Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  IV

  The slavery issue played a part in a growing Republican disenchantment with McClellan. But more important than slavery were McClellan's defects of character and generalship.

  "McClellan is to me one of the mysteries of the war," said Ulysses S. Grant a dozen years after the conflict. Historians are still trying to solve

  30. CWL, V, 48–49; Moncure D. Conway, The Rejected Stone: or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America (Boston, 1861), 75–80, 110; Principia, May 4, 1861.

  31. Stevens quoted in T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (Madison, 1941), 12, and Margaret Shortreed, "The Anti-Slavery Radicals, 1840–1868," Past and Present, no. 16 (1959), 77; House action in CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., 15.

  that mystery.32 Life seemed to have prepared McClellan for greatness. His birth into a well-to-do Philadelphia family and his education at the best private schools prepared him for admission to West Point by special permission when he was two years under the minimum age. After graduating second in his class, McClellan won renown at the age of twenty for engineering achievements in the Mexican War. His subsequent army career included assignment as an American observer of the Crimean War. In 1857 he resigned his commission to become chief engineer and vice president of a railroad at the age of thirty and president of another railroad two years later. In May 1861, at the age of thirty-four, he became the second-ranking general in the U. S. army and in July he took command of the North's principal field army. McClellan came to Washington, in the words of the London Times correspondent, as "the man on horseback" to save the Union; the press lionized him; a sober-minded contemporary wrote that "there is an indefinable air of success about him and something of the 'man of destiny.' "33

  But perhaps McClellan's career had been too successful. He had never known, as Grant had, the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility. The adulation he experienced during the early weeks in Washington went to his head. McClellan's letters to his wife revealed the beginnings of a messiah complex. "I find myself in a strange position here: President, Cabinet, Genl. Scott & all deferring to me," he wrote the day after arriving in Washington. "By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land." Three days later he visited Capitol Hill and was "quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received and the respect with which I was treated." Congress seemed willing "to give me my way in everything." The next week McClellan reported that he had received "letter after letter—have conversation after conversation calling on me to save the nation—alluding to the Presidency, Dictatorship, etc." McClellan said he wanted no part of such powers, but he did revel in the cheers of his soldiers as he rode along their lines—cheers that reinforced his Napoleonic self-image. "You have no idea how the men

  32. Quotation from Warren W. Hassler, Jr., General George B. McClellan: Shield ofthe Union (Baton Rouge, 1957), xv. For a good summary of writings on McClellan, see Joseph L. Harsh, "On the McClellan-Go-Round," in John T. Hubbell, ed., Battles Lost and Won: Essays from Civil War History (Westport, Conn., 1975). 55–72

  33. Russell, My Diary North and South, 240; Nevins, War, I, 269.

  brighten up now when I go among them. I can see every eye glisten. . . . You never heard such yelling. . . . I believe they love me. . . . God has placed a great work in my hands. . . . I was called to it; my previous life seems to have been unwittingly directed to this great end."34

  The first victim of McClellan's vainglory was General-in-Chief Scott. More than twice McClellan's age, Scott was America's foremost living soldier, a hero of two wars, second only to George Washington in miilitary reputation. But Scott's fame belonged to past wars. McClellan aspired to be the hero of this one. A rivalry with the "old general," as McClellan privately called Scott, soon developed. In truth, there could be only one head of the post-Bull Run military buildup. McClellan set about this task with great energy. He put in eighteen-hour days that achieved quick and visible results. McClellan communicated directly with the president, bypassing Scott. The latter, whose age and infirmities prevented him from doing more than a few hours of daily paperwork, grew piqued at being left out of things. McClellan complained that Scott was frustrating his plans to expand and prepare the army for an early offensive. "I am leaving nothing undone to increase our force," McClellan wrote to his wife in early August, "but that confounded old Gen'l always comes in my way. He is a perfect incubus. He understands nothing, appreciates nothing. . . . I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor. . . . If he cannot be taken out of my path, I . . . will resign and let the admin[istration] take care of itself. . . . The people call upon me to save the country—I must save it and cannot respect anything that is in the way."35 Lincoln tried to mediate between the two generals, but only succeeded in delaying the inevitable. The president finally succumbed to pressure from Republican senators and allowed Scott to retire on November 1 "for reasons of health." McClellan succeeded him as general in chief. Lincoln cautioned McClellan that the dual jobs of general in chief and commander of the Army of the Potomac "will entail a vast labor upon you." Replied McClellan: "I can do it all."36

  34. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, July 27, 30, Aug. 9, Oct. 31, 1861, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress. These letters to his wife consist of extracts from the originals, copied by McClellan himself sometime after the war. There is no way of knowing whether he edited these copies in any substantive way, for the originals no longer exist. The extracts are in Series C, Container 7 of the McClellan Papers. Edited versions of some of these letters were published in W. C. Prime, ed., McClellan's Own Story (New York, 1887).

  35. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, Aug. 8, 9, 1861, McClellan Papers.

  36. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 33.

  The senators helped force Scott's retirement because McClellan convinced them that the "old general" was mainly responsible for the army's inactivity. When McClellan had first arrived in Washington he expressed an intent to "carry this thing 'en grand' & crush the rebels in one campaign."37 Republicans thought this had the right ring. But McClellan soon began to express fears that Beauregard was about to march forward with a huge army to crush him. A curious lack of confidence began to creep into McClellan's words and deeds, even as he continued to think of himself as God's chosen instrument to save the republic. The first signs appeared of a chronic tendency to overestimate enemy strength and to use this estimate as an excuse to remain on the defensive. In October, McClellan had 120,000 men while Beauregard and Johnston had only 45,000 in and near Manassas. But McClellan professed to believe that the enemy numbered 150,000 and was preparing to attack him.38

  The Confederates had pushed their picket posts within sight of Washington. They had also established batteries on the lower Potomac to interdict river traffic to the capital. In late September the southerners withdrew from one exposed position on Munson's Hill a few miles southwest of Washington. When the Federals moved in, instead of the large cannon they had expected they found a log shaped and painted to

  37. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, Aug. 2, 1861, McClellan Papers.

  38. The head of McClellan's secret service, Allan Pinkerton, has long been notorious for providing the inflated estimates of Confederate troop numbers on which McClellan based his calculations. Pinkerton deserves some but perhaps not all of this notoriety. His activities embraced two spheres: espionage behind enemy lines and counter-espionage behind Union lines. As founder of the famous Pinkerton detective agency, he naturally employed numerous agents who had been trained as detectives. These men did a good job of ferreting out and arresting Confederate agents, for their previous experience fitted them for such work. As espionage agents they were less successful. They tended to accept too readily the rumors and gossip about rebel units and movements they picked up in Richmond and elsewhere. But even when they did acquire accurate information, their figures on Confederate numbers usually included all troops in a given theater (for example, all of Virginia east of t
he Blue Ridge Mountains). By the time these figures reached McClellan and he had digested them, they had become transmuted into the number of men in Johnston's army alone. It is not clear whether McClellan or Pinkerton was primarily responsible for this error. In any case McClellan believed what he wanted to believe—that the enemy outnumbered him and he therefore could not undertake an offensive until he outnumbered the enemy—something that, given McClellan's psychology, was never likely to happen. For a good discussion of this question, see Edwin C. Fishel, "The Mythology of Civil War Intelligence," in Hubbell, ed., Battles Lost and Won, 83–106.

  resemble a cannon. This "Quaker gun" embarrassed McClellan and called into question his reports of superior Confederate forces. The patience of northern people with the lack of action against the saucy rebels had begun to wear thin. The Quaker gun incident further dissipated the once-enormous reservoir of support and adulation for McClellan. As the fine, dry days of October wore away and the Army of the Potomac still made no advance, some Republicans began to suspect McClellan's competence and even his loyalty. The daily telegraphic bulletin, "All quiet along the Potomac," which had reassured northerners just after Bull Run, now became a phrase of derision aimed at McClellan. " 'Young Napoleon' is going down as fast as he went up," wrote an Indiana Republican after testing the pulse of public opinion. Lyman Trumbull said in November that if McClellan's army went into winter quarters without fighting a battle "I very much fear the result would be recognition of the Confederacy by foreign governments [and] the demoralization of our own people. . . . Action, action is what we want and must have."39

  Action did temporarily break the quiet along the Potomac on October 21, but not the kind the North was hoping for. The rebels held the town of Leesburg, Virginia, forty miles upriver from Washington. Hoping to dislodge them, McClellan ordered General Charles P. Stone to make a "slight demonstration" from the Maryland side of the river while other Union regiments marched upriver on the Virginia side to threaten the Confederate flank. Stone assigned the mission to Colonel Edward Baker, a former Illinois politician and old friend of Lincoln, who had named his second son after him. Baker sent most of his brigade across the river, where it ran into a Confederate brigade posted in the woods at the top of a hundred-foot bank called Ball's Bluff. With no previous combat experience, Baker and his men took poorly chosen positions. After some lively skirmishing, in which Baker was killed, the Confederates drove the Yankees in disorder down the bank and into the river, where some of those who escaped bullets were drowned. More than half of Baker's 1,700 men were killed, wounded, or captured.

  This humiliating disaster evoked from Lincoln tears of grief for Baker's death and provoked among Republicans an angry search for a scapegoat. When Congress met in December it established a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate the causes for defeat at Ball's Bluff and Bull Run. Benjamin Wade chaired the committee and radical Republicans dominated it. Damned by its critics as a "Jacobin"

  39. Nevins, War, I, 300; Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, 45.

  conspiracy to guillotine Democratic generals and praised by its defenders as a foe of inefficiency and corruption in the army, the committee was a bit of both.40 In its early months it did function something like a star chamber court in its quest for scapegoats. The committee's first victim was General Stone. This officer had acquired a proslavery reputation because of a bitter exchange of letters with Governor Andrew of Massachusetts concerning the return to slavery of contrabands who had sought refuge with Massachusetts regiments under Stone's command. Several witnesses before the committee vaguely described alleged contacts between Stone and Confederate officers. Even though this testimony built a case of treason against Stone, whom the committee suspected of sending his men into a trap, the general was given no opportunity to confront his accusers or even to read their testimony. While McClellan tried for a time to protect his subordinate, he soon realized that Stone was a surrogate for the committee's real target—himself. When additional dubious evidence of Stone's supposed dealings with the enemy came to McClellan, he turned it over to Secretary of War Stanton, who ordered Stone's arrest. For six months this luckless—and probably innocent—general was imprisoned at Fort Lafayette. No formal charges were ever ever brought against him. He was finally released and restored to minor commands, but his career was ruined.41

  Whether or not McClellan threw Stone to the wolves to protect himself,42 he had clearly gotten into deep political waters by the end of 1861. McClellan was a Democrat. Some of his closest army comrades in prewar days had been southerners, including Joseph Johnston whose army at Manassas McClellan seemed reluctant to attack. Although no admirer of slavery, McClellan liked abolitionists even less. He had political

  40. For criticism of the committee, see especially William W. Pierson, Jr., "The Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War," AHR, 23 (1918), 550–76; T. Harry Williams, "The Committee on the Conduct of the War," Journal of the American Military History Institute, 3 (1939), 139–56. For a defense of the committee, see Hans L. Trefousse, "The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War: A Reassessment," CWH, 10 (1964), 5–19; and Howard C. Westwood, "The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War—A Look at the Record," Lincoln Herald, 80 (1978), 3–15.

  41. Committee on the Conduct of the War, Reports, 1863 (Washington, 1863), Vol. II; R. B. Irwin, "Ball's Bluff and the Arrest of General Stone," Battles and Leaders, II, 123–34; Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, 94–104.

  42. Stone himself came to believe this, and T. Harry Williams strongly suggests such an interpretation in Lincoln and the Radicals, 101, 104.

  ties with New York Democrats who had begun to mention him as the party's next presidential candidate. To one of these Democrats, McClellan wrote in November: "Help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union. . . . To gain that end we cannot afford to mix up the negro question."43

  Lincoln at this time would have agreed with McClellan's expression of war aims. The president also did his best to shield McClellan from the growing criticism of the army's inactivity. "I intend to be careful and do as well as possible," McClellan told Lincoln during one of their early discussions. "Just don't let them hurry me, is all I ask." Lincoln replied: "You shall have your own way in the matter." The president borrowed books on military science from the Library of Congress and sat up late trying to master the elements of strategy. As an amateur he was willing to defer to McClellan the professional. At the same time, as a professional in his own field the president tried to educate the general in the realities of politics—especially the danger of ignoring political pressures in a people's war. At one of their frequent meetings, Lincoln tried to make McClellan see that the demands of Republican leaders for action were "a reality, and must be taken into account."44

  McClellan not only resisted such realities; in private he also expressed his contempt for all Republican politicians—including Lincoln. In letters to his wife he wrote that "I can't tell you how disgusted I am becoming with these wretched politicians—they are a most despicable set of men. . . . I am becoming daily more disgusted with this imbecile administration." The cabinet contained "some of the greatest geese I have ever seen. . . . Seward is the meanest of them all—a meddlesome, officious, incompetent little puppy. . . . Welles is a garrulous old woman . . . Bates an old fool. . . . The presdt. is nothing more than a well meaning baboon . . . 'the original gorilla.' . . . It is sickening in the extreme . . . [to] see the weakness and unfitness of the poor beings who control the destinies of this great country."45

  One evening in November, Lincoln and Seward called on McClellan at home. He was out at a wedding party; when he returned an hour

  43. McClellan to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Nov. 8, 1861, S. L. M. Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library.

  44. Foote, The Civil War, I, 142; Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, 45.

  45. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, Oct. 2, 7, 10, Nov. 2, 17, 1861, Mc
Clellan Papers.

  later and learned of his visitors, McClellan ignored them and went upstairs. Half an hour later a servant informed the president and secretary of state that the general had gone to bed. Lincoln's private secretary was furious, but the president reportedly said: "I will hold McClellan's horse if he will only bring us success."46

  But that was the rub. Military success could be achieved only by taking risks; McClellan seemed to shrink from the prospect. He lacked the mental and moral courage required of great generals—the will to act, to confront the terrible moment of truth on the battlefield. Having experienced nothing but success in his career, he was afraid to risk failure. He also suffered from what might be termed the "Bull Run syndrome"—a paralysis that prevented any movement against the Confederates until the army was thoroughly prepared. McClellan excelled at preparation, but it was never quite complete. The army was perpetually almost ready to move—but the enemy was always larger and better prepared.