The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

by Shelby Foote

  Pope, too, came in for his share of abuse. “Open sneering at General Pope was heard on all sides,” one veteran observed. Another, passing the luckless commander by the roadside, hailed him with a quote from Horace Greeley: “Go west, young man! Go west!” Perhaps this had something to do with changing his mind as to the state of his men’s hearts. At any rate, when morning came—Sunday, August 31—he wired Halleck: “Our troops are … much used-up and worn-out,” and he spoke of giving the enemy “as desperate a fight as I can force our men to stand up to.” Franklin’s corps had come up the night before, in time to establish a straggler line in front of Centerville; Sumner too was at hand, giving Pope 20,000 fresh troops with which to oppose the rebels. But his confidence was ebbing. He told Halleck, “I should like to know whether you feel secure about Washington should this army be destroyed. I shall fight it as long as a man will stand up to the work. You must judge what is to be done, having in view the safety of the capital.”

  No sooner had he sent this, however, than a reply to last night’s rosy message bucked him up again. “My Dear General: You have done nobly,” Halleck wired. “Don’t yield another inch if you can avoid it.” Pope thanked him for this “considerate commendation” and passed along the encouraging news that “Ewell is killed. Jackson is badly wounded.… The plan of the enemy will undoubtedly be to turn my flank. If he does so he will have his hands full.” Meanwhile, Franklin’s soldiers mocked and taunted the bedraggled Army of Virginia, jeering along the straggler line at its “new route” to Richmond. Overnight, Pope’s confidence took another sickening drop. Three hours after sunrise, September 1, he got off another long dispatch to Halleck. After a bold beginning—“All was quiet yesterday and so far this morning. My men are resting; they need it much.… I shall attack again tomorrow if I can; the next day certainly”—he passed at once to darker matters: “I think it my duty to call your attention to the unsoldierly and dangerous conduct of many brigade and some division commanders of the forces sent here from the Peninsula. Every word and act and intention is discouraging, and calculated to break down the spirits of the men and produce disaster.” In the light of this, he closed with a recommendation that ran counter to the intention expressed at the outset: “My advice to you—I give it with freedom, as I know you will not misunderstand it—is that, in view of any satisfactory results, you draw back this army to the intrenchments in front of Washington, and set to work in that secure place to reorganize and rearrange it. You may avoid great disaster by doing so.”

  While waiting to see what would come of this, he found that Jackson (who was no more wounded than Ewell was dead) was in the act of fulfilling his prediction that Lee would try to turn his flank. Stonewall’s men had crossed Bull Run at Sudley Springs, then moved north to the Little River Turnpike, which led southeast to Fairfax Courthouse, eight miles in the Union rear. Pope pulled the troops of Phil Kearny and Brigadier General I. I. Stevens, who commanded Burnside’s other division under Reno, out of their muddy camps and sent them slogging northward to intercept the rebel column. They did so, late that afternoon. There beside the pike, around a mansion called Chantilly, a wild fight took place during a thunderstorm so violent that it drowned the roar of cannon. Jackson’s march had been slow; consequently he was in a grim and savage humor. In the rain-lashed confusion, when one of his colonels requested that his men be withdrawn because their cartridges were too wet to ignite, the reply came back: “My compliments to Colonel Blank, and tell him the enemy’s ammunition is just as wet as his.”

  This spirit was matched on the Federal side by Kearny, who dashed from point to point, his empty sleeve flapping as he rode with the reins clamped in his teeth in order to have his one arm free to gesture with his saber, hoicking his troops up to the firing line and holding them there by showing no more concern for bullets than he did for raindrops. His prescription for success in leading men in battle was a simple one; “You must never be afraid of anything,” he had told a young lieutenant two days ago. Stevens followed his example, and between them they made Stonewall call a halt. The firing continued into early darkness, when on A. P. Hill’s front the men were surprised to see a Union general come riding full-tilt toward them, suddenly illuminated by a flash of lightning. They called on him to surrender, but he whirled his mount, leaning forward onto its withers with his arm around its neck, and tried to gallop away in the confusion. They fired a volley that unhorsed him, and when they went out to pick him up they found that he was dead, lying one-armed in the mud, the back of his coat and the seat of his trousers torn by bullets. They brought his body into their lines. “Poor Kearny,” Hill said, looking down at him. “He deserved a better death than that.”

  Stevens too was dead by now, shot while leading a charge, and the Federals fell back down the pike and through the woods. They did so more from being disheartened by the loss of their leaders, however, than from being pressed; Jackson did not pursue. Thus ended the Battle of Chantilly, a rain-swept drama with off-stage thunder, vivid flashes of lightning, and an epilogue supplied next morning by Lee, who sent Kearny’s body forward under a flag of truce, “thinking that the possession of his remains may be a consolation to his family.”

  Pope by then was back at Fairfax, within twenty miles of Washington, having received from Halleck the instructions he had sought: “You will bring your forces as best you can within or near the line of fortification.” As the army retreated—“by squads, companies, and broken parts of regiments and brigades,” according to one enlisted diarist—its commander lost the final vestige of his former boldness. “The straggling is awful in the regiments from the Peninsula,” he complained to Halleck. “Unless something can be done to restore tone to this army it will melt away before you know it.” This was a new and different Pope, a Pope not unlike a sawdust doll with most of its stuffing leaked away. A surgeon who looked through a headquarters window the previous evening saw him so: “He sat with his chair tipped back against the wall, his hands clasped behind his head, which bent forward, his chin touching his breast—seeming to pay no attention to the generals as they arrived, but to be wholly wrapped in his own gloomy reflections.” The doctor wrote long afterward, and being a kind-hearted man, who had dealt with much misery in his life, he added: “I pitied him then. I pity him now.”

  It was perhaps the only pity felt for him by anyone in the whole long weary column slogging its way eastward. Last night’s thunderstorm had deepened the mud along the pike, and overhead a scud of clouds obscured the sun, which shed an eerie yellow light upon the sodden fields. In a way, though, the weather was fitting, matching as it did the mood of the retreat. “Everyone you met had an unwashed, sleepy, downcast aspect,” one officer observed, “and looked as if he would like to hide his head somewhere from all the world.” Now that the immediate danger was past, a still worse reaction of sullenness had set in among the troops, whose mistrust of Pope quite balanced his expressed mistrust of them. As one colonel put it, “No salutary fear kept them in the ranks, and many gave way to the temptation to take a rest.… There was everywhere along the road the greatest confusion. Infantry and cavalry, artillery and wagons, all hurried on pell mell, in the midst of rallying cries of officers and calls and oaths of the men.”

  Banks had come up from Bristoe Station, bringing the army’s wagons with him though he had been obliged to put the torch to all the locomotives and freight cars loaded with stores and munitions from Warrenton and other points below the wreckage of Broad Run bridge. His corps, having seen no fighting since Cedar Mountain, was assigned the rear guard duty, which consisted mainly of prodding frazzled stragglers back into motion and gathering up abandoned equipment littered along the roadside. At the head of the column—miles away, for the various units were badly strung out, clotted in places and gapped in others as a result of accordion action—rode Pope and McDowell, attended by their staffs and followed closely by the lead division, formerly King’s but now under Brigadier General John P. Hatch, who had succeeded the ai
ling King. That afternoon the sun came out, but it did little to revive the downcast marchers: least of all Hatch, who had more cause for gloom than most. He had commanded a cavalry brigade, that being the arm of service he preferred, until Pope relieved him for inefficiency and transferred him to the infantry. So Hatch had this to brood over, in addition to the events of the past few days. Then suddenly, up ahead, he saw something that made him forget his and the army’s troubles.

  Off to one side loomed Munson’s Hill, which Joe Johnston had held with a dummy gun last winter. From its crown, Hatch knew, you could see the dome of the Capitol. But what engaged his attention just now was a small group of horsemen coming down the road toward Pope and McDowell: particularly the man in front, who rode a large black horse and wore a vivid yellow sash about his waist. Hatch thought there was something familiar about the trim and dapper way he sat his charger. Then, as the man reined to a halt in front of the two generals, returning their salutes with one of his own which “seemed to carry a little of personal good fellowship to even the humblest private soldier,” Hatch knew the unbelievable was true; it was Little Mac. He spurred ahead in time to hear McClellan tell Pope and McDowell he had been authorized to take command of the army. Off to the left rear just then there was a sudden thumping of artillery, dim in the distance. What was that? McClellan asked. Pope said it was probably an attack on Sumner, whose corps was guarding the flank in that direction. Then he inquired if there would be any objection if he and McDowell rode on toward Washington. None at all, McClellan replied; but as for himself, he was riding toward the sound of gunfire.

  Before the two could resume their journey, Hatch took advantage of the chance to revenge the wrong he believed had been done when his cavalry brigade was taken from him the month before. Trotting back to the head of his infantry column, within easy hearing distance of Pope and McDowell, he shouted: “Boys, McClellan is in command of the army again! Three cheers!” The result, after an instant of shock while the words sank in, was pandemonium. Caps and knapsacks went sailing high in the air, and men who a moment ago had been too weary and dispirited to do anything more than plant one leaden foot in front of the other were cheering themselves hoarse, capering about, and slapping each other joyfully on the back. “From an extreme sadness,” one Massachusetts volunteer recalled, “we passed in a twinkling to a delirium of delight. A deliverer had come.” This was the reaction all down the column as the news traveled back along its length, pausing at the gaps between units, then being taken up again, moving westward like a spark along a ten-mile train of powder.

  Such demonstrations were not restricted to green troops, volunteers likely to leap at every rumor. Sykes’ regulars, for example, were far back toward the rear and did not learn of the change till after nightfall. They were taking a rest-halt, boiling coffee in a roadside field, when an officer on picket duty saw by starlight the familiar figure astride Dan Webster coming down the pike. “Colonel! Colonel!” he hollered, loud enough to be heard all over the area, “General McClellan is here!” Within seconds every man was on his feet and cheering, raising what one of them called “such a hurrah as the Army of the Potomac had never heard before. Shout upon shout went out into the stillness of the night; and as it was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division and corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance. The effect of this man’s presence upon the Army of the Potomac—in sunshine or rain, in darkness or in daylight, in victory or defeat—was electrical.” Hard put for words to account for the delirium thus provoked, he could only add that it was “too wonderful to make it worth while attempting to give a reason for it.”

  Nor was the enthusiasm limited to veterans of Little Mac’s own army, men who had fought under him before. When Gibbon announced the new commander’s arrival to the survivors of the Iron Brigade, they too reacted with unrestrained delight, tossing their hats and breaking ranks to jig and whoop, just as the Peninsula boys were doing. Later that night, Gibbon remembered afterward, “the weary, fagged men went into camp cheerful and happy, to talk over their rough experience of the past three weeks and speculate as to what was ahead.”

  It was Lincoln’s doing, his alone, and he had done it against the will of a majority of his advisers. Chase believed that the time had come, beyond all doubt, when “either the government or McClellan must go down,” and Stanton had prepared and was soliciting cabinet signatures for an ultimatum demanding “the immediate removal of George B. McClellan from any command in the armies of the United States.” When Welles protested that such a document showed little consideration for their chief, the War Secretary bristled and said coldly: “I know of no particular obligation I am under to the President. He called me to a difficult position and imposed on me labors and responsibilities which no man could carry.” Already he had secured four signatures—his own, Chase’s, Bates’, and Smith’s—and was working hard for more (Welles and Blair were obdurate, and Seward was still out of town) when, on the morning of this same September 2, he came fuming into the room where his colleagues were waiting for Lincoln to arrive and open the meeting. It was a time of strain. Reports of Pope’s defeat had caused Stanton to call out the government clerks, order the contents of the arsenal shipped to New York, and forbid the retail sale of spirituous liquors in the city. Now came the climactic blow as he announced, in a choked voice, the rumor that McClellan had been appointed to conduct the defense of Washington.

  The effect was stunning: a sort of reversal of what would happen later that day along the blue column plodding east from Fairfax. Just as Chase was declaring that, if true, this would “prove a national calamity,” Lincoln came in and confirmed the rumor. That was why he was late for the meeting, he explained. He and Halleck had just come from seeing McClellan and ordering him to assume command of the armies roundabout the capital. Stanton broke in, trembling as he spoke: “No order to that effect has been issued from the War Department.” Lincoln turned and faced him. “The order is mine,” he said, “and I will be responsible for it to the country.”

  Four nights ago he had gone to bed confident that the army had won a great victory on the plains of Manassas: a triumph which, according to Pope, would be enlarged when he took up the pursuit of Jackson’s fleeing remnant. Overnight, however, word arrived that it was Pope who was in retreat, not Stonewall, and Lincoln came into his secretary’s room next morning, long-faced and discouraged. “Well, John, we are whipped again, I am afraid,” he said. All day the news got worse as details of the fiasco trickled through the screen of confusion. Halleck was a weak prop to lean on; Lincoln by now had observed that his general in chief was “little more than … a first-rate clerk.” What was worse, he was apt to break down under pressure; which was presently what happened. Before the night was over, Old Brains appealed to McClellan at Alexandria: “I beg of you to assist me in this crisis with your ability and experience. I am utterly tired out.”

  Lincoln’s mind was also turning in Little Mac’s direction, although not without reluctance. Unquestionably, it appeared to him, McClellan had acted badly in regard to Pope. One of his subordinates had even been quoted as saying publicly, “I don’t care for John Pope a pinch of owl dung.” It seemed to Lincoln that they had wanted Pope to fail, no matter what it cost in the blood of northern soldiers. McClellan, when appealed to for counsel, had advised the President to concentrate all the reserves in the capital intrenchments and “leave Pope to get out of his scrape” as best he could. To Lincoln this seemed particularly callous, if not crazy; his mistrust of the Young Napoleon was increased. But early Tuesday morning, when Pope warned that “unless something can be done to restore tone to this army it will melt away before you know it,” he did what he knew he had to do. “We must use what tools we have,” he told his secretary. “There is no man in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as [McClellan]…. If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.”

  So he
went to him and told him to return to the army whose wounded were already beginning to pour into the city. And that afternoon, despite the howls of the cabinet—Stanton was squelched, but Chase was sputtering, “I cannot but feel that giving command to McClellan is equivalent to giving Washington to the rebels”—Lincoln had Halleck issue the formal order: “Major General McClellan will have command of the fortifications of Washington and of all the troops for the defense of the capital.” This left Pope to be disposed of, which was done three days later. “The Armies of the Potomac and Virginia being consolidated,” he was told by dispatch, “you will report for orders to the Secretary of War.” Reporting as ordered, he found himself assigned to duty against the Sioux, who had lately risen in Minnesota. From his headquarters in St Paul, where he was settled before the month was out, Pope protested vehemently against the injustice of being “banished to a remote and unimportant command.” But there he stayed, for the duration.