by Larry Tagg
The Radicals changed their tactics. Now that the headquarters of the combined armies was in the War Department telegraph office and not in McClellan’s tent, they could organize the general’s failure from Washington. Lincoln’s secretary John Hay heard the whisperings from his desk. He wrote in his diary, “Gen. McC. is in danger. Not in front but in rear.”
The Radicals plotted to kill McClellan’s campaign by a thousand cuts. Wade and Chandler started in immediately. They met with Lincoln and demanded that he subtract Blenker’s division from McClellan’s army and march it across Virginia to join their man, John C. Frémont, newly in charge of the Mountain Department in western Virginia. Blenker’s division, a “foreign legion” of 10,000 European veterans, was McClellan’s favorite. “So far as ‘the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war’ were concerned,” he wrote, “it certainly outshone all the others.” Lincoln met with McClellan and told him that “he was most strongly pressed” to remove Blenker’s men, but assured the general he would not deprive him of his choice unit. “[Lincoln] suggested several reasons against the proposed removal of the division,” according to McClellan. “He assured me he knew this thing to be wrong.” Days later, however, McClellan received the following letter, a few hours before sailing:
MY DEAR SIR: This morning I felt constrained to order Blenker’s Division to Frémont; and I write this to assure you that I did so with great pain, understanding that you would wish it otherwise. If you could know the full pressure of the case, I am confident you would justify it—-even beyond a mere acknowledgment that the Commander-in-chief, may order what he pleases.
Yours very truly, A. Lincoln
Thus, as McClellan embarked his army for the decisive battle, his force was missing 10,000 men that he had counted on to spearhead the end of the rebellion. The general protested to Lincoln, dismayed that politics had been allowed to interfere with the crucial military campaign of the war. “[Lincoln] then assured me,” McClellan wrote, “that he would allow no other troops to be withdrawn from my command.”
Lincoln’s assurances, however, proved worthless. Only three days later, on April 3, the day after McClellan arrived on the Peninsula, he received a telegram withdrawing the Fort Monroe garrison, another 10,000 men, from his force. And this was only prelude, for the very next day, just as he was first bringing rebel troops under fire at Yorktown, another telegram informed McClellan of the deepest cut: “By direction of the president,” it said, “General McDowell’s army corps has been detached from the forces under your immediate command, and is ordered to report to the Secretary of War.” With this, McClellan learned that McDowell’s corps—his largest, 35,000 men strong— had been suddenly subtracted from his army. A week earlier, he had counted on 156,000 men for the campaign that would decide the war; now he would have to fight that fight with 100,000. This, for McClellan, was the bitter fruit of Lincoln’s first three weeks in command.
Lincoln, the lawyer-in-chief, the one man in the country most terrified of a rebel capture of Washington, had subtracted McDowell to guard the capital. He did so out of ignorance of McClellan’s provisions for its defense. Besides the 19,000-man garrison in the forts around the capital itself, the general had left 35,000 men in the Shenandoah Valley, 8,000 in Warrenton, and 10,000 at Manassas. This was “defense in depth”—that is, not all concentrated in one place, but thrown forward to expose a rebel attack and delay it long enough to marshal a counterstroke. But these soldiers were beyond Lincoln’s view. Neither did Lincoln understand that McClellan’s huge Union army on the outskirts of the rebel capital would itself make Washington safe. No rebel army could march toward the Potomac with disaster in its rear.
So little did Lincoln understand, in fact, that he and Stanton had sent for a military expert for advice. This was sixty-four-year-old philosopher-soldier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock. It was a strange choice. Hitchcock had been absorbed with his real love, which was writing books on alchemy and eccentric interpretations of the Gospels, since his retirement from the army seven years before. Stanton summoned Hitchcock from his home in St. Louis and on March 17 put him in charge of the newest of Lincoln’s growing list of advising councils. This was the Army Board, made up of the generals at the head of the Bureaus of the War Department—ordnance, commissary, quartermaster, paymaster, chief engineer, surgeon general, and adjutant general—bureaus that McClellan had called “miserable nests of petty intrigues.” Now, Hitchcock and the seven bureau chiefs of the Army Board would be added to the roster of Lincoln’s advisors, already crowded with the Committee on the Conduct of the War, General McClellan, the council of corps commanders in the Army of the Potomac, and the three political appointees—novice Generals Frémont, Banks, and Wadsworth—who commanded the armies defending Washington.
General James Wadsworth was not only newly in charge of Washington’s soldiers, he was newly a soldier himself—a white-haired, fifty-two-year-old gentleman farmer from New York who had left the plow to join McDowell’s staff only the previous summer. He had been installed in command of Washington because he was an abolitionist with connections to the Radical Republicans and because he had said wonderfully harsh things about McClellan in recent weeks. According to McClellan, “[Stanton] had spoken to me on the subject some days before, whereupon I objected to [Wadsworth’s] selection for the reason that Gen. Wadsworth was not a soldier by training. I said that one of the very best soldiers in the army was necessary for the command of Washington, which was next in importance to the command of the Army of the Potomac—an officer fully posted in all the details of the profession.” Stanton replied that Wadsworth had been selected to conciliate the agricultural interests of New York, and that there was no point in discussing it anyway because it was a fait accompli. McClellan was appalled by the choice. Wadsworth, he said, “was no general; he was a man of bad character and a pseudo-fanatic,” a “vile traitorous miscreant.”
With such bad blood between the two generals, it is not surprising that Wadsworth knew nothing of McClellan’s sophisticated design for Washington’s defense. McClellan had been so anxious to flee Washington, “that sink of iniquity,” that before he sailed to the Peninsula on April 1 he had not informed Wadsworth—or Lincoln, or Stanton—of his defensive arrangements. With a cavalier disregard for the President’s gnawing concern for the safety of the capital, and as an insult to all three leaders, he had seen fit only to send a copy of his defensive scheme to Hitchcock.
Hitchcock, however, had declined to inspect McClellan’s plans. According to McClellan, Hitchcock, “after glancing his eye over the list, observed that he was not the judge of what was required for defending the capital; that [my] position was such as to enable [me] to understand the subject much better than he did, and he presumed that if the force designated was in [my] judgment sufficient, nothing more would be required.” As a result, once the steamer Commodore puffed away with McClellan on it, no one in Washington knew the specifics of McClellan’s plans for the capital’s defense—in particular, of the importance of the troops posted in the approaches from Virginia.
General Wadsworth, in charge of Washington’s safety, knew only that he could count barely 19,000 poorly-equipped recruits in the camps around the capital, now that McCellan’s army was almost all gone to sea. Wadsworth concluded that McClellan had left Washington undefended—just as his Radical friends had suspected he might!—and came hurrying round to Stanton with the news. Stanton, who was as in the dark about McClellan’s arrangements as Wadsworth, hustled Wadsworth’s warning over to Hitchcock. Hitchcock, who had only days before signed off on McClellan’s troop count, now looked at it again and decided that McClellan had left Washington at risk. Wadsworth, meanwhile, rushed to the Committee for the Conduct of the War with the news that McClellan had not done his duty, and they were of course delighted. Stanton, Wadsworth, and the Committee converged on the White House to tell Lincoln that they—the lawyer, the farmer, and the congressmen, with their vast military expertise—had determined that W
ashington was in danger. Lincoln, who nursed a visceral fear for the safety of the capital and who already had grave doubts about the wisdom of McClellan’s Peninsula adventure, was easily convinced.
Thus, Lincoln, in a spasm of doubt and indecision, held back the 35,000 men of McDowell’s 1st Corps, who were just then preparing to board the transport ships to the Peninsula. And thus, McClellan, just as his guns were getting the range of the enemy on the Peninsula in what all expected to be the war’s decisive campaign, learned that more than one-third of his army had been made to disappear—not killed or captured by enemies in his front, but subtracted by Lincoln in the telegraph office.
Convinced that he had been stabbed in the back in Washington and was hopelessly outnumbered on the Peninsula, McClellan was now a beaten man. Without 55,000 men he had counted on before he sailed, and without the support of Lincoln, his hope of success for his campaign evaporated. He stormed and sputtered. “It is the most infamous thing that history has recorded,” he raged in a letter to his wife. He wrote to Lincoln, pleading, “I beg that you will reconsider the order detaching the first Corps from my command. In my deliberate judgment the success of our cause will be imperiled by so greatly reducing my force … .” But Lincoln was unmoved, and McClellan remained in shock over his smashed plans. “I know of no instance in military history where a general in the field has received such a discouraging blow,” he wrote. He fumed that he “had now only too good reason to feel assured that the administration, and especially the Secretary of War, were inimical to me and did not desire my success … .” The amateurs had deranged his plans when he was “too deeply committed to withdraw,” he said. He called Lincoln’s decision “a fatal error.” He wrote to his friend Samuel Barlow of the conspiracy in Washington and of “the stupidity and wickedness” of his enemies there, “a set of heartless villains.” Almost a week later, his bitterness toward Lincoln, Stanton, and their Radical councils was still brimming when he wrote to Ellen, with a hint of revenge at some future poll:
Don’t worry about the wretches—they have done nearly their worst & can’t do much more. I am sure that I will win in the end, in spite of all their rascality.
History will present a sad record of these traitors who are willing to sacrifice the country & army for personal spite & personal aims. The people will soon understand the whole matter & then woe betide the guilty ones.
According to one soldier, Lincoln’s popularity, already low with the Army of the Potomac, sank lower as the rumors spread from tent to tent:
[I]t was whispered that … sundry mischievous politicians in Washington had so influenced [Lincoln and Stanton] against General McClellan that they were doing everything in their power to destroy his plans and damage him in the eyes of the public. These reports had a very bad effect on the army, and more especially on its officers. They placed McClellan in the position of an injured man, with an army to fight in front of him and a worse enemy in his rear; and yet it did him no real good. Respect for the authorities at Washington was already too low in the Army of the Potomac, and reports like these were not calculated to promote that good understanding between the executive powers and our army so necessary to success.
In the eyes of the Democratic newspapers of the North, Lincoln had thrown off his conservative mask. He had wrecked McClellan’s plans, and was under the influence of the Radicals, who were jealous of the Democratic general’s success and eager to deal a death blow to his Peninsula campaign and his presidential hopes, no matter the cost to the Union. Even the moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly printed a rebuke: “It is impossible to exaggerate the mischief which has been done by division of counsels and civilian interference with military movements,” it said. General Heintzelman, certainly no friend of McClellan’s, called Lincoln’s withholding of McDowell’s corps “a great outrage.”
* * *
McClellan’s only consolation was that, just at that moment, with the rebels huddled in their trenches at Yorktown, he was ready to make the kind of war his whole military life had prepared him for. So upset by the sudden loss of his 1st Corps that he was unable to believe he still outnumbered the rebels five to one, he settled down to demonstrate the lessons he had learned in 1855 as an official observer at the siege of Sepastopol. There, the huge, fortified port city of Russia had fallen to the sheer weight of metal assembled by the more technically advanced British and French. McClellan now itched to reprise that performance in the mud of Virginia, and in the early days of April he started digging his trenches and inching forward his giant siege artillery. Lincoln was impatient at what he feared was a repeat of McClellan’s stall before Manassas, and he wrote to the general on April 6, “You now have over one hundred thousand troops… . I think you better break the enemy’s lines … at once. They will probably use time, as advantageously as you can.” After the betrayal of the last week, however, McClellan had broken charity with Lincoln, and he showed his spite in a letter to his wife: “The Presdt very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I had better break the enemy’s lines at once! I was much tempted to reply that he had better come & do it himself.”
McClellan’s go-slow instincts hardened in the next few days, as the nation shrank in revulsion at the news of the horrible bloodbath at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee on April 6 and 7, where as many people died in one battle as had died in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined. McClellan no doubt watched the newspapers with interest as General Ulysses Grant was pilloried for exposing his army and almost fired for his carelessness. It was an object lesson that confirmed McClellan in his cautious course. He was content to roll up his huge guns—13 inch seacoast mortars that weighed nine tons and lobbed 220-pound shells. Day after day, week after week during the soaking rains of April he hauled them forward. Old Man Blair was one Republican who broke ranks with Lincoln to applaud McClellan for his caution, writing the general, “If you can accomplish your object of reaching Richmond by a slower process than storming redoubts & batteries in earth works, the country will applaud the achievement which gives success to its arms, with greatest parsimony of the blood of its children.” Those children, the common soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, were certainly grateful to McClellan for his pains.
By May 5, the guns were in place and ready to make a historic roar that would be heard round the world. But the orange light of the rising sun, creeping over the Union siege artillery with their barrels loaded and lanyards taut, fell on empty rebel trenches. The rebels had left Yorktown overnight. Only a sharp rearguard action at Williamsburg slowed, very temporarily, their withdrawal up the Peninsula to within the sound of Richmond’s church bells. When the outskirts of the capital were reached the Confederate army, now in numbers nearly equal to McClellan’s, turned to face the Army of the Potomac.
* * *
The next two months were the rosiest of the entire war in the North. Complaints about the prairie president’s lack of ability were drowned by the flood tide of Union victories in the West in the spring of 1862. There, the Union armies and gunboat fleets had been winning battles since February, when the previously obscure General Grant captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. The forts were gateways to the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which flowed like major highways into the deep southern states; whole Union armies floated deep into the Confederacy. On the Mississippi River, New Orleans in the south was captured, then Memphis in the north. On the Atlantic coast, too, General Burnside had made a beachhead on the shores of North Carolina.
Northern editors outdid each other proclaiming an early victory to the war. The New York Times exclaimed “The End at Hand,” and underneath gushed, “The highest military authorities of our Government believe the Confederate rebellion to be hopelessly overthrown.” The New York Herald predicted the end of the war in a mere seventy-five days, the New York Tribune in sixty, the Brooklyn Eagle “within a month or two.” So complacent had become the general mood, in fact, that the Secretary of War disbanded the recr
uiting offices and suspended enlistments.
Democrats were delighted. Their generals were winning everywhere. Democrat General Henry Halleck presided over the victories in the West won by Democrat General Grant. (Grant would famously convert to Republicanism in time for his presidential run in 1868.) General Burnside, too, was a Democrat. And now George McClellan, the idol of the Democratic Party, was about the deliver the coup de grace at Richmond, and he would do it his way, entirely according to scientific military principles. His popularity rose higher than it had been since his celebrated strut into Washington the summer before. The Young Napoleon’s mighty army could now see the steeples of Richmond, and almost nobody had been killed. McClellan’s bloodless victories at Manassas and Yorktown, which had so frustrated the impatient Lincoln, were trumpeted as triumphs of modern warfare in the Democratic press. Harper’s Weekly praised McClellan, saying, “No General of modern times ever displayed more sagacity, courage, and, to use his own words, ‘adaptation of means to ends,’ than Major- General McClellan.” His war in the East was clean and civilized, certainly better than the awful gore of Shiloh. Now that reports were filtering through the lines that the Confederate government was evacuating its capital at Richmond, Northern editorials about Reconstruction popped up like wildflowers, urging McClellan’s Democratic policy that everything, including slavery, be returned to its pre-war condition. Meanwhile, McClellan was feeling his way up the Virginia peninsula toward Richmond, rolling forward his giant siege guns on railroad tracks.
Now was the time to bend every effort, strain every nerve to capture Richmond. Now, more than ever, unity of purpose was needed, directed by one controlling mind. In the first week of April, however, after Lincoln had held back McDowell’s corps from joining McClellan’s army, he had divided the Virginia theater into a confused patchwork of military departments with overlapping responsibilities, under six generals: Frémont in western Virginia, Banks in the Shenandoah Valley, McDowell at Fredericksburg, Wool at Fort Monroe, McClellan on the Peninsula, and Burnside on the North Carolina coast.
