear “much said here in the army on the subject.”¹⁵

Others would have laughed at Wainwright’s evaluation. They were the army’s Republican officers, the ones who read New York and Philadelphia papers as regularly as they could and then debated in camp, laying the groundwork for the army’s involvement in the national public sphere based on what historian Michael C. C. Adams refers to as “camp-fire bitching.”¹⁶ These men believed the act heralded a watershed moment in world history. A rabidly Republican captain in the 105th Pennsylvania announced to his family that the camp of the Third Corps had “abundant food for conversation” in Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation. He warned that only “another revolution” would rid the United States of the “incubus,” adding that no amount of political activism could absolve the nation of its original sin. “It is no atonement,” he said, “for our long continued brutality & wrong—we can make no atonement for this.”¹⁷

Politically educated enlisted men debated the matter as well, setting an example for their more novice comrades. Pvt. Oliver Willcox Norton, a moderate Republican in the Fifth Corps’ Eighty-Third Pennsylvania, approved of the proclamation in theory but feared it would accomplish little except to harden Southern resolve. “Next winter will witness scenes so bloody that the horrors of the French Revolution will be peace in comparison to it,” he wrote home. “Seward was right—the ‘irrepressible conflict’ will continue till freedom or slavery rules the nation.”¹⁸ Pvt. George W. Beidelman of the Seventy-First Pennsylvania wrote home that the day would be remembered for all time: “As having an important bearing upon the war, as well as the future destiny of our country and the whole world, the great event of the day is the Emancipation proclamation of the President. God bless him!” Beidelman insisted the measure was “well received as far as my observation goes.”¹⁹

Partisan junior officers and the handful of highly educated soldiers in the ranks debated Northern policy while most in the army were still learning the war’s political dimensions. To be sure, many had grown up hearing aspersions of the Slave Power, but in autumn 1862 the ranks still scoffed at “politics” and defined it in terms of petty partisanship like the administration’s belligerence toward their commander. “Politicians” were the ones poisoning the war effort with second-guessing and messages of disunity. Major Rufus Dawes of the Iron Brigade recalled the phenomenon: “the animadversions against the President himself, for what was called ‘interference’ with the plans of his generals, were common and severe throughout the army.”²⁰ The love for McClellan which reached apogee that November grew out of a naive desire to free the army from this political albatross. In time, men who shared this view would come to find that McClellan’s supposed protection from the political interference of Lincoln’s administration was in itself a deeply political act. Under the guise of duty, patriotism, and devotion to Constitution, what McClellan actually protected the army from was the language of the Republican Party.²¹

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The political stakes in the 1862 midterm elections were high. With Lincoln’s announcement of emancipation, hard-line Democrats finally had an issue they could exploit to marginalize Republicans as radical fanatics. In response, Republicans painted Democrats as disloyal charlatans who capitalized on Northern racism and imperiled the Union itself. The war’s frustrating course caused Republicans and Democrats alike to purify their own parties. Antiwar protests swept portions of the lower Midwest, forcing the president’s opposition to decide once and for all whether to support the war. Some Democrats broke ranks from an emerging “Copperhead” wing of their party to join the “War Democrat” faction, which at least broadly supported the administration. Lincoln reacted to news of antiwar protests by announcing a suspension of habeas corpus, and the perception of executive overreach energized his critics.²²

On the heels of Antietam, twelve loyal Republican and “National Union” governors gathered in Altoona, Pennsylvania, to express solidarity with the Lincoln administration. In the process, the “war governors” resolved to support emancipation and censure McClellan.²³ Infuriated conservatives in the army leveled a punishing criticism. Tempers flared particularly among Democratically inclined Pennsylvania officers who felt betrayed by the state’s popular governor Andrew Curtin. Assistant Surgeon Bernard McNeil of the Sixty-Ninth Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia outfit with a strong Irish Democratic pedigree, fumed to his uncle back home that, if radicals were free to choose the entire course of the war, “I for one will leave at instantes [sic].” “McClellan has the confidence of the soldiers & I believe the people,” he affirmed.²⁴

On October 2, Lincoln visited the army near Sharpsburg to prod McClellan and his subordinates into moving. For three days he toured camps, visited field hospitals, and reviewed the veteran ranks.²⁵ Interestingly, men who decried “politics” seem not to have tied Lincoln to the partisan political class. Instead, common soldiers were star-struck and focused on the president’s pathetic physical appearance. They dashed off details of Lincoln’s troubled demeanor to an adoring audience as proof they had been close to him during the review. A soldier in the Ninth Corps noted that Lincoln handled his mount “in a masterly fashion” and cultivated his appearance as “Honest Abe” among the troops by wearing a simple “democratic black suit and stovepipe hat.”²⁶ An Iron Brigade private wrote home, “He is a very tall man and looks very old and careworn,” adding, “He bowed very politely to us.”²⁷ As William C. Davis has observed, the president’s visits and homely demeanor helped convince some of these soldiers that Lincoln personally was looking out for them, even if the rest of the political class was not.²⁸

Not all were won over so easily. As Major Dawes had mentioned, some soldiers viciously attacked Lincoln in conversation around their campfires or in diaries. Another major in the First Corps, this one a proud Democrat, insisted the president was shamefully uninterested in the army’s welfare and oblivious to its sacrifices. “Not a word of approval, not even a smile of approbation,” he said; “For that matter the army has not received the smallest official acknowledgment from Washington of their late victories.”²⁹ Indeed, in a private conversation just before his departure, Lincoln supposedly insisted that the Army of the Potomac was simply “McClellan’s body guard.”³⁰

Just days after Lincoln’s visit, McClellan decided political discussion in the ranks warranted action. Democrats hoped he might announce his public opposition to emancipation, but McClellan wisely chose a more nuanced route. In General Order Number 163, he outlined the conservative Democratic view of an army’s appropriate political behavior. Most of the document preached that soldiers must respect the civil-military divide. He reminded officers and men that heated political discussion “when carried out beyond the ordinary temperate and respectful expression of opinion” was improper. Violations of this principle, he insisted, would divide the army into factions incapable of supporting the civilian leadership. He concluded by reminding soldiers that “the remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.” McClellan’s order offered a clear articulation of the conservative vision of politics in the military: boisterous partisanship was illegitimate the moment it left the lips of soldiers, and devotion to the Constitution came before anything else. And the tantalizing reminder that elections were fast approaching revealed his own sentiments on the day’s controversies.³¹

McClellan’s directive to vote would have carried more weight had Democratic-controlled state legislatures permitted absentee ballots for soldiers. After contentious debate, only Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maryland had secured voting capabilities for soldiers by the time of the 1862 election. Ohio, Vermont, Michigan, Maine, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Illinois, Delaware, New Jersey, Indiana, and Massachusetts remained resolute against enfranchising soldiers until at least 1863, and many did not lift prohibitions until well into 1864. The issue was sharply partisan, with Democrats believing Republicans had disproportionately volunteered for the war and would swing elections in favor of the president’s party if the army were permitted to vote in the field.³² Ironically, as the war continued, Democratic prohibitions on soldier voting prodded previously apolitical young men in the ranks into the waiting arms of the Republican Party.

Among those who could vote, soldiers writing home colored their regiment’s voting patterns through the lens of unabashed partisanship. The First Minnesota, part of Democrat Col. Willis Gorman’s Second Corps brigade, voted on October 21 by sealing party ballots and entrusting them to commissioners in camp.³³ Writing to a Republican newspaper, one soldier insisted that over 90 percent of the First voted for that party in the congressional elections, while a Democrat tried to convince readers that two-thirds of the Minnesotans had cast their lot against the president’s party.³⁴ Although the Keystone State did not yet allow soldiers to vote in the field, the officers of Company C of the Fiftieth Pennsylvania organized a mock election. Among 23 men who voted, 21 cast Republican ballots. Lt. George W. Brumm used the results to pillory Democrats at home in a letter to the Pottsville Miner’s Journal. “You can have no idea what an indignant feeling exists among the Pennsylvania Volunteers against the men who have deprived the soldiers of their vote,” he seethed, adding, “This is an account the Breckinridgers must settle with the soldiers when they return home.”³⁵

Political activity was even more heated in outfits recently comprising Pope’s Army of Virginia. The Sixth Wisconsin gained notoriety when Col. Edward S. Bragg received the Republican nomination for Congress in his district. Major Rufus Dawes, a self-described abolitionist, termed his commanding officer a “War Democrat” who had attended the convention that nominated Stephen Douglas in 1860. Bragg was no friend of the radicals, penning his private frustration about the political attention blacks received. When a contraband walked into his tent later in the war wearing the First Corps badge given to him by an officer, Bragg exploded. “By the aid of a knife I soon destroyed the ‘cuffies’ plumage. What an ass a man must be to put his uniform on a dirty nigger that don’t belong to him,” he wrote.³⁶ The 1862 Republican convention that nominated Bragg desired to bring loyal Democrats into the party’s ranks to alienate a growing antiwar faction in the Midwest. Renaming itself the “Republican Union Congressional Convention,” the party wanted Bragg “notwithstanding upon questions of civil administration,” and claimed, “He sustains a creed different from ours.”³⁷ As late as October 27, Bragg assured Dawes that his election was “probable,” but Dawes, a native Ohioan, remained dubious about other Midwestern politics because of the Buckeye State’s Democratic gains. “I have little faith,” the major noted after witnessing the rise of antiwar crusader Clement Vallandigham in his native state of Ohio. Dawes’s fears about political headwinds were well-founded. Bragg lost the election despite the Wisconsin soldier vote.³⁸

Opposition to the absentee ballot initiative had been strong among Wisconsin’s Democratic minority. Assemblyman Frederick Thorpe, keen to curtail Republican votes in the army, mirrored McClellan’s advice and warned of the “introduction of party strife and bitter partisan [sic] divisions and dissensions into the army” which would serve only to divide it.³⁹ In mid-September, state Republicans overcame minority opposition and passed a measure charging each regiment’s three field officers with acting as “election inspectors” to monitor and report the outfit’s vote.⁴⁰ On November 4, Sgt. Cornelius Wheeler of the Second Wisconsin recorded in his diary that “polls were opened at each company’s headquarters” on the cold, blustery march through Snickersville, Virginia.⁴¹ The newly appointed Republican colonel of the Second was Lucius Fairchild, who would go on to serve as governor of Wisconsin after the war. Fairchild’s “inspection” of the regiment’s vote gained criticism back home when the La Crosse Democrat charged that the Second had reported more Republican votes than there were men in the regiment.⁴² In total, however, Badger State soldiers gave over 6,000 votes to Republicans, while Democrats received only 2,000.⁴³ Bragg’s own Sixth Wisconsin followed the general trend when the regiment’s survivors of Brawner’s Farm, South Mountain, and Antietam offered 21 Democratic and 49 Republican votes.⁴⁴

Major Dawes, proud of his regiment’s criticism of antiwar Democrats, explained the Iron Brigade’s insatiable appetite for political activity. “Despite restrictions on political discussion, in the articles of war, we discussed all questions of politics or religion, with the utmost freedom,” he declared.⁴⁵ A soldier of the Second agreed on the subject of soldiers’ political awareness, opining during the election that “the army read[s] and, as a general thing, are as well posted on what is going on in the several States as if they were there in person and can judge for themselves of the ability of the man to represent their district either in Congress or the State Legislature.” He claimed the majority of the men around him agreed with freeing the enslaved.⁴⁶ The brigade had been stationed for months along the Rappahannock line, where the Midwesterners interacted with escaped slaves who gave the soldiers a new appreciation for the struggle’s policy implications. Cpl. Robert K. Beecham remembered a runaway slave preacher who found his way into the Iron Brigade: “Never was robed priest, ministered cardinal, or pompous pope listened to with more respectful attention.”⁴⁷ Dawes observed a similar reaction to fugitives among the Sixth. Such a deluge of escapees entered the Iron Brigade’s lines that spring and summer, the major recalled, that their presence heralded “a sharp discussion on the policy of emancipation.”⁴⁸ Nearly every officer in the brigade hired one of these contrabands as a personal servant. Dawes recalled that, personally, the more he came in contact with “southern ideas and institutions” the more pragmatically he realized the eradication of slavery would be a necessary ingredient to Union victory.⁴⁹ Before long, the Sixth Wisconsin could be heard belting out the lyrics to “John Brown’s Body” wherever it marched.⁵⁰ This disgust at the sight of slavery primed the men for guidance by their officers toward the Republican vision for the war.

The Iron Brigade’s Bragg was not the only Army of the Potomac officer nominated for high office in 1862. James S. Wadsworth was a wealthy Ivy Leaguer from Geneseo, in New York’s “Burned-Over District” of abolitionist fervor. Wadsworth began his political career in the 1840s as a Barnburner Democrat who bucked party orthodoxy, endorsed public projects championed by Whigs, and castigated the slaveholding South as morally and materially backward.⁵¹ By the time the Mexican War forced the issue of territorial expansion, Wadsworth joined critics of the Slave Power and emerged as a leading Free Soil figure in New York. In 1856, he rallied behind John C. Frémont and the Republicans. As an active supporter of Republican governor Edwin Morgan, Wadsworth gained a commission in May 1861. By all accounts a brave officer, Wadsworth earned the recognition of even his harshest political critics for gallant conduct at Bull Run and briefly secured a brigade command in McDowell’s corps.⁵² In late 1861, Wadsworth chaired a committee that examined several officers of the Iron Brigade to determine who was unfit to command men, and the regiment’s Irish Company D, presumably its most Democratic contingent, took the hardest hit.⁵³ For much of 1862 he served as commander of the capital’s Military District, where radicals applauded his efforts to help escaped slaves. As a leading army Republican, Wadsworth was instrumental in convincing Lincoln to retain McDowell’s First Corps in northern Virginia instead of allowing it to assist McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign. McClellan never forgave Wadsworth and long after the fact referred to him as “a man of bad character & a pseudo-fanatic.”⁵⁴

Wadsworth treated enlisted men with respect, even those he knew revered Little Mac. When common soldiers of McClellan’s beloved Fifth New York “Duryeé’s Zouaves” left a Washington bar in frustration because the owner would only serve officers, Wadsworth beckoned them to follow him back inside for service. “A bottle of champagne and some glasses,” he bellowed to the bartender, and then, lifting his drink, offered, “Now, boys, here’s to General McClellan and his army. You’ll like that toast.”⁵⁵ Wadsworth must have hoped soldiers would remember this sort of egalitarian courtesy when it came time to discuss voting in letters home.

Wadsworth insisted on a strong proadministration platform in 1862. “This is the rebellion of an aristocracy,” he declared, “base, selfish & degraded. … We cannot put down the rebellion & save the aristocracy & we ought not to, if we could.”⁵⁶ Such language resonated with young men reared to value Northern free labor—whether Republican, Democrat, or politically neutral. Because of his association with McDowell’s corps, Wadsworth had close ties to the Army of the Potomac. Unfortunately for Wadsworth, who eventually lost the election, New York’s soldiers were not permitted to vote in 1862. In a controversial move designed to limit Republican turnout, New York’s legislature forbade absentee ballots, and the margin was so slim between Wadsworth and his opponent, Democrat Horatio Seymour, that the soldier vote may well have put “Old Waddy” over the top. Captain Henry Wiley of the 104th, “Wadsworth’s Guards,” described the regiment’s dejection upon hearing that their candidate had lost to “the Pro-Slavery, Anti-war, Jeff Davis Sympathizer, Dema[go]gue Seymour.”⁵⁷

Consolation for Wadsworth must have come from the realization that McDowell’s old corps (to which he would return after the gubernatorial loss) was quickly becoming one of the army’s most Republican-friendly outfits, thanks largely to the New Yorker’s own magnetic personality and to the unit’s service with Pope’s army. In the wake of Antietam, when the First Corps lingered in western Maryland, candidate Wadsworth visited camp. A Thirty-Fifth New York captain recalled the moment fondly to his hometown newspaper. “They gathered around him by thousands to welcome and hail him,” the officer wrote, trying mightily to convince readers of his old general’s suitability for governor.⁵⁸ Sergeant Joseph C. Otis of the Thirty-Fifth agreed, noting to readers at home, “Could the 35th have a say in the matter, every man would go in for ‘old Wad’!”⁵⁹ A Lowville newspaper published a Democratic soldier’s account of how revered Wadsworth was among the troops. “Were that brigade allowed to come home and vote,” he opined, “the volunteers would march to the polls in a solid phalanx and cast their ballots for James S. Wadsworth, so highly do they all esteem him.”⁶⁰ An officer of the Twenty-Third New York assured newspaper readers that Wadsworth had that regiment’s unequivocal support. “Their vote would be given to him without a dissenting voice,” insisted Maj. William Gregg, “even Colonel Hoffman, Lieut. Hiram Smith, and Lieut. Davoe—ultra-Democrats as they always have been—have expressed a wish to see him elected.”⁶¹

One Republican regiment in Wadsworth’s old division refused to be deterred in its effort to vote. The Seventy-Sixth New York, a Cortland County regiment, boasted strong abolitionists in its ranks. The Seventy-Sixth had performed garrison duty in Washington when the District’s emancipation bill passed in early 1862, and when police officers still attempted to round up fugitive slaves, the Seventy-Sixth leveled bayonets on the officials.⁶² On July 4, 1862, the New Yorkers lauded a speech by Capt. George F. Noyes of General Doubleday’s staff for speaking “such truths [as] were not usually spoken in any part of the country covered by the dark pall of slavery.”⁶³ The regiment later despised its role in having to protect a Virginia secessionist’s property that November, “while its guilty owner sat on his porch talking disloyalty.”⁶⁴ Small wonder then that officers in this regiment circumvented New York’s 1862 voting prohibition and published a straw poll in the newspapers, just as the Fiftieth Pennsylvania had in the Ninth Corps. Of 342 New York enlisted men present for duty, 325 voted for Wadsworth. Of the 29 line officers, 21 voted for Wadsworth, and among the field and staff, only one Democratic vote could be found.⁶⁵

The elections of 1862 made Pope’s old units such as these the Army of the Potomac’s principal Republican core, a loyal opposition to the Democratic political culture desperately maintained by McClellan and his chief subordinates. At the heart of this new Republican wing was the First Division, First Corps. Col. Walter Phelps of the Twenty-Second New York, who insisted that to win the war, “political brakes” must be removed, speculated that “this Division, yes this Corps must be an exception” to the army’s politics.⁶⁶ The candidacies of Wadsworth and Bragg united these voices under the Republican banner. The division’s commander during the election season was Abner Doubleday, long known as the staunchest of the regular army’s small abolitionist class. Doubleday notoriously surrounded himself with likeminded staffers, so any junior officer or enlisted man who passed through First Division headquarters that autumn was likely to gain an earful of outright radicalism unusual at such lofty levels of command. Captain Noyes, the staff member who delivered the Independence Day address so warmly received by the division’s ranks, was among the most articulate at headquarters. He rolled his eyes at self-righteous mentions of “states’ rights” among occupied farms and villages. Southerners, he opined in his diary after Wadsworth’s defeat, “persuade themselves that it is for the doctrine of state rights that they are contending. … But when an earnest and candid man seeks to go to the root of the matter, he always brings you down to the question of slavery.”⁶⁷

Other outfits came to mirror the budding Republican sentiment of the First Corps that autumn. The Twelfth Corps, also hailing from Pope’s Army of Virginia, gave constant headaches to the army’s Democratic wing. In November, a bitter contest among the officer circle of the Sixtieth New York emerged for the position of lieutenant colonel. Unlike many outfits where the candidates vying for command boasted different political patrons, the officers of the Sixtieth were almost exclusively Republican. The first officer to offer his services to Governor Morgan was Quartermaster Edwin A. Merritt, a past delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention. Merritt, who penned his application on Election Day 1862, closed by expressing a desire for Wadsworth’s victory and the embarrassment of “Rebels and Rebel sympathizers, represented by Seymour.”⁶⁸ Three other candidates for the silver oak leaves followed. Maj. Abel Godard was the “ardent [R]epublican” raised by New York assemblyman Harlow Godard, who wrote Governor Morgan personally on his son’s behalf.⁶⁹ Chaplain Richard Eddy received support from a prominent friend as one whose promotion would benefit “the cause of our free institutions.”⁷⁰ Finally, Capt. John C. O. Redington, the nephew of an eloquent antislavery assemblyman from St. Lawrence County, emerged as the governor’s favored choice. Missing from the list of contenders was Capt. Thomas Elliott of Company F, apparently the only officer in the regiment to count Democratic friends in Albany among his confidants.⁷¹ The debate within the Republican circle was heated. Petition followed petition as officers gathered day and night to debate their merits. Formal polls tallied the shifts in sentiment with each passing day, until, as Chaplain Eddy recalled, “the Governor certainly could not have had a very clear notion of what the officers really did want!”⁷² Except that he could tell one thing very clearly: the officers of the Sixtieth New York would only accept a Republican in command. And as long as a Republican held power in the statehouse at Albany, the Sixtieth would get its wish.

Once Democrats secured numerous critical victories in the midterms and gubernatorial races, the dynamic of political patronage like that of the Sixtieth shifted. In Democratic-held statehouses, the political enemies of Republican fervor moved quickly to contain it. When Maj. Edward Pye of the Ninety-Fifth New York (First Division, First Corps) applied for promotion later in 1863, his request met with outright denial from Democratic governor Horatio Seymour, Wadsworth’s one-time rival for the statehouse who was well aware of Pye’s “Abolition proclivities.”⁷³ So, too, the application from Capt. Duncan Cameron of the Twenty-Second New York met with derision from Democrats close to Seymour. A confidant informed the governor that Cameron’s supporters included abolitionists like Doubleday and Wadsworth, the latter “of whom perhaps you may have heard.”⁷⁴

Democratic officers also moved to crush rising Republican activity. Two of the army’s most prolific Democratic writers, Charles Wainwright and George Breck, were New York natives who held artillery commands in the First Corps. Breck, a Rochester druggist by trade, had enlisted explicitly to restore the Union and the Constitution, and over the course of the war he wrote a regular column to his hometown Union and Advertiser describing the army’s political culture. On November 4, Breck’s own command, Battery L, First New York Light Artillery, held a straw poll similar to that of the Seventy-Sixth New York. Of 101 votes cast in camp, Wadsworth narrowly edged out Seymour 52 to 49, a much closer contest than in neighboring outfits. Breck, a Seymour partisan, came to embrace the “Copperhead” epithet. If Seymour’s supporters were all traitors, Breck insisted, “what an army of open traitors there is in the field, and what a vast number of candidates for the gallows!”⁷⁵ These words ignored the fact that Wadsworth had carried the day in several neighboring regiments.

Col. Charles Wainwright, a wealthy Elmira native, was Breck’s political kindred spirit in the First Corps artillery. Addressing the New York election results in the middle of a Virginia snowstorm, a jaded Wainwright complained that Democratic victories were doubtless “meant more as a reproof to the radical tendencies of Mr. Lincoln” than sympathy with Seymour’s political party.⁷⁶ As politically inclined as any man in the Army of the Potomac, Wainwright had predicted days earlier that “a few days will show whether they [the administration] have been waiting until this election is over in order to remove McClellan.”⁷⁷ The increasingly reactionary tone of Breck and Wainwright offers the best evidence that sentiment in the surrounding First Corps had shifted toward Republicans by late 1862.

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Like President Lincoln himself, the press and much of the Northern public excoriated McClellan for not capitalizing on the successes of Antietam. To the army, however, more practical concerns weighed on their minds and bodies. The army had suffered an estimated 15,000 total casualties in the eleven-hour bloodletting at Antietam, littering farms and villages around the battlefield with the dead and wounded. And unlike previous engagements, the Army of the Potomac retained the field in the weeks after Antietam, so administering to the wounded was an enervating ordeal. Most importantly, the army was not in good health again, a problem exacerbated by a critical shortage of supplies that hampered day-to-day operations.⁷⁸ This dearth of good provisions contributed to renewed bouts of diarrhea and dysentery in an army still reeling from the health catastrophe of the Peninsula. In the Fifty-Ninth New York, for example, ninety of the same men ravaged by diarrhea and fever on the Peninsula entered the regimental hospital from September 26 to 29, indicating a severe unit-wide recurrence.⁷⁹ General Humphreys, commanding a brigade in Porter’s Fifth Corps, complained that the poor living conditions were taking their toll. “I was getting a little in the Harrison’s Landing way,” he noted on October 22, when 900 out of 7,000 men in his division, “a very large percentage,” were on the sick list.⁸⁰

This latest health crisis, like the earlier bout at Harrison’s, took on a heated political character. While some generals complained the administration was expecting impossible things, many in the ranks could only surmise a conspiracy among McClellan’s political critics to hamper the army’s supply chain.⁸¹ Benjamin Hirst of the Fourteenth Connecticut had been able to get his hands on Republican “Party Newspapers” and was “disgusted” at embellishments he encountered about how the administration sent all the supplies McClellan’s army needed.⁸² In reality, as Chief Quartermaster Col. Rufus Ingalls insisted, it was the fault of negligent regimental and brigade commanders who were not forwarding adequate requisitions. As with so many issues in the army, political perception was reality.⁸³

The sickly army digested news of election returns as it lay in camp near Warrenton. “The North is again divided by party lines and the political campaign is as bitter this fall as I ever knew it to be,” lamented Col. Charles F. Taylor of the Thirteenth Pennsylvania Reserves. “We seem to be verging every day toward [revolution] and a Military Despotism.”⁸⁴ Capt. William Biddle of McClellan’s personal staff likewise expressed his contempt for divisive politicians but held out hope for McClellan personally. “Some say the Genl. is [to] have Chief Command very soon, and go to Washington,” Biddle told his father, and he “shouldn’t be surprised.”⁸⁵ But on November 9, word arrived from Washington that McClellan’s days commanding the Army of the Potomac were over and there would be no great promotion to general-in-chief again. General Orders Number 182, dated November 5, announced the general’s removal from command. At nearly the same time, reports came that Fitz John Porter had been summoned to Washington to answer serious charges from John Pope. Cultivating support among the radicals on the JCCW, Pope blamed Porter for failing to support his Army of Virginia adequately at Second Bull Run. The twin blows to McClellan and Porter were the most direct and concerted attack the army’s conservative wing suffered during the war.

Reaction in the army, at least among the politically aware, was predictably divided.⁸⁶ The government’s actions against McClellan and Porter were too much for Democrats to stomach. Grumblings about the Emancipation Proclamation gave way to white-hot rage. Marsena Patrick, a diehard Democrat acting as the army’s provost marshal, confided to his diary the view circulating through headquarters that the entire episode was a political conspiracy, a direct assault on the army’s antiadministration circle. “The removal was planned,” he insisted, “to be carried out the moment the Elections were over.” In other words, McClellan’s dismissal was political payback. “Now that Seymour is elected by such an immense majority over Wadsworth, their Anger is uncontrollable,” Patrick declared.⁸⁷ Rumors incited resentment.⁸⁸ The provost marshal insisted in his diary that the ultimate cause of McClellan’s removal was relentless political maneuvering by Joseph Hooker, First Corps commander and friend of the Radical Republicans. The suspicion gained further fuel when Hooker assumed temporary command of Porter’s old corps.⁸⁹

Some politically savvy Republican officers in the army delighted in McClellan’s downfall. Most of them were in the Third Corps, which had been retained in Washington during the Maryland Campaign but was rejoining the army in time for its next movements. Surgeon William Watson of the 105th Pennsylvania “Wildcats” observed that in his regiment, the “common soldiers” were “violently denouncing” politicians for their actions, just as the officers “approve of [McClellan’s] removal.”⁹⁰ One of those officers in the 105th was Capt. Levi Duff, who seethed that he was tired of “half way work” among “lukewarm generals.” It was time to remove them, he declared, and let Lincoln “appoint generals who will recognize the Proclamation & enforce the laws.”⁹¹ Such men believed the sacrifices and hardships of soldiering demanded better leadership. The Third Corps, therefore, that old bastion of Hooker and Kearny, included some of the army’s staunchest pro-Republican figures in shoulder straps.

Unlike many of their officers, the enlisted ranks of the Third Corps remained devoted to McClellan and suspicious of his political antagonists in Washington. The view from some in the ranks laid blame at the feet of their own general officers who had conspired, it was believed, to replace McClellan. John Haley, a well-educated political moderate in the Seventeenth Maine, suspected foul play at corps headquarters when he observed that “no stone is left unturned to keep alive this feeling of distrust among the privates and lower-grade officers.” He watched helplessly as dispassionate dialogue gave way to vitriol, politically astute men in his corps being “so steeped in prejudice that they can see nothing but party.”⁹² Daniel Crotty of the Third Michigan recalled the common soldier’s fury upon hearing the news. “If he only said the word,” Crotty insisted, “McClellan and his army would march on Washington, and chastise those who are intriguing against our noble commander, and doing their best to destroy our army.”⁹³ This sentiment shows how inextricably soldiers linked McClellan’s future with their own, a belief that had become almost sacred among many in the rank and file.

While the First and Third Corps continued to brew Republican support, the Second and the Fifth Corps were emerging as the army’s principal strongholds of organized Democratic activity, and the reactions of both officers and men generally aligned in a love for McClellan and contempt for his Republican antagonists. In the Philadelphia Brigade of Sumner’s Second Corps, the city’s old-line Democratic officers and men echoed Crotty’s Third Michigan by desperately wishing for McClellan to lead them “to Washington and kick out of office all those miserable thieves.”⁹⁴ The administration would never “get a man in his place that the Soldiers will love & place confidence in as they do McClellan,” wrote a member of Battery B, First New York Light Artillery.⁹⁵ In the Fifth New Hampshire, commanded by the outspoken Democrat Edward Cross, men sobbed at the misery that had befallen them. “The polliticians, I supose, have caused it,” one soldier wrote home.⁹⁶ All this angst was too much for one Republican in the Nineteenth Massachusetts. Surgeon Dyer, who had attended to dozens of sick and dying at Harrison’s Landing and always blamed McClellan’s caution for their hardship, bemoaned all the talk in the Nineteenth about marching on Washington, installing McClellan as a dictator, and “all such nonsense.” Dyer’s solution was simple: “A little wholesome discipline would do these traitors good.”⁹⁷

Some pro-McClellan young officers were more measured. In a letter to his brother on November 12, Henry Ropes, a Harvard-educated officer in the Twentieth Massachusetts, expressed his own anxiety over the civil-military strains: “When I consider [McClellan’s removal] in connection with the recent elections, I almost despair for the country.”⁹⁸ Two days later, he admitted that his “confidence in Lincoln and Halleck is about gone” but insisted on rallying quickly to steel the army’s heart for renewed action. “Peace means truce,” Ropes seethed, “nothing more. The South must be crushed, or the North, i.e., the country, the Republic will perish.”⁹⁹ For Ropes, the trauma of Little Mac’s dismissal dovetailed with the regiment’s bloodbath at Antietam—both were unthinkable sacrifices that drove him to accept any expediency in overwhelming the Confederacy. “We must look solely at the end to be accomplished,” he demanded, “the total subjection of the Rebellion, and overlook everything between, no matter what expense or what sacrifice of life is to come.”¹⁰⁰ Ropes justified his continued respect for McClellan by insisting the general’s inactivity would have laid a foundation of training for the hard struggle ahead.¹⁰¹

On November 10, McClellan visited the First Corps to bid farewell to some of the same men who had supported Republicans in the recent election. But even there, a handful of Democratic officers threatened to resign over the removal. Some of them apparently approached Lieutenant Colonel Bragg of the Sixth Wisconsin, the political moderate fresh from his congressional defeat at the hands of antiwar Democrats, in an attempt to instigate a coup. These officers wished to “reorganize the army according to their own notion, march to Washington and demand the restoration of McClellan.” They believed with some justification that Bragg was a kindred spirit; in a private letter he had confided, “Little Mac is gone, and my heart and hopes have gone with him.”¹⁰² But Bragg was mindful of his duty and forced them to abandon the “revolutionary scheme.” One Badger in the Sixth, “hot as any one at the removal of Little Mac” noted that officers who threatened such action should be considered treasonous. “We would have made their exit from ‘the old Sixth’ one that they would have remembered all their lives,” he boasted.¹⁰³ Maj. Rufus Dawes wrote that acting Iron Brigade commander Lysander Cutler handily quelled any such activity. “He declared,” Dawes recalled, “that he would recommend dismissal, for tendering a resignation while in the presence of the enemy, any officer who offered to resign for such a reason.”¹⁰⁴ Democratic officers could still articulate opposition, but they would no longer be able to endanger military discipline in making their political statements.

On the morning of November 11, after just enough time to stew over political machinations, the Army of the Potomac gathered to bid farewell to McClellan. The crammed ranks of each corps lined McClellan’s procession route in a sight that Pvt. William McCarter of the Irish Brigade claimed “had never been equaled on the American continent.”¹⁰⁵ Guns barked and men cheered as McClellan trotted past. The only halt apparently happened when the men of the Irish Brigade, among the staunchest conservative Democrats in the army, attempted to lower their palm-green battle flags for the general to ride over.¹⁰⁶ McClellan refused, pulling the reins on his steed Dan Webster until the Irishmen raised their banners. But the romantic gesture showed the alarming extent to which McClellan worship had mixed with the soldiers’ emerging sense of civil religion, the idea that Union was interwoven delicately with Christianity and that McClellan was the leader of this new phenomenon. Even for an age of purple prose and melodrama the gesture was extraordinary. Other Little Mac admirers refused to be outdone. Gen. Andrew Humphreys, commanding a division in the Fifth Corps, galloped to McClellan’s side and boasted for all to hear that “he wished to God Genl. McClellan would put himself at the head of the army and throw the infernal scoundrels at Washington into the Potomac.”¹⁰⁷ Cheers from successive regiments swelled into an army-wide ovation that inspired an officer of the 118th Pennsylvania to record in his diary, “This is history!” But then, disappointingly for many, McClellan gripped his reins and trotted off into the sunset of his military career.

If acclaim and enthusiasm characterized the army’s assembly that morning, disgruntlement and despair were its companions once the review broke ranks. “The return march bore more resemblance to the ‘Dead March’ at a soldier’s funeral than the movement of live and active men,” recalled Private McCarter. “All appeared dejected, lonely and lost. Hundreds wept bitterly.”¹⁰⁸ That evening, expressions of sorrow descended into drunken rage. “In their cups men spoke their minds,” General Patrick recorded in his diary when he returned to his tent.¹⁰⁹ A member of the Twenty-Fourth New York may have spoken for many when he wrote home, “Our main prop is gone now. I am willing to give up.”¹¹⁰

Tempers flared in mid-to-late November as McClellan devotees read newspaper accounts forcing them to live through the emotional farewell all over again, and not surprisingly a few of the men took to the public sphere to vent their anger. Wounded pride was strongest in Sykes’s Regular Division of Porter’s Fifth Corps. General Patrick observed that the old regular army ranks were “uproarious & demand that McClellan shall be removed, if at all, to the Command of the Army [in Washington],” adding, “The troops love him with a devotion almost idolatry.”¹¹¹ On November 13, Horace Greeley’s radical New York Daily Tribune published the account of a correspondent imbedded in Franklin’s Sixth Corps who witnessed the farewell ceremony and found the Regulars’ attitude particularly unnerving. As McClellan galloped past, the newspaperman alleged, “a few regiments of regulars stood in dumb silence,” and not because they flagged at all in their devotion to the Young Napoleon. Far from it. “They had been led by their officers,” the Tribune declared, “to believe that if he was removed they would be instructed by them to lay down their arms, or, in other words, to mutiny, and had been disappointed, not having received such orders.”¹¹²

Mutiny—the word seemed to leap blood-red from the page. Enraged, some of the Regulars organized a public rebuttal and dashed it off to the more moderate Philadelphia Inquirer. Their standard-bearer was Capt. Henry E. Maynadier of the Tenth United States Infantry. “It is absolutely false,” Maynadier spat. The Regulars had cheered themselves hoarse, he insisted (which, after all, was just as bad to Republican eyes because it demonstrated an unsettling devotion to McClellan). Democratic regular officers were coming to despise that their volunteer comrades enjoyed free license to spout opinions in public while they themselves remained shackled to antipartisan professionalism. Maynadier and the men of the Tenth United States tackled the issue head-on. “In the regular army, to hear is to obey,” he lectured, “and while we demand the poor privilege of expressing our natural feelings, in common with our comrades in arms, we cannot bear that a partisan feeling should be attached to it.” All they were guilty of, Maynadier insisted, was a devotion to their commanding general, and in fact the “strongest” bond between the regular army troops and McClellan, the captain declared, “and the one which the general himself more particularly inculcated, was a common devotion to the cause in which we are engaged.” He closed by noting that circumstances portended another battle, and some of these maligned Regulars might be forced to surrender their lives to that cause. As McClellan had taught them, “We shall ever be comrades in supporting the Constitution of our country.”¹¹³ It was not the savviest rebuttal, using politically charged language to eschew issues which had become intensely partisan. Even the Regulars, however, could no longer refrain from participating in the debate. In contrast to the view of loyalty embraced by a growing number of Republican-supporting officers and men, this Democratic definition of loyalty placed its primary emphasis on maintaining the Constitution, not the administration.

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The Fifth Corps, which included Sykes’s Regular Division, felt particularly aggrieved when word arrived on November 25 that their commander Fitz John Porter confronted court-martial charges. Ostensibly, the trial was to investigate Porter’s conduct on August 29 at Second Bull Run, where his corps allegedly failed to support Pope’s Army of Virginia as earnestly as Pope later insisted he had ordered. In reality, Porter’s much-publicized trial was the pinnacle of a consistent campaign by congressional radicals to root out Democratic loyalty within the troublesome Army of the Potomac, a crusade dating back to Ball’s Bluff.

Porter’s background shows why he was a target for radicals in Washington. John Hennessy, the modern-day authority on Porter’s career and conduct at Second Bull Run, identifies the general’s political vision and that of his allies in the Army of the Potomac as the “conservative patriot” culture, which he defines as the mantle of conciliatory, “Union-loving people.”¹¹⁴ Like McClellan and the Regulars under his own command, Porter believed “Union” meant the inviolability of the Constitution, not simply devotion to the administration.

Porter attempted to cultivate this “conservative patriot” philosophy within the army wherever he saw the threat of Republican politics. As it turned out, his fall owed much to the emergence of vocal Republican fervor and private political machinations percolating from the officer class of his own corps, men who had cultivated close relationships with key Republican patrons to influence public policy and advance their own careers. These men also proved adept at indoctrinating the men under their command with the fundamental arguments of administration policy.

Porter earned Republican scorn at the war’s outset by insisting that Col. John Pickell of the Thirteenth New York countermand a directive requiring a fellow Union officer to free his own slave—a bizarre situation in every respect. Shortly after, Porter ran afoul of prominent New England antislavery senator Henry Wilson, who was moonlighting as colonel of the Twenty-Second Massachusetts. Porter ordered Wilson to cease pillaging Rebel property and, perhaps foolishly, relied on Republican brigade commander John H. Martindale to pass along the rebuke. Martindale “did his part so maliciously and malignantly as to rouse Wilson’s bitter and active enmity towards me for many years,” Porter recalled.¹¹⁵ Privately, Porter wrote New York World editor Manton Marble to criticize Republican policies. In what Hennessy calls “perhaps the greatest of all wartime writings from the army’s conservative core,” Porter articulated that emancipation would poison the war effort and render reunification impossible.¹¹⁶

Martindale and Wilson were not the only officers in the Fifth Corps who cultivated opposition to Porter and McClellan. Brig. Gen. Daniel Butterfield utilized a network of Republican politicians to undermine this conservative Democratic clique. Ruthlessly ambitious, Butterfield took “private and confidential” pen to paper in the wake of the Porter court-martial announcement to remind Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase that his corps commander was simply a McClellan crony. “I have not been fairly used or treated by McClellan [and] I fear not by General Porter,” he related, adding with a dash of false modesty that he only wished for the army’s success, not his own recognition. He warned Chase that “the bulk of the army” was under McClellan’s spell, but added, “I do not speak for myself.”¹¹⁷

Butterfield’s philosophy for training the volunteers under his command insisted that the men should be imbued with a basic lesson: “They are to serve their country and not to uphold any particular general.”¹¹⁸ He was on leave for much of September and October because of a debilitating disease contracted at Harrison’s Landing, but his “Light Brigade” (consisting of the Twelfth, Seventeenth, and Forty-Fourth New York, Eighty-Third Pennsylvania, Sixteenth Michigan, and Twentieth Maine) was quickly developing one of the most pro-Republican cultures in the army.¹¹⁹ The officers of the Eighty-Third Pennsylvania and Forty-Fourth New York, dubbed “Butterfield’s Twins,” encouraged soldiers to read newspapers whenever possible. Both regiments started camp debate societies to argue politics.¹²⁰ Wedged between Butterfield in command and Republican subordinates was the commander of the Sixteenth Michigan, Col. T. B. W. Stockton, who complained to Governor Seymour of New York that he lost his command because of closely held “Democratic principles.”¹²¹ An understanding of Butterfield’s political connections and command philosophy helps illuminate the emerging anti-McClellan, pro-Republican culture that would characterize Butterfield’s brigade, an island of refuge for Lincoln supporters awash in Porter’s Democratic officer corps.

Porter followed McClellan as a martyr in the Fifth Corps. Many viewed the act as a meddlesome imposition of politics on the army. A dejected Fourth Michigan soldier opined that “the gloom thickens” with the Porter departure. Lt. William F. Robinson, also of the Fourth, despised that radicals were “politicizing” the whole affair.¹²² Archconservative Democrat and 118th Pennsylvania captain Francis Adams Donaldson pulled no punches describing to his brother how the president’s party was “lying and swearing away the life of this great man.” The dismissal, he insisted, was “the last straw to break the camel’s back.”¹²³

Private letters from Fifth Corps soldiers writing directly to Porter attempted to soothe the general’s wounded ego. Col. Horace Binney Sargent, commanding the First Massachusetts Cavalry, assured Porter that “the Agony of his Glory” would crown him victorious in the end.¹²⁴ Capt. John A. Gordon, Fourth Michigan, took up his pen to assure Porter personally that “though as soldiers” the men of the Fifth Corps would “do their duty … that high regard, that implicit confidence, that deep love, can never be felt for any other commander.”¹²⁵ Weeks after the trial, one of Porter’s most ardent supporters, Brig. Gen. Charles Griffin, assured his disgraced commander that the men in the ranks were desperate to write him of their bereavement.¹²⁶ Harrison H. Snyder, an enlisted man from the Sixty-Second Pennsylvania, wrote his former commander that the Fifth Corps felt “deceived, surprised, chagrined” by the politicians who besieged the army’s leadership. “What is your corps, the noble 5th, that McClellan loved,” the private wondered, “since you left it? I fear it is almost demoralized.” Insisting that he spoke for the entire corps—a sentiment which must have warmed Porter’s wounded heart—the soldier assailed the “weak morbid Administration” and promised a day when his comrades “will prove to you their friendship by ousting your enemies and placing you in a position that you may look upon them with disdain and utter contempt.”¹²⁷

McClellan and Porter represented the army’s greatest bulwark against radicalism and civilian interference, many soldiers believed. “The patience of the soldiers may yet be tried too far,” Captain Donaldson noted in early December, “and then look out for a second Cromwell and a dissolved rotten Congress.”¹²⁸ For the moment, the opinions of most soldiers remained private, with a trickle of publicized army sentiment on the topics of the election, McClellan, and Porter appearing in the press. Only after several more months of political education would partisan opinions flood newspapers nationwide.

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The period between late September and mid-November 1862 was one of intense political debate within the Army of the Potomac. Beginning with the preliminary emancipation proclamation and continuing through the midterm elections, political events outside the army split the officer corps and ranks along partisan lines. Democratic soldiers saw vindication in the midterms just as Republicans scorned a home front increasingly alienated from the soldiers’ sentiments. Proadministration officers and enlisted men particularly loathed Democrats at home for rejecting the soldiers’ voting rights in crucial states such as New York and Pennsylvania. As a result of these contentious midterms, small pockets of Republican loyalty emerged within the army, demonstrating how the political legacies of John Pope’s Army of Virginia would divide the army for months to come.

For an army still reaching political maturity, the prohibition of absentee voting and McClellan’s removal were two sides of the same coin: politicians were selfishly harming the war effort. To these men, McClellan had protected them from the sin of politics, not poisoned them with it. So his exit in the eyes of many was like Christ carrying his cross to Golgotha, and his crucifixion by the radicals contributed to the culture of martyrdom. In time, however, after the ensuing months of political education that 1863 offered, many of the same men who had worshipped him would come to shake their heads that they had been so naive.