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Over near Chancellorsville, where the whippoorwills began calling plaintively soon after sunset, now as then, the mood was much the same. The fighting had been heaviest around here last year, and there still were many signs of it, including skeletons in rotted blue, washed partly out of their shallow graves by the rains of the past winter. No one but the devil himself would choose such ground for a field of battle, veterans said; the devil and old man Lee. In an artillery park near the ruin of the Chancellor mansion, which had burned to its brick foundations on the second day of conflict, a visiting infantryman looked glumly at a weathered skull that stared back with empty sockets, grinning a lipless grin. He prodded it with his boot, then turned to his comrades - saying "you" and "you," not "we" and "us," for every soldier is superstitious about foretelling his own death, having seen such words come true too many times - and delivered himself of a prediction. "This is what you are all coming to," he told them, "and some of you will start toward it tomorrow."
-- The Civil War: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote
It has been a long time coming, but we are finally into Mr. Foote's final volume of his narrative. After his success in the western theater, General U.S. Grant has been given command over all the armed forces of the Union. And he is now with the Army of the Potomac back in the Virginian wilderness in an aggressive bid to storm Richmond, after other generals had tried and failed a number of times before against the redoubtable Robert E. Lee.
It is the spring of 1864, after having lost the Mississippi River to Grant, President Davis sees his Confederate territory effectively reduced to an 800-mile-wide triangle, the "irreducible hard core" of the Confederate nation.
Davis's strategic objective focused on the Northern election that would be coming around that fall - if only Lincoln could be denied any significant victories that would boost the war spirit of the North. As Foote writes:
"Weary of profitless bloodshed, the northern people would vote to end the war by turning Lincoln out of office and replacing him with a man who preferred to see half the nation depart in peace, as the saying went, rather than to continue the aimless destruction the two halves would have been visiting on each other for nearly three years."
So, the end game is now in motion...
Over near Chancellorsville, where the whippoorwills began calling plaintively soon after sunset, now as then, the mood was much the same. The fighting had been heaviest around here last year, and there still were many signs of it, including skeletons in rotted blue, washed partly out of their shallow graves by the rains of the past winter. No one but the devil himself would choose such ground for a field of battle, veterans said; the devil and old man Lee. In an artillery park near the ruin of the Chancellor mansion, which had burned to its brick foundations on the second day of conflict, a visiting infantryman looked glumly at a weathered skull that stared back with empty sockets, grinning a lipless grin. He prodded it with his boot, then turned to his comrades - saying "you" and "you," not "we" and "us," for every soldier is superstitious about foretelling his own death, having seen such words come true too many times - and delivered himself of a prediction. "This is what you are all coming to," he told them, "and some of you will start toward it tomorrow."
-- The Civil War: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote
It has been a long time coming, but we are finally into Mr. Foote's final volume of his narrative. After his success in the western theater, General U.S. Grant has been given command over all the armed forces of the Union. And he is now with the Army of the Potomac back in the Virginian wilderness in an aggressive bid to storm Richmond, after other generals had tried and failed a number of times before against the redoubtable Robert E. Lee.
It is the spring of 1864, after having lost the Mississippi River to Grant, President Davis sees his Confederate territory effectively reduced to an 800-mile-wide triangle, the "irreducible hard core" of the Confederate nation.
Davis's strategic objective focused on the Northern election that would be coming around that fall - if only Lincoln could be denied any significant victories that would boost the war spirit of the North. As Foote writes:
"Weary of profitless bloodshed, the northern people would vote to end the war by turning Lincoln out of office and replacing him with a man who preferred to see half the nation depart in peace, as the saying went, rather than to continue the aimless destruction the two halves would have been visiting on each other for nearly three years."
So, the end game is now in motion...
