Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  "He had already received the sobriquet of 'Old Brains,' but when I beheld his bulging eyes, his flabby cheeks, his slack-twisted figure, and his slow and deliberate movements, and noted his sluggish speech, lacking in point and magnetism, I experienced a distinct feeling of disappointment which from that day never grew less. I could not reconcile myself to the idea that an officer of such negative appearance could ever be a great leader of men. . . . Long before the war ended he came to be recognized by close observers, and especially by the Secretary of War, as a negligible quantity."1

  The record of Halleck's dispatches during the days just before and after Pope's disaster makes curious reading. At a time when the big problem on which the fate of the Union might depend was to get Pope's and McClellan's armies united before Lee could force a battle, Halleck was sounding partly like a dollar-a-year man worried because the newspapers were impertinently printing confidential memoranda, and partly like a tired bureaucrat fussily absorbed by trifles. He wired Pope to clean all the newspaper reporters out of his army and to let no telegrams go out except those signed by himself—there had been too many news leaks recently. Pope protested; Halleck replied that "your staff is decidedly leaky" and complained that the very order calling for a news black-out had been printed in the papers as soon as it was issued. Virtuously Halleck added that "there has been much laxity about all official business in this army."

  Office details engrossed him. Three days before the great collision at Bull Run, Pope protested that he was not being kept up to date about the movements of McClellan's forces. Halleck wired back petulantly: "Just think of the immense amount of telegraphing I have to do and then say whether I can be expected to give you any details as to the movements of others, even when I know them." After the fighting began, when Pope implored Halleck to come out and take charge of things himself, Halleck wired tersely: "It is impossible for me to leave Washington." When the commander of the defenses of Washington complained that he could not man the fortifications owing to lack of artillerymen, Halleck replied: "If you are deficient in anything for the defense of the forts, make your requisitions on the proper office. ... I have no time for these details and don't come to me until you exhaust other resources."

  To anyone who has ever worked in Washington, Halleck is quickly recognizable for what he actually was: a typical old-line government-service hack, to whom the tidy operation of an office is an end in itself, infinitely more important than anything the office can conceivably do. If the papers progress smoothly from "incoming" to "outgoing," all is well, even though the Republic fall, and it is much less important to prevent the fall than to make certain that no wreckage lands on one's own desk. The Republic is strong and it has amazing resilience, and it can support people like that ordinarily without much trouble, but it can hardly endure having such a one in command of its armies at the height of a furious war.

  In the midst of all the Bull Run confusion Secretary Stanton sent in a demand for the full record regarding McClellan's withdrawal from the peninsula: when was he ordered to leave, when did he leave, was the whole operation handled with such slackness as to endanger the country? Recognizing this as Stanton's search for ammunition to destroy McClellan, but bearing in mind also that McClellan might yet ride out the storm and be the hero of the nation, Halleck sent a facing-both-ways reply. He gave all the dates, stated that the withdrawal was not made with the speed the national safety required, but added that once McClellan did begin to move he moved fast and that McClellan at the time reported the delay as unavoidable. No matter who won, Halleck was safe. His reply could be read as condemnation or as vindication, as circumstances might require.

  And so one more attempt by the President to solve the problem of army high command was nickering out in windy futility. Lincoln had demoted McClellan because, with McClellan in the number-one spot, nothing much ever seemed to happen. There had been no way to convey to the young general the terrible urgency of the moment, the need to bring the war to a close before it blew up into a raging flame that might consume more than it saved. For a time the President himself, aided by the Secretary of War, had been running things, which had brought nothing but disaster. Military affairs could not be handled by amateurs, even though the President, with a persistence both ludicrous and pathetic, drew military textbooks from the archives and boned up on strategy in his spare time. So Halleck, the genius recommended by General Scott, had been called in, and for a space Lincoln thought he had what he finally got when he called in Grant; but now Halleck was proving that Lincoln had just made another mistake.

  Which was tragic, from any viewpoint. Almost anything—including a change in the American form of government—might happen if the command problem were not solved. McClellan's implied proposal for veto power by a soldier over political decisions by the civil authorities had been pigeonholed neatly enough, but some equally astounding suggestions were coming in from other quarters. Chase and Stanton were leading a drive for government by Cabinet: choice of the top generals, and with it control of the war, should be lodged with a junta of cabinet ministers. This drive was failing, partly because Lincoln would have none of it and partly because of the good sense and Yankee stubbornness of Gideon Welles, who flatly refused to be a party to it. Dimly allied with it was a move by Republican leaders to give executive control to Congress: Congress should pick the generals, pass on strategy, and set all war policies, and the Committee on the Conduct of the War—busily spreading fear and distrust and working with clumsy ruthlessness and undying energy—would be its instrument. Nobody who doubted the need for ending slavery overnight would be allowed to have any hand in army affairs—although private soldiers who were not abolitionists would still, presumably, be allowed to die in battle, if perchance they were hit by Southern bullets.

  This pressure by the leaders of his own party was something Lincoln could by no means ignore. He had taken his political life in his hands by reinstating McClellan in command of the Army of the Potomac, and the party leaders were sounding off about it. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, almost incoherent with fury, underlining words with sputtering pen point, was writing that recent disasters to the army had been caused by "treason, rank treason, call it by what name you will," and could see no hope save in "a demand of the loyal governors backed by a threat" to bring about an immediate change in policy; the President was "unstable as water" and was letting himself be "bullied by those traitor Generals" who would yet create a military dictatorship.2

  To the Republican leaders, everything was simple. The Army of the Potomac was not aggressively used and was shamefully pushed around by muscular Rebels. The reason, as they saw it, could only be that it was led by men whose hearts were not in the cause; by case-hardened Democrats; by men who sympathized with slavery and who therefore did not really want the rebellion suppressed; by men disloyal, in plain English. The remedy was, of course, obvious: entrust the army only to generals whose abolitionist convictions were strong beyond all question and there would be no more of this pampering and cosseting of treason.

  This led them into manifest absurdities. They considered John Charles Fremont ideal material for high command: he was sound on the slavery question, and that was enough. The mere fact that he was totally devoid of military ability was beside the point. They also felt that the ineffable Ben Butler would make a good army commander; he was fully as incompetent as Fremont in the military field, but he was "loyal" on the only issue which mattered—even now he was rubbing slaveholders' noses in it, in New Orleans. Franz Sigel, the transplanted German revolutionary, and David Hunter, who had rashly proclaimed emancipation along the Georgia coast, would be equally acceptable. No one ever accused those men of being especially qualified soldiers, but no one ever accused them of sympathy with slavery, either, and that was all that counted. Lincoln flared up once when burly Ben Wade was insisting on the removal of McClellan; if he removed him, asked the President irritably, with whom should he replace him? "Anybody!" cried Wade. Lincoln shoo
k his head; "anybody" might do for Wade, he said, but he must have somebody.

  Yet these men had a point. One could almost say that they were right for the wrong reasons—or partly right, at any rate, for reasons that were mostly wrong. There was a crippling deficiency in the army command, from the brigades and divisions on up, and it was the kind of deficiency from which the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia did not suffer: a lack of the hard, grim, remorseless, driving spirit that must be on tap if wars are to be won.

  Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley offers an example: driving his men in pursuit of Banks with remorseless fury, sending them on far past the point of physical exhaustion, continuing to pursue even though most of his army had fallen out from sheer inability to take another step, keeping it up long after a more sober general would have realized that pursuit was impossible—but winning, in the end, because he forced Banks to fight at Winchester before Banks could rally his men and get set for the blow, which meant that Banks got licked disastrously.

  Jackson was an undefiled genius, to be sure, and it is hardly fair to expect all corps and division commanders to measure up to his standard. But there was a touch of the same sort of thing in the other Confederate commanders. General A. P. Hill was too heedless and impetuous by far, rushing into the attack without proper caution—but, in the end, providing the killing punch, against the odds, that helped to knock McClellan's right wing back behind the Chickahominy. Longstreet was sullen and balky, ignoring Lee's expressed wish, waiting for his foe to make one more ill-advised maneuver. Yet finally, when the opening appeared, he came down on the enemy's exposed flank like an avalanche, every man in action, no reserves held back for use in case something went wrong; and he turned the second battle of Bull Run into a rout. The Confederacy's other General Hill, D. H. Hill, was a carping dyspeptic who observed that Lee's tactics at Malvern Hill were all wrong and that it was hopeless to assault the massed Yankee guns; but when finally ordered he went in with such a cold fury that he almost turned certain defeat into dazzling victory. The least common denominator of those men was that they fought all-out. If they hit at all they hit with everything there was. They had an exultant acceptance for the chances of war. They fought as if they enjoyed it, and they probably did. The Army of the Potomac just was not getting that kind of leadership. Kearny had had it, but he was dead. Most of the other generals seemed uninspired.

  What the radicals really meant when they complained that the Federal generals were too easy with their opponents was that the generals kept missing their chances for lack of that extra ounce of deep combativeness. They were quite wrong in believing that this would be remedied by promoting stanch abolitionists, but they were quite right in insisting that more forceful leaders were needed; and they anticipated Clemenceau in believing that war was far too important to be left to the generals, anyway. The North had not yet found the men who had the flaming spirit of war. McClellan's army was not handled the way Lee's army was: neither as a whole nor in its divisions and brigades. The key perhaps lies in the fact that any attempt to show how a Northern general at this period failed to measure up usually makes its point by showing, for contrast, what his opposite number on the Confederate side was doing.

  Canny old Secretary Welles in the Navy Department really had the answer. He was ceaselessly shuffling naval officers, looking for that hard-fighting, driving quality without which all other assets are vain. Over and over in his diary one finds him speaking of some distinguished officer who didn't quite measure up: "He has wordy pretensions, some capacity, but no hard courage . . . scholarly pretensions, some literary acquirements, but not of much vigor of mind. . . . Is an intelligent but not an energetic, driving, fighting officer, such as is wanted for rough work." He summed up the army's problem neatly enough: "Some of our best-educated officers have no faculty to govern, control and direct an army in offensive warfare. We have many talented and capable engineers, good officers in some respects, but without audacity, desire for fierce encounter, and in that respect almost utterly deficient as commanders."

  A considerable part of the radicals' suspicion was directed at West Point. Had not that school been under Southern control for a generation or more? Had not some of its most distinguished graduates gone South when the war began? Did it not seem to produce, for the North, bookish and doctrinaire generals who made war by rote and neglected to hit the enemy when he should be hit? And was not war itself, for that matter, really quite a simple matter if a man had his heart in the right place? To the radicals, lack of professional training for army command was a positive asset, not a deficiency. A man whose heart was in the war was infinitely better than a professional who did not care.

  Since most of the really successful generals in that war, Northern and Southern alike, finally turned out to be West Pointers, this attitude seems almost willfully obtuse today; yet here again the politicians had a point. The government's experience with the older regular-army officers in the early part of the war had not been too happy. Very few of the regulars had shown enthusiasm for the Northern cause. Many limited themselves to a strict performance of the letter of their duty, were utterly lacking in zeal, openly predicted defeat, and admittedly served the North only because the honor of a soldier required it. The stuffiness that had grown up in a small officer corps limited to routine duties in the long years of peace had not gone unnoticed. Jacob Cox of Ohio, a civilian who rose to become a better than average major general, has recorded that one general to whom he reported early in the war admonished him severely on the importance of obeying orders literally but not going one step beyond: "If you had been in the army as long as I have, you would be content to do the things that are ordered without hunting up others." Cox was quite as caustic as anyone in criticizing the incompetent officers who came in from civilian life, for political reasons, under the volunteer system, but he remarked: "It seems to me an entirely fair conclusion that with us in 1861, as with the first French republic, the infusion of the patriotic enthusiasm of a volunteer organization was a necessity, and that this fully made up for the lack of instruction at the start."8

  And if the volunteer system elevated many a nincompoop to high command, it also brought up some good men with solid talents for war: more of them than one is likely to realize, reading the blanket denunciations of political generals. The North got men like John Logan and Frank Blair, for instance—untutored civilians who became such good soldiers that each was able to command an army corps under as grim a fighting man as William T. Sherman. Blair and Logan were political generals pure and simple, one the brother of a cabinet minister, the other a prominent Democrat whom it was important to placate, but they were first-rate soldiers as well. It may be that Sherman, with his rough informality and his utterly unregimented mind, had more of a knack for developing fighting men than anyone in the East had; it may be noted that in the Army of the Potomac O. O. Howard never showed a sign of anything but diligent mediocrity, but that when he was transferred west and went under Sherman he presently became an army commander. On his march to the sea Sherman had more ex-civilians than West Pointers among his generals, and they were men of his own choosing. Sherman's favorite corps commander was believed to be Joseph A. Mowrer, who never saw West Point.

  In the East, too, some of the volunteer officers were measuring up. One of the best men in the Army of the Potomac was the amazingly warlike Manhattan lawyer, Colonel Francis Barlow, now commanding the 61st New York but ultimately to be an inspired, savagely fighting division commander. Barlow had the quality the Republicans were looking for, if they only knew it—the indefinable something which can best be summed up as a positive taste for fighting. Instead of wearing a regulation officer's sword he carried the heaviest cavalry saber he could find; said that when he whacked a laggard or a straggler with the flat of it he wanted to hit with something that would hurt. He had an obsession about preventing straggling, and he let it gnaw at him until he found the answer, which wasn't until after he came to division command.
Then, when on the march, he used to detail a company to form a skirmish line, with fixed bayonets, at the rear of the division column, with orders to sweep up and drive forward all stragglers. It wasn't a pleasant assignment. Most of the men in the skirmish line had to scramble over ditches and fences and fallen logs and work their way through brambles and underbrush while the rest of the army was tramping the smooth highway, and they got all the dust the division kicked up. The natural result was that after an hour of it they were mad enough to bayonet their own parents, and a straggler who fell into their hands was due to get very rough treatment. As a consequence: no stragglers from Barlow's division.

  Barlow was no stickler for the niceties of military dress. He wore his single-breasted uniform coat unbuttoned, and under it he wore a checked flannel shirt, lumberjack-style. He looked, one of Meade's staff officers wrote, "like a highly independent mounted newsboy," and a Brady photograph shows him as a slouchy, rangy, limber young man, black felt hat crumpled in one hand, heavy boots on his feet, clean-shaven, rather handsome, with quiet, deadly-cold eyes. After he got his division he took it where the fighting was. Somebody totted up figures after the war and found that in all the Federal armies there were nineteen regiments which had done so much hard fighting that each had lost at least sixteen officers killed in action; five of the nineteen belonged to Barlow's division. He had entered the army as a private in the spring of 1861; became a colonel a year later, and when the Maryland campaign began was commanding what might be called half a brigade—his own regiment, plus the 64th New York, which was attached to it.