Happiness Is Not My Companion , livre ebook

HAPPINESS IS NOT MY COMPANION
HAPPINESS IS NOT MY COMPANION
The Life of General G. K. Warren
David M. Jordan
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by email iuporder@indiana.edu
2001 by David M. Jordan
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z3948-1 984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jordan, David M., date
Happiness is not my companion : the life of General G. K. Warren / David M. Jordan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-253-33904-9 (cl : alk. paper)
1. Warren, Gouverneur Kemble, 1830-1882. 2. Generals-United States-Biography. 3. United States. Army-Biography.4. United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Campaigns. I. Title
E467.1.W4 J67 2001
973.7 092-dc21
[B]
00-050641
1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02 01
To my grandson, Augustus Francis Clearwater Born
Happiness is not my companion.
-G. K. W ARREN TO E MILY C HASE , J ULY 27, 1862
It is pitiful that one of his last requests was to be laid in the grave . . . without soldierly emblems on his coffin or uniform upon his body. The iron had entered his soul.
- H ENRY L. A BBOT
CONTENTS
Preface
1. Cold Spring and West Point
2. Topographical Engineer
3. Into the West with Harney
4. The Black Hills
5. The Explorer Becomes a Soldier
6. On the Virginia Peninsula
7. From Second Manassas to Fredericksburg
8. With Hooker
9. To Little Round Top
10. The Aftermath of Gettysburg
11. Second Corps Interlude
12. Fallout, 1863-1864
13. Into the Deep, Dark Woods
14. Bloody Spotsylvania
15. Around Lee s Right
16. Standoff at Petersburg
17. The Mine and the Railroad
18. West to Peebles Farm
19. To the End of 1864
20. Beginning of the End
21. To the White Oak Road
22. All Fools Day
23. A Soldier s Good Name
24. An Engineer, Again
25. Newport
26. The Court Begins
27. The Court Resumes
28. The Lawyers Have Their Say
29. The Frustration of Waiting
30. Where Malevolence Cannot Reach
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
W ARREN ? W ARREN ? W HO WAS G OUVERNEUR K. W ARREN ? His is not a name that resounds in the history of the American Civil War, but it seems to turn up all the time. One of the workhorses of the Army of the Potomac, he never commanded it, but his name pops up in the battles from Big Bethel to Five Forks, from the beginning of the war to almost its very end. Second Manassas, Chancellorsville, Bristoe Station, the Wilderness, Hatcher s Run-it is difficult to discuss a battle fought by the Federal army in the east without running into Warren s name in connection with it.
Sometimes Warren s name becomes very prominent indeed. Focus on July 2, 1863, the second day of the mammoth battle of Gettysburg. Longstreet has moved his Confederate corps around to the left of the Union lines, to throw two divisions upon Little Round Top, the capture of which will require Meade s army to retreat, because that height, in rebel hands, will dominate the Union line along Cemetery Ridge. Gouverneur K. Warren, the chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac, rides to the top of Little Round Top and finds that it is unoccupied by any force but a couple of signal corpsmen. On his own responsibility, he pushes troops up the hill. Arriving just in time, they save Little Round Top for the Union and Gettysburg for the Army of the Potomac. Without the quick eye and quicker action of G. K. Warren, the battle of Gettysburg would probably have ended on the late afternoon of July 2, 1863, resulting in an ignominious retreat by Meade s army. What reaction that would have caused in the body politic over which Abraham Lincoln presided is obviously a matter of speculation, but it would certainly have been serious, coming on the heels of the disasters at Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, so close and threatening to the capital, where weariness with the war and defeatism were widespread.
Move on, then, to April 1, 1865. Although no one knows it at the time, Robert E. Lee s Army of Northern Virginia has but nine more days of existence. At an obscure country crossroads called Five Forks, southwest of Petersburg, Virginia, Major General Warren s Fifth Corps has combined with Philip Sheridan s cavalry to win an overwhelming victory over a Confederate force led by George Pickett. As the early darkness settles over the battlefield and the magnitude of the Union triumph is being recognized, Warren is stunned to receive an order from Sheridan, his temporary superior, relieving him from the command of his corps. Warren goes off in search of Sheridan, finds him, and asks him to reconsider the order, surely one made in the heat of battle under mistaken impressions. Reconsider, hell, roars Sheridan. I never reconsider my orders. And so Major General G. K. Warren rides off, out of the war.
Who, then, is Gouverneur Kemble Warren? What manner of man is this, who, from the absolute heights of heroism at Gettysburg, is plunged to the depths of humiliation as the great war is about to end? What kind of a soldier was he, what kind of a person? Warren has left numerous clues to his being, and many other men, members of the great army of which Warren was a leader, have left their remembrances of him. One man, signing himself an old private, wrote of Warren years after the war, He was very quiet and retiring in his manner, but somehow his men all loved him and had great faith in his ability. He is smart, wrote a private in the Fifth New York; there is no mistake in him. On the other hand, the provost marshal of the Army of the Potomac called Warren a very loathesome, profane ungentlemanly disgusting puppy in power. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., of the Massachusetts Adamses, not a man to bestow thoughtless compliments, called Warren one of the very best of our army, while Abner Small of the Sixteenth Maine spoke of the loved Warren. Yet Charles Wainwright, the commander of the Fifth Corps artillery, marveled at Warren s excesses of temper and the desperate blackguardism they displayed. A man who can produce such reactions can do with further examination. One of Warren s former aides wrote to him after the war, [Y]ou know you can not escape the attention of the future historian. 1
Warren was a man with a fine intellect, widely read, and of keen sensibilities. He was also an excellent engineer, mapmaker, and scientist. He was a soldier who cared much for the safety and welfare of the men under him, and he was sickened by the appalling carnage of the war in which he took such a prominent part. He was also arrogant and proud, and he hesitated hardly at all in putting down those of his colleagues he regarded as inferiors. His mind s eye took in much beyond what was his immediate concern, but this gift worked against him in the hierarchical realm of military life. Warren was prone to long sieges of depression, and he himself agreed that others found him to be morose and unsmiling. A complex and enigmatic man, Gouverneur Kemble Warren is not one to be easily categorized.
Warren s wife and daughter took the trouble to save everything they could find of papers relating to the general. They turned up family letters from his pre-West Point years, the records and journals of his prewar explorations in the Nebraska and Dakota territories, letters which Warren had written before he met his future wife, Emily, in Baltimore in 1862, and all the letters which he and Emily exchanged over the years, none of which apparently were ever discarded. Warren himself cooperated in this venture, because he was a saver, one who preserved all sorts of things over his career, from canceled checks and mathematical calculations for engineering projects to sketches of maps and orders received in the heat of famous Civil War battles. All of these items, and more, were carefully gathered by his daughter and turned over to the New York State Library in Albany.
With these aids we can make an effort at answering the question Who is Gouverneur Kemble Warren? I recognize that a different selection of quotations from the vast trove of Warren s letters might produce a different picture from the one I have developed in this book. It is the historian s task to choose what he brings forth in his work so that it presents a portrait as free of distortion as possible, and I have attempted to show the Warren with whom I became so well acquainted in the course of reading through his papers.
The primary resource, of course, has been the great collection of papers in the New York State Library, which I examined with the help of Jim Corsaro, Fred Bassett, Ed McGuire, and the rest of the fine staff there. As in any venture of this sort, however, there has been a great amount of additional assistance. Among those who have rendered it are Dr. James A. Hanson; Deborah McKeon-Pogue of the Special Collections Division and Judith A. Sibley of the Archives Division at the United States M