They were going back home to Maine or Vermont or Ohio,
And they didn’t care who knew it, and that was that.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Johnston and Beauregard,
Now joined by the dusty Davis, found themselves
As dazed by their victory as their foes by defeat.
They had beaten one armed mob with another armed mob
And Washington was theirs for the simple act
Of stretching a hand to the apple up on the bough,
If they had known. But they could not know it then.
They too saw spectres—unbroken Union reserves
Moving to cut their supply-line near Manassas.
They called back the pursuit, such scattered pursuit as it was.
Their men were tired and disordered. The chance went by
While only the stiff-necked Jackson saw it clear
As a fighting-psalm or a phrase in Napoleon’s tactics.
He said to the surgeon who was binding his wound,
With a taciturn snap, “Give me ten thousand fresh troops
And I will be in Washington by tomorrow.”
But they could not give him the troops while there yet was time.
He had three days’ rations cooked for the Stonewall Brigade
And dourly awaited the order that never came.
He had always been at God’s orders, and God had used him
As an instrument in winning a certain fight.
Now, if God saw fit to give him the men and guns,
He would take Washington for the glory of God.
If He didn’t, it was God’s will and not to be questioned.
Meanwhile he could while the hours of waiting away
By seeing the Stonewall Brigade was properly fed,
Endeavoring, with that rigid kindness of his
To show Imboden his error in using profanity
—In the heat of battle many things might be excused,
But nothing excused profanity, even then—
And writing his Pastor at Lexington a letter
Enclosing that check for the colored Sunday-school
Which he’d promised, and, being busy, had failed to send.
There is not one word of Bull Run in all that letter
Except the mention of “a fatiguing day’s service.”
It would not have occurred to Jackson there might have been.
Walt Whitman, unofficial observer to the cosmos, reads of the defeat in a Brooklyn room. The scene rises before him, more real than the paper he stares upon. He sees the defeated army pouring along Pennsylvania Avenue in the drizzling rain, a few regiments in good order, marching in silence, with lowering faces—the rest a drenched, hungry mob that plods along on blistered feet and falls asleep on the stoops of houses, in vacant lots, in basement-areas huddled, too tired to remember battle or be ashamed of flight.
Nothing said—no cries or cheers from the windows, no jeers from the secessionists in the watching crowd—half the crowd is secessionist at heart, even now, more than ever now.
Two old women, white-haired, stand all day in the rain, giving coffee and soup and bread to the passing men. The tears stream down their faces as they cut the bread and pour out the coffee.
Whitman sees it all in his mind’s eye—the tears of the two women—the strange look on the men’s faces, awake or asleep—the dripping, smoke-colored rain. Perplexed and deep in his heart, something stirs and moves—he is each one of them in turn—the beaten men, the tired women, the boy who sleeps there quietly with his musket still clutched tightly to him. The long lines of a poem begin to lash themselves against his mind, with the lashing surge and long thunder of Montauk surf.
Horace Greeley has written Lincoln an hysterical letter—he has not slept for seven nights—in New York, “on every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.”
He was trumpeting “On to Richmond!” two weeks ago. But then the war was a thing for an editorial—a triumphal parade of Unionists over rebels. Now there has been a battle and a defeat. He pleads for an armistice—a national convention—anything on almost any terms to end this war.
Many think as he does; many fine words ring hollow as the skull of an orator, the skull of a maker of war. They have raised the Devil with slogans and editorials, but where is the charm that will lay him? Who will bind the Devil aroused?
Only Lincoln, awkwardly enduring, confused by a thousand counsels, is neither overwhelmed nor touched to folly by the madness that runs along the streets like a dog in August scared of itself, scaring everyone who crosses its path.
Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory. His huge, patient, laborious hands start kneading the stuff of the Union together again; he gathers up the scraps and puts them together; he sweeps the corners and the cracks and patches together the lost courage and the rags of belief.
The dough didn’t rise that time—maybe it will next time. God must have tried and discarded a lot of experiment-worlds before he got one even good enough to whirl for a minute—it is the same with a belief, with a cause.
It is wrong to talk of Lincoln and a star together—that old rubbed image is a scrap of tinsel, a scrap of dead poetry—it dries up and blows away when it touches a man. And yet Lincoln had a star, if you will have it so—and was haunted by a prairie-star.
Down in the South another man, most unlike him but as steadfast, is haunted by another star that has little to do with tinsel, and the man they call “Evacuation” Lee begins to grow taller and to cast a longer shadow.
Book III
By Pittsburg Landing, the turbid Tennessee
Sucks against black, soaked spiles with soil-colored waters.
That country is huge and disorderly, even now.
—This is Ellyat’s tune, this is no tune but his—
Country of muddy rivers, sombre and swollen,
Country of bronze wild turkeys and catfish-fries
And brushpile landings going back to the brush.
A province of mush and milk, a half-cleared forest,
A speckled guinea-cock that never was cooped
But ran away to grow his spurs by himself.
Neither North nor South, but crunching a root of its own
Between strong teeth—perhaps a wild-onion-root,
Perhaps a white stalk of arbutus, hardier there,
Than any phantom-arbutus of
