by Shelby Foote
There was little that was surprising in this removal. What was surprising was the Secretary’s choice of a successor: David Dixon Porter. Porter was only a junior commander, so that to give him the job Welles had to disappoint and outrage more than eighty senior officers. Besides, there were personal drawbacks. Like his brother Dirty Bill, Porter was not above claiming other men’s glory as his own; he would stretch or varnish the truth to serve his purpose; he would undermine a superior; he would promise a good deal more than he could deliver—all of which he had done at New Orleans, and then had gone on to do them again at Vicksburg. Yet he had virtues, too, of the sort which Othello said proceeded from ambition in “the big wars.” Like Lincoln in his pre-Manassas judgment of John Pope, Welles apparently believed that “a liar might [yet] be brave and have skill as an officer.” Weighing the virtues against the vices, the gray-bearded brown-wigged naval head confided in his diary: “Porter is but a Commander. He has, however, stirring and positive qualities, is fertile in resources, has great energy, excessive and sometimes not overscrupulous ambition; is impressed with and boastful of his own powers, given to exaggeration in relation to himself—a Porter infirmity—is not generous to older and superior living officers, whom he is too ready to traduce, but is kind and patronizing to favorites who are juniors; is given to cliquism, but is brave and daring like all his family. He has not the conscientious and high moral qualities of Foote to organize the flotilla, and is not considered by some of our best naval men a fortunate officer. His selection will be unsatisfactory to many, but his field of operations is peculiar, and a young and active officer is required for the duty to which he is assigned.”
Having decided that the credits overbalanced the debits, in weight if not in number, Welles called Porter into his office and informed him that he was being sent as an acting rear admiral to take charge of the navy on the western waters. The order was dated October 9; Porter, who had come north on leave, hoping to cure a touch of fever he had contracted in the region to which his chief was now returning him, accepted both the assignment and the promotion as no more than his due. Six days later he was in Cairo, where he assumed command of the 125 vessels comprising the Mississippi Squadron, together with 1300 officers, only twenty-five of whom had been in the old navy, and approximately 10,000 sailors. What he would do with these boats and officers and men—and whether Welles would be sustained by circumstance in his choice of a man whose character he doubted—remained to be seen.
At any rate, Buell and Davis had been brought down. And now as October wore toward a close, giving occasion in the East for a mocking revival of “All Quiet Along the Potomac,” Lincoln was after larger game. In fact he was after the top-ranking man in the whole U.S. Army: George B. McClellan. The other two had been wing shots—targets of opportunity, so to speak—but this one he was stalking with care, intending to catch him on the sit.
According to some observers this should not be difficult, since that was the Young Napoleon’s accustomed attitude. The managing editor of the New York Tribune, for example, had written privately in late September, a week after the Battle of Antietam, that one of his reporters had just returned from the army, “and his notion is that it is to be quiet along the Potomac for some time to come. George, whom Providence helps according to his nature, has got himself on one side of a ditch, which Providence had already made for him, with the enemy on the other, and has no idea of moving. Wooden-head at Washington will never think of sending a force through the mountains to attack Lee in the rear, so the two armies will watch each other for nobody knows how many weeks, and we shall have the poetry of war with pickets drinking from the same stream, holding friendly converse and sending newspapers across by various ingenious contrivances.” In other words, this Indian summer, with its firm roads and its fair skies tinged with woodsmoke, was to be wasted, militarily, like the last one, in getting ready for a movement which bad weather would postpone. Whether the country would stand for another such winter of apparent inactivity Lincoln did not know. But he himself could not; nor did he intend to.
On the first day of October, without sending word that he was coming, he boarded a train and rode out to Western Maryland to see the general and his army. McClellan, however, got word that he was on the way and met him at Harpers Ferry. Pleased to find that the President had brought no politicians with him, “merely some western officers,” McClellan wrote his wife: “His ostensible purpose is to see the troops and the battlefield; I incline to think that the real purpose of his visit is to push me into a premature advance into Virginia. I may be mistaken, but think not.”
He was not mistaken. That was precisely why Lincoln had come; “I went up to the field to try to get [McClellan] to move,” he said later. But as usual when he was face to face with Little Mac, discussing military matters, he got nowhere. Apparently he did not really try very hard; the primary inertia was too great. When he urged an advance, McClellan went into an explanation of shortages and drawbacks, and Lincoln dropped the subject. According to the general, “He more than once assured me that he was fully satisfied with my whole course from the beginning; that the only fault he could possibly find was that I was perhaps too prone to be sure that everything was ready before acting, but that my actions were all right when I started.” Later they sat on a hillside, Lincoln with his long legs drawn up so that his knees were almost under his chin, and McClellan afterwards wrote that Lincoln told him: “General, you have saved the country. You must remain in command and carry us through to the end.” When McClellan said that this would be impossible—“The influences at Washington will be too strong for you, Mr President. I will not be allowed the required time for preparation”—Lincoln replied: “General, I pledge myself to stand between you and harm.”
It was a three-day visit, and much of the time was spent reviewing the troops. The President “looked pale,” according to one veteran who saw him, while another remarked that as he “rode around every battalion [he] seemed much worn and distressed and to be looking for those who were gone.” Doubtless he was thinking of the fallen, but he was also thinking of the men he saw—and of what they represented. A Union surgeon noted that Lincoln was “well received” by the soldiers, “but by no means so enthusiastically as General McClellan.” Lincoln did not mind this much. What he minded was the thought that this gave rise to. “The Army of the Potomac is my army as much as any army ever belonged to the man that created it,” McClellan told a member of his staff about this time. “We have grown together and fought together. We are wedded and should not be separated.” The army felt that way, too, and Lincoln knew it. He also knew that if the soldiers felt it strongly enough, mutiny would follow any order for the general’s removal from command. This was much on his mind during the visit, and resulted in a curious scene. Just before dawn of the second morning, he woke O. M. Hatch, an Illinois friend. “Come, Hatch,” he said, “I want you to take a walk with me.” Together they climbed to a hilltop overlooking the camps, and as sunrise lighted the valley where the troops lay waiting for reveille, Lincoln made an abstracted gesture, indicating the tented plain below. “Hatch, Hatch,” he said in a husky voice, barely above a whisper. “What is all this?” His companion was confused. “Why, Mr Lincoln, this is the Army of the Potomac,” he replied. Lincoln shook his head. “No, Hatch, no. This is General McClellan’s bodyguard.”
He returned to Washington, October 4. Two days later Halleck astonished McClellan with a telegraphic dispatch: “The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south. Your army must move now while the roads are good.… I am directed to add that the Secretary of War and the General-in-Chief concur with the President in these instructions.” McClellan replied that he was “pushing everything as rapidly as possible in order to get ready for the advance.” Beyond this bare acknowledgment, however, the only sign he gave that he had received the directive was a step-up in the submission of requisitions for more supplies of every description. He wa
nted shoes, hospital tents, and horses: especially horses, the need for which was presently emphasized by Jeb Stuart, who once more covered himself with glory at the Young Napoleon’s expense.
Under instructions from Lee to scout the Federal dispositions—and, if possible, destroy the railroad bridge over the Conococheague near Chambersburg, which would limit McClellan’s rail supply facilities to the B & O—Stuart crossed the Potomac above Martinsburg at early dawn, October 10. He had with him 1800 horsemen and four guns. By noon he was across the Pennsylvania line, approaching Mercersburg. Soon after dark, the lights of Chambersburg were in view. Demanding and receiving the surrender of the place, he appointed Wade Hampton “Military Governor,” quite as if he intended to stay there all fall, and bivouacked that night in the streets of the town. There were two disappointments. A bank official had escaped with all the cash in the vault, and the Conococheague bridge, being built of iron, proved indestructible. However, there were material compensations, including the capture and parole of 280 bluecoats, the opportunity to spend Confederate money in well-stocked Pennsylvania stores, and the impressment of more than a thousand excellent horses. Many of these last were draft animals of Norman and Belgian stock, and it was fortunate that they were seized in harness, since no southern quartermaster could furnish collars large enough for the big-necked creatures soon to be hauling rebel guns and wagons. Their former owners, never having seen an actual secessionist, were under the impression that Stuart’s troopers were Federal soldiers, sent to harass farmers suspected of disloyalty, and many of them protested indignantly as the raiders led their heavy-footed animals away: “I’m just as good a Union man as any of you!”
Jeb’s men had come nearly forty miles to reach their assigned objective, stirring up a hive of enemy cavalry in the process, and now the problem was how to get them back. Stuart met it as he had done before. When the column formed outside Chambersburg next morning, he led it, not southwest in the direction he had come from, but due east. Though he would have to ride more than twice as far to reach the Potomac by this route, it gave him the advantage of being unexpected along the way. The gray-jackets whooped at this evidence that they were about to repeat their Peninsula performance by staging another “Ride Around McClellan.” Eastward they rode, beyond the Blue Ridge, on through Cashtown, where they stopped to feed the horses, then turned south, avoiding the college town of Gettysburg, eight miles off. Late that afternoon they recrossed the Pennsylvania line and entered Emmitsburg; beyond which, riding in darkness now and frequently changing to captured horses to spare their own, they forded the Monocacy. Some fought sleep by dismounting to walk a mile or so from time to time. Others slumped in their saddles and frankly slept, their snores droning loud above the hoofclops.
Word of the raid had spread to Washington by now. “Not a man should be permitted to return to Virginia,” Halleck wired McClellan, who replied: “I have given every order necessary to insure the capture or destruction of those forces, and I hope we may be able to teach them a lesson they will not soon forget.” But that was not to be. Sunday morning, October 12, near the mouth of the Monocacy—where Lee had crossed with his whole army, marching north the month before—Stuart broke through a weak link in the cordon, splashed across the Potomac, and regained the safety of the Confederate lines. He had two men missing, victims most likely of commandeered Yankee whiskey, and a handful slightly wounded. That seemed to him a small price to pay for the nearly three hundred bluecoats paroled at Chambersburg and the thirty-odd public officials brought back as hostages to secure the release or considerate treatment of Southerners now in Union hands. More than a quarter of a million dollars in public and railroad property had been destroyed, and in exchange for about sixty lame or worn-out animals abandoned along the way, the gray troopers had brought 1200 horses back from Pennsylvania for service under the Stars and Bars. Most satisfactory of all—at least to Stuart, who thus once more had justified his plume—was the knowledge that all this had been accomplished in the immediate presence of more than 100,000 enemy soldiers whose commander, midway through the raid, had announced his intention to “teach [the rebels] a lesson” by effecting their capture or destruction.
Instead it was McClellan who had been taught a lesson, though whether he would profit from it was doubtful; apparently he had failed to absorb much from the same lesson when it was first administered, four months ago on the Peninsula. Now as then, he was the object of much derision, North and South—only this time Lincoln himself led the chorus. He was aboard a steamer, returning from a troop review at Alexandria, when someone asked him: “Mr President, what about McClellan?” Without looking up, Lincoln drew a circle on the deck with the ferrule of his umbrella. “When I was a boy we used to play a game,” he said, “ ‘Three Times Round, and Out.’ Stuart has been round him twice. If he goes around him once more, gentlemen, McClellan will be out.”
A new and biting note of mockery was coming into the President’s references to the commander of the Army of the Potomac. Formerly this had been restricted mainly to comments on Little Mac’s political suggestions—as when the governor of Massachusetts asked what Lincoln was going to reply to some advice McClellan had offered on a civil matter; “Nothing,” Lincoln said. “But it made me think of the man whose horse kicked up and stuck his foot through the stirrup. He said to the horse, ‘If you are going to get on I’ll get off.’ ” Thus he had dealt with McClellan the would-be statesman, reserving his respect for McClellan the soldier. Now this too was fading. On the day after Stuart got back from his raid, Lincoln sent the circumnavigated Young Napoleon a long letter full of advice, in effect a lecture on strategy and tactics. “You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness. Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?… Exclusive of the water-line, you are now nearer Richmond than the enemy is by the route you can and he must take. Why can you not reach there before him, unless you admit that he is more than your equal on the march?… I would press closely to him, fight him if a favorable opportunity should present, and at least try to beat him to Richmond on the inside track. I say ‘try’; if we never try, we shall never succeed.” That was the main thing, as Lincoln saw it: Beat him. A stalemate would not serve. Even a repulse was not enough. “We should not so operate as to merely drive him away. As we must beat him somewhere or fail finally, we can do it, if at all, easier near to us than far away. If we cannot beat the enemy where he now is, we never can, he being again within the intrenchments of Richmond.… It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy, and it is unmanly to say they cannot do it.” He added: “This letter is in no sense an order.”
Thus Lincoln. But McClellan apparently had as little respect for Lincoln the would-be strategist as Lincoln had for McClellan the would-be statesman. October’s perfect weather went sliding by, and the army hugged its camps while its commander, despite his own chief quartermaster’s protest that “no army was ever more perfectly supplied than this one has been as a general rule,” continued to call for more and more supplies. He also wanted more soldiers, believing himself outnumbered, though his strength report of October 20 listed 133,433 men “present for duty,” with an “aggregate present” of 159,860. Next day Halleck wired him: “Telegraph when you will move, and on what lines you propose to march.” McClellan replied that he was nearly ready, but when he followed this with an urgent request for more horses, claiming that the ones he had were broken down by arduous service and weakened by foot-and-mouth disease, Lincoln lost his temper. “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses,” he wired on October 25. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”
McClellan was upset. “It was one of those little flings that I can’t get used to when they are not merited,” he wrote his wife, and he protested at some leng
th to Lincoln the following day, defending his troopers and announcing that the long-awaited movement of his army across the Potomac had begun. Mollified, the President replied that he had “intended no injustice to any, and if I have done any I deeply regret it. To be told, after more than five weeks’ total inaction of the army … that the cavalry horses were too much fatigued to move, presents a cheerless, almost hopeless, prospect for the future, and it may have forced something of impatience in my dispatch.” McClellan had an apology, such as it was, yet his gloom was unrelieved. Through it he saw plainly what was coming. When one of his corps commanders indicated a spot on the map where he thought the next great battle would be fought, he nodded agreement but added sadly: “I may not have command of the army much longer. Lincoln is down on me.”
Lincoln was indeed down on him. Though he wired that he was “glad to believe you are crossing,” privately he was saying that he was tired of trying to “bore with an auger too dull to take hold.” However, he had a final secret test in mind. Lee’s army, drawn up around Winchester, was farther from Richmond than McClellan’s, which was crossing the Potomac below Harpers Ferry; “His route is the arc of a circle, while yours is the chord,” Lincoln had said in the tactics lecture, two weeks before. If, in spite of this disadvantage, the Confederate commander managed to interpose his troops between the advancing Federals and his capital, McClellan would be out. So Lincoln decided, and kept his decision to himself, watching and waiting. He waited long. It took the blue host nine days to cross the river and begin its southward creep, east of the Blue Ridge, toward a concentration around Warrenton. By that time, Lee—unmolested—had shifted half his army to Culpeper, squarely across the Federal line of march. McClellan had failed the test, and Lincoln’s mind was made up. He would remove him.
Fearing that this was about to happen, old Francis Blair pled against it with all the persuasion learned in a lifetime spent advising Presidents. McClellan was the Union’s one best hope for preservation, he declared. Lincoln disagreed. “I said I would remove him if he let Lee’s army get away from him, and I must do so. He has got the slows, Mr Blair.”