by Bruce Catton
There were occasional alarms. On July 6, McClellan told his wife that the enemy was massed in his front and that he was about to give battle. It was a solemn occasion, and he wrote: “I go into this battle with the full conviction that our losses make it necessary for me to chance the fate of my army. My men are confident & I have no doubt as to our success unless the Creator orders otherwise. I believe we will give them a tremendous thrashing.… Tomorrow will probably determine the fate of the country.” Tomorrow, as it happened, brought no battle at all. Lee was not massing troops anywhere: he had just notified Mr. Davis that the Yankee gunboats made it impossible for him to attack the Union position with any hope of success, and that he would therefore leave a small force of infantry and cavalry to keep an eye on things, and take the rest of the army back to Richmond and let it get some rest.11 Not being obliged to fight, McClellan spent at least part of July 7 composing a document which he gave to Mr. Lincoln shortly after the President reached camp.
Some time earlier the general had asked leave to submit a paper on the general state of military affairs, but this document—if indeed it had any connection with that request—was pure politics: advice from a general to a President on the kind of war the President ought to be conducting. It was in substance a flat restatement of the conservative Northern Democratic position on the war, submitted with the warning that if it were not made official government policy “our cause will be lost.” Military power must not be used to upset “the relations of servitude,” and “neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Without a conservative policy it probably would not be possible to get new recruits for the Army, and “a declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” Of course, Mr. Lincoln would need a general-in-chief who was in thorough sympathy with such a policy; General McClellan did not ask for the appointment, but would happily serve “in such position as you may assign me.” (There was a faint, quaint echo here of the position Mr. Seward had taken in the spring of 1861 when he gave Mr. Lincoln a note modestly offering to run the government for him.) The general reported that Mr. Lincoln read the paper, thanked him for it, and put it in his pocket.12
There were, of course, many things for the President to do. He reviewed the troops, looking at the soldiers, letting them look at him.13 He talked with McClellan and with the corps commanders about the condition of the army and the intentions of the Rebels, trying to find out whether the army was safe where it was and whether if need be it could safely be withdrawn. He was especially struck by the great number of absentees from the army, and after he returned to Washington he wrote anxiously to McClellan on the subject. As far as he could learn, he said, at least 45,000 soldiers who belonged to the army were not with it, and there seemed to be no way to get them back; which was a pity, because if McClellan had them he could in the President’s opinion, “go into Richmond in the next three days.”
These absentees represented a problem the War Department never was able to solve. Comparatively few of the missing 45,000 were actually deserters; mostly, they were men who had fallen ill and had been transferred to hospitals in their home states, the theory being that they would recover more rapidly in familiar surroundings. The theory was sound enough, but the home-state hospitals were entirely under the control of home-state politicians, and the army had no way to reclaim a man who got into one of them. McClellan once estimated that not more than a tenth of the men who were sent to these hospitals ever returned to duty, and neither he nor any other army commander was able to do anything about it.14 To the end, the army carried on its rolls the names of thousands of men who never fought.
But the paper on war aims was what really mattered now.
In place of the larger effort which Mr. Lincoln was demanding it called for a more moderate effort. In effect it proposed that the administration act as if somebody else had won the presidential election of 1860. (Define war, with Clausewitz, as a simple extension of politics: here was a bland proposal to make this war an extension of the politics of the losers rather than of the victors.) It rested on the assumption that the war had not, in 15 desperate months, changed the base for any man’s thinking, and it was aimed at victory-by-consent and restoration of the status quo.
The paper meant more than it openly said, but its interpretation was no problem for anyone who knew how the conservative officers in the Army of the Potomac were talking. Quite openly, these men were saying that the administration wanted McClellan to fail so that it could impose anti-slavery doctrines on the South. This, they said, meant final disruption of the Union, because no matter how badly the Southern states were beaten they would never come back into the Union unless the government promised not to touch slavery. The Union could not possibly be restored by sheer force. Secession needed a beating, but it also needed reassurance, kind words and a lot of coaxing.
The point of view is explicitly stated in a letter written just then by Colonel Gouverneur K. Warren, a Regular who commanded a brigade in Porter’s corps and who would eventually be a hero of Gettysburg and a corps commander. Warren wrote that President Lincoln ought to “discard the New England and Greeley abolitionists entirely; this would remove the cause for resistance from the masses South, and we could crush out the Secession leaders.” He went on to assert that the restored Union “is unattainable without allowing the Southern people their constitutional rights, for it is otherwise degrading them.”15
McClellan shared this notion, and he had actually come to feel that his recent defeat might really have been a blessing. Writing to Mrs. McClellan on July 10, in a mood of rare humility, the general put it thus:
“I have not done splendidly at all—I have only tried to do my duty & God has helped me—or rather He has helped my army & our country—& we are safe. I think I begin to see His wise purpose in all this & that the events of the next few days will prove it. If I had succeeded in talcing Richmond now the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible. However that may be, I am sure that it is all for the best.”16
What the general was telling his wife was of course a deep secret, although he believed that Secretary Stanton—“the most deformed hypocrite & villain that I have ever had the bad fortune to meet with”—was reading all of his private telegrams, and he remarked that the Secretary’s ears would probably tingle if he could also read the letters to Mrs. McClellan.17 But the existence in the officer corps of this kind of feeling was common knowledge. Not long before the beginning of the Seven Days, Porter wrote to Manton Marble, of the strongly Democratic New York World, with a pointed suggestion: “I wish you would put the question. Does the President (controlled by an incompetent Secy) design to cause defeat here for the purpose of prolonging the war?” And the effect of this train of thought on officers’ attitude toward their own government comes out in an indignant letter written a few weeks after this by Alexander S. Webb, a rising young staff officer who was inspector general for the army’s chief of artillery. Webb assured his father that “the fools in Washington” were determined that “General G.B. McC must be ‘subalternized,’ ” and he burst out angrily: “Was there ever such a government, such fools, such idiots. I tell you father I feel as if every drop of blood I have should be poured out in punishing these men. I hate or despise them more intensively than I do the Rebels.”18
This was a strange state of mind to be pervading general headquarters of the nation’s most important army, and it led the commanding general into strange mental and emotional byways. The day after McClellan saw a disguised blessing in his defeat, he confided to his wife: “I have commenced receiving letters from the North urging me to march on Washington & assume the Govt!” He would of course do nothing of the kind, but the idea remained in his mind, and a little time after this he told her: “I have nothing as yet from Wash. and begin to believe that they intend & hope that
I & my army may melt away under the hot sun—if they leave me here neglected much longer I shall feel like taking my rather large military family to Wash. to seek an explanation of their course. I pray that under such circumstances I should be treated with rather more politeness than I have of late.”19
More often, his mood was one of resignation. He believed that he would be superseded and he did not care very much: “I have lost confidence in the Govt. & would be glad to be out of the scrape—keep this to yourself.” The feeling deepened, and shortly afterward he wrote: “If things come to pass as I anticipate I shall leave the service with a sad heart for my country but a light one for myself. I am tired of being dependent on men I despise from the bottom of my heart. I cannot express to you the infinite contempt I feel for these people;—but one thing keeps me at my work—love for my country and my army.” His feeling toward President Lincoln had curdled: “I cannot regard him in any respect my friend. I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow if he dared to do so. His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings than those of thorough contempt.”20
To his old friend Barlow he wrote in similar vein. He was sorry so many good soldiers had “fallen victims to the stupidity and wickedness at Washington which have done their best to sacrifice as noble an Army as ever marched to battle,” but he was resigned: “I do not care if they do take me from this Army—except on account of the Army itself. I have lost all regard & respect for the majority of the Administration, & doubt the propriety of my brave men’s blood being spilled to further the designs of such a set of heathen villains.”21 But the mood of resignation did not keep him from feeling angry, and he gave Mrs. McClellan his unvarnished opinion of Secretary Stanton:
“So you want to know how I feel about Stanton, and what I think of him now. I will tell you with the utmost frankness. I think that he is the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard or read of; I think that (and I do not wish to be irreverent) had he lived in the times of the Savior, Judas Iscariot would have remained a respected member of the fraternity of the apostles, & that the magnificent treachery & rascality of E. M. Stanton would have caused Judas to have raised his arms in holy horror, & he would certainly have claimed & exercised the right to have been the betrayer of his lord & master, by virtue of the same merit that raised Satan to his ‘eminence.’ I may do the man injustice.”22
Mr. Lincoln of course never saw this letter, but he did know that there was a bottomless chasm between his Secretary of War and his principal field commander, and he also knew that the general’s letter of advice on war policy did not fit at all with his own determination to drive on for victory at any cost; and on July 11 he signed an order naming Major General Henry W. Halleck General-in-Chief of the armies of the United States and ordering him to report at once to Washington.
CHAPTER SIX
Unlimited War
1: Trading with the Enemy
In the old days, Nassau in the Bahamas was a sleepy colonial port where time stood still and nobody cared. Hardly anything ever happened. Once in a great while a tropical storm would drive some merchant ship on an offshore reef, and the more energetic inhabitants could go out, after the storm was over, to pick the bones. Once in a great while, too, one of the cruisers of Her Majesty’s West Indian squadron would drop in for a visit, lying in port with deck awnings white under the sun while the commanding officer went ashore to confer with the governor on some item of empire business. Most of the time the place simply drowsed, and a visitor remarked that its whole air was “one of indolent acquiescence in its own obscurity.”
Then came the American Civil War, and Nassau suddenly became the most important single way station on the sea road to the Southern Confederacy, which meant that for a brief, frenzied time it was the town where fortunes could be made more quickly than anywhere else on earth. The harbor was full of ships, the wharves were piled with freight, and the streets, inns, and drinking places were crowded with men who had much money to spend, not much time to spend it, and the reckless high spirits born of the knowledge that no matter how much they spent they would get it all back in a very few days. Nassau, in short, was the center of a hell-roaring boom, and one sailor wrote that what was going on here must have been like the scenes in the pirate havens in the days when the Spanish Main was beyond the law.
Nassau was like this because it was a neutral port within easy reach of the Confederate coast. (There were others—Bermuda, Havana, Matamoros in Mexico, even blue-nose Halifax far to the north—but Nassau was the busiest of all. Here the blockade-runners got their cargoes, which came over from England in complete security, and here they delivered the cotton which the outside world wanted so much; and no merchant had ever imagined anything like the profits that could be made here. Freight charges on Confederate imports could run to fifty pounds sterling per ton, sometimes to eighty or a hundred pounds, and a cargo of five hundred bales of cotton could earn fifty pounds for each bale. A ship that made two round trips between Nassau and the mainland paid for herself and showed a profit besides, and if she made more than two her owners grew rich. Sailors got the unheard-of wage of $100 a round trip, plus a $50 bonus, and there were desertions from the warships of the West Indies squadron as a result. A ship captain could earn $5000 for a round trip, and in addition he could carry a certain amount of freight on his own account, which was like owning a gold mine. One skipper bought a thousand pairs of corset stays in Liverpool for the equivalent of twenty-seven cents apiece, and sold them in Wilmington, North Carolina, for three dollars each. He also discovered that tooth brushes (of which a huge number could be carried in an ordinary carpet bag) could be sold in the Confederacy for seven times their cost.1
The business started rather slowly. During most of the first year of the war, cautious British shippers refused to run the blockade with anything but their oldest, least valuable vessels; wheezy, leaky steamers, and ordinary sailing craft—“unseaworthy slugs which we could well afford to lose,” as one supercargo recalled. The blockade was very loose during 1861, and hardly ten per cent of the blockade-runners were caught; it was partially effective then only because fear of capture kept many ships in port and because the Confederate government was opposed to the cotton exports which were the only substantial means of paying for imports.2 But by 1862 the United States Navy had learned its trade and had put many new cruisers on patrol, so that getting through called for faster ships; also, the cotton embargo was relaxed, and the fantastic profits that could be made were beginning to be clear to one and all. So British yards began to build ships especially designed for blockade-running—long, narrow, rakish vessels of shallow draft and low freeboard, painted gray to reduce visibility at night (one captain even made his crew wear white uniforms, believing that it was too easy for Yankee lookouts to see a man in dark clothing), burning anthracite coal which made little or no smoke, with short pole masts, and smokestacks that could be telescoped down to stubs. Some of these vessels were jerry-built, and racked themselves to pieces in short order, but most of them were sturdy enough to do their work, and although a good many were caught or driven ashore a great many more got through. They had little trouble with the dangerous offshore shoals and sandbars; the war had put scores of licensed coastal pilots out of work, and these men, lured by Southern patriotism and high wages, could take the blockade-runners in through channels the Federal cruisers dared not attempt.3
The number of harbors open to the inbound blockade-runners was limited. The Federal thrust which sealed off the North Carolina sounds closed a whole series of ports that could have been used, the occupation of Port Royal in South Carolina was even more effective, and in the spring of 1862 Savannah was virtually blocked when the Northerners bombarded and captured Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River. But Charleston remained, closely guarded though it was, and most important of all there was Wilmington.
Wilmington was on the Cape Fear River, the hardest river on all the coast to close. The river came sl
anting down to the sea behind a long sandy peninsula which was cut here and there by little inlets, some of them deep enough for a shoal-draft steamer. The principal entrance, protected by a dangerous shoal, was guarded by Fort Fisher, a work so strong that the Federals never tried to take it until the war was nearly over, and there were batteries to guard all of the little inlets. The blockading squadron had to patrol a sieve forty miles long, and the Confederates had signal stations all along the coast to tell blockade-runners where the patrol was weakest. Traffic here could be cut down but it could never be stopped, and so many blockade-runners went in and out that some Northerners believed that the blockade-running captains had made a deal with officers of the United States Navy. Secretary Welles never took any stock in these rumors, but the mere fact that they were in circulation showed how porous the blockade really was at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.4 Like Nassau, Wilmington became a gold-rush town, a swaggering staggering little seaport that had suddenly become one of the busiest and most important places in all the Confederacy.
