by Bruce Catton
The investigating committee the President was talking so hopefully about was the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, and “the case” was the bungled fight at Ball’s Bluff which had wrecked a brigade of the Army of the Potomac and had killed Colonel Edward D. Baker, close friend of Mr. Lincoln and a prominent member of the Senate. Reacting to this disaster, Congress in December had created this investigating committee, with Ben Wade as its chairman. Other members were Senators Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, along with Representatives Daniel W. Gooch of Massachusetts, John Covode of Pennsylvania, George W. Julian of Indiana and Moses F. Odell of New York. The committee had broad powers and relentless determination; in effect it was the action arm of the militant radicals, largely controlled by Wade and Chandler; a fearsome committee if ever there was one. Right now it was methodically ruining Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, who had commanded the troops that fought at Ball’s Bluff. Stone was blameless but unlucky, a professional who did not understand how violently this war departed from the professional soldier’s tradition. He was about to learn.
General Stone was caught in the middle. A West Pointer who had been entrusted with security of the capital in the anxious days just before Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, he commanded a division along the upper Potomac in the summer and fall of 1861, and this division contained three regiments from Massachusetts, strongly tinged with abolitionist sentiment. Fugitive slaves kept coming into his lines, pursued by indignant masters, and General Stone followed his orders in respect to all such: that is, he promptly returned the fugitives to their owners, who were residents of Maryland and presumably loyal Unionists. The New Englanders complained bitterly, and before long General Stone was involved in hot arguments with the Governor of Massachusetts, forceful John A. Andrew, and with the even more forceful Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Then on October 21 came Ball’s Bluff, in which battle these same New England regiments suffered heavy losses.
Less than a week after the battle, Bull Run Russell made a little note: “It is whispered that General Stone, who ordered the movement, is guilty of treason—a common crime of unlucky generals—and at all events is to be displaced and will be put under surveillance.” Harper’s Weekly said that “somebody must be sacrificed on the altar” and remarked that General Stone’s reputation was under attack, and Senator McDougall asserted later that rumor, “that great manufacturer of falsehoods,” had been calling the general a traitor throughout the fall and winter. When the Committee on the Conduct of the War began to hold closed-door hearings on Ball’s Bluff, Stone was squarely on the spot.8
He got no help from his superiors. Called before the committee early in January to explain why his troops had gone into action at Ball’s Bluff, General Stone was flying blind. As far as he knew, all that was going on was a clumsy attempt by uncomprehending civilians to examine the military plans and orders under which he had been operating. The case was fairly clear; he had been instructed to make a demonstration toward Leesburg, Virginia, to see what the Confederate forces there were doing and if possible to induce them to go elsewhere, and whether he had done well or poorly he had at least done what he had been told to do. Yet he could not really explain it, because Army headquarters put him under wraps just before he testified. Some time later he said: “I was instructed at General McClellan’s headquarters that it was the desire of the general that officers giving testimony before the committee should not state, without his authority, anything regarding his plans, his orders for the movements of troops, or his orders concerning the position of troops.”9 That left General Stone in the position of assuming all of the responsibility for an action taken at the direction of the high command. He could pass the buck to no one.
General Stone knew very well that his military competence was under attack, and about the time of the hearings he did what any professional soldier would do in a similar case; he asked for a court of inquiry, at which the record would speak for itself under the examination of fellow professionals. A court of inquiry, however, he could not get. A staff officer at McClellan’s headquarters warned him not to apply, pointing out: “Your military superiors are under attack, and that consideration involves the propriety of abstaining just now.”10 The only inquiry would be this one by the Committee on the Conduct of the War, and what General Stone did not know was that the committee proposed to show, not merely that he had made mistakes but that he was actively disloyal to his country.
After it heard General Stone the committee heard others, all in closed session, and it got some rather odd testimony. It appeared that General Stone had exchanged letters with Confederate officers across the Potomac. There had been many flags of truce, with mysterious emissaries passing back and forth. Camp gossip said that if Union guns damaged Confederate civilians’ property General Stone would see that it was paid for. Escaped slaves were too willingly restored to men who claimed them. Encouraged by leading questions, various officers and enlisted men said that they doubted General Stone’s loyalty, considered him a secessionist at heart and did not want to fight for him. He had let the Rebels plant batteries when he could have prevented it. (It turned out later that the batteries specifically complained of simply did not exist.) This went on and on, through 260 pages of the committee’s records.11 It was not exactly evidence, as a lawyer would understand the word, but it was at least testimony, and the committee passed it along to the Secretary of War (first Cameron, and then Stanton) and suggested that General Stone be called to account.
On January 28, Secretary Stanton sent McClellan a written order to relieve General Stone from his command and put him under arrest. McClellan removed him, but suspended execution of the order for his arrest, saying that Stone ought to have a chance to answer the charges, and, on January 31, Stone went before the committee for a second time and learned that he was in serious trouble. He was told that the committee had evidence which “tends to prove that you have had undue communication with the enemy,” and for the first time he realized that the committee really took this fantastic talk of treason seriously. Instead of being asked to explain a military mistake he had been supposed to prove that he was not a Benedict Arnold.
He did not know who had accused him or specifically what he was accused of. He could do nothing but make a general statement of innocence, which he did, with hot eloquence: “This is a humiliation I had hoped I should never be subjected to. I thought there was one calumny that could not be brought against me.… This government has not a more faithful soldier; of poor capacity, it is true, but a more faithful soldier this government has not had.… If you want more faithful soldiers you must find them elsewhere. I have been as faithful as I can be.”12
He might as well have saved his breath. He was no longer Charles P. Stone, a man with honor to defend and a life to live. He was just a counter on the board where an intense struggle for power was going on; he had been played, and the contestants were about to remove him and drop him in the box. Senator Wade was out to prove that lack of drive on the field of battle probably came from an over-tolerant attitude toward slavery and slaveholders, and that this in turn might well bespeak treason. He was sounding a grim warning for all Army officers who were lukewarm on slavery and who also were failing to win victories.
Among these officers was General McClellan, who apparently did not at once get the true drift of things. Colonel J. H. Van Alen, an officer on the headquarters staff, told Attorney General Bates that when it was learned that the committee wanted Stone removed from command, McClellan remarked, “They want a victim,” to which Colonel Van Alen replied: “Yes—and when they have once tasted blood, got one victim, no one can tell who will be next.”13 McClellan evidently failed to see that the committee wanted not so much a victim as an object lesson. This object lesson, indeed, was being set up primarily for the instruction of the general-in-chief himself.
Anyway, Stone’s destruction proceeded without any protest from Army headquarters; which, at last, piousl
y lined up with the men who were destroying him. A week after General Stone’s second appearance before the committee, while the order for his arrest was still in abeyance, McClellan’s intelligence agents laid hands on a refugee from Leesburg who had a tale to tell, and they sent McClellan a report. As McClellan described the report later: “There were in it statements which the refugee said he had heard made by the Rebel officers, showing that a great deal of personal intercourse existed between them and General Stone. I think it was also stated that General Evans, then the Rebel commander there, had received letters from General Stone; and there was a general expression on the part of those Rebel officers of great cordiality towards Stone—confidence in him.” General McClellan doubted that this statement by itself was enough to justify the arrest of General Stone, but he talked to the refugee and felt that the man was sincere and so he took the report and showed it to Secretary Stanton—who ordered him to arrest General Stone at once and send him to Fort Lafayette, in New York Harbor.
Accordingly, on February 8, McClellan sent an order to the provost marshal directing him to arrest General Stone, retain him in close custody, and send him under guard to Fort Lafayette for confinement, with the injunction: “See that he has no communication with any one from the time of his arrest.”14 So it was done. General Stone was locked up. There were no formal charges against him anywhere. Try as he could, he was unable to get a hearing, or even a plain statement of the reasons for his arrest; he simply stayed in prison, not to emerge until many months had passed, his reputation a ruin.
Early in March, General McClellan himself discussed the Ball’s Bluff affair before the committee. He really knew nothing about the disastrous move across the river, he said, except what General Stone had told him. He himself had ordered a demonstration, and he insisted that he had not meant that troops were to be sent across at Ball’s Bluff; General Stone might have met his instructions simply by moving troops down to the river bank and displaying them there. For the rest, General Stone had given discretionary orders to Colonel Baker, and to judge the matter by General Stone’s report Colonel Baker was responsible for the result. General McClellan added that he knew of no good reason why General Stone could not have sent troops to Colonel Baker’s relief from the force he had at Edwards Ferry, a few miles downstream from the scene of the action.15 And that closed the case. No matter how the committee allocated the blame, it was not going to be able to award any of it to General McClellan.
It was time for the Army of the Potomac to move, and when it moved there were in the background these two seemingly unrelated factors: President Lincoln’s desperate attempt to get the slavery issue settled before it changed the character of the entire war, and the radicals’ implacable determination to destroy any general who, being unsound on “the Negro question,” was not waging war with ruthless speed and effectiveness. Taken together, these factors would affect every move the Army made and every decision its commander reached. Unless he understood their implications the Army commander, like General Stone himself, would be contending with incomprehensible shadows.
6: Forward to Richmond
Mr. Lincoln had formally ordered a general advance by all of the armies for February 22. On that day Mr. Davis addressed a rain-drenched crowd in Richmond, while Bedford Forrest was getting the last wagonloads of supplies out of Nashville and Joe Johnston was reflecting on the folly of telling elected officials about military plans; and the Army of the Potomac remained in its camps, idle except for the firing of Washington’s Birthday salutes. Two days later Mr. Lincoln went to a funeral. His eleven-year-old son Willie had died, victim of the typhoid fever that was so prevalent, and Mr. Lincoln rode out to the Oak Hill Cemetery in a carriage with his oldest son Robert and the two Senators from Illinois. Mrs. Lincoln, too broken to leave the White House, kept to her room, and a February gale—a fragment of the same weather that had spoiled the Confederate inauguration—ripped at the bunting with which patriotic merchants had decorated the downtown streets of Washington. Then, a few days after this, McClellan put part of his army in motion, taking approximately 40,000 men up the Potomac to Harper’s Ferry; a promising move which drew much attention and which by unlucky chance came to look like a humiliating fiasco.
Before descending on Richmond (as he planned eventually to do) McClellan wanted to re-establish and protect the western line of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. To do this he proposed to move a large force up the Shenandoah Valley, and to supply this army it was necessary to have new bridges over the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry. His engineers quickly laid a pontoon bridge there, and on February 26 the advance guard crossed the river, troops cheering, bands playing “Dixie,” McClellan and his staff looking on, all hands bubbling with enthusiasm. Then the engineers got ready to build a second and more important bridge, big enough to carry all of the traffic involved in the movement and supply of a substantial army; a semipermanent bridge, designed to rest on a number of canal boats, which had been floated up the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and were now to be moved over into the river so that they could serve as piers.1
Everything had been carefully organized. Working parties were ready to begin. The long column of troops was moving up the Maryland side of the river, and it was time to get the boats out of the canal—at which moment it was discovered that the boats were just a few inches too wide to go through the locks that would bring them to the place where they were needed.
A high wind came up, endangering the pontoon bridge, the approaches to which were already clogged by wagon trains. The ponderous canal boats lay below the locks, as useless as if they had never left Washington. The engineers and their working parties were able to do nothing, and since they could do nothing the Army itself could not do very much, and it was all most embarrassing. McClellan rode forward as far as Charles Town, where old John Brown had been tried and hanged less than three years ago, and he made up his mind to hold this town and the country roundabout. The advance guard was moved forward, and arrangements were made to build up supplies at Harper’s Ferry so that this one-bridge army could eventually move on to Winchester; with the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley held the Baltimore & Ohio people could at least rebuild their own railroad bridge. The general and his staff and all the rest of the army then went back to Washington, which was chuckling over a new joke: this expedition, people told one another, had died of lockjaw.2
Mr. Lincoln got the news about all of this from Secretary Stanton, who strode into his study, locked the door behind him, and showed the President the telegram about the canal boats. When the President asked him what this meant, Stanton replied: “It means that it is a d——d fizzle. It means that he doesn’t intend to do anything.” Mr. Lincoln then sent for Brigadier General Randolph B. Marcy, a long-service regular who was a member of General McClellan’s official family and of his personal family as well; that is, he was General McClellan’s chief-of-staff and also his father-in-law, warmly loyal to the man in each incarnation. Mr. Lincoln now blew up at him with an anger few men ever saw him display.
“Why in the nation, General Marcy,” demanded the President, “couldn’t the general have known whether a boat would go through the lock before spending a million dollars getting them there? I am no engineer, but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a hole, or a lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it.” General Marcy tried to explain—after all, the general-in-chief didn’t go around with a yard-stick in his hands, measuring things personally—but he was cut short. Mr. Lincoln told him sharply that this failure had just about destroyed the prestige won at Fort Donelson, and said there was a rising impression that General McClellan did not really intend to do anything anyway. At last he dismissed the unhappy chief-of-staff with a curt “I will not detain you any further now, general.” Secretary Nicolay recalled later that this was just about the only time he ever saw Mr. Lincoln lose his temper.3
Actually, the Harper’s Ferry expedition looked worse than it was. The B
altimore & Ohio was able presently to resume train service to the West; Federal troops occupied Winchester; and General McClellan eventually argued that despite the misfit canal boats the expedition had had important strategic consequences.4 But it does seem to have convinced the President that either he or Mr. Stanton must henceforth have much more to say about the organization, movements, and general direction of the Army of the Potomac. He quickly acted on this conviction.
It began with the situation along the Potomac River below Washington. (Upstream or downstream, the Army’s luck on this river was bad.) The Confederates had batteries on the lower river, closing the stream to merchant vessels and actually putting the capital under a partial blockade, which did little real harm but made the Federal government look impotent. The Army of the Potomac could always go down and open the river, but as long as General Johnston held his position at Centreville and Manassas the Confederates could easily close it again, because with the main Confederate Army in northern Virginia the right bank of the lower Potomac was Confederate territory no matter what anybody did. General McClellan thus felt that the big thing was to get Johnston out of northern Virginia; once that happened the lower Potomac would open itself.
Just here, however, the case began to grow very complicated.
McClellan wanted to take his army by water to the town of Urbanna, near where the Rappahannock River entered Chesapeake Bay; and he wanted Johnston’s army to stay exactly where it was until this move was made, because Urbanna was much nearer Richmond than Centreville was. Once the Army of the Potomac reached Urbanna, Johnston would have to retreat in a hurry, and there was every prospect that the Federals could destroy him as he did so. Then Richmond could be taken, and the war no doubt would end. Furthermore, since the Potomac would remain closed until Johnston fled, McClellan’s army would go to Urbanna by way of Annapolis, where its transports could descend the broad, unblocked Chesapeake. It would begin its “forward to Richmond” move, in short, by marching off to the north of east, attacking neither the batteries which isolated Washington nor the Confederate Army which menaced it. It occurred to Abraham Lincoln that this was altogether too much to expect an impatient public to understand. It would look like outright retreat, and the administration could not quite explain publicly that this was the first cunning move in a campaign against Richmond. Before he could consent to this program the President must confer with his cabinet, with General McClellan, and finally with General McClellan and all of the general’s principal subordinates.
