by Shelby Foote
He would remove him: but not just yet. November 4 was the first Tuesday in the month, which meant that it was election day in most of the northern states, and therefore not a propitious time for disturbing voters who were disturbed enough already. Even Chase, who vied with Stanton in the intensity of his desire to see McClellan ousted, admitted privately that it was inexpedient to fire the general on the eve of the congressional elections, lest the Administration’s motives be misconstrued as a sop to the radicals. There was a widespread conviction among conservatives that the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had been sop enough in that direction. Political unrest found its basis there, together with objection to arbitrary arrests and the general lack of satisfaction with the prosecution of the war itself, which seemed to have stalled on every front. Nor was this dissatisfaction limited to moderates and conservatives. Iowa Senator J. W. Grimes, a loyal Republican whose constituents had voted heavily for Lincoln in 1860, was saying flatly: “We are going to destruction as fast as imbecility, corruption, and the wheels of time can carry us.” Lyman Trumbull of Lincoln’s home state was complaining bitterly of a “lack of affirmative, positive action and business talent in the cabinet,” while to Governor Andrew of Massachusetts it seemed that “the President has never yet seemed quite sure that we [are] in a war at all.”
Such remarks were straws in the wind, down which Democrats sniffed victory in November. And in many instances they got it. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana—all of which had gone solidly Republican in the election held two years ago—sent Democratic delegations to the House of Representatives. So did Illinois, where Lincoln’s good friend Leonard Swett went down in defeat to John T. Stuart, the President’s former law partner, who thus made one among the nine Democrats elected as opposed to five Republicans. New Jersey, which had split its vote before, now went solidly Democratic; Wisconsin, on the other hand, now split her six-man delegation down the middle. Although the number of Democratic congressmen increased from 44 to 75 as a result of this election, the Republicans would remain the majority party because they managed to carry three widely scattered regions: New England, the Border States, and the Far West. Such comfort as Lincoln found in this was considerably soured, however, by the fact that most observers saw in the individual defeats a rebuke of the party leader and a rejection of his policies on the conduct of the war. The friendly New York Times ran the election story under the heading, “Vote of Want of Confidence,” and in Lincoln’s own home state the Salem Advocate declared: “We saw the President of the United States stretching forth his hand and seizing the reins of government with almost absolute power, and yet the people submitted. On the 4th day of November, 1862, the people arose in their might, they uttered their voice, like the sound of many waters, and tyranny, corruption and maladministration trembled.”
Lincoln took it philosophically, though he found it hard to do so, remarking that he felt like the boy who stubbed his toe on the way to see his girl; he was too big to cry, he said, and it hurt too much to laugh. One thing it did, at any rate, however it came out. It cleared the way for action on McClellan. November 5, before the election tabulations were complete, Lincoln had the orders for his removal drawn up. The following evening they were given to Brigadier General C. P. Buckingham, the so-called “confidential assistant adjutant-general to the Secretary of War,” who left with them next morning, November 7, aboard a special train bound for McClellan’s headquarters at Rectortown, near Manassas Gap. The first snowfall of winter was whitening the North Virginia landscape and the car in which he rode was drafty; but Buckingham did not wonder that an officer with so much rank as his was being exposed to such discomfort and employed as a sort of overdressed messenger boy, Stanton having explained that McClellan might refuse to relinquish command of his army if the order was presented to him by a man with anything less than stars on his shoulders. Even with them, the Secretary had added darkly, there was a strong possibility of some such mutinous action on the part of the commander of the Army of the Potomac. He advised the brigadier to make his arrival unannounced, thus gaining the military advantage of a surprise attack.
It was still snowing at 11 o’clock that night. McClellan sat alone in his tent, ending the day as usual with a letter to his wife, who was busy getting settled in their new home at Trenton, New Jersey. Nothing in his manner showed that the proposed surprise had failed; but it had. He knew that Buckingham had arrived early that evening, and he knew what his arrival probably meant. Whatever there was of real surprise lay in the fact that, instead of coming directly from the depot to army headquarters here at Rectortown, the War Department emissary had ridden down to Salem, five miles south, where Burnside’s corps was posted. Presently, however, this too was explained. A knock came at the tent pole, and when McClellan looked up from his letter, calling for whoever it was to enter, the canvas flap lifted and there stood Buckingham and Burnside, snow collected on the crowns and brims of their hats and sifted into the folds of their greatcoats. Behind his facial ruff of dark brown whiskers—also lightly powdered with snow, so that it resembled a badly printed trademark—“Dear Burn” looked both embarrassed and distressed.
McClellan knew what that meant, too, but for the present he gave no sign of this. He invited the visitors in, quite as if for an informal midnight chat, and for a time he and Buckingham exchanged pleasantries, Burnside sitting glumly by, looking rather as if he had been struck a hard blow on the head. Finally, though, the staff brigadier remarked that he had come to deliver some papers; and with that he passed them over. There were two of them, both dated November 5. Lincoln having authorized Halleck, “in [his] discretion, to issue an order [removing McClellan] forthwith, or so soon as he may deem proper,” the general-in-chief had deemed it proper to act without delay:
Major General McClellan, Commanding, c.:
General: On receipt of the order of the President, sent herewith, you will immediately turn over your command to Major General Burnside, and repair to Trenton, N.J., reporting, on your arrival at that place, by telegraph, for further orders.
Very respectfully, your obedient servant.
The second was from the Adjutant General’s office, and was a direct quotation of the first sentence of Lincoln’s message to Halleck:
By direction of the President of the United States, it is ordered that Major General McClellan be relieved from the command of the Army of the Potomac, and that Major General Burnside take the command of that army.
By order of the Secretary of War.
Neither of the orders being really any stronger than the other, it appeared that the Young Napoleon’s superiors considered two blows likelier to floor him than just one. However that might have been, he kept his balance under the double impact. He read both sheets, then said with a smile and in the same pleasant tone as before: “Well, Burnside, I turn the command over to you.” Close to tears, the Indiana-born Rhode Islander implored McClellan to stay with him for a day or two while he began to get accustomed to handling the reins. He had not wanted this job; had, in fact, refused it twice already, pleading incompetence, and once again this evening when Buckingham first came to Salem—that was why they had arrived so late; he had spent two hours arguing against his appointment—but Buckingham had reminded him that this was no request, it was a double-barreled order; he had no choice. Besides, the staff brigadier had added, if Burnside declined the command it would go to Hooker. That decided it; he had accepted, and all he asked now was that Little Mac stay with him for a couple of days to help him get settled in the driver’s seat. McClellan agreed, and the two generals went back out into the snowy night.
Alone again, the deposed commander took up his pen and returned to his letter: “Another interruption—this time more important. It was in the shape of Burnside, accompanied by Gen. Buckingham.… Alas for my poor country! I know in my inmost heart she never had a truer servant.” He did not say, as he had said before, that this was a temporary step-down, that he would be recalled when things w
ent as wrong for Burnside as they had gone for Pope. He was through and he knew it. But he added: “Do not be at all worried—I am not. I have done the best I could for my country; to the last I have done my duty as I understand it. That I must have made many mistakes I cannot deny. I do not see any great blunders; but no one can judge of himself. Our consolation must be that we have tried to do what was right.”
All that really remained to be done was say goodbye to the army whose affection for him was, in the end, his most enduring monument. Next day, when the order for his removal was published, the reaction combined disbelief and horror, both of which gave way to rage, which in turn was tempered by sadness. The various corps, drawn up for a farewell exchange of salutes, broke ranks as they had done before at his approach. Now as before, they crowded around him, touched his boots, and stroked the flanks of his horse, only this time the tears were produced by sorrow, not by jubilation. Nor had all the anger been drained off. “Send him back! Send him back!” they cried in his wake, as if their shouts could be heard in the capital, fifty miles away. The Irish brigade cast its colors in the dust for him to ride over; “but, of course,” one observer wrote, “he made them take them up again.” The same man heard a general say he “wished to God that McClellan would put himself at the head of the army and throw the infernal scoundrels at Washington into the Potomac.” Another yelled: “Lead us to Washington, General—we’ll follow you!” Burnside shared the prevailing gloom, still so badly choked up that when one division commander, having voiced his regrets to McClellan, turned to him and offered congratulations, the new army head could hardly speak. “Couch, don’t say a word about it,” he implored.
McClellan accepted this adulation with as much satisfaction as ever, possibly more, but he remained strangely calm in the midst of it and did nothing to encourage the various expressions of resentment. “The officers and men feel terribly about the change,” he wrote his wife on the second night after receiving the order for his removal. “I learn today that the men are very sullen and have lost their good spirits entirely.” This was putting it mildly indeed; but the truth was, he had lost much of his former flamboyance. Even his written farewell to his soldiers was comparatively restrained. “In you I have never found doubt or coldness,” he told them, and he added: “We shall ever be comrades in supporting the Constitution of our country and the nationality of its people.”
That was all; or almost all. November 11 he took his final leave of them, riding down to Warrenton Junction, where a train was waiting to carry him away. After receiving the salute of a 2000-man detachment stationed here, he boarded the train and took his seat. But before the engineer could obey the highball, the troops broke ranks, surrounded the car, then uncoupled it and ran it back, yelling threats against the Administration and insisting that McClellan should not leave. “One word, one look of encouragement, the lifting of a finger,” one witness later declared, “would have been a signal for a revolt against lawful authority, the consequences of which no man can measure.” Instead, McClellan stepped onto the front platform and delivered a short address to the men, who had fallen silent as soon as he appeared. “Stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well,” he said. Calmed, the soldiers recoupled the car and the train pulled out, followed by “one long and mournful huzza [as the men] bade farewell to their late commander.” His route led through the capital, but he had already told his wife: “I shall not stop in Washington longer than for the next train, and will not go to see anybody.”
In their tears, in their passionate demonstrations of affection for this man who moved them in a way no other general ever had or ever would, it was as if the soldiers had sensed a larger meaning in the impending separation; it was as if they knew they were saying goodbye to something more than just one stocky brown-haired man astride a tall black horse. It was, indeed, as if they were saying goodbye to their youth—which, in a sense, they were. Or it might also have been prescience, intimations of mortality, intimations of suffering down the years. There had been Pope, and now it appeared that there would be others more or less like him. Knowing what that meant, they might well have been weeping for their own lot, as well as for McClellan’s. “My army,” he had called them from the start, and it was true. He had made them into what they were, and whatever they accomplished he would accomplish too, in part, even though he would no longer be at their head.
That was no doubt his greatest satisfaction; but there were others, no less welcome for being delayed. Five years after the guns had cooled and were parked in town squares and on courthouse lawns, with sparrows building nests in their muzzles, he received what was perhaps his finest professional compliment, and received it from the man who had occupied the best of all possible positions from which to formulate a judgment. Asked then who was the ablest Federal general he had opposed throughout the war, Robert E. Lee replied without hesitation; “McClellan, by all odds.”
McClellan was gone, and others were gone with him: Fitz-John Porter, for example, who was relieved from command by authority of the same message Lincoln had sent Halleck on November 5, relieving Little Mac. His corps went to Hooker, whose own had been severely cut up at Antietam, and Porter himself was brought back to Washington to face charges for having failed to obey Pope’s order for an attack on the Confederate right “at or near Manassas, in the State of Virginia, on or about the 29th day of August, 1862.” The court having convicted him, Lincoln ordered that he be “cashiered and dismissed from the service … and forever disqualified from holding any office of trust or profit under the Government of the United States.” Winged thus by a stray pellet from the blast that felled his chief, Porter had to wait long for vindication. It came at last, officially, nearly a quarter of a century later, when Congress in 1886 commissioned him a regular-army colonel, to rank from 1861, and permitted him to retire immediately thereafter, without back pay but with honor.
One other major figure was to go, though not entirely: Benjamin Butler was too useful a man, and too powerful a politician, to be assigned to limbo alongside Buell and McClellan. Like them he was a Democrat, but he was blatantly so—with the result that what had been for them a disadvantage was for him a downright blessing. So long as he occupied a high position in the army, the Administration could not be accused of conducting a strictly Republican war, whereas his dismissal would have exactly the reverse effect. Butler of course was aware of this advantage, and operated accordingly. What was more, he was efficient, particularly as an administrator. Yet for all his ingenuity in dealing with the problems attending the occupation of New Orleans (he had not only succeeded in making the Creoles “fear the stripes” in his flag, he had also brought them some of the sanitary benefits of Lowell, Massachusetts, including an intensive flushing-out of their sewers and an equally intensive regulation of their morals) the squint-eyed general had not fulfilled his early promise as a terror to the rebels in the field. Of late, in fact, he had entirely neglected that side of military life, even having gone so far as to pull his troops out of Baton Rouge in order to avoid a return engagement with the Confederates who had attacked the place in early August. Obviously he would not do for the bloody work Lincoln now saw would have to be done if the war was ever to end. However, the disposition of Butler was no large problem. His talents were so manifold that he would be about as useful in one place as another. He could be shifted.
Fortunately for Lincoln’s purpose he had a replacement there at hand, in the form of the commander of the Washington defenses. Banks, like Butler, was a Massachusetts politician, so that to exchange them, one for another, would not upset the voters of their region. Besides, Banks was resourceful, energetic, and pugnacious: a combination of qualities all too rare of late, in more places than New Orleans. In short, he was just the kind of man Lincoln thought he wanted for the job he had in mind. It was true that wherever he had fought he had been whipped, sometimes rather spectacularly, but this had not been the result of any unwillingness to fight; quite the
reverse—and generally it had been against Stonewall Jackson, whom he would be unlikely to encounter down in Louisiana or up the Mississippi. That was where Lincoln intended to send him. On November 8, the day after Buckingham left for Rectortown with the orders placing Burnside in command of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln had the Adjutant General issue an order assigning Banks “to the command of the Department of the Gulf, including the State of Texas,” and the following day he had Halleck write the new commander a letter of instructions, explaining the purpose—or, more strictly speaking, purposes—for which he was being transferred so far south.
Vicksburg and Mobile were to be his primary objectives, and he was to have the coöperation of the navy in effecting their reduction. “The President regards the opening of the Mississippi River as the first and most important of all our military and naval operations,” he was told, “and it is hoped that you will not lose a moment in accomplishing it.” Following this, Halleck continued—quite as if the thing had been done already with a flourish of the pen—Banks was to move eastward from Vicksburg to Jackson, “and thus cut off all connection by rail between Northern Mississippi … and Atlanta … the chief military depot of the rebel armies in the West.” This done, he would return approximately to his starting point in order to “ascend with a naval and military force the Red River as far as it is navigable, and thus open an outlet for the sugar and cotton of Northern Louisiana.” Not even then did Halleck allow him time for a breather. “It is also suggested that, having Red River in our possession, it would form the best base for operations in Texas.” There at last he closed with the assurance, “These instructions are not intended to tie your hands or to hamper your operations in the slightest degree … and I need not assure you, general, that the Government has unlimited confidence not only in your judgment and discretion, but also in your energy and military promptness.”