Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  with only part of his mind; a certain area had to be given over to emotions which were all the more mad and overpowering because he shared them with everyone else.

  Hence the Civil War was fought and directed in an air of outright melodrama. It was stagy and overdone, and the least inhibited theatrical director nowadays would throw out large parts of the script on the simple ground that it was too wild to be credible—but it was all real, the villainies and dangers were all visible, and the worst things anyone could imagine seemed quite as likely as not to be completely true. The confused soldiers who imagined that General McDowell wore a fancy hat in order to have traitorous communion with the Rebels were not out of their minds; they were simply applying, on their own level, the same sort of panic suspicion that was besetting their elders. All the way through there were two lines of action going on: the visible one, out in the open, where there were flags and rumbling guns and marching men to be seen, and the invisible one which affected and colored all the rest. Sunlight and death were upon the earth in the spring of 1862, and no one was wholly rational.

  On the surface, everything was fine. Nearly two hundred thousand young men had been drilled, disciplined, clothed, armed, and equipped. They innocently thought themselves veterans. They had roughed it for a whole autumn and winter under canvas, knew what it was like to sleep on bare ground in the rain, had learned the intricate, formalized routines by which marching columns transformed themselves into battle lines, and they had been brought to a razor edge of keenness. The great unpredictable that lay ahead of them seemed a bright adventure, for in the 1860s cynicism was not a gift which came to youth free, in advance; it had to be earned, and all illusions had to be lost the hard way. Day by day the new divisions got ready for the great move southward, discarding surplus gear, preparing wagon trains for cross-country movement. The roads and docks and warehouses along the Potomac were full of bustle and hustle, and the empty transports lay waiting on the bright water.

  But beneath this enthusiasm and eager hope there were doubt and bickering, and the men who knew the most were the men who worried the most. A cloud somewhat larger than a man's hand lay upon the sky: symbolized, as winter died, by a very literal cloud of black, oily smoke rising from the burning supply depots of the Confederate encampments around Centreville and Manassas. Confederate Joe Johnston, meditating on the fact that McClellan had three times his numbers, had decided not to wait to be pushed. He put the torch to all the goods he could not move—a million pounds of bacon, along with much else, went to the flames—and he pulled his army out of its entrenchments, marching back to a safer post behind the Rappahannock River. And while this retreat was, in a way, what everybody had been hoping for—Rebel vedettes could no longer gaze insolently down on the capital city, and the troublesome batteries along the Potomac were all evacuated, leaving the waterway clear—the move took the high command by surprise. It might be cause for joy, but it was also very disturbing.

  To General McClellan, among others. In the elaborate chess game that was just beginning he had worked out a clever sequence of moves, and this retreat joggled the board and displaced the men. McClellan had planned to float his army down to the mouth of the Rappahannock, landing at a town called Urbanna, some sixty miles due east of Richmond. That would put him in Johnston's rear, the Confederate Army would have to retreat in hot haste—and, being so hasty, very likely in considerable disorder—and the Federal army would be where it could cut off this retreat and bring on a battle under highly favorable circumstances. But now Johnston was not where he had been, and the Urbanna move was no good. Committed to the water route, at the cost of long, infinitely difficult wrangles with President and Cabinet, McClellan realized that he would have to go to Fortress Monroe and make his way up the long peninsula between the York and James rivers.

  In a way, that was all right. His flanks and his supply line would be protected, and he had been informed that the peninsular highways were sandy, and hence readily passable in wet weather—a thumping bit of misinformation, if ever there was one. But it meant a slow, slogging drive, no chance to cut off the Rebel army, and a big, stand-up fight before Richmond was reached. He had written earlier that the move via the peninsula was "less brilliant." Still, he greatly preferred it to the overland route, which was what Lincoln and his Cabinet wanted: the route straight down the railroad track, supply fine getting longer each day and cruelly tempting the Rebel cavalry raiders, and all sorts of mischance possible as the army got deeper into enemy territory.

  There had been trouble about that; much trouble, the end of which was not yet. Out of it had come a singular episode—fantastic, reflecting the temper of the times and the strange character of the war they were fighting. It happened, oddly, on the very day General Johnston started his gray columns south out of Manassas, when Lincoln sent for McClellan early in the morning and asked him to come to the White House. When McClellan got there he found the President sober, somewhat distraught. There was, said Lincoln, an ugly matter to talk about. It seemed to be so ugly that Lincoln hardly knew how to begin; McClellan finally had to prompt him by suggesting that, the uglier the matter was, the better it would be to speak about it frankly and openly. So Lincoln got into it.

  People had been telling him, said the President, that there was much more to McClellan's plan of campaign than met the eye. The big objection to taking the army down the bay by water had always been the fear that Washington would be left uncovered, defenseless against a sudden Rebel stab—and a successful stab into the heart of the capital would mean the end of everything, the Southern Confederacy a real nation, the mystic union of the states dissolved forever. Now, the President went on, it was being alleged, by men whose suspicions had to be taken into account, that McClellan was planning to leave the capital unprotected on purpose—that he was inviting the Rebel stab, that he wanted the Confederacy to win, that he was moving according to stealthy and treasonous design.

  McClellan sprang to his feet. He could permit no one, he said, to couple his name with the word "treason." Years later he wrote that he spoke "in a manner not altogether decorous toward the chief magistrate." The President, said the general hotly, would have to retract that expression. Lincoln tried to soothe him; the expression was not his, he was merely telling McClellan what others were saying. For his part, he did not for a moment believe that McClellan had any traitorous intent. (Which should have been fairly obvious; otherwise, he was simply an imbecile to retain him in command of the army.) McClellan's feathers, having been thoroughly ruffled, were slow in settling back into place. He remarked that the President might well be careful thereafter in his use of language. Again Lincoin insisted that the offensive accusation was not his; according to McClellan, Lincoln apologized, and the general finally took his leave, wondering how "a man of Mr. Lincoln's intelligence could give ear to such abominable nonsense."

  Abominable nonsense it surely was. Lincoln was no fool and McClellan was no knave, but they sat in the White House and this monstrous accusation that the commander of the nation's armies was a traitor had to be taken up and considered, dark suspicion being the order of the day. What a change had taken place since the great days of the previous July when all anybody wanted was to entrust the country's fate to the young general from the West; what an unendurable tension must have been in the air, to make such an interview possible!

  Yet McClellan seems to have missed the real point. He left the White House feeling that Lincoln himself more than half believed the charge, and he was naturally full of deep resentment. But somehow he never realized that the mere existence of this calumny must profoundly affect his own course of action. Here again was that unknown quantity in the military equation he had to solve, and there was nothing in the West Point textbooks to prepare him for it. How does a general beginning a great campaign act, when the men he must report to suspect that he wants to lose rather than to win?

  The one thing that is obvious is that such a general does not act the way generals ordi
narily act. For McClellan was not a general out of the military histories, solving according to the best scientific principles the problem which the civil power had handed him; he was a man living and working in an era so desperately beset that "abominable nonsense" could be believed by responsible public officials. What might be permitted to a general in another era would not be permitted to him. The existence of the deep and terrible suspicion and uncertainty which lay back of Lincoln's summons to the White House would have to be as much a factor in McClellan's calculations as would the strategic plans of General Joseph E. Johnston. Lincoln had tried to tip him off, and McClellan could see only that a great injustice was being done.

  Events were not kind to him in the days immediately after the interview. Johnston's retreat became known. McClellan marched his troops down to Centreville and Manassas, partly for pursuit, in case the Confederate withdrawal offered an opening to strike, and partly to give the army practice in cross-country movements. Viewed by a military eye, the defensive works which Johnston had evacuated were indeed strong; but in the gun emplacements there remained large numbers of harmless wooden cannon—trimmed logs, painted black and upended over wagon wheels, menacing-looking from a distance but incapable of killing Union soldiers. Whether these Quaker guns had been there all the time or had simply been put in place by the wily Confederate leader (a man fertile in deceptive expedients) to cover the withdrawal, no one knew—or much cared: for the obvious fact was that in nearly eight months of command McClellan had never got his troops close enough to Johnston's lines to find out whether Johnston's guns would shoot or not. The story of the wooden guns went all across the land, and there was an uproar: so this was the danger that had kept the great Federal army immobile all fall and winter. Proper military caution was made to look like plain timidity. It was unfair, but there was no help for it; and the men who doubted McClellan's desire to win a victory had one more item to record against him.

  None of this depressed the army itself. The boys enjoyed the march, even though they had strong remarks to make about the depth of the Virginia mud; and while they were innocently eager to go into action they were willing to agree that the general who kept them from assaulting the wicked entrenchments around Manassas had done them a good turn. McClellan deftly reminded them of this in a spirited address issued at Fairfax Courthouse in mid-March. After telling the soldiers that he was about to take them "where you all wish to be—the decisive battlefield," and remarking that the time of inaction was over, he declaimed:

  "I am to watch over you as a parent over his children; and you know that your general loves you from the depths of his heart. It shall be my care, as it has ever been, to gain success with the least possible loss; but I know that, if it is necessary, you will willingly follow me to our graves for our righteous cause. ... I shall demand of you great, heroic exertions, rapid and long marches, desperate combats, privations perhaps. We will share all these together; and when this sad war is over we will return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac."1

  The army was definitely going to move. With the Manassas line evacuated, it was going to go to the peninsula rather than to Urbanna, and the transports had been assembled. Lincoln was deeply dubious about the move, and he laid down as the unalterable guiding principle that, no matter where the army went or what it did, Washington must not for one minute be left unprotected. The steps he took to make certain of that point were not especially pleasing to McClellan. He first removed McClellan from command of all the armies and limited him to command of the Army of the Potomac. (There may be some reason to suppose that this was simply a precautionary measure—that Lincoln intended to have a long look at McClellan in actual field operations and was ready to restore him to supreme command if everything went well. No one was named to the vacated job for some months. McClellan, of course, could see it only as a demotion, and it rankled.)2 As a second step, having stipulated that the capital must at all costs be left secure, Lincoln called a council of McClellan and his corps commanders—those new corps commanders, in whose selection McClellan had had no voice—and asked them what force they, as military men, thought adequate to insure such security.

  The assembled generals, after taking thought, reported that forty thousand men "in and about Washington" would be adequate. Lincoln accepted this figure, stipulating in addition that a substantial guard must also be left in the neighborhood of Manassas, to keep the Confederates from reoccupying their abandoned works. This was agreed to. There were men enough to provide this force and still leave McClellan ample means for his campaign on the peninsula. But while the men were going aboard ship and the first of the transports were dropping down the Potomac, high strategy began to get all snarled up in a question of arithmetic, and the way was paved for failure.

  The plan was somewhat complicated. McClellan was going to take upward of a hundred thousand men down to Fortress Monroe for the march up the peninsula. In addition, McDowell, commanding one corps of the army, was to assemble thirty thousand-odd at Fredericksburg, whence he could take them down to join McClellan whenever McClellan summoned him. Up in the Shenandoah Valley there was General Banks, whose primary function was to keep the Rebels from cutting the line of the Baltimore and Ohio and erupting into Pennsylvania. Banks had more men than he needed, the situation in the valley being quiet, so he was instructed to leave part of his men there and bring the bulk of them over to Manassas. Farther west, in the mountain country where McClellan had made his first reputation, there was General John Charles Fremont, the famous "Pathfinder" of California, the darling of the abolitionists, and a hero to all ardent Republicans.

  Lincoln was already aware of Fr6mont's irritating eagerness to make high policy for the administration, and he knew that he was hopelessly inept as an administrator, but he had not yet discovered that the man was also completely incompetent as a soldier; and Fremont's mission was to slide southwest through the mountains in the general direction of eastern Tennessee, where there was strong Unionist sentiment that seemed worth cultivating and where there was also an important Confederate railway line that might profitably be seized. To give Fremont added strength, and also to put under his congenial command more of the German regiments in which anti-slavery sentiment ran so strong, Lincoln detached Blenker's division from McClellan and sent it west; he admitted to McClellan that political pressure which he felt unable to resist was chiefly responsible for this, and McClellan bitterly wrote it down as a sign that the President was weak-willed.

  Everybody was beginning to move. Banks was bringing the larger part of his force east over the Blue Ridge, to take station at Manassas; McDowell was grouping his own divisions and preparing for the advance; the leading elements of the Army of the Potomac were going ashore at Fortress Monroe—going down from the ships on long, floating bridges and jumping into waist-deep water to wade the last few yards—and if the administration was making things difficult for McClellan, it was at least satisfied with the layout. And just then Stonewall Jackson upset the entire schedule.

  What Jackson actually did, measured by any quantitative standard, was not really very important. He commanded fewer than four thousand men at that time, and he had them camped in the Shenandoah Valley to keep an eye on the Yankee invader. He got wind of

  Banks's move eastward, underestimated the numbers Banks was leaving behind, and moved boldly forward to the attack, hitting Shields's division at Kernstown, a few miles south of Winchester, one afternoon late in March. Since Shields had twice as many men as had been supposed, Jackson was roundly whipped and he had to retreat up the valley after a savage Hide battle which Shields's boys recalled later with vast pride—theirs was the only outfit in the Union Army which could say it had licked Stonewall Jackson in open fight. As a military spectacle this battle of Kernstown was notable chiefly because it showed what an iron-hard man Jackson was: he cashiered his best general afterward for withdrawing his men without orders.
To be sure, the men were totally out of ammunition and were badly outnumbered, and the withdrawal was just plain common sense, but that made no difference: the retreat hadn't been ordered at headquarters, and anyhow, as Jackson sternly remarked, the men could have stayed and used their bayonets. This was rough on the general who got cashiered, but it had a notably stimulating effect on all other generals who served under Jackson thereafter.3

  Seemingly, all that had happened was that Jackson had made an ill-advised attack and had been beaten. But the effects, by a roundabout route, were felt afar off. Both McClellan and Banks agreed that if Jackson was strong enough to attack Shields he had better be watched pretty carefully, since the Rebels obviously had more men in the valley than had been supposed—neither general dreaming that Jackson had made his attack with so small a force. So it was decided that Banks must keep his entire command in the Shenandoah Valley, a strategic area of considerable sensitivity; and troops were drawn from the fortifications around Washington to occupy the Manassas-Centreville fine which had originally been designated for Banks. That done, McClellan took a last look around, concluded that everything was under control, wrote a final note to the War Department showing how the troops which he was not taking with him were disposed, and set off for Fortress Monroe.

  Now the dispositions he had made, as revised because of the battle of Kernstown, were certainly adequate to give Washington the protection Lincoln had insisted on. As a military man McClellan could honestly feel that he had done all that was required. But he wasn't called on to satisfy military men on this point; he had to satisfy politicians who were more than ready to see spooks under the bed, and from their point of view he had left himself wide open to the charge of ignoring his instructions-this general whom the Secretary of War and the administration leaders on Capitol Hill had already accused of treasonous intent. The actual figures are a bit dull, but they need to be looked at for a moment: