Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  The attorney general was not alone in feeling that Mr. Lincoln was carrying a heavy load. Some weeks earlier Mr. Russell of the London Times had gained the same impression. Mr. Russell went around one evening to see General McClellan and was told that the general, being tired, had gone to bed and would see no one; he learned that a night or two before this the same message had been given to the President, who had dropped in to discuss the war with his general-in-chief, and when he reflected on the load the President was carrying the newspaperman saw something both ludicrous and pathetic in the man’s plight. “This poor President!” he mused. “He is to be pitied; surrounded by such scenes, and trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare, big guns, the movements of troops, military maps, reconnaissances, occupations, interior and exterior lines, and all the technical details of the art of slaying.” Mr. Lincoln, he reflected, was compelled to run “from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports, recommendations, sometimes good-humored, never angry, occasionally dejected, and always a little fussy.” It involved a great deal of lost motion, and at times the President seemed a figure of fun, but it occurred to Mr. Russell that there had been Presidents who looked more dignified but somehow accomplished a good deal less.3

  The war was moving, and Mr. Lincoln felt that the men whom he had appointed to direct it ought to be moving with it. This they were not doing. General McClellan could hardly be blamed for contracting typhoid fever, but the fact remained that he had been general-in-chief for two months and the Federal war effort was still going by piecemeal. In Missouri, General Halleck was methodically restoring order to the administrative chaos left by General Frémont, but if he had any plans for waging vigorous war no one knew what they were, least of all General Buell, who commanded in Kentucky and who would inevitably be concerned in any offensive General Halleck might undertake. General Buell, in his turn, was as busy as a man could be making preparations, but he did not seem ready to do anything and neither Mr. Lincoln nor McClellan himself had been able to persuade him that there was any merit in the plan to invade eastern Tennessee. Almost desperately, Mr. Lincoln had written to Halleck and Buell, asking them if they were “in concert”; each man had replied, in effect, that he had no idea what the other man was doing. General Buell added that he supposed General McClellan would look after all of this, and General Halleck warned the President that “too much haste will ruin everything”; and Mr. Lincoln found as the New Year began that he was running three separate wars—in Missouri, in Kentucky, and in Virginia—and that there was no apparent connection between any two of the three.4

  Missouri and Kentucky were a long way off, to be sure, but Virginia was right under the President’s eyes. It was the showcase, watched by Congress and the press and the country, and although the Army of the Potomac had grown large and had begun to look and feel like a real army, displaying excellent drill and high morale in an endless series of colorful reviews, the fact remained that it was not actually doing anything. The worst part of this was that although the army was inactive a good charter for action seemed to exist, and action by this charter had been promised. The promise, unhappily, had never been fulfilled.

  Early in November, General McClellan had assured Secretary Chase that he planned a bold swift movement. He would (he said) move 50,000 men to Urbanna, a little town near the mouth of the Rappahannock River some fifty miles east of Richmond. Once this advance was made, the general went on, he would send 50,000 more men to the same place, and with the two forces combined he would march west and capture Richmond before the Confederate Army around Manassas could get back to defend the place. Inasmuch as Mr. Chase was Secretary of the Treasury and the financial problem was massive, General McClellan asked how soon this advance ought to be made. Chase told him that “I could get along under existing arrangements until about the middle of February,” and McClellan assured him that there was no problem; the whole thing would be done by February 1.

  This was not just a scheme airily expounded to soothe a cabinet minister. Early in December, McClellan discussed the project soberly with Brigadier General J. G. Barnard, chief of engineers, and Barnard offered a couple of ideas for his consideration. It would take a good deal of time, said Barnard, to move the big army down the Chesapeake Bay by water, and Joe Johnston might very well slip in and capture Washington while the move was being made. Since Washington must be protected no matter what happened, it would thus be necessary to leave at least 100,000 men in the lines around the capital. Furthermore, this water-borne campaign against Richmond necessarily involved as a first step the capture of Norfolk. If McClellan was going to move via Urbanna the operation against Norfolk should be begun at once.

  … thus General Barnard. The whole business was most interesting, but the fact remained that nothing whatever had come of any of it. What McClellan had said would be done by February 1 was not being done and nobody was preparing to do it, and it was beginning to be clear that it was not just the attack of typhoid fever—which, fortunately, was rather a mild case—that was causing the delay.5

  There were men in Congress who were starting to complain bitterly, and they were men to whom a Republican President was obliged to listen. The Army was immobilized, these men were saying, because the men who could order it to move did not have their hearts in their work. The professional leadership of the Army must be at fault. In the Senate, Lyman Trumbull opposed a bill to increase the number of cadets at West Point, asserting bluntly: “I believe that it is owing to the West Point Academy that this war has languished as it has,” and in the House, Owen Lovejoy cried that “we are afraid that we shall hurt somebody if we fight; that we shall get these rebels and traitors so exasperated that they will not return to their loyalty.”6 It was of course true that Mr. Lovejoy was a whole-souled abolitionist, and hence in a minority, but it was also true that more and more men were beginning to value zeal for the cause above professional competence. (The Senate by a vote of 25 to 12 killed the bill to enlarge the cadet corps.) Furthermore, the demand for hard blows struck quickly and vigorously was increasingly being coupled with a demand that the war be directed against slavery as well as against disunion. Grim Thaddeus Stevens, Republican leader in the House, called on the administration to recognize the magnitude of the crisis and to realize that “this is an internecine war in which one party or the other must be reduced to hopeless feebleness.” The Federal power could never win such a war, he declared, until it got a revolutionary determination inspired by “the grand idea of liberty, equality and the rights of man.” As things stood, “we feel that while we are fighting for a compact we are fighting to rivet still stronger the chains of slavery.” Give to each general, he urged, a sword for one hand and “the book of freedom” for the other, and the army would soon “sweep despotism and rebellion from every corner of this continent.”7

  The President still saw the war as a fight to restore the Union, and he wanted to keep it that way. The most important fact about such a war, however, was that it had to be won, and the President was being forced to see that it had better be won quickly. If the professionals could do this for him, well and good. If they could not, men like Stevens were giving clear warning that the remorseless revolutionary struggle (against which Lincoln had warned, in his message to Congress) would soon become a reality. The professional might indeed find the book of freedom a troublesome bit of baggage, but it would be thrust into his hand if he did not win without it. Abraham Lincoln knew no more of military matters than any other small-town lawyer, and his efforts to educate himself were (as Mr. Russell had observed) both frantic and ungainly; but he could see that he would win no war unless the massive power of the Federal government could be brought to the points of contact and unflinchingly applied, and early in January he tried to get some action.

  McClellan was sick and could not be consulted. The President had written to Halleck and Buell, urging that they join hands and break Sidney Johnston’s line, getting in return from each man the bland
confession that there were not even the haziest of plans for co-operation. Halleck went so far as to read the President a little lecture on the military art, pointing out that if he and Buell tried to mount simultaneous offensives they would simply be operating on exterior lines against a centrally placed enemy, a thing which “is condemned by every military authority I have ever read.” On this letter the President wrote: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”8

  What followed was both pointless and odd, testifying to nothing except the President’s desperation.

  On the night of January 10, Mr. Lincoln held a White House meeting, talking to General Irvin McDowell, who in a way was McClellan’s second-in-command in the Army of the Potomac, and to General William B. Franklin, a sober regular who commanded one of the divisions in that army; inviting also Secretary Seward, Secretary Chase, and the Assistant Secretary of War, Mr. Thomas Scott. Mr. Lincoln bluntly admitted that he had to do something—he at least had to talk to somebody—and he remarked quaintly that if General McClellan, sick or well, did not plan to use the army right away he would like to borrow it, provided he could find out what ought to be done with it. The two generals, subordinates of the absent McClellan but answerable also to the President, seem to have been more or less embarrassed: understandably enough, since in the history of the Republic no White House conference quite like this one was ever held, before or since.

  They made constrained suggestions: flank Joe Johnston out of Manassas, take the army down to York River to move on Richmond direct, organize the troops into regular army corps for better ease of movement, assemble a siege train, get water transportation lined up, and so on; and the Quartermaster Corps was asked how long it would take to get the steamboats ready. (Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs reported that it would take quite a time—four to six weeks, at the least.) Mr. Seward remarked that the important thing was to win a victory, and a victory at Manassas would be just as good as one on York River; and after this had gone on through three meetings McClellan himself got wind of it, found that he was well enough to attend conferences, and showed up at last, pale, still rather weak, full of dignity and reserve, casting a spell on his subordinates. Mr. Lincoln said that if the general-in-chief could function once more he himself would be glad to let go of the controls, and when Secretary Chase applied pressure McClellan said that he had a plan and a time schedule but that he would prefer not to talk about them at a meeting as large and (though he did not say it quite this way) as disorganized as this one. The business flickered out, finally, with the President saying that he would adjourn the meeting. Everyone’s feathers had been ruffled and nothing much had been done, and the President went back to letter-writing.

  On January 13, the final day of this unique series of conferences, Mr. Lincoln wrote to Halleck and Buell, trying to tell them what his notions of strategy were. He pointed out that he was giving no orders; these would come (no doubt) from McClellan; he was just trying to show how his mind was working.

  “I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision,” he wrote; “that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an overmatch for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”9

  What the two generals thought of this is not on record, but the fact remains that Mr. Lincoln had been doing his homework. He had got, after nine months of war, a good grasp of the basic strategic principle that would have to guide him, and although nobody in Richmond saw his letter it got a strange, corroborative echo from that city in the very week that he wrote it.

  There were anxious men in Richmond as well as in Washington this winter, the cause of the anxiety being not so much the inaction of generals as the strange conduct of state governors. Federal operations along the exposed Atlantic coast had created much alarm, and governors of seacoast states were demanding that weapons and men which had been sent to the Virginia theater be returned at once so that the coast could be defended. This impressed Jefferson Davis as a recipe for certain disaster, and Attorney General Bragg wrote in his diary: “The President was much irritated and declared if such was to be the course of the States toward the Government the carrying on of the war was an impossibility—that we had better make terms as soon as we could, and those of us who had halters around our necks had better get out of the Country as speedily as possible.” Mr. Bragg added that the President seemed even gloomier now than he had been in December, and he remarked wistfully: “I wish he was dictator.”

  It seemed to Mr. Bragg that the Confederacy had been saved, so far, only because the Federal government did not press its advantages—“we profit more from their blunders and want of spirit to use the great advantages they have, than from our own feeble means and good conduct”—but he did not think this was going to go on much longer, and he confessed: “The plan of the enemy seems to be to attack us at many points simultaneously and thus preventing our sending aid to any given point, they outnumbering us at every point of attack. If they now fail, they can hardly make another such effort—But will they fail? or if they partially succeed now, what is to be the effect? It is vain to disguise the fact that we are in imminent peril.… A few days may decide our fate. God be with us and help us—”10

  Like President Lincoln, Mr. Bragg lacked a military education. But he did know what could defeat the Confederacy, and he saw it precisely as Mr. Lincoln saw it. What he feared most was what Mr. Lincoln was trying to get his generals to do, and if neither General Buell nor General Halleck could quite get the President’s point Mr. Bragg would have got it perfectly. What Mr. Lincoln had said he had said, using slightly different words.

  The two men knew what they were talking about. The Federal government had at last reached the point where it could apply an unendurable pressure. At Hampton Roads it had assembled a strong amphibious expedition—15,000 soldiers on transports, with assorted gunboats to lead the way—and just when General McClellan’s subordinates were trying to explain what might be done with the Army of the Potomac this expedition sailed out past the Virginia Capes, bound for Hatteras Inlet. It would enter the North Carolina sounds, break up Confederate installations there, occupy the mainland and repeat the Port Royal thrust at a point much closer to the Confederate capital. At the same time an even stronger expedition was being made ready to attack New Orleans itself, largest city in all the South, and the foundries at Pittsburgh were casting a score of big mortars and 30,000 shells to batter in the forts which defended that place; and on January 20 a wiry, elderly naval officer, Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut, was given his orders for this force. Finally, parts of the western armies were on the move at last. A division of Buell’s troops under General George Thomas was laboriously marching along the muddy Kentucky roads, through cold rains, to attack Confederate Zollicoffer’s force which anchored the eastern end of Sidney Johnston’s undermanned defensive line. General Grant, at the same time, was moving south from Cairo to menace the western end of that line, while Federal gunboats were prowling up the Tennessee River to see whether Confederate defenses there were as strong as they were supposed to be. (They would discover that they were not, and much would come of the discovery.) Slowly but surely the war was getting off of dead center.

  As a matter of fact, the Federal government had been losing less time than ardent patriots supposed. What was being lost was more serious: understanding between the civilians who were running the government and the professional soldiers who were running the government’s armies. The notion that the civilians should leave military matters to military men was dissolving. With this there was the beginning of a corrosive suspicion: might it not be that a general who move
d slowly or ineffectively was not so much incompetent as disloyal? The professionals were being isolated and they were feeling their isolation; the messages they got from Washington were beginning to look like outrageous interference on the part of the politicians (who were responsible for all failures), and it would presently be easy for generals in their turn to question the motives of the men from whom their orders came. On January 20, General Halleck spoke his mind in a letter to General McClellan.

  Writing as one professional to another, General Halleck said that the war so far had been conducted “upon what may be called pepperbox strategy.” As he had tried to explain to President Lincoln, Federal forces were out on the rim of a circle and the Confederates were inside the circle: “We cannot expect to strike any great blow, for he can concentrate his forces on any one point sooner than we can ours.” And the general voiced his lament: “I take it for granted, general, that what has heretofore been done has been the result of political policy rather than military strategy, and that the want of success on our part is attributable to the politicians rather than to the generals.”11

  Like everyone else General Halleck was feeling frustrated, which led him to see things as they were not. The Federal government had lost certain battles, to be sure, but it had won advantages that were of vast importance. Missouri and western Virginia had been gained, the border was in hand, the southern seacoast had been broken open and was about to be broken still further; and General Halleck and General Buell, bedeviled by a politically minded President, were at last being driven to begin the operations that would open the Mississippi Valley and push the Confederate frontier down below the southern border of Tennessee. The political policy which General Halleck was deriding was in fact justifying itself. Out on the rim, the Federals were starting to do exactly what Mr. Bragg was afraid they would do—put the heat on in so many places that the weaker power could not successfully resist. Albert Sidney Johnston was viewing the Federal war effort as a methodical preparation “to carry on the war against the Confederacy with a purpose as inflexible as malignant,” and he could see no hope except to “convert our country into one vast camp of instruction for the field of every man able to bear arms.” Just before the end of the year 1861 he had notified the Governor of Tennessee that to defend the vital center of his line he could count on hardly more than 17,000 men.12