Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  As Vice-President, Alec Stephens had no more day-by-day responsibilities than any other American who occupies that office. Yet he represented something—if nothing more, that part of the South which had believed most fervently in states’ rights and a simple pastoral society—and he was becoming more and more the confidant for people who were vigorously in opposition to everything the administration was doing. Robert Toombs, surly as a bereaved bear, was writing to him from Camp Pine Creek, near Fairfax Courthouse, complaining that Joe Johnston was “a poor devil, small, arbitrary and inefficient” and by implication denouncing Mr. Davis for keeping such a man in power. The trouble, Toombs believed, was West Point, where both Mr. Davis and General Johnston had been educated, an institution whose graduates seemed unable to appreciate military capacity in those who had merely been to the United States Senate.

  “The army is dying,” wrote Toombs. “I don’t mean the poor fellows who go under the soil on the roadside, but the army as an army is dying and it will not survive the winter. Set this down in your book, and set down opposite to it its epitaph, ‘died of West Point.’ We have patched a new government with old cloth, we have tied the living to the dead … we are lying down here rotting.”

  From another correspondent in the same army camp, Thomas W. Thomas, Stephens got even bitterer words. Less than a month before the election in which Davis and Stephens were running together as a ticket, Thomas was telling Stephens: “All governments are humbugs and the Confederate government is not an exception. Its President this day is the prince of humbugs and yet his nomination for the first permanent presidency meets with universal acceptance, and yet I do know that he possesses not a single qualification for the place save integrity.… Imbecility, ignorance and awkwardness mark every feature of his management of this army. He torments us, makes us sick and kills us by appointing worthless place-hunters to transact business for us on which depends our health, efficiency and even our lives.… He is king, and here where we are fighting to maintain the last vestige of republicanism on earth we bow down to him with more than eastern devotion”12

  What Thomas Thomas might think of the administration in the fall of 1861 would not be worth recording, except for its revelation of the kind of talk which Mr. Davis’s Vice-President and running mate was willing to listen to at the very moment when the administration was asking election for a six-year term. Mary Boykin Chesnut, mistress of a great South Carolina estate and wife of one of President Davis’s intimate associates, wrote that “there is a perfect magazine of discord and discontent in that Cabinet; only wants a hand to apply the torch and up they go.”13 September had hardly begun before Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory was noting that “there was an opposition in Congress to the Administration”; Davis agreed with him, although Benjamin thought the case was not that bad. Thomas Bragg, the administration’s new attorney general, felt that the governors from the deep South were “giving trouble about troops and not acting in harmony with the Administration,” and he believed that the situation was going to get worse.14

  Part of this, to be sure, represented little more than the growing pains of a new government whose leaders were unhappily discovering that it was possible to be sorely vexed by their own friends as well as by Yankees. But more of it came out of a dawning realization that the first summer of the war, even though it had been marked by glorious victories, had not in fact been going very well. The blockade was beginning to hurt, and the ardent recruits who could not be armed were impatient witnesses to the pain; and the Southern coast lay all but naked to the gathering Federal fleets. The North was settling down for a long pull, and although it had not yet mustered its power it had already won the border, from Virginia all the way to Kansas. The offensives that lay just ahead would be conducted by Federals, not by Confederates, and the more a man knew about Confederate strength the less confident he was that these offensives could be beaten back. To the average Southerner the war had hardly begun, but the leaders could see ominous signs in the sky. Time was passing, and it was working for the wrong side.

  The editor of the Richmond Whig darkly noted that “our past inaction, whether constrained or voluntary, by enabling the enemy to organize his whole strength, will render necessary a vast deal of terrible fighting on our side, to battle his assaults and make good our independence.” The Daily Examiner called attention to the fact that “the peace party of the North, like the Union party of the South, has entirely disappeared,” and predicted that unless the Southern government could place the army on a completely new footing, “its chance next year will be bad.”15 President Davis closed a gloomy letter to General G. W. Smith with the cry: “Oh, that we had plenty of arms and a short time to raise the men to use them.”16

  Underlying everything, perhaps, there was an uneasy feeling that the war was threatening to take the South where the South did not want to go. The unhappiness of the men who were writing such angry letters to Alexander Stephens was symptomatic. Secession had been a valiant attempt to preserve not merely a fragment of the past but a concept of a society wherein the individual was everything and the government was next to nothing. This concept had a fatal limitation: it based a noble ideal of freedom upon a belief in slavery. In a short war, in which hot courage swept everything before it, this crippling contradiction might be evaded. It would have to be faced squarely in a long war.

  2: Struggle for Power

  When George B. McClellan reached Washington on the afternoon of July 26 to take command of the capital and its army, he was the living symbol of the Northern demand for speedy action. He may not consciously have meant to be anything of the kind, and in the end the role was a little too heavy for him, but that was how it was in the beginning. He was the North’s first great hero, and for a little while he made the sky look brighter.

  McClellan was a perfectionist, driven by an authentic vision and also by an ambition that soared on an updraft of public acclaim. He was a man who had great talents; he knew that he had them and he proposed to use them to the fullest, and at first he was in an immense hurry. During the year that lay just ahead he would finally come to seem the most maddeningly deliberate of men, but in the beginning he was impatient—impatient with incompetence, with pomposity and its fumbling ineptitudes, with the techniques of delay. He knew what was wrong with the Federal war effort and he knew how to set it right, and neither the President, the general-in-chief nor anyone else could stand in his way. To the restless men who wanted the rebellion put down at the earliest possible moment McClellan briefly appeared to be the very embodiment of the spirit that would win the war.

  It fitted neatly with his position as national hero. He reached the capital when the military relics of the Bull Run disaster were still being collected and sorted out, and he brought with him the record of victory in the western Virginia mountains—the proof that Northern soldiers could beat Southern soldiers if they were just led by the right man. He had a cool self-assurance, a winning manner, and a jaunty readiness to accept unlimited responsibility, and to a capital and a nation grown disillusioned with militiamen he seemed to be all soldier. His first steps were to sweep the stragglers off the streets, to police the barrooms, to get the innumerable stray officers back on duty, and to create an organization which looked like business. He not only made the capital safe; he made it look and feel safe, and when he rode about the camps on his business he was greeted by cheers.

  On July 27 McClellan was formally welcomed by the President and was invited to come back to the White House in the afternoon and meet the cabinet. This was somewhat displeasing to General Scott, who felt that this new commander ought to stay within prescribed channels and approach the Chief Executive only through the commanding general, but after touring the city, making note of its defenseless condition and remarking that drunken soldiers and officers made the downtown section “a perfect pandemonium,” McClellan shook hands with the top brass and, in the evening wrote to his wife to tell her all about it. Apparently the experience
had been somewhat dazzling.

  “I find myself in a new and strange position here: President, cabinet, General Scott and all deferring to me,” he wrote. “By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that was I to win one whole success now I could become dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial! I see already the main causes of our recent failure.”1

  For a man who had been in town hardly more than twenty-four hours these were strong words; yet it is easy to see how McClellan came to write them. He had become the power of the land, and everybody was deferring to him. He had come on the scene at that magical moment (which, for an ambitious man, may lead either to apotheosis or to downfall) when people long so desperately for a miracle worker that they take their appointed hero on faith, so that for a time he can do nothing wrong and can have, quite literally, anything he wants. All of the deep determination to wipe out the shame of Bull Run and go on to victory was expressing itself just now in the feeling toward McClellan. As far as Washington could speak for the country, the nation was putting itself unreservedly in his hands, and McClellan could not help knowing it … nor could he help being affected by the knowledge.

  On August 2 he wrote to his wife full of confidence. He had just given the President “a carefully considered plan for conducting the war on a grand scale,” and he went on: “I shall carry this thing on en grand and crush the Rebels in one campaign. I flatter myself that Beauregard has gained his last victory. We need success and must have it. I will leave nothing undone to gain it.” But he must have a free hand: “Gen. Scott has been trying to work a traverse to have Emory made Inspector General of my army and of the army. I respectfully declined the favor and perhaps disgusted the old man.… He cannot long retain command I think—when he is retired I am sure to succeed him, unless in the mean time I lose a battle—which I do not expect to do.”2

  He had been in Washington no more than one week, and not for two more days would he even be ready to organize the regiments of his army into brigades; yet already he was fiercely possessive regarding that army, and he was looking ahead to the day when Scott would be removed from his path and he himself would be general-in-chief. If this was largely due to the simple fact that he had a good professional’s pride in his job and resented anything that might delay him in its performance, it might have been heightened just a little by the kind of talk that was being poured into his ears. The attention he was getting was enough to test any man’s poise.

  On the night of August 4 there was a state dinner at the White House, given in honor of Prince Napoleon of France, who had come over to have a look at America and at the war. McClellan and Scott entered together, Scott leaning on McClellan’s arm—swollen, gouty age, stumping along with vigorous, handsome young manhood—and McClellan felt correctly that “many marked the contrast.” At the dinner table a lieutenant colonel on Prince Napoleon’s staff, Camille Ferri Pisani, found himself seated between McClellan and the British minister, Lord Lyons. The officer talked with McClellan at some length; then, during a lull in the conversation, Lord Lyons asked him: “You are aware that you are talking with the next President of the United States?” Ferri Pisani repeated the remark to McClellan, who “answered with a fine, modest and pleasant smile.”3

  When a newcomer in Washington finds, after no more than ten days on the job, that he is being spoken of casually as the next President, his self-esteem is apt to grow beyond manageable proportions. Yet it seems clear that at this time what was driving McClellan was chiefly an intense desire to get on with the job. In his memorandum to the President, written on the day of that White House dinner, McClellan had recognized that this war was not going to be like other wars, in which the object usually was “to conquer a peace and make a treaty on advantageous terms.” There could be no treaty here: what was necessary was not merely to beat the enemy in the field but “to display such an overwhelming strength as will convince all our antagonists, especially those of the governing aristocratic classes, of the utter impossibility of resistance.” The contest “began with a class; now it is with a people,” and only decisive military success could settle things. McClellan urged a comprehensive war plan: tighten the blockade, open the Mississippi, invade eastern Tennessee, establish a force of 38,000 men to protect the upper Potomac, the line of the Baltimore & Ohio and the capital itself, and then form a field army of 225,000 men to smash Confederate strength in Virginia and roll on “into the heart of the enemy’s country, and crush out the rebellion at its very heart.” Possibly a smaller force could do the job, but speed was essential; “the question to be decided is simply this: shall we crush the rebellion at one blow, terminate the war in one campaign, or shall we leave it for a legacy to our descendants?”4

  In a Washington which had come increasingly to feel that General Scott’s famous Anaconda Plan represented an inert defensive policy and foreshadowed an unendurably long war fought at a leisurely pace, this sort of talk was like a breath of fresh air. Crusty Gideon Welles summed up Scott’s policy by saying that the old lieutenant general wanted only to enforce “non-intercourse with the insurgents, shut them out from the world by blockade and military frontier lines, but not to invade their territory,” and he felt that this was unwise for the country.5 He noticed, as did others, that Secretary Seward, still active as a policy-maker, quickly transferred his support from Scott to McClellan. The two men conferred almost daily, and it presently developed that Seward knew more about McClellan’s plans and his disposition of troops than Scott himself knew. If, in his memorandum to Lincoln, McClellan had stepped far out of his sphere as army commander to outline grand strategy for the entire nation, he was unquestionably getting Seward’s energetic support.

  On August 8, McClellan wrote a letter to his wife that showed how things were going: “Rose early today (having retired at three a.m.) and was pestered to death with senators, etc, and a row with General Scott until about four o’clock; then crossed the river and rode beyond and along the line of pickets for some distance. Came back and had a long interview with Seward about my ‘pronunciamento’ against General Scott’s policy.… How does he (Seward) think that I can save this country when stopped by General Scott—I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor! He cannot or will not comprehend the condition in which we are placed and is unequal to the emergency. If he cannot be taken out of my path I will not retain my position but will resign and let the admin. take care of itself.”6

  The row with Scott grew out of a letter which McClellan had that same day sent to the general-in-chief, saying that military intelligence indicated a threatened offensive by Beauregard, that Washington was woefully insecure, and that it was necessary to reinforce Washington at once to a strength of at least 100,000 men “before attending to any other point.” Scott became indignant, telling Secretary of War Cameron that he had been unable to get McClellan to discuss the matter in person, that he himself did not think Washington was in any danger at all, and that he was tired of being bypassed and overridden by his junior—as a result of which, Scott urged that the President “allow me to be placed on the officers’ retired list, and then quietly to lay myself up—probably forever—somewhere in or about New York.”7 President Lincoln intervened, and at his request McClellan withdrew the letter, “with the most profound assurance for General Scott and yourself,” but the old general was not appeased. He refused to withdraw his own letter, asserting that McClellan persisted in discussing with various members of the cabinet matters that he should properly be discussing with the general-in-chief, and adding: “With such supports on his part, it would be as idle for me as it would be against the dignity of my years, to be filing daily complaints against an ambitious junior who, independent of the extrinsic advantages alluded to, has unquestionably very high qualifications for military command.”8

  The pace was getting faster. On the same day that he withd
rew the offending letter, McClellan wrote to his wife: “Gen. Scott is the great obstacle. He will not comprehend the danger. I have to fight my way against him. Tomorrow the question will probably be decided by giving me absolute control independently of him. I suppose it will result in enmity on his part against me; but I have no choice. The people call upon me to save the country. I must save it, and cannot respect anything that is in the way. 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. I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands. I have not sought it. I know how weak I am, but I know that I mean to do right, and I believe that God will help me and give me the wisdom I do not possess. Pray for me, that I may be able to accomplish my task, the greatest, perhaps, that any poor, weak mortal ever had to do.”9