Around midnight the sky cleared, a moon appeared, and Wednesday dawned bright. An intricate series of maneuvers by Sherman ended in a ravine on Bragg’s right. Stalled, Sherman asked for a demonstration elsewhere to relieve the pressure on him. The only Northern troops not engaged lay behind breastworks in the city. They had been awaiting instructions since morning. At 3:30 P.M. Grant sent them word to sieze the Confederate rifle pits at the base of the ridge—the very center of Bragg’s line. Sallying out of Chattanooga, they deployed in line for the attack. Among their regiments was the 24th Wisconsin. Among the 24th’s officers was its wiry adjutant, eighteen-year-old Arthur MacArthur of Milwaukee.3
By 4:15 P.M. the men were ready. At 4:20 the signal guns were heard—six cannon shots fired at intervals of two seconds—and the assault began. It was still meant to be no more than a feint, drawing off some of the graycoats facing Sherman, but events swiftly acquired a momentum of their own; after the pits had been taken at bayonet point there occurred what James M. Merrill later called “one of the most dramatic moves in the entire war.” The situation at the base of the cliff had become impossible. Exposed to plunging fire from above, the demonstrators were trapped, an exigency unanticipated by their commanders. Logic suggested immediate retreat; they had fulfilled their mission. Instead the troops advanced upward. Legend has it that Phil Sheridan drained a half-pint of whiskey, hurled the bottle up the slope, yelled, “Here’s how!” and climbed after it. According to another account, he raised his hat, a gesture interpreted by the soldiers as a command to charge. But when a staff officer rode up to find out what was happening, Sheridan said he had done nothing and was mystified. The truth is that they were witnessing an act of magnificent insubordination; eighteen thousand blue-clad boys, infuriated by the musketry scything their ranks, had sprung at the heights on their own.4
Grant, watching the advancing white line of musket fire from Orchard Knob, turned in his saddle and asked angrily, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?” Thomas said he didn’t know; he certainly hadn’t. Then Grant wheeled on General Gordon Granger: “Did you order them up?” Granger answered, “No, they started up without orders.” Fuming, Grant muttered, “Well, it will be all right if it turns out all right.”5
By now sixty Union battle flags were rising toward the crest, among them the banner of the 24th Wisconsin. Meanwhile the Confederate defenders on the summit were taking a murderous toll. A Union bugler, losing his leg to a cannonball, sat on an outcrop of rock, blowing the call to charge until he collapsed. In one regiment six color-bearers fell. The 24th’s first color-bearer was bayoneted; the second was decapitated by a shell; then young MacArthur grasped the flagstaff and leaped upward, crying, “On, Wisconsin!” His face blackened with smoke, his muddy uniform tattered and bloodstained, he reached the top of the precipice, and there—silhouetted against the sky, where the whole regiment could see him—he planted the standard. Other blue-clad troops gained the crest at about the same time, thus winning the battle and clearing the way for Sherman’s march through Georgia. There was glory for all; nevertheless, as Major Carl von Baumbach reported afterward, “I am satisfied that no standard crested the ridge sooner than that of the 24th Wisconsin.” The feat was largely the work of one youth. As MacArthur’s commanding officer said of him in his report, “I think it is no disparagement of others to declare that he was the most distinguished in action on a field where many of the regiment displayed conspicuous gallantry, worthy of the highest praise.”6
Today an inconspicuous stone, a few hundred feet above the I-75 freeway and sixty-five feet from the site of Bragg’s headquarters, marks the place:
WISCONSIN
24TH INFANTRY
2ND DIVISION
4TH CORPS NOV. 25, 1863
5 P.M.7
A few minutes after five o’clock Sheridan arrived on the scene. As Douglas MacArthur told the story a century afterward, the general embraced the teenaged adjutant and said to the young man’s comrades in a broken voice, “Take care of him. He has just won the Medal of Honor.” If true, this would bespeak an extraordinary prescience, since the award, owing to red tape, was not made until twenty-seven years later. It was deserved, for all that. The boy’s courage was genuine, and that charge was not his only example of it in those cruel years. Aged seventeen at the outbreak of the war, he had wanted to join up at once. As a MacArthur, and the son of a judge, he naturally felt entitled to a commission. His father wrote Lincoln, asking that the youth be appointed to the U.S. Military Academy, and Senator James R. Doolittle took young Arthur to the White House. There the President regretfully explained that there were no present openings in the West Point cadet corps. The judge then flexed his political muscle in Milwaukee, and on August 4, 1862, Arthur was named first lieutenant and adjutant of the regiment he would later lead.8
He was not an immediate success. A pale-faced stripling of small stature, whose roosterlike voice broke repeatedly during his first parade formation, he was instantly dubbed “the little adjutant.” His infuriated commander shouted, “I’ll write the governor and ask him to send me a man for an adjutant, instead of a boy!” Combat, however, was another matter. At Perryville Sheridan cited him for gallantry and made him a brevet captain. At Murfreesboro, where the 24th was sorely tested, Major Elisha C. Hibbard reported that Arthur “at once grasped the situation, and being the only mounted officer in sight, for the moment assumed command, and by his ringing orders and perfect coolness checking the impending panic, restored confidence, rallied and held the regiment in line.” Missionary Ridge followed. After it, Captain Edwin B. Parsons wrote the adjutant’s father: “Arthur was magnificent. He seems to be afraid of nothing. He’d fight a pack of tigers in a jungle. He has become the hero of the regiment. As you know, vacancies among the officers are now filled by vote and Arthur, by unanimous agreement, has been elevated to the rank of Major.”9
At Kennesaw Mountain his eve-of-battle reconnaissance was praised by Colonel A. L. Wagner as “brilliantly handled,” furnishing “an exception to the general rule of severe losses on special reconnaissance.” MacArthur was wounded twice during that battle—another casualty was Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce—but he was back in action the following week. Over a four-month period during Sherman’s drive toward Atlanta, the young major fought in thirteen battles. After the Georgia capital fell, Sherman sent the 24th into the Battle of Franklin. Though wounded twice more there, Major MacArthur, as his brigadier wrote Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “bore himself heroically . . . with a most fearless spirit.” Citing the regiment and its commander, a superior officer reported: “It is rare in history that one can say a certain unit saved the day. But this was the case at Franklin when the 24th Wisconsin, with no orders from higher up, by its spontaneous action, repelled the enemy and rectified our lines. In this it was bravely led by . . . Arthur MacArthur.” For “gallant and meritorious services in the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., and in the Atlanta campaign,” he was brevetted again, this time to the rank of full colonel, thus becoming, at nineteen, the youngest officer of that rank in the Union army. Henceforth he would be known throughout Wisconsin as “the boy Colonel.”10
His experience had been extraordinary, even in those stirring times, but its chief historical significance lies in the lesson he drew from it. The keystone of all his achievements, Arthur concluded after the war, had been those forty minutes when he had climbed the strategic heights overlooking Chattanooga—in defiance of orders. The moral, he would later tell his adoring son Douglas, was that there are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory.11
The boy colonel was actually Arthur MacArthur, Jr. The family’s Christian names are somewhat confusing. Douglas MacArthur II, the diplomat, is the son of Arthur HI, and Arthur IV is the son of the first Douglas, the most famous bearer of the family name. Put another way, the grandfather, father, brother, and son of General Douglas MacArthur were all christened Arthur.
The MacArthur’ are a venerable line—“There is nothing older,” runs a Scottish aphorism, “except the hills, MacArtair, and the devil”—but the present branch may be said to have put down roots in 1825, when the first Arthur, then ten years old, arrived in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, accompanied by his widowed mother. Behind them they left the mists of Glasgow, where the child was born, and a number of equally foggy Scottish myths, some of which persist to this day.12
According to one of them, the MacArthur’ (MacArtair is the Gaelic spelling) are part of the Arthurian legend, being descended from the sixth-century Briton who, though no king and the possessor of no Round Table, did lead Christian warriors against invading Saxons. A second folktale traces them back to another Arthur, the son of one King Aedan MacGrabhran of Argyll, and his queen, a princess of the medieval Celtic kingdom of Strath-clyde. This would put the MacArtairs in the Highlands during the eighth or ninth century and conflicts with a third account, the most improbable of all, which identifies Charlemagne as an ancestor of Douglas MacArthur.13
These are fantasies, but there are said to be half-buried stones in existence which commemorate MacArtairs who died in the Crusades during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and we know that some of the men returned to Scotland, because by the thirteenth century the clan held extensive estates in the old earldom of Garmoran. By now they had a tartan, comprising shades of green with a thin yellow stripe; a badge, wild myrtle; an armorial motto, Fide et Opera (with faith and by work); and a battle cry, “Eisd O Eisd” (“Listen, O Listen”), which may be found in the ancient Scottish lyric:
O the bags they are piping on the banks of Loch Awe,
And a voice on Cruachau calls the Lairds of Lochaw;
“MacArtair, most high, where the wild myrtles glisten,
Come, buckle your sword belt, and Listen! O Listen!”14
Loch Awe’s shores were the stronghold of the MacArtairs in the years following the Crusades. In the beginning they prospered. As allies of Robert the Bruce, their lairds held the chieftainship of the great Campbell clan in the 1200s and 1300s, dominating another of the clan’s warring factions, the Argylls. In 1427 their luck ran out. John MacArtair, leader of some one thousand kinsmen, was adjudged insubordinate by King James I of Scotland, who summoned him to Inverness and had him beheaded. The Argylls took over the Campbell chieftainship and John’s grieving relatives moved forty-three miles to Glasgow, whence the discouraged among them ultimately emigrated to the United States. Still, if bloodlines mean anything, theirs was good stock. It was enhanced in the New World; Sarah Barney Belcher of Taunton, Massachusetts, the boy colonel’s great-grandmother, became a common ancestor of Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt—Douglas was an eighth cousin of Churchill and a sixth cousin, once removed, of FDR—and three of World War II’s great leaders were thus linked by American intermarriages.15
After growing up in Chicopee Falls, the first Arthur MacArthur attended Wesleyan University and Amherst College, studied law in New York, and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1840. In 1844 he married Sarah Belcher’s granddaughter Aurelia; Arthur Jr. was born in Springfield the following June. Meanwhile Arthur Sr.’s law practice was flourishing. He sparred with Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate; he became public administrator of Hampden County and judge advocate of the Western Military District of Massachusetts. Four years after the birth of his first son he moved his family to Milwaukee, where, in 1851, he was elected city attorney. Becoming an ornament of the Democratic party, he was elected lieutenant governor of Wisconsin at the age of forty. It was an untidy election; the governor was convicted of fraud at the polls, and for five days his lieutenant governor presided over the Madison state house—“probably the record,” Douglas MacArthur observed late in life, reaching as always for superlatives, “for the shortest term ever served by a governor of one of our states.”16
Curiously, the electoral scandal did not rub off on Arthur Sr. Four years before Fort Sumter he was elected a judge of Wisconsin’s second judicial circuit; the year of Gettysburg he was reelected. After Lee’s surrender, Andrew Johnson chose him leader of the U.S. delegation to Louis Napoleon’s Paris exposition of 1868, and the year of the Franco-Prussian War President Grant named him to the bench of the District of Columbia Supreme Court. For eighteen years he presided in the capital, and after he stepped down he continued to be an active scholar, publishing, before his death, ten books on law, linguistics, history, spiritualism, and education, including a defense of Mary, Queen of Scots, and The Biography of the English Language. In addition he served as a law school regent and saw his second son, Frank, graduate from Harvard (‘76) and follow in his footsteps as an attorney.17
To his grandchildren the first Arthur was a bewhiskered, heroic figure, “a large, handsome man,” as Douglas would later recall, “of genial disposition and possessed of untiring energy. He was noted for his dry wit and I could listen to his anecdotes for hours.” He could, but apparently he didn’t; even then the future five-star general was apt to forget the clan’s ancient war cry, and the old man would admonish his precocious grandson: “Never talk more than is necessary.” Once he gave him another word of advice. They were playing poker—the judge had taught him how—and Douglas staked every chip he had on four queens. Laying down four kings, his grandfather murmured, “My dear boy, nothing is sure in this life. Everything is relative.”18
Wintering at the Hotel Indian River in Rockledge, Florida, and summering in Atlantic City, Judge and Aurelia MacArthur spent their busiest months at 1201 N Street in Washington. There, as an impressionable adolescent, Douglas witnessed an endless parade of powerful, frock-coated men who called to confer with the old man: industrialists, professors, congressmen, senators, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices. The mahogany-paneled and red-rep-covered walls looked down on the glitter of old silver, gold watch-chains, and highly polished brass fittings; the rooms were filled with the aroma of expensive cigars and the confident baritones of the ruling class; the dining room gleamed with immaculate linen and leather-cushioned chairs; the women who swept out past the tubbed ferns and the marble-topped tables when the cut-glass brandy decanter was passed were elegant, handsomely coiffed, and exquisitely gowned in the height of Godey’s fashions. And when the judge cleared his throat, his guests fell silent. That, the boy learned, was how those privileged to dine at a MacArthur’s table responded to their host. Long before he died on August 24, 1896, while watching the surf at Atlantic City, the first Arthur had taught his grandchildren that while everything else in life might be relative, the family’s membership in a hereditary patriciate was close to being a constant. It was a lesson which had been driven home during their childhoods by the example of his son, the boy colonel, who was, however, no longer a boy and no longer a colonel.19
Sarah Barney Belcher, common ancestor of Douglas MacArthur, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill
Arthur MacArthur, Sr., grandfather of Douglas MacArthur
Twenty years after the judge’s death, Douglas’s brother, Arthur III, wrote to the daughter of one of their father’s contemporaries: “That he was one of those who fearlessly faced the issue and played a man’s part in that great epic, the Rebellion, must always be a source of pride to you. To me, of a generation which reaps the result of their manhood, it is always a source of envy.” That was in 1916, the year of Jutland. Arthur III was an American naval officer, and the world was witnessing the greatest challenge, till then, that the military profession had ever known. Yet to the writer of those lines the struggle of 1861—1865 was still the apotheosis of warfare, invested with indescribable color and romance. There is no doubt whose views Arthur III was reflecting; they had been those of his father.20
Appomattox had meant a shattering readjustment for Arthur Jr. In June 1865 he had led the gallant remnants of the 24th Wisconsin through downtown Milwaukee and then tried to settle down and read law. He couldn’t stick it. Peace was boring. Eight months later he was back i
n a blue kersey uniform—this time as a second lieutenant in the regular army. He was immediately jumped to first lieutenant, and on July 28, 1866, he received captain’s bars, but there he remained for twenty-three exasperating years, stuck behind the Civil War promotion hump. His foes, moreover, were no longer disciplined columns of Southern gray, worthy of a MacArthur’s steel. He was, as Douglas MacArthur would put it a century later, “engaged in the onerous task of pushing Indians into the arid recesses of the Southwest and of bringing the white man’s brand of law and order to the Western frontier.”21
Putting the best face on it, the army in those years was a professional police force refereeing disputes between cattle and sheep ranchers over grazing grounds and protecting settlers from resentful bands of Navahos, Pueblos, Pawnees, Crows, Blackfeet, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Apaches. Putting on the worst face, the troops were engaged in a nineteenth-century colonial war indistinguishable from those of empire-building Europeans in Asia and Africa. This was the West of Custer, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Buffalo. Bill, and Wild Bill Hickok, the last two of whom Arthur knew, but it was not as exciting as that roll call of folk heroes suggests; even Frederic Remington misrepresented it. Although the forces deployed by Generals-in-Chief Grant (till 1869), Sherman (till 1883), and Sheridan (till 1888) engaged the Indians in thirty or more actions each year, the role of any one fort was largely passive and unsung. As William A. Ganoe was to point out in his History of the United States Army, in the East the army was “unseen, unknown and unpopular. It was difficult for the service to get even the most mediocre recruits. . . . And the country seldom looked beyond the Mississippi to hear the ominous sounds of massacre and depredation that the troops were trying vainly to suppress.” As we shall see, much of it was great fun for officers’ small sons, who thrilled to the warning in the November 1880 Las Vegas Gazette that “New Mexico has been for years the asylum of desperadoes” where “we jostle against murderers, bank robbers, forgers, and other fugitives in the post office and on the platform at the depot,” but it was enormously frustrating for their ambitious fathers. Except for brief periods of court-martial duty, Captain MacArthur spent most of those early postwar years in lonely sagebrush garrisons separated by trackless expanses of the Great Plains or the Rockies, remote outposts with names like Fort Wingate, Fort Rawlins, Fort Sanders, Fort Bridger, Fort Kearny, Fort Selden, Camp Stambaugh, Fort Fred Steele, Fort Bliss, and Camp Robinson. When a silver sledge drove a gold-headed spike into a laurel railroad tie, joining the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines at Promontory Point, Utah, the captain was stationed a few miles to the east at Fort Bridger, but he didn’t witness the ceremony. Geronimo led the Chiricahua Apaches on a celebrated rampage not far from Fort Selden, but MacArthur’s Company K of the 13th Infantry played no major role in quelling it. He never visited a dance hall in Virginia City or Deadwood or Tombstone. He was lucky to see a magic-lantern show about the exploration of the Grand Canyon, and there must have been times when he yearned for the comparative excitement of law books in Milwaukee. The end of the frontier in 1889 evoked sentimental sighs elsewhere in America. If Arthur mourned it, he left no record of his sorrow.22