Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  For Lincoln, the success of McClellan’s campaign was a matter of increasingly desperate importance. The radicals were clamoring for more drastic war measures, for an immediate emancipation of the slaves. With his party split and his prestige endangered, Lincoln sorely needed the justification of a great victory for the Army of the Potomac. The country, too, showed wild impatience—the impatience which hope and confidence engender. Stanton—presumably from motives of economy—had ordered recruiting discontinued; and this fact, together with the victories in the West and the fame of McClellan’s army, produced a feeling of optimism, and a belief that the war would be ended by midsummer. Late in April, the news of a great victory resounded from the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans, the chief commercial port of the South, had surrendered to an attacking squadron commanded by Flag Officer David G. Farragut. He was a Southerner, born in Tennessee. His wife was a Virginian, and at the outbreak of war he had been on duty at Norfolk, surrounded by secessionist influences. Farragut had served under the Union flag as long as General Scott, for he had gone to sea at the age of ten, and he was a veteran of over sixty when he had his first opportunity to distinguish himself. Commander David D. Porter accompanied the expedition with a fleet of mortar boats. Though a Northern man, Porter had been friendly with the secessionist politicians of Washington, and he was one of the naval officers on whom Gideon Welles had looked with suspicion in the spring of 1861. The capture of New Orleans brought both Farragut and Porter into prominence, and the country rang once more with the praise of wooden ships.

  The single flaw in the triumphant advance of the Union cause in the spring of 1862 was the delay of the Army of the Potomac before Yorktown. The main body of the Confederate army had had time to reach the Peninsula, and McClellan was confronted by a considerable force. To his embittered mind, the enemies at his back seemed scarcely less formidable. Three other Union generals were operating in Virginia outside McClellan’s control, responsible only to the Secretary of War: Frémont, in the Mountain Department; McDowell, whose corps had been transformed into a separate command, the Department of the Rappahannock; and Banks, for whom the Department of the Shenandoah had been created. As he brooded over his wrongs, McClellan was convinced that “the abolitionists and other scoundrels” were sacrificing the Army of the Potomac out of personal spite; and his dispatches cried without ceasing for more men and more guns. Franklin’s division was detached from McDowell’s command, and sent to the Peninsula. Before the reinforcements had disembarked, before McClellan’s bombardment had commenced, Yorktown fell into the possession of the Federal forces. The process was already familiar. To the surprise of McClellan, Joe Johnston had evacuated the city.

  The country rejoiced to learn that the Army of the Potomac was moving at last. After a bloody encounter at Williamsburg, it continued to advance. Federal gunboats and transports passed up the York River, and shiploads of forage, provisions and ammunition moved to McClellan’s base at White House Landing on the Pamunkey. Slowly and cautiously, the great army crawled forward through the mud. It was two weeks before it was encamped in the swamps of the Chickahominy River, eleven miles from Richmond. The health of the troops was reported to be good. Thoughtful persons might have paused over the news item that two rations of whisky and quinine were daily issued to the troops.

  Steamers from Fort Monroe were arriving at the Sixth Street wharf. Some brought men released from Richmond prisons on parole—happy men who were bound for home. Cheering the Stars and Stripes and singing patriotic songs, they marched to the Soldiers’ Retreat, the eating house erected at the depot. Other steamers carried quieter men from the army hospital at Yorktown. Most of the wounded had been taken to Northern cities. These were soldiers wasted by camp fever, by typhoid and consumption. Around their stretchers on the wharf hovered relatives and friends, as well as curious strangers and vendors of eggs and fruits, eager to profit from their necessity.

  At Shillington’s Book Store, Confederate bank notes taken at Bull Run were still on sale, and one of the Quaker guns from Centreville was exhibited under Hammack’s Restaurant at the Avenue and Fifteenth Street. The capital did not lack new trophies, those tangible souvenirs which lend reality to great events and put them within the grasp of common men. In Mr. Hood’s jewelry store on the Avenue was displayed a part of a steel vest which a Confederate captain had worn at Williamsburg. It was ironically described as bulletproof—the hole made by the fatal ball could be plainly seen. A sailor, John E. McKay, sold some broken scraps of wood and iron, and made such a good thing of it that he fell to treating his shipmates, and ended up in the guard-house. There was magic in the rubbish, for it was all that remained of the dreaded Merrimac. The rebels had abandoned Norfolk, and the ironclad, left without a harbor, had been blown up by her own men.

  Released from the stalemate in Hampton Roads, Federal gunboats steamed up the James River. Only the Chickahominy and the Confederate forces lay between the Army of the Potomac and Richmond. On the Rappahannock, across from Fredericksburg, McDowell awaited his orders to march to McClellan’s assistance. By any test of lines drawn on a military map, Richmond seemed doomed to fall. But in the Federal plans, there was a weak spot—the capital of the Union. It was apprehensive, it was endowed with a profound symbolical importance, and for generalissimos it had only two civilians.

  Stonewall Jackson’s band of rebels in the Valley was the only enemy force in the vicinity of the capital; but it was one of Stanton’s more subtle criticisms of McClellan that, though the Army of the Potomac threatened Richmond, he feared the Confederates might feel free to march in force on Washington. In April, he had made a little experiment. Over Wadsworth’s protests, he had insisted on assuming an attack on the capital, and directing the troops within the city limits to assemble at the Chain Bridge and the Aqueduct. About three hours after the command was given, four thousand men had gathered, some with inadequate ammunition, some with no ammunition at all.

  Jackson, the War Office learned, had received large reinforcements. His movements were all the more alarming because they were mysterious. There were contradictory stories of his whereabouts and intentions. Frémont, west of the Valley, reported that Jackson was threatening a part of his force—the Federals were actually attacked and driven back. McDowell heard that Jackson might be expected in his front. Stanton was convinced that, wherever Jackson might be, he was on his way to the capital. “Washington is the only object now worth a desperate throw,” the War Secretary wrote Banks. Mulling over his reports, Mr. Stanton came to the conclusion that Jackson was withdrawing from the Valley to the south. He detached a division from Banks’s command, and hurried it to the support of McDowell, who was ordered to join McClellan in reducing Richmond. With McDowell’s advancing army interposed between Washington and the Confederates, the strategy of the War Department seemed to leave nothing to be desired; and it appeared—as Stanton must have suspected all along—that the business of generals was one that a pair of industrious lawyers could master in no time. That General Banks had been left a single division with which to defend the Valley was a source of anxiety only to General Banks.

  In attempting to outguess Jackson, Mr. Stanton had drawn all the wrong conclusions. The rebel general was not moving south. With the handles of their frying pans stuck in their gun barrels, his ragged troops traveled as fast and light as foxes. Jackson was a black-bearded Presbyterian ascetic who packed his haversack with a supply of lemons and three books—the Bible, Webster’s Dictionary and Napoleon’s Maxims of War. With all his fanatical soul, he hated Yankees, and he was a bold and brilliant soldier. Doubling back from the mountains west of the Valley with a speed undreamed of by the Federals, Jackson swept through Front Royal. On Saturday evening, May 24, the President and the War Secretary came back from a pleasant farewell visit to McDowell’s army, to find the telegraph instruments snapping dots and dashes of alarm. Sunday morning brought news that Banks had been routed at Winchester. Though Jackson would not mail a letter so that it traveled o
n the Lord’s Day, he did not let Sabbatarian scruples interfere with fighting. Often in the saddle he raised his face to his God (who also hated Yankees) to implore guidance in his campaign. Divine interposition could scarcely have scattered the Federal forces more perfectly to Jackson’s advantage than had those amateurs of war, Mr. Stanton and Mr. Lincoln.

  With the rebels pressing hard behind them, the soldiers of Banks’s solitary division fled across the upper Potomac. There was no longer any mystery about Stonewall Jackson’s whereabouts. He was within easy reach of the capital. Every man that could be spared from Washington and Baltimore was rushed to Harper’s Ferry; and Stanton—as nervous, General Wadsworth said, as an old woman—telegraphed appeals for help to the Northern States. The newsboys’ treble cry, “Washington in danger!” rang through the cities of the Union. The whole Confederate army was reported to be advancing on the Potomac. Amid general apprehension that senators and representatives were about to be seized as prisoners of war, militia and home guard regiments hurried down to the rescue.

  They had come on a fruitless errand. Jackson did not attempt to cross the Potomac. The alarm fell flat, as the capital learned that the rebels were swiftly retreating up the Valley. The “big scare” was over, but Jackson had accomplished his object. McDowell’s advance on Richmond had been promptly suspended. Military opinion was forced to yield to the Government’s anxiety for the capital. McDowell protested as vehemently as McClellan, but one of his divisions was ordered to Washington, and another to the Valley. Without ever confronting McDowell’s army—that army which might have turned the tide at Richmond—Jackson had effectively dispursed it. For some time, the hope persisted in the Union that his daring raid had led him into a trap, and that his army would be destroyed by the forces sent to intercept it. Slipping between the Federal armies at Strasburg, Jackson executed a successful retreat, winning two more victories at Cross Keys and Port Republic before he joined the army before Richmond.

  Meantime, from McClellan’s forces straddling the Chickahominy, came the bloody news of Fair Oaks. It was hailed in Northern newspapers as a great Union victory, but the tale of the losses was long and sorry. In the lobby of Willard’s, Zach Chandler was drunk—“a bad habit,” wrote Attorney General Bates, “that has lately crept upon him“—and abused McClellan before the crowd, calling him a liar and a coward. Though the radicals raged, the country had not lost confidence. The Federals had made a hard and gallant fight. After the battle, the rebels were said to have retired “in a sort of Bull Run panic.” Joe Johnston had been badly wounded. The Army of the Potomac was only five miles from Richmond. Nerved by the strong excitement of war, the people of the Union resolutely faced the casualties and delays, and looked forward to the fall of the Confederate capital.

  More troops were sent to McClellan—another fine division of McDowell’s corps and ten picked regiments from Fort Monroe, as well as a number of new regiments. The June days lengthened, but there was silence on the Virginia Peninsula. Rumors circulated in Washington that Richmond had been captured, and Jeff Davis had committed suicide. The only reliable news was borne by the hospital ships, discharging their cargoes of fevered men from the Chickahominy swamps. Several excursion parties from the capital had visited White House Landing on the Pamunkey. McClellan had received Secretaries Seward, Welles and Bates, Commander Dahlgren, Mrs. Frederick Seward, the wife and daughter of Admiral Goldsborough and other ladies, who had taken a pleasant cruise on the steamboat, City of Baltimore, accompanied by the caterer Wormley and his assistants. The general had had ambulances harnessed up to drive them around the camps, and a hospital nurse wrote home about the visits of ladies “in silks and perfumes and lilac kid gloves.” In late June, however, after greeting several groups of sight-seeing politicians, McClellan forbade a party of congressmen to visit his front lines, and they returned to spread an evil report of the general and all his works. Washington was excited by a rumor of heavy fighting on the Peninsula, of a bad reverse for McClellan. The Star traced the story, not to the usual secessionist inspiration, but to an employee of the Capitol, who had it on the authority of members of Congress. This mischievous report had, in the Star’s opinion, “been set afloat in a spirit of revenge by some of the junketing marplots who were so deservedly set to the right about by General McClellan, on their endeavor to penetrate to his front, on their late visit to the Peninsula.”

  Only a few days later, the noise of battle came at last from the neighborhood of Richmond. Through the roar of the cannonade sounded the obscure names of little, sleepy, fever-ridden places. Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, Savage’s Station, White Oak Swamp stood blood-spattered in the headlines; and men tried to divine from the ambiguous and censored stories what new approach to Richmond had dictated this series of engagements. Three days of silence followed. When the news of Malvern Hill broke the suspense, and it was learned that the base of the Army of the Potomac had been changed from the Pamunkey to Harrison’s Landing on the James, there could no longer be any doubt that McClellan’s movement had been a retreat. In vain, the press protested that the battles of the Seven Days had been Union victories, and that a removal to the line of the James had been accomplished by the most masterly strategy. Marking the places on their big war maps, the people of the Union could plainly see that Harrison’s Landing was nearly twenty-five miles from Richmond; and, at last, after the strong hope that had survived the delays and the terrible waste of men, despondency spread through the country like a sickness.

  In the second summer of the war, the Union again faced disaster. Recruiting, discontinued by Mr. Stanton in April, had been resumed in June; but the failure on the Virginia Peninsula, startling the Government out of its satisfaction with an army of half a million men, made a new call for troops imperative. During the uncertainty of the Seven Days, the necessity was indirectly presented to the country. Mr. Seward secretly arranged with the governors of the Northern States to request the President to make the call, and in compliance with this inspired demand, Mr. Lincoln asked for three hundred thousand men. The country received the proclamation staunchly, if without enthusiasm. To attract recruits, cash bounties were offered, States and localities chipping in to increase the premiums.

  In his personal campaign against McClellan, Stanton had long since succeeded in enlisting the full co-operation of Chase. In some measure, he had influenced all the Cabinet members against the general, who had, Welles remarked, “failings enough of his own to bear without the addition of Stanton’s enmity to his own infirmities.” To McClellan himself, however, the War Secretary made many professions of devotion, and after the Seven Days he wrote him letters that were fulsome with love and loyalty. No man, he wrote, ever had a truer friend than he had been to McClellan; the general was seldom absent from his thoughts, and he would make any sacrifice to aid him. When General Marcy came up from Harrison’s Landing, Stanton invited him into his private office, put his hand on his knee and assured him, as a proof of his desire to serve McClellan, that he “would be willing to lay down naked in the gutter and allow him to stand upon my body for hours.”

  If he hoped to allay McClellan’s resentment, Stanton was mistaken in his man. In the general’s eyes, he was “the vilest man,” “the most unmitigated scoundrel,” and “the most depraved hypocrite and villain.” McClellan wrote his wife: “I think that (I do not wish to be irreverent) had he lived in the time of the Savior, Judas Iscariot would have remained a respected member of the fraternity of the Apostles, and that the magnificent treachery and rascality of E. M. Stanton would have caused Judas to have raised his arms in holy horror. . . .”

  While his superlatives were reserved for Stanton, McClellan raged with scarcely less fury against the rest of “those hounds in Washington.” In his grandiose self-justification, and his ideas of persecution, he had become almost irrational, and the terrible Seven Days had driven him to the verge of an emotional breakdown. After Gaines’s Mill, he had sent Stanton an agitated dispatch, charging his defeat to
the Government because it had not sustained him. “If I save this army now,” he wrote in conclusion, “I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” McClellan knew that these were unforgivable words—he lashed out hysterically, too far gone to care for the consequences. It happened, however, that Stanton did not read the accusation. The dispatch fell under the horrified eye of Colonel E. S. Sanford, who took it upon himself to delete the sentences, thus turning the censorship on Stanton.

  When the troubled President went down with Stanton to Harrison’s Landing, there was little to reassure him in McClellan’s state of mind. In his desperate situation, the general had found time to concern himself with politics. He had written a long letter advising Mr. Lincoln on his duties—especially, the avoidance of any pronouncement against slavery—and, with incomparable brass, he handed this to the President, who read it and remarked that he was obliged to him.