The tall figure slowly rose and stood in silence.
"Remove him from his command," the younger man pleaded. "For G.o.d"s sake do it now. Write the order for his removal this minute--give it to me!
I"ll kick his door open and hand it to him."
The deep set dreamy eyes were turned within as he said in slow intense tones:
"No--I"ll hold McClellan"s horse for him if he"ll give us one victory!"
CHAPTER XXI
THE BLOODIEST DAY
The struggle opened with disaster for the Union army. Though Lee"s plan of campaign fell by accident into McClellan"s hands, it was too late to frustrate the first master stroke. Relying on Jackson"s swift, bewildering marches, Lee, in hostile territory and confronted by twice his numbers, suddenly divided his army and hurled Jackson"s corps against Harper"s Ferry. The garrison, after a futile struggle of two days, surrendered twelve thousand five hundred and twenty men and their vast stores of war material.
The contrast between General White, the Federal officer in command who surrendered, and Jackson, his conqueror, was strikingly dramatic. The Union General rode a magnificent black horse, was carefully dressed in shining immaculate uniform--gloves, boots and sword spotless. The Confederate General sat carelessly on his little s.h.a.ggy sorrel, dusty, travel-stained and carelessly dressed.
The curiosity of the Union army which had surrendered was keen to see the famous fighter. The entire twelve thousand prisoners of war lined the road as Jackson silently rode by.
A voice from the crowd expressed the universal feeling as they gazed:
"Boys, he ain"t much for looks, but, by G.o.d, if we"d had him we wouldn"t have been caught in this trap!"
The first shock of Lee"s and McClellan"s armies was at South Mountain, where the desperate effort was made to break through and save Harper"s Ferry. The attempt failed, though the Union forces won the fight. Lee lost twenty-seven hundred men, killed and wounded and prisoners, and the Federal general, twenty-one hundred.
Lee withdrew to Sharpsburg on the banks of the Antietam to meet Jackson"s victorious division sweeping toward him from Harper"s Ferry.
On the first day the Confederate commander made a display of force only, awaiting the alignment of Jackson"s troops. His men were so poorly shod and clothed they could not be brought into line of battle. When the fateful day of September 17th, 1862, dawned, still and clear and beautiful over the hills of Maryland, more than twenty thousand of Lee"s men had fallen by the roadside barefooted and exhausted. When the first roar of McClellan"s artillery opened fire in the grey dawn, they hurled their sh.e.l.ls against less than thirty-seven thousand men in the Confederate lines. The Union commander had ma.s.sed eighty-seven thousand tried veterans behind his guns.
The President received the first news of the battle with a thrill of exultation. That Lee"s ragged, footsore army hemmed in thus with Antietam Creek on one side and the broad, sweeping Potomac on the other would be crushed and destroyed he could not doubt for a moment.
As the sun rose above the eastern hills a gleaming dull-red ball of blood, the Federal infantry under Hooker swept into action and drove the Confederates from the open field into a dense woods, where they rallied, stood and mowed his men down with deadly aim. Hooker called for aid and General Mansfield rushed his corps into action, falling dead at the head of his men as they deployed in line of battle.
For two hours the sullen conflict raged, blue and grey lines surging in death-locked embrace until the field was strewn with the dead, the dying and the wounded.
Hooker was wounded. Sedgwick"s corps swept into the field under a sharp artillery fire and reached the shelter of the woods only to find themselves caught in a trap between two Confederate brigades ma.s.sed at this point. In the slaughter which followed Sedgwick was wounded and his command was saved from annihilation with the loss of two thousand men.
While this desperate struggle raged in the Union right, the centre was the scene of a still bloodier one. French and Richardson charged the Confederate position with reckless valor. A sunken road lay across the field over which they rushed. For four terrible hours the men in grey held this sunken road until it was piled with their bodies, and when the last charge of the resistless blue lines took it, they found but three hundred living men who had been holding it against the a.s.saults of five thousand--and "b.l.o.o.d.y Lane" became immortal in American history.
It was now one o"clock and the men had fought almost continuously since the sun rose. The infantry fire slowly slackened and ceased in the Union right and centre.
Burnside, who held the Union left, was ordered to advance by the capture of the stone bridge over the Antietam. But a single brigade under General Toombs guarding this bridge held an army at bay and it was one o"clock before the bridge was captured.
Burnside now pushed his division up the heights against Sharpsburg to cut Lee"s line of retreat. The Confederates held their ground with desperate courage, though outnumbered here three to one. At last the grey lines melted and the men in blue swept triumphantly through the village and on its edge suddenly ran into a line of men clad in their own blue uniform.
They paused in wonder. How had their own men gotten in such a position?
They were not left long in doubt. The blue line suddenly blazed with long red waves of flame squarely in their faces. It was Hill"s division of Jackson"s corps from Harper"s Ferry. The ragged men had dressed themselves in good blue suits from the captured Federal storehouse. The shock threw the Union men into confusion and a desperate charge of the strange blue Confederates drove them back through the village, and night fell with its streets still held by Lee"s army.
For fourteen hours five hundred pieces of artillery and more than one hundred thousand muskets had thundered and hissed their cries of death.
On the hills and valleys lay more than twenty thousand men killed and wounded.
Lee"s little army of thirty-seven thousand had been cut to pieces, having lost fourteen thousand. He had but twenty-three thousand left.
McClellan had lost twelve thousand, but had seventy-five thousand left.
And yet so desperate had been the deadly courage with which the grey tattered army had fought that McClellan lay on his arms for three days.
The day"s work had been a drawn battle, but the President"s heart was broken as he watched in anguish the withdrawal of Lee"s army in safety across the river. It was the last straw. McClellan had been weighed and found wanting. He registered a solemn promise with G.o.d that if the great Confederate Commanders succeeded in making good their retreat from this desperate situation he would remove McClellan.
The Confederates withdrew, rallied their shattered forces safely in Virginia, and Jeb Stuart once more rode around the Northern army!
The President issued his Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, challenging the South to war to the death, and flung down the gauntlet to his rival, the coming leader of Northern Democracy, George Brinton McClellan, by removing him from command.
CHAPTER XXII
BENEATH THE SKIN
John Vaughan saw the blow fall on McClellan"s magnificent headquarters in deep amazement. The idol of the army was ordered to turn over his command to General Burnside and the impossible had happened.
Instead of the brilliant _coup d"etat_ which he and the entire staff had predicted, the fallen leader obeyed and took an affectionate leave of his men.
McClellan knew, what his staff could not understand, that for the moment the President was master of the situation. He still held the unbounded confidence of his officers, but the rank and file of his soldiers had become his wondering critics. They believed they had crushed Lee"s army at Antietam and yet they lay idle until the skillful Southern Commander had crossed the Potomac, made good his retreat, and once more insulted them by riding around their entire lines. The volunteer American soldier was a good fighter and a good critic of the men who led him. He had his own ideas about how an army should be fought and maneuvered. As the idol of fighting men, McClellan had ceased to threaten the supremacy of the civil law. There was no attempt at the long looked for _coup d"etat_. It was too late. No one knew this more clearly than McClellan himself.
But his fall was the bitterness of death to the staff who adored him and the generals who believed in him. Burnside, knowing the condition of practical anarchy he must face, declined the command. The President forced him to accept. He took it reluctantly with grim forebodings of failure.
John received his long leave of absence from his Chief and left for Washington the night before the formal farewell. His rage against the bungler who ruled the Nation with autocratic power was fierce and implacable.
His resentment against the woman he loved was scarcely less bitter. It was her triumph, too. She believed in the divine inspiration of the man who sat in the chair of Washington and Jefferson. Great G.o.d, could madness reach sublimer folly! She had written him a letter of good wishes and all but asked for a reconciliation before the battle. Love had fought with pride through a night and pride had won. He hadn"t answered the letter.
He avoided his newspaper friends and plunged into a round of dissipation. Beneath the grim tragedy of blood in Washington flowed the ever widening and deepening torrent of sensual revelry--of wine and women, song and dance, gambling and intrigue.
The flash of something cruel in his eye which Betty Winter had seen and feared from the first burned now with a steady blaze. For six days and nights he played in Joe Hall"s place a desperate game, drinking, drinking always, and winning. Hour after hour he sat at the roulette table, his chin sunk on his breast, his reddened eyes gleaming beneath his heavy black brows, silent, surly, unapproachable.
A reporter from the _Republican_ recognized him and extended his hand:
"h.e.l.lo, Vaughan!"
John stared at him coldly and resumed his play without a word. At the end of six days he had won more than two thousand dollars from the house, put it in his pocket, and, deaf to the blandishments of smooth, gentlemanly proprietor, pushed his way out into the Avenue.
It was but four o"clock in the afternoon and he was only half drunk. He wandered aimlessly down the street and crossed in the direction of h.e.l.l"s half-acre below the Baltimore depot. His uniform was wrinkled, his boots had not been blacked for a week, his linen was dirty, his hair rumpled, his handsome black moustache stained with drink, but he was hilariously conscious that he had two thousand dollars of Joe Hall"s ill-gotten money in his pocket. There was a devil-may-care swing to his walk and a look in his eye that no decent woman would care to see twice.
He ran squarely into Betty Winter in the crowd emerging from the depot.
The little bag she was carrying fell from her hands, with a cry of startled anguish: