25

Springtime in the Wilderness

 

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At last spring was again upon the land in the Wildcat Dis­trict of Pennsylvania. Even before the snow had completely melted, arbutus had poked up its heavy fragrance on the mountain tops. White and purplish hepatacas pushed them­selves, through their winter blanket of oak leaves. Soon the most beautiful of all northern Pennsylvania early spring­time flowers (the natives called them simply "mountain pinks") would be burgeoning. The older men were talking about the spring terms of court, always an eagerly antici­pated event in the county seats. The younger men were dis­cussing the new bounty law. Both had much to say about the forthcoming annual lumber rafting expeditions down­stream. The women-folk were abuzz over the projects of the soldiers' aid societies, which had sprung up everywhere. A select few were contemplating with anxiety the examina­tions for teachers' certificates soon to be held.

As it had been for so long now, there was the talk about the war. The papers were full of such subjects as Vallandigham and Copperheads. What would Grant be able to do, now that he had been brought East? A lady by the name of Kate Putnam had written a war poem published in the Boston Transcript. Entitled "On the Rapidan," it was a part of the boilerplate carried in some of the Wildcat District gazettes. It was a real tear-jerker about a Union picket who had been

 

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shot dead along the moonlit, shimmering waters of the river which separated the two armies.[1]

It was a warm spring day, May 4, along the Rapidan as the Bucktails, leading the division and traveling light in the manner of the veterans they now were, crossed the river at Germanna Ford. The Reserves had broken camp at Bristoe a few days earlier. By easy marches they reached Culpeper where the Union Army was concentrating. After a winter of watching the enemy across the Rapidan, the big push was starting.[2]

Ulysses S. Grant, in command of all the Union armies, was with the Army of the Potomac, now consolidated into three corps. In this corps revamping Warren was at the head of the Fifth Corps, having replaced the rather slow, but hard-bitten Sykes. It was Grant's plan to get his mighty war marchine over the Rapidan, through the area called the Wilderness, and fight the Southern Army, which lay around Orange.[3] Two river crossings were used. The Sixth Corps, as well as the Fifth, crossed at Germanna. General Hancock, not fully recovered from his Gettysburg wound, took his Second Corps over a few miles downstream at Ely's Ford. All three corps then plunged into the bleak, black Wilderness, hoping to get through the awful area before the Confederates learned much about the movement.

Beginning their last campaign, the Pennsylvania Reserves were recovering from rancor born of treatment by the high command which they considered unfair. When the division had set out for Gettysburg the previous summer, topside had seen fit to hold back the Second Brigade for the Washington defenses. This brigade never did rejoin the Reserves. In April it was dissolved. The Third and Fourth Regiments were sent off to western Virginia. The Seventh was assigned to the First Brigade. The Third Brigade got the Eighth

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Regiment. Officers and men of the division never could for­give the big brass for splitting them up in the midst of the war. The Reserves' organization had been unique, the men had become good fighters, and considerable esprit de corps had developed. Most soldiers thought in terms of regimental and corps loyalty. The men of the Reserves were also proud of their division. While the Second Brigade was intact, there was always the chance of its return. When it was finally broken up, that chance was gone. From the governor of the state down to the last man in the ranks there was marked re­sentment in the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps .[4]

The Reserves had lately been even more troubled over persistent camp scuttlebut to the effect that their three-year term of service would not date from their original muster into state service. The Bucktails, it will be remembered, never had been technically mustered into Federal service. Their period of enlistment was rapidly running out, and the soldiers wanted the government to acknowledge the fact. Whether or not they decided to sign up for another hitch, they wanted it understood that their present enlistment would end three years from the date they had formally joined Andy Curtin's Pennsylvania Army in May 1861.

While this concern was division-wide, with mutinous rumblings in almost every outfit, matters were worst in the Sixth Regiment. There seven men, who considered their term of enlistment already expired, refused to do duty. The obstinate seven were promptly placed in the brig. However, it appeared that they might have a point (it had been over three years since they first went to camp). Nobody seemed to know quite what to do with the seven sitters-down. Mc­Candless, temporarily in command of the division, hastily got off a letter to the Fifth Corps chief setting forth the situa­tion in the Sixth Regiment and asking what to do about it.

 

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The problem was too knotty for a mere corps commander to handle. Four days after McCandless had penned his plea for guidance, it reached G.H.Q.

Fortunately, Meade understood the "peculiar" organiza­tion of the Pennsylvania Reserves. He even remembered that the Bucktails had never been really mustered into Fed­eral service. Apparently he had also been informed that the men of his old command felt the matter very seriously and that there were signs of mutiny. The commander wrote a short endorsement on the McCandless letter to the effect that the Reserves should be discharged at the end of their state muster. Then Meade sent it on to Washington, signifi­cantly asking for a reply by wire.[5]

It took a while for the various channels to operate. How­ever, a few days before the Pennsylvania division crossed the Rapidan, a dispatch from the War Department was read to each regiment. Washington had followed the suggestion of General Meade. The men would be discharged three years from their state muster. It had been finally settled. The Re­serves, now ten little regiments in all, divided into two brigades, had only a few more weeks of war ahead of them.[6]

 The Army of the Potomac had been in the Wilderness be­fore. Everyone remembered the business of Mine Run the previous fall. Grant did not want to fight in this trackless region, which lay south of the Rapidan for a dozen miles along the river's length and measured about six miles through. Across this wild, rough area ran those two parallel east-west roads, which the soldiers remembered from Mine Run days, the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road. From Germanna the Reserves marched down a narrow road which ran somewhat southeast as it cut through the dark, dense second growth. The continuation of this road south of the turnpike bore a name also remembered in connection

 

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with previous fighting, the Brock Road. Near where the Brock Road began was the old, run-down Wilderness Tav­ern. Close by was a little clearing known as the Major Lacy farm. Here in the May twilight the Bucktails camped. The arms which were stacked that night at the Bucktail bivouac were brand new Spencer rifles. The Sharps, which the men had learned to use so well and to trust so implicitly, had been turned in for these seven-shot repeaters, similar to the car­bines which the cavalry was now using.[7]

The uneasy night in the gloomy forest gave way to a clear morning. The Reserves' orders were to advance as far as the little hamlet known as Parker's Store on the plank road, where they had been the autumn before. They started early along a cross-road which was hardly a lane, running south­westerly along a small stream called Wilderness Run, their wagons rolling along behind. Back of the Fifth Corps was the Sixth.[8] A few miles east was the Second, near Chancellors­ville, with orders to push south and then west to join the other corps. Burnside's Ninth Corps, not formally a part of the Army of the Potomac, was on its way to the Rapidan. As his other divisions started to move south, Warren had sent his First Division, under Brigadier General Charles Griffin, west on the turnpike to make sure there would be no flank attack as the Army moved across the Wilderness.

Griffin's men soon ran into trouble. It was trouble in the form of Ewell's Second Corps of hard-fighting Confederate veterans. Thus began the Battle of the Wilderness. As the fighting started to get bigger and louder along the turnpike, orders were issued to call back the Reserves and all the other divisions which had been started for the open country to the south. Lee apparently had chosen to fight in the un­broken forest. Sedgwick's men went in on the north side of the turnpike.

 

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Warren ordered Major General James S. Wadsworth and his Fourth Division to the left of Griffin south of the pike. In this division was a brigade commanded by the Bucktails' old skipper of Peninsula days, Roy Stone. Among the regiments of this brigade were the One Hundred Forty-Ninth and One Hundred Fiftieth Pennsylvania, the New Bucktails.[9] Wads­worth's men lost their direction in the thick, tangled under­brush, and, before they realized it, Ewell's Southern soldiers were shooting up their left flank.

The Bucktails would have a relatively easy time during all the ghastly fighting of the two days ahead. Possibly this was because General Samuel W. Crawford, never numbered among the better combat officers, did not work his best on May 5-6. With the First Brigade leading, the Reserves were within a mile of Parker's Store by seven-thirty. Ahead blue cavalry was having a brisk brush with gray infantry. The cavalry colonel called on Crawford to push some men ahead and help him out. The Reserves' chief gave Hartshorne the nod and the Bucktails deployed across one of the few open spaces in the area. In the woods on the far side of the opening they ran into graybacks. It could have been a good stiff fight, but just then (8:30 A.M.) the corps commander suspended the movement toward Parker's. Warren also told Crawford to get his train to the rear and to connect with Wadsworth, who was about to have trouble south of the turnpike. The skirmishing First Rifles were recalled and Crawford pre­pared to sit out the morning. This certainly was not one of the bewhiskered general's better days.[10]

 Crawford watched the advance units of A. P. Hill's Corps move along the plank road toward the all-important inter­section with the Brock Road. He reported this to Warren, but did nothing more. With Crawford staying put in what that officer considered a good defensive position, as the

 

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morning minutes ticked away, the Fifth Corps commander sent him two more urgent messages to get his division back to help Wadsworth. Finally about noon, the Reserves' com­mander detached McCandless and a part of his First Brigade (Second, Sixth, Seventh, and Eleventh Regiments) to sup­port Wadsworth, who by then had really been having a time of it.[11]

In the meantime topside was taking steps to do something about Hill's columns marching east along the plank road. Meade dispatched George W. Getty's Division of the Sixth Corps along the Brock Road toward its junction with the plank road. He also sent a message to Hancock to hurry his Second Corps to this vital spot.[12]

McCandless and his men began to have a worse time in the Wilderness jungle than even Wadsworth had had. It was impossible to maintain any lines in the thick, scrubby tangle. The Seventh Regiment missed its direction and was captured almost to the last man.[13] After McCandless had taken the four regiments to try to support Wadsworth, Craw­ford kept the Bucktails, the First Regiment, and the Third Brigade along the little cross-road where it had been all day. This remnant of the Reserves division was now sandwiched between two points of heavy fighting. As the two Confed­erate corps pushed along the two main highways, gray troops started to appear in front of Crawford. Some Union cavalry, being shoved back along the lane, rode through the Reserves. The First Rifles were up front, and they started using their new Spencers against the advancing Rebel skirmishers. A Confederate officer told his men to close in; the blue soldiers, he urged, were only dismounted cavalry. One of the boys in butternut had better eyes than his officer. This soldier's re­action to the command to attack was: "Cavalry, hell! Cavalry don't carry knapsacks and wear bucktails."

 

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About this time a staff officer reined in his sweating mount where Crawford was standing. He had orders to withdraw at once. Rebels had begun to spill over from both of the fight­ing zones, and the Reserves would soon be surrounded. So they began to fall back. Bucktail Lieutenant J. P. Bard had taken Companies E and K off to the left. They had to do considerable scrambling to get back through the creeping vines as the Confederates started to close in. By the time the Reserves had completed the withdrawal, darkness was settling over the Wilderness.[14] As night came down over the gloomy maze, the fighting stopped. All along the line be­tween the turnpike and the plank road the Union soldiers dug in. Most of the Army of the Potomac had had a rough day in the Virginia woods. It had been pushed and punished, but its lines had held at all points.

The woods had caught fire from the day-long fighting, and that night little patches of flame flickered here and there across no-man's land. Smoke slowly drifted through the thickets and across the line where the Reserves were en­trenched. Now and then amid the fragrance of smoldering leaves and pine needles wafted in on the night air, the men could detect the heavy odor of burned human flesh.[15]