by Bruce Catton
The Confederates were banked up four ranks deep, and the firing started with the rival lines no more than fifty yards apart — murderously close range, for the clumsy muzzle-loaders that constituted the infantry weapon in those days were deadly at anything under two hundred and fifty yards. The Iowa boys, who had hoped they could have one good fight before they were paid off, got their wish. They stood next to a battery of regular artillery, six guns commanded by an uncommonly hard-boiled West Pointer, Captain James Totten, who went into action with a canteen of brandy at his hip. Even in the excitement of their first battle the Iowans marveled at the profane fury with which Captain Totten stormed at his lieutenants and his gunners — “Forward that caisson, God damn you, sir!… Swing that piece into line, God damn you, sir!” — as his guns slammed canister and case shot into an advancing Rebel line and blew it apart.
The Rebels withdrew briefly, the smoke lifted from the field, and the volunteers found themselves facing an empty pasture with a snake-rail fence on the far side. A lone Confederate was perched on this fence, defiantly swinging a Confederate flag, and when the Iowans prepared to shoot him their officers went along the line ordering them not to: he was too brave, something about his valiant posture made it indecent to take pot shots at him. Captain Totten’s regulars felt otherwise; an Irish gunnery sergeant swung a piece around, got the Rebel in his sights, pulled the lanyard, and blew the man all to fragments — and with an angry yell the Confederate line surged forward in a new assault. The Kansans came in to help repel this attack, smoke settled close to the ground, everything was a wild clangor of beaten metal and shouting men, and a remarkable number of the northern volunteers got shot. For untaught soldiers it was rough, and men fought blindly, not knowing what they were doing; an officer came on one man who was loading his musket feverishly, firing straight up into the air, reloading and firing again, an automaton acting entirely by blind instinct.8
Lyon came along the line, bleeding from two wounds, his shaggy whiskers clotted with blood. He was profoundly depressed: a third of his men were down, Sigel’s attack had gone completely astray, no help was in sight, all the Rebels in Missouri seemed to be coming in on him. When Totten offered him a pull at the brandy he waved him aside, and to an aide he muttered: “Major, I fear the day is lost.” The aide said something hopeful, and Lyon galloped off to bring up a few companies he had been holding in reserve. He got them up to the front, and some of the untried young hotheads shouted that if he would lead them they would charge with their bayonets and chase the Rebels all the way to Arkansas. Lyon was the man for that. He swung his hat, wreaths of smoke floating about him, blood on his hair and blood on his uniform, and he wheeled to lead them — and then a stray bullet whacked into his heart and killed him. The charge died before it got started, and it developed that there was no surviving Union officer above the rank of major.9
The principal major turned out to be one Samuel D. Sturgis. He looked things over, concluded that the little army had about fought itself out, and took it away in retreat with the regulars to bring up the rear. Eventually the army arrived at the railhead at Rolla. There the 1st Iowa found a consignment of new uniforms, together with orders to head back home and get paid off. The boys took a bath in the nearest pond, threw away their filthy old uniforms, put on the new, and set off for Iowa, glad they had been in that one battle. At Burlington twenty thousand people were waiting to welcome them home, and they paraded down the streets singing a little tune called “The Happy Land of Canaan.”10
Chapter Three
MEN WHO SHAPED THE WAR
1. The Romantics to the Rescue
WINFIELD SCOTT was an old man, vain and ponderous, dropsical and infirm, a swollen and grotesque caricature of the brilliant soldier who had won the Mexican War and who, because he once so perfectly acted the part of the proud soldier, had been known half affectionately as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He was mixed up now in a war that had come too late for him, a bewildering sort of war that saw his pet enemy, Jefferson Davis, and his pet soldier, Robert E. Lee, making common cause against the country that had all of his loyalty. He was greatly partial to the regular army, believed that volunteer troops needed many months in training camp before they could take the field, and doubted that cavalry would be of much account in this war; everybody knew that it took a full two years of drill to turn an ordinary recruit into a competent trooper. He blamed himself for having let political pressure make him send McDowell’s unready army out on the disastrous expedition to Bull Run, and his own physical disabilities — getting in and out of the chair behind his desk, with much puffing and wheezing, was about all he could manage — must have been a painful reminder that this war was in process of slipping out from under the commanding general of the army.
Yet the old man had a clear eye. Others might talk about the one swift blow that would end the rebellion. Bright young General McClellan, for instance, had proposed a quick stab up the Kanawha Valley, across western Virginia, and over the mountains to Richmond, and since he proposed that this be done with the ninety-day men, he had obviously been thinking of a short war. But Scott saw it differently. The Confederacy, he believed, would never be subdued by piecemeal; it would have to be enveloped and throttled. The job could hardly be begun before the enlistments of the ninety-day men had expired, and it was time to think in terms of the long pull.
Let the navy (said Scott) blockade the southern coasts. The army, then, must drive down the Mississippi, opening the river all the way to the Gulf, splitting the western states from the Confederacy and holding the valley in such strength that the blockade of the Southland would be complete. With rebellion isolated, it could then be crushed at leisure.
The proposal got to the White House and was talked about, and before long it was being discussed in the press. It called up the picture of a gigantic constrictor tightening a deadly inexorable grip about the seceding states, and it became generally known as the “Anaconda Plan,” under which title it was widely derided by impatient patriots who looked for a quick and easy war. Scott, they complained, believed that the war could be won without fighting — visible proof that he was a senile old fumbler who had lived beyond his usefulness. “On to Richmond” had more of a swing to it.
But Scott had something. He had submitted a general idea, not an actual strategic plan, and he was not suggesting that the war could be won without fighting. Instead, he was trying to show the things that would have to be done before a really effective fight could be made. And although his idea was scoffed at, it did take root in the mind of Abraham Lincoln. In the end, the Anaconda idea became the basis for the Federal war effort.1
By midsummer it appeared that the lieutenants through whom most of the spadework for this plan must be done would be chiefly two — George Brinton McClellan and John Charles Frémont.
The army in 1861 hardly possessed two more completely different soldiers — and yet, in an odd way, they had certain traits in common. They came into their new posts as ready-made heroes, welcomed by a land that wanted heroes to worship. They had the gift for making fine phrases, and so for a time they could express perfectly the spirit with which men of the North were going to war. A great many men believed in them passionately and went on believing in them long after failure had come. They had color and dash, romance seemed to cling to them, and at bottom each man was essentially a romantic. That was their great handicap, for this was not going to be a romantic war and it would never be won by romantics.
The romantic in McClellan was buried under a layer of crisp, energetic efficiency. Called to Washington immediately after Bull Run and given command of all the troops in and around the capital, he seemed the very model of the businesslike, self-reliant administrator. He found the town overrun with men in uniform who drifted about the streets (and jammed the saloons) in aimless confusion, not knowing what they were up to or what was expected of them, conscious of the shame of panic and defeat. He detailed regular army soldiers to police the place, got the
wanderers back into camp, saw that the camps were properly laid out and intelligently managed, ironed out the kinks in the commissary system so that everyone got plenty to eat, and set up a regime that involved endless hours of drill. In short, he restored order, made the men feel like soldiers, and before long he instituted a series of grand reviews in which the new soldiers could look at themselves in the mass and could begin to realize that they were part of a powerful, disciplined, smoothly functioning army.
The transformation was taking place. The Bull Run fight had taken off a little of the pressure, and McClellan was doing what McDowell had never had a chance to do; he was creating an army, and it had a name, a name that would cast long shadows and stir great memories before the end came — the Army of the Potomac. More often, though, the newspapers spoke of it simply as “McClellan’s army,” and that was the way the men themselves thought of it. They were McClellan’s men, and in spirit most of them would continue to be that as long as they lived.
For McClellan had touched their spirits. To the men who had lived through Bull Run he brought back pride and self-respect. To the newcomers, who did not carry Bull Run in their memories, he gave the feeling that it was grand to be a soldier. To all he gave a sense of belonging to something big and powerful that was going according to plan.
The men did not set eyes on him very often, to be sure. Instead of living in camp he rented a large house in downtown Washington not far from the White House, and he lived in considerable splendor, giving elegant dinner parties for important people, his doors guarded by swanky regulars, with glittering staff officers and aides following him wherever he went. The average soldier saw him only at the big reviews, and at such times McClellan always made a dramatic entrance. There would be the great level field, long ranks of men in blue standing at attention (the men secretly proud of their ability to stand and march and look like real soldiers), carriages full of senators and diplomats and starchy womenfolk waiting on the far side of the field, officers with drawn swords poised immobile in front of their commands, everybody tense with expectancy. Then the jaunty little man on his big black horse would come galloping down the line, his escort trailing out after him, and the whole field would break out in a wild shout of enthusiasm … and all at once army life would be just as exciting and romantic and wonderful as it had seemed to be when one stood with raised hand before the mustering officer, and all the drudgery and annoyance of training camp would be forgotten.2
A Massachusetts recruit summed it up.
“The boys are happy as clams at high water,” he wrote to his family. They were being drilled hard, but somehow it seemed good: “I never done anything yet that I like so well as I do soldiering.” There was a bond between private soldier and commanding general, a bond that became almost tangible as the general rode down the lines: “He has got an eye like a hawk. I looked him right in the eye and he done the same by me. I was bound to see what he looked like and I think I would know him if I should see him again.” The general was “Our George” or “Little Mac,” and he would not put his boys into action until he was sure that everything would be all right with them: “He looked like a man that was not afraid of the cry On to Richmond.… The rank and file think he is just the man to lead us on to victory when he gets ready and not when Horace Greeley says to go. For my part I think he is just the man, and” — using a colloquialism that apparently expressed the ultimate — “the kind of a man that can keep a hotel.”3
Everybody was getting ready. Infantrymen were discovering the ins and outs of brigade and division drill, were learning that doing guard duty was not quite as much fun as they had expected it to be, and were beginning to realize that a great many volunteer officers were not up to their jobs; a regiment that had any regular officers would consider itself lucky, since the regulars knew how to make camp routine go more smoothly. Budding artillerists fired their guns in target practice and blinked in awe at the discovery that a gunner, if he looked closely, could see his missile from the moment it left the muzzle until it ended its flight. (A few were slightly sobered by the reflection that if you could do this you probably could see the enemy’s shells approaching as well, which would be pretty nerve-racking.) Green recruits trying to become cavalrymen complained that government-issue saddles, high before and high behind, gave a soldier a perch like a two-pronged fork astride a round stick; he couldn’t easily fall off, but he couldn’t exactly be said to be sitting on anything, either. The new troopers found that their horses caught onto the drill as fast as the men did. When the bugles sounded “March!” or “Halt!” or “Wheel!” most of the horses would respond without waiting for their riders to guide them.4
Even the drummer boys were practicing, working at mysteries known as the double and single drag, learning all of the irregular syncopated beats that carried orders to marching men; a crack regiment, it seemed, was one that could maneuver all over a parade ground without spoken orders, the commands being transmitted entirely by the drums. Precocious infants not yet old enough to shave, the drummers took great pride in their work. Long afterward one of them remembered it: “When a dozen or more of the lads, with their caps set saucily on the sides of their heads, led a regiment in a review with their get-out-of-the-way-Old-Dan-Tuckerish style of music, it made the men in the ranks step off as though they were bound for a Donnybrook Fair.”5
And if all of this made for the men a living, shifting panorama of bright color and taut anticipation, it is clear that it did the same for McClellan himself. The man had basic traits of the true romantic: the ability to see, each moment, the fine figure he must be cutting in other men’s eyes, and the imperative need to play his part in such a way that he himself can look on it with admiration. In his letters to his young wife (he had been married only a little more than a year) McClellan was forever reciting with a kind of bemused wonder the details of his own sudden rise to fame; inviting her to look, he could stand by her shoulder and look also.
“I find myself in a new and strange position here; President, cabinet, Gen. Scott and all deferring to me,” he would tell her. “I seem to have become the power of the land.… It seems to strike everybody that I am very young.… Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called on to save my country?”6
To save it singlehanded? Possibly. Washington was full of strange talk in that summer of 1861, and McClellan had been there less than a fortnight when he was hearing some unusual suggestions. He told his wife about them:
“I receive letter after letter, have conversation after conversation, calling on me to save the nation, alluding to the presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be united with you forever in heaven, I have no such aspiration. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved. I am not spoiled by my unexpected new position. I feel sure that God will give me the strength and wisdom to preserve this great nation; but I tell you, who share all my thoughts, that I have no selfish feeling in this matter.”7
Clearly enough, it was a magnificent and enchanting vision that was dancing before the young general’s eyes, and he was luxuriating in it as a tired man luxuriates in a warm scented bath. Yet if this romantic indulgence might in time narrow his field of vision and place limits on the things he might do, it was not at the moment keeping him from buckling down to a solid job of work. He was surrounding Washington with forts, he was training an army of high morale, and if he was at bottom a romantic he was at least a romantic of high administrative capacity.
This, unhappily, was a good deal more than could be said for the other principal in Scott’s team of lieutenants, Major General John Charles Frémont.
Frémont was a skyrocket; a man who rose fast, seeming to light all the sky, and then went plunging down into darkness. Right now he was on the way up, and giving off sparks, with the great darkness still ahead of him; but he had had his ups and downs before. As a dashing young lieutenant of topographical engineers in the 1840s, the son-in
-law of powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, he had led spectacular exploring sorties across the Far West and had become known all over America as “the Pathfinder.” The precise value of his explorations may have been open to some question, but his talents as a publicist were not; and if he did not actually find very many new paths through the West, he at least centered national attention on paths other people had found, and he and the Far West became famous together.
It appears that fame went to his head. In the Mexican War he got into California in time to have a hand in detaching that territory from Mexico, and he enjoyed brief glory as an empire-builder; then, when the army sent a full-fledged general out to California to take charge, Frémont refused to obey his orders, and the army cracked down hard. Frémont was recalled to Washington, court-martialed, and dismissed from the service. To rebuild his reputation he led an expedition that was to find a route for a railroad from St. Louis to San Francisco. He elected to march into the worst of the Colorado Rockies in the bitterest winter the West had known in years, lost more than a fourth of his men through cold and starvation, saw the expedition evaporate completely, and went on to California by himself over the well-traveled southern route — and on his arrival found that the new gold rush had made him a multimillionaire, pay dirt having been struck in quantity on a ranch he had bought a year or two earlier.
Then he became a senator, and in 1856 the new Republican party made him its first candidate for President, and the North throbbed to the drumbeat chant: Free soil, free men, Frémont! Clearly, he was a man the Republican administration had to reckon with, and he was one of the very first men to be commissioned as major general after Fort Sumter fell. (The date of the commission was extremely important, as far as rank was concerned, since a major general automatically outranked all other major generals whose commissions bore later dates than his.) When old General Harney was finally pulled out of St. Louis, Frémont seemed the obvious person to put in his place.
