by Bruce Catton
Nor was this the worst. What the colonel had run into so far was simply what might be called the advance guard of the retreat: the walking wounded, the fainthearts, and the honestly bewildered, pushed ahead by the army as it made its own progress to the rear. Next day the main body began to come through. During the daytime it was fairly orderly, but when evening came everything seemed to disintegrate.
"Those who for eight days had done nothing but march and fight were worn out with fatigue," the colonel noted. "Everyone knew that the enemy was no longer at our heels. No salutary fear kept them in the ranks and many gave way to the temptation to take a few hours rest. They lighted great fires, whose number became greater and greater, so that at a few leagues from Alexandria the whole country appeared to be illuminated. There was everywhere along the road the greatest confusion. Infantry and cavalry, artillery and wagons, all hurried on pell mell, in the midst of rallying cries of officers and calls and oaths of the men."3
One-armed General Howard, rejoining the troops after recovery from his wound just in time to take part in the retreat after Chantilly, wrote dolefully: "Who will ever forget the straggling, the mud, the rain, the terrible panic and loss of life from random firing, and the hopeless feeling—almost despair—of that dreadful night march!"4
An Irish private, clumping through the mud, growled an all-inclusive complaint at the hardships of army life. A comrade scoffed at him: "You're just sore because you aren't a general and can't ride a horse."
"No," said the Irishman stoutly. "It's because it's meself that is obliged to associate with such fools as yourself and Gineral Pope."
An officer of Porter's regulars noted that "everyone you met had an unwashed, sleepy, downcast aspect, and looked as if he would like to hide his head somewhere from all the world." At each halt men would drop by the road and fall sound asleep, and each time it became harder and harder to rouse the men and get them to take their places in the ranks when the march was resumed. Some stragglers were still trying ineffectually to find their regiments; others had given up and were slouching along without their weapons, neither knowing nor caring where their regiments were. Men who went into bivouac around Fairfax Station found that the fields had turned into marshes, although the rain, fortunately, had stopped at last. Far away to the northwest there was heard the rumble of gunfire as some collision of outposts brought isolated batteries into action. Closer at hand Jeb Stuart's troopers were harassing the rear guard—Banks's corps, which had been guarding stores at Bristoe Station during the Bull Run fight and which had been ordered to destroy locomotives and cars, burn all supplies, and come hiking back to Alexandria. It came up to take position in rear of the army, its spirits sagging to zero. General George H. Gordon, commanding a brigade in this corps, noted that when supplies were issued at Fairfax on September 2, the divisions of Hooker and Kearny together drew only 5,000 rations. Between them they had taken more than 10,000 men into action at Bull Run and had suffered a joint total of 1,500 casualties; fully 3,500 men, then, had gone absent without leave—and this from two of the crack divisions of the army. Gordon also noted an Ohio cavalry regiment numbering just under 600 men which was short 448 horses.
In all the accounts of this retreat there is a great deal about the mud, the hunger, and the weariness of men who had marched and fought until they were utterly exhausted. Yet those were not in fact the really important troubles. A few miles away to the north and west, taking a day's rest in the fields near the Potomac before striking across the river for further adventures, was Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. It had marched just as far and just as hard, and had gone just as hungry, and had fought just as much. In proportion it was even beginning to suffer as much from straggling, owing to a complex of reasons ranging all the way from lack of shoes to inability to understand the rationale of invasion. But this army was light-hearted and full of enthusiasm. It was well led and knew it, and it had absorbed the notion that there were no Yankees anywhere whom it could not whip. While Pope was sadly wiring Halleck that "there is an intense idea among [the troops] that they must get behind the entrenchments," and one of Colonel Haupt's aides was sending back word that "the volunteers are much demoralized and ready to stampede," the Confederates were looking ahead to new campaigns with high confidence.
It wasn't hardships that had got the Federals down, although they had had hardships and to spare. It was what had seeped down to the men in the ranks from the hatred, suspicion, and confusion in high places, the wastage which the men had seen for themselves and had themselves been a part of, the heart-numbing realization that what ought to be the Republic's finest army had been shockingly and irretrievably mishandled. The very best that ardent young spirits could give of bravery and endurance had been given, and it had all been to no purpose. Porter's men, teaching the straw-feet how to fight; Gibbon's young Westerners, proving their manhood by standing up toe to toe with their enemies until night came down to make fighting impossible; the Pennsylvanians and the regulars and the Germans, hanging on in the dusk around the Henry House Hill to keep open the last line of retreat—all of these had done as well as any soldiers could do on any field, and all of them knew that it had been futile. They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a fool.
And then, at the last minute of despair, the unbelievable happened.
The head of the leading column of the retreat was coming in on the Fairfax road, near the forts on Munson's Hill, on the afternoon of September 2. The sun had finally come out, and the roads had dried enough so that a long, lazy cloud of dust hung in the air above the marching men. Pope and McDowell rode in the lead, their uniforms gray with the dust, their beards powdered. Their mounted staff officers and orderlies followed them, and after a brief interval came Hatch's division with an endless shuffle-shuffle of dragging feet, each man staring dully at the back of the man in front, nobody saying a word. Out into the road ahead, coming toward them, rode a little knot of horsemen, trotting forward confidentiy; the man in front rode a great black horse and had a bright yellow sash about his waist and was erect and dapper in the saddle, and as he came up to the two generals his hand flipped up to the visor of his cap in a salute that had all the gaiety and snap of the youthful, confident army these men had once been and had all but forgotten. General Hatch, looking ahead, stiffened as he saw it—there was only one man in the army who saluted in just that way—and he cantered ahead suddenly to see and hear for himself. He got there just in time to listen as General McClellan told Pope and McDowell that by order of the President he was assuming command of the troops.
The two generals impassively returned the salute. McClellan gave a few directions about the positions the troops should take when they reached the fortifications. On the horizon there was a dull bump-bump of gunfire, and McClellan asked what that might be. Pope answered that it was probably some attack on Sumner's corps, coming up as flank guard; meanwhile, did General McClellan object if Pope and McDowell rode on in to Washington? McClellan replied that he had not an objection in the world, but for himself he was going to ride to the sound of the firing and see what was going on in the way of fighting. . . . One gathers that the interchange did McClellan a great deal of good.
Hatch had heard all that he needed to hear. He had a score to settle with Pope, whom he hated. When Pope had first come east, Hatch had been in command of the cavalry attached to Banks's corps, and when Pope had made his first thrust down to the Rapidan, Hatch had been ordered to go in advance to seize the important railroad junction of Gordonsville and destroy Rebel supplies and connections there. The march had been delayed; while Hatch waited for infantry and artillery to go with him, the delay gave the enemy time to occupy Gordonsville in force, and the move had been a failure. A few days later Pope ordered him to try again, th
is time taking cavalry alone and cutting the railroad line from Gordonsville to Charlottesville. Hatch crossed the Blue Ridge in a pelting rain, got mired in muddy mountain roads, and came stumbling back a few days later, his mission unaccomplished; Pope gave him an angry dressing-down, relieved him of his command, and sent him to King's division to lead a brigade of infantry. Hatch felt that he had been unfairly treated. Now was his chance to get even.
He trotted back the few yards that separated the generals from the head of his own infantry. In a loud voice—easily to be heard by Pope and McDowell—he shouted: "Boys, McClellan is in command of the army again! Three cheers!"5
There was a brief, stunned silence; then a wild, hysterical yell went up from the soldiers. Hats, caps, and knapsacks were tossed into the air. The roar swept back along the column as men to the rear heard the news, and the men still farther back joined in without waiting to be told: they knew there was only one man alive who could make the army cheer like that. The cheering did not stop; men capered, thumped each other on the back, yelled themselves into hoarseness. Far back down the highway, out of sight, went the noise, officers joining with the men. One of Hatch's staff came spurring back to John Gibbon and gave him the news. As an old regular, Gibbon took it as just another camp rumor and said so. No, insisted the officer, this time it was true: he himself had seen McClellan, just up the road, giving orders to Pope and McDowell. Gibbon swung in his saddle and raised his own voice: "Men, General McClellan is in command of the army!" The air was filled with tumult. Men broke ranks, danced, howled, laughed hysterically, wept; and, Gibbon wrote later, "the weary, fagged men went into camp cheerful and happy, to talk over their rough experience of the past three weeks and speculate as to what was ahead."8
It was a big army and it covered a lot of ground, and it took time for the word to get around. Sykes's regulars, pushing on to get into the lines before midnight, were still on the road by starlight. They had fallen out for a short breather, and the dead-exhausted men had dropped in their tracks and were dozing. Two officers stood by their horses, looking ahead in the darkness, and saw a few horsemen approaching. One of the officers gaped: if he didn't know better, he said, he would say one of those riders was McClellan. This, said the other officer, was nonsense. McClellan had been relieved days ago, and anyhow, what would he be doing out here, at this time of night, without an escort? The first officer continued to stare, hope rising. Then some other officer saw, and recognized; and over the silent roadway, where men slept in the dust under the stars, he raised a strong, clear voice that could shout orders above the din of battle: "Colonel! Colonel! General McClellan is here!"
Ten seconds later every man was on his feet, sending a long cheer up to the night sky; "such a hurrah," a participant wrote later, "as the Army of the Potomac had never heard before. Shout upon shout went out into the stillness of the night; and as it was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division and corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance. The effect of this man's presence upon the Army of the Potomac—in sunshine or rain, in darkness or in daylight, in victory or defeat—was electrical, and too wonderful to make it worthwhile attempting to give a reason for it."7
The men who were there that night seem to have spent the rest of their lives trying to make people who were not there understand what it was like. About all they could say was that there was mad cheering and hysterical happiness and a sudden feeling that everything was going to be all right, so that every man forgot that he was tired and hungry and dirty, forgot that he had been miserably beaten, and looked forward with a bright certainty that all mistakes would presently be redeemed. And it is clear that some sort of miracle had happened; the most amazing and dramatic one, perhaps, in American military history, with an entire army completely transformed between the hot dust of mid-afternoon and the quiet coolness of starlight. But exactly why this miracle took place, and precisely what it was that this man did to make the soldiers love him as no general in the army's history was ever loved—this they could not seem to tell, probably because they did not quite know themselves. One veteran, trying to explain, finally let it go by saying: "The love borne by soldiers to a favorite chief, if it does not surpass, is more unreasoning than the love of woman."8
Whatever it was, there it was: an intangible, like so many of the important things in the life of an army, or a nation, or a man, indefinable but of tremendous power. The men who cheered and exulted and went gladly forth to the bloodiest field of all because they saw this man at the head of the column are all gone, and the man himself, with the hatred and the adoration that he inspired, is gone with them, and the cheers and the gunfire of that army echo far off, in old memories, unreal and ghostlike, the passion and the violence all filtered out, leaving the inexplicable picture of an army transfigured. And it seems that this man, with his yellow sash and his great black horse and his unforgettable air of parade-ground trimness and dash, somehow was in his own person the soldier every soldier had longed to be, the embodiment of the gaiety that had been lost and the hope that had been given up. He was what the army and the impossible, picture-book war itself had meant back in the army's youth when innocence had not yet died. And when he came back men split their throats with cheering, and tilted their battle flags proudly forward, and forgot that they had been starved and misused, and became a great army once more and went off to define the shape and purport of the war on the sunlit fields and glades that were waiting for them around a little Dunker church in the Maryland hills.
TWO
The Young General
1.A Great Work in My Hands
He was trusted to the point of death by one hundred thousand fighting men, but he himself always had his lurking doubts. The soldiers firmly believed that where he was everything was bound to be all right. They would gladly awaken from the deepest sleep of exhaustion to go and cheer him because they felt that way. After Malvern Hill an entire division, underfed for days, deserted the sputtering campfires where in a gloomy rain it was cooking the first hot meal of the week, in order to splash through the mud and hurrah as he galloped down the road, and felt satisfied even though all the fires went out and breakfast was sadly delayed. But it seems that McClellan was never quite convinced. An uncertainty tormented him. It was almost as if some invisible rider constantly followed him, in the brightly uniformed staff that rode with him, and came up abreast every now and then to whisper: "But, General, are you sure?" Every man tries to live up to his own picture of himself. McClellan's picture was glorious, but one gathers that he was never quite confident that he could make it come to life.
Perhaps this was partly because too much had happened to him too soon. Long afterward he remarked: "It probably would have been better for me personally had my promotion been delayed a year or more"; and he was probably quite right. Fame came early, and it
came like an explosion, touched off before he had had a chance to get set for it. He found himself at the top of the ladder almost before he started to climb, and the height was dizzying. One day he was leading a diminutive army of volunteers in an obscure campaign far back in the wild mountains; the next day—almost literally, the next day—he was the savior of his country, with President and Congress piling a prodigious load on his shoulders, and with every imaginable problem arising from the most confusing and pressing of wars seemingly coming straight to him, and to him alone, for solution. He bore himself with a confident air and he said calmly, "I can do it all," but somewhere far down inside there was a corroding unease.
He was thirty-five when the war started. A West Point graduate, he had done well as a young subaltern in the Mexican War, and later he had been sent to the Crimea by the War Department to watch the British and the French fight the Russians. Then, with the rank of captain, he had resigned from the army to go into business. A capable engineer, by the spring of 1861 he had become a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year railroad president, and he was working in Cincinnati when Fort Sumter fell and the war began. Th
e war reached out for him without delay.
It began with the governors. State governors were of great importance in the war machinery of that era—considerably more important than the War Department itself, at first. Under the law, all volunteer regiments were raised, officered, and trained by the state authorities, and the regiments were sworn into Federal service only after they had been completely organized in the states. This threw a heavy load on the governors—men of peace and politics, whose military staffs consisted of militia colonels and brigadiers, ardent persons but utterly ignorant of any warlike activity beyond a peacetime militia muster. The governors, as a result, were frantic to get a few West Pointers around them, and a retired army officer with an excellent record, like McClellan, was an obvious prize. So by mid-April, McClellan, who was a Pennsylvanian by birth, had received a message from Governor Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania, inviting him to come to Harrisburg at once and take charge of the Pennsylvania troops. He wound up his business affairs in Cincinnati as quickly as he could and took off for Harrisburg, stopping at Columbus en route to see Ohio's Governor William Dennison, who wanted his advice. The stopover made all the difference.
McClellan appeared at Dennison's office, wearing civilian garb and a soft felt hat, impressing the governor and his advisers as a quiet, modest, self-possessed man and looking, as one of them remarked, exactly like what he was—"a railway superintendent in his business clothes." The governor explained what he was up against. He had what looked like the impossible job of getting ten thousand men ready for the field, and there was no one around who knew the first thing about the military arts. The state arsenal contained nothing in the way of equipment but a few boxes of ancient smoothbore muskets, badly rusted, plus a couple of brass six-pounder field-pieces, somewhat honeycombed from the firing of salutes and devoid of any auxiliary equipment except for a pile of mildewed harness. The recruits were already beginning to show up—a few companies, gaudy in old-style militia uniforms, had got to town and were sleeping in uncomfortable elegance in the legislative chambers in the state-house—and so far the state had not even picked a site for a training camp. Under these circumstances the governor had no intention of letting a good West Pointer slip through his fingers, and he then and there offered McClellan the command of Ohio's troops—the command of them, plus the task of getting them housed, fed, clad, trained, and organized. McClellan promptly accepted, moved into an office in the statehouse, and got down to work, a major general of volunteers.1
