Rebuffed by the Navy, Stanton asked bumptious old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the New York steamboat magnate, on what terms he would contract to sink or bottle up the Merrimac. Vanderbilt agreed to convert his $3,000,000 yacht Vanderbilt into a warship and turn her over to the government. Lightning-fast, she could outmaneuver the ponderous Merrimac, and ram and sink her. When the Vanderbilt arrived in Hampton Roads, the Navy at once took her in charge over Stanton’s bitter protests.13
Close behind the frightening news on March 9 of the Merrimac’s foray came intelligence that the Confederates had fallen back from Manassas Junction. McClellan hurried off to the army to verify the news. His staff was jubilant at the unexpected windfall, but soon let it be known that McClellan had been anticipating it and had never intended to attack Manassas at all.
That night he telegraphed to Stanton that he was so busy preparing to put the troops in motion that he had no time to carry out Lincoln’s order about organizing the army into corps. Would Stanton suspend the order? McClellan asserted that unless the suspension was granted he must call off his advance. Not wishing to delay the long-awaited movement of the army, Stanton yielded.
McClellan marched the Army of the Potomac in all its impressive might to the abandoned Confederate position. But at the Confederate entrenchments he met a surprising sight—many of the cannon whose menacing appearance had held him back for months were nothing but logs painted black.
The cabinet met that afternoon. Stanton complained that army matters were in a wretched state. Ignorance, negligence, disorder, insubordination, and reckless extravagance characterized the whole concern, he said. McClellan doctored all reports and told Stanton only what he chose to. If he had any plans for an attack, he kept them to himself. Stanton refused to bear any further responsibility if his hands remained tied. He demanded that the armies and the country be relieved of “the Potomac incubus.” Supporting him, Bates urged the President to assume the power the Constitution granted him and “command the commanders.”14
That night Lincoln called Stanton, Seward, and Chase to his office. Seward arrived first. Lincoln read him a War Order No. Three. It stated that as McClellan had personally taken the field, he would now be relieved as general in chief and would command only what was to be known as the Department of the Potomac. Halleck would have a new Department of the Mississippi with Buell as a subordinate. A Mountain Department, between the others, was assigned to Frémont. All department commanders would be ordered to report “severally and directly” to the Secretary of War.
Seward commended Lincoln for the decision and suggested that the order of removal go out in Stanton’s name in order to strengthen the War Secretary’s position. Stanton arrived just at that time and protested that “a row had grown up” between him and McClellan’s friends, and he feared that the order would be ascribed to “personal feelings” if his name appeared on it. Lincoln agreed, and the order went out in his name.
The first year of war had now produced another experiment in the command structure of the Union armies, and in the relationships between the civilian President and Secretary of War and the military commanders. Lincoln’s order explicitly made Washington the center of policy, of supply, and of communications; he and Stanton were now the commanding general of the Army.
To be sure, political pressures against McClellan had helped to create this demotion for him. But a change of this nature was overdue. Quite apart from the question of efficiency, McClellan had opposed Lincoln’s policies; worse, he had failed to take the war to the enemy, as Lincoln and Stanton had insisted that he do. Only time could tell if this reform would work better than the chaotic triangle of authority that had preceded it.15
Meanwhile Stanton was working out relationships with the other army commanders, who may have had some advantage over McClellan in working at some remove from the immediate neighborhood of the busy, prying Secretary. If Stanton disliked Halleck, as that officer suspected, he did not permit his personal feelings to stand in the way of Halleck’s advancement. On the other hand, Stanton apparently had nothing to do with elevating Frémont, who, ever since the issuance of his abortive emancipation edict, had been the knight-errant of the radical Republicans.
Soon after Stanton became Secretary of War, Wade had approached him in Frémont’s behalf. It behooved Stanton to keep on good terms with the chairman of the powerful Committee on the Conduct of the War, and he had commented to Dana, who also interceded for Frémont: “If Gen. Frémont has any fight in him he shall (so far as I am concerned) have a chance to show it, and I have told him so … having neither partialities nor grudges to indulge, it will be my aim to practice the maxim ‘the tools to him that can use them.’ ” But it was Lincoln, not Stanton, whom the radicals prevailed on to give Frémont another chance.16 Stanton would soon find himself hampered by Lincoln’s determination to keep faith with the radicals in this matter.
Stanton, as a matter of fact, dealt sternly with Frémont. When the general sent a list of proposed staff appointments to the War Department from New York City, the Secretary told General Thomas: “I will not allow Generals to carry on the war … holding court in New York, taking proposals for appointments on their staffs. I see that they are organizing just such a gang as they had at St. Louis, and I intend to prevent it.”
When Frémont joined his command and began to employ the same loose methods that had contributed to his undoing in Missouri, Stanton brought him up short and ordered him to follow standard procedures. Later Frémont advised Sumner that Stanton “has been an insidious enemy of mine since his advent to his office.”17 Frémont was likely to see a personal enemy in anyone who opposed his whims and, like McClellan, he became convinced that Stanton had helped ruin him, but the nature of the relationship between him and Stanton goes counter to the contention of some historians that Stanton was a catspaw of the radical Republicans.
McClellan accepted his demotion with surprisingly good grace, perhaps because he believed that he would soon again dominate Lincoln and Stanton. A McClellan supporter quoted Lincoln on March 18 as promising “that he should sustain the General in spite of opposition,” which may have meant no more than it said—that McClellan would be supplied, his units manned, and his troops armed, as well as any other command. But to McClellan, such reports augured differently. “The President is all right,” he wrote to Barlow, “he is my strongest friend.” And McClellan did not hesitate to resume his former role of mentor to the man he thought of as the inexperienced, incompetent, and perhaps untrustworthy head of the War Department. Obviously, he had learned nothing from his humiliation of what was expected of a Union general.18
On the whole, this reshuffling increased Stanton’s popularity. Frémont’s restoration to command pleased the radicals, who forgave Stanton his opposition to the promotion, and they congratulated the Secretary, as Wade expressed it, on “the signal victories which have been achieved under the administration of your department.” Professional soldiers voiced their approval of Halleck’s elevation. General William T. Sherman wrote to his brother John, Wade’s Ohio colleague in the Senate, of his “unlimited confidence in Halleck,” and Ulysses S. Grant told his wife that with Halleck in command in the West the Committee on the Conduct of the War would find little to criticize there.
Stanton lost some reputation for his already legendary panic at the Merrimac’s appearance; McClellan’s supporters derided all of his accomplishments. But the fact was that in a very short time in office, Stanton, though unable yet to force co-operation among the several army chieftains, had secured effective civilian control of the armies in the field and was forcing reforms on army headquarters in Washington. It is in part to Stanton’s credit that the government was waking up to a consciousness of the nature, scope, and cost of the war it was waging.19
Now that the civilians held the reins, Stanton knew that he and Lincoln required professional military counsel more than ever before. Although both men distrusted most regular army officers, Stanton turned to a g
eneral, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, living in retirement in St. Louis, and asked him to come to the War Department. A West Point graduate and a former commandant of the Military Academy, a veteran with forty years service including a distinguished record in the Mexican War, Hitchcock was highly regarded by his brother officers. But he was almost sixty-four years old, in poor health, and recently had shown more interest in philosophy, spiritualism, and mysticism than in the practice of war.
Although he did not want to stay in Washington, fearing that he would become an anti-Frémont counter, Hitchcock finally succumbed to Stanton’s earnest pleas. After refusing in turn the Secretary’s offers of command of the Army of the Potomac in place of McClellan, the adjutant-generalship, and charge of the Ordnance Bureau, Hitchcock agreed to serve as Stanton’s adviser, without rank. His decision was wiser than Stanton’s tenders. Hitchcock was a ridiculous choice for any active command, and to contemplate entrusting him with the Army of the Potomac, upon whose successes the life of the Republic hinged, was a gesture of folly on Stanton’s part. It is also a measure of how desperately the Secretary felt the nation required a capable, venturesome, obedient top commander.
As an adviser, Hitchcock warned the Secretary that some War Department reforms were progressing too rapidly: “The Army is something like an organic (living) body; a whole within itself, and yet containing many subordinate organisms.… The whole may need improvement; and so may the parts; I do not deny it. But, it is exceedingly dangerous to make changes, unless called for by urgent necessity—a necessity so apparent that the subordinates themselves shall appreciate it.” Hitchcock pointed to the dangers which he saw in Stanton’s rough handling of the Adjutant General’s operations. “Touch the head of the Department and you shake the whole system,” he warned, and Stanton heeded this advice.
It amazed Hitchcock that the tempestuous Stanton accepted suggestions with perfect calm. “His earnestness in behalf of the country and the government,” Hitchcock noted, “had such complete possession of his faculties, that he had no place for any feeling that … could stand in the way of success.” Each morning, when Stanton assembled the War Department bureau chiefs in his office, Hitchcock witnessed Stanton’s “dedicated purpose to put down the rebellion by every effort that human wisdom would suggest.”20
Hitchcock was witnessing a spiritual transformation in Stanton, who now identified the Union with morality. Stanton had recommenced regular church attendance, and in late March he wrote a minister friend of “how deeply—intensely—I feel the need of acknowledging Divine power and imploring Divine aid in this hour of national trial. And how weak and helpless I feel my own efforts to be in the part I have been called upon to fill!” He asked for prayers “in this hour of apparent victory” for the guidance of public officers, “lest calamity come upon us.”
Disaster could come only from delay in carrying war to the enemy, and his impatience with McClellan increased. The withdrawal of the Confederate forces to a position behind the Rappahannock River rendered it impossible for McClellan to use Urbana as a base; so he now proposed to advance on Richmond by way of the Yorktown Peninsula. After approving the plan, a council of his corps commanders estimated that from 40,000 to 50,000 troops would be required to assure the safety of Washington under Lincoln’s March 8 directive. Stanton informed McClellan that Lincoln “makes no objection” to the plan, provided Washington and Manassas were secure from attack. The note of impatience—“Move the remainder of the force down the Potomac, choosing a new base at Fortress Monroe, or anywhere between here and there; or at all events, move the remainder of the army at once in pursuit of the enemy by some route”—was probably lost on McClellan.
The War Department provided McClellan with a fleet of transports; troops began embarking on March 17.21 McClellan left for the Peninsula on April 1, rejoicing at the coming isolation from Washington, “that sink of iniquity.” Lincoln had further displeased him just before he sailed by apologetically informing him that he had been obliged for political reasons to withhold General Louis Blenker’s division from him and send it to Frémont. Although Lincoln wished primarily to placate the radicals, he also hoped that reinforcements might enable Frémont to take Knoxville and aid the loyalists in eastern Tennessee.
McClellan waited until he was on shipboard to report on the number of troops he had left to defend Washington. Then, by some legerdemain with figures that brought forces in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere into his count, he calculated that the city was guarded by 77,000 soldiers. A more realistic count by General James S. Wadsworth, commanding the Washington defenses, showed that McClellan had left him only 19,000 men in the forts around the city and at Manassas in front of it, and that his force was insufficient for the important work assigned to it. Stanton instructed Generals Hitchcock and Lorenzo Thomas to verify Wadsworth’s figures. They found them to be correct. Stanton went with Hitchcock and Meigs to take the dire news to Lincoln.
Like Stanton, Lincoln felt that the symbolic importance of Washington was inestimable. Its capture would plunge the North into dejection and reanimate the South, and by winning recognition of Southern independence from European nations might well determine the outcome of the war. The President, having withheld Blenker’s division from McClellan, disliked interfering with him again, but something had to be done. Two of McClellan’s corps were still waiting to embark at Alexandria. After consultations with Stanton and his bureau chiefs, Lincoln decided that one of these corps must be retained in front of Washington. Stanton selected the First Corps, commanded by McDowell.22
Meanwhile, McClellan, arriving at Fort Monroe on April 2, had pushed his army forward. The Confederates, under General J. B. Magruder, vastly outnumbered, rapidly gave ground, preparing to fight a delaying action from behind the Yorktown redoubts and the boggy Warwick River. But cautious probing convinced McClellan that the Warwick River line could not be taken by assault. He began to bring up heavy guns to put Yorktown under seige.
McClellan was sitting quietly on the ground listening to his artillery firing practice salvos when he received a telegram informing him that the President had decided to keep McDowell’s corps in front of Washington. He wired a hope that Lincoln would reconsider.
Later that same day, Stanton sent McClellan more displeasing news. The President had established two new military departments—the Department of the Shenandoah, to be commanded by General Nathaniel P. Banks, and the Department of the Rappahannock, to be under McDowell. McClellan protested that such an arrangement would deprive him of the power of ordering up supplies and ammunition. Stanton assured him that “the whole force and material of the government will be as fully and speedily under your command as heretofore, or as if the new departments had not been created.” Lincoln urged McClellan to attack at once. The enemy would profit more by delay than McClellan could, he wrote. But McClellan, magnifying the numbers of the enemy, continued to dally and complain.
Despairing, Stanton admitted to Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning that in his opinion McClellan should have been removed from command long before, that he was not in earnest, could not emancipate himself from Southern influences—but was not disloyal, as was rumored—and was unwilling to do anything calculated seriously to damage the South. Ready to grasp at any straw, Stanton wanted Browning to suggest to Lincoln that Colonel N. B. Buford be made a major general and given command of the Army of the Potomac.23 Buford would eventually prove himself to be a competent cavalry commander, but at this point in his career it would have been the wildest sort of gamble to entrust him with the command of the nation’s largest army.
Republican politicians and editors renewed their criticism of McClellan, and Lincoln again warned him of the critical position in which he was placing himself by his failure to attack. “And, once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow,” he wrote on April 9; “I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead
of fighting at or near Manassas, was merely shifting, and not surmounting a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.” The President declared that he had never spoken in greater kindness, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain the general. “But you must act,” he concluded.
McClellan seemed to miss the point. He sent a plea for Franklin’s division, which was part of McDowell’s command. Stanton argued that McDowell’s corps should be kept together and sent forward by land on the shortest route to Richmond, thus aiding McClellan but at the same time covering Washington.24 Hitchcock, Meigs, and Thomas agreed with him, but McClellan kept insisting that all reinforcements be sent to him by water. Lincoln, anxious for McClellan to have no further cause for complaint, decided to send Franklin’s 11,000 men on transports, and Stanton reluctantly acquiesced. When Franklin’s troops reached Fort Monroe, McClellan kept them on shipboard for more than two weeks.
Then the telegraph brought news of a bloody battle in the West—a near disaster for Grant. After the capture of Fort Donelson, Halleck had ordered General C. F. Smith with 30,000 troops to Pittsburgh Landing, on the Tennessee, where Buell was to join him with 25,000 men by an overland march from Nashville. Then the combined Union armies would push southward to complete the conquest of the Mississippi Valley.
Grant had been removed from command for being absent without leave and for failing to report regularly to Halleck. Actually, he had gone to Nashville to consult with Buell, and his dispatches had failed to get through to Halleck because communications had broken down. When Halleck learned the truth, he restored Grant to command. The stubby general rejoined his troops at Pittsburgh Landing.25
But the Confederates, under Albert Sidney Johnston, had a surprise in store for Grant. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, his second in command, had reorganized their shaken troops more quickly than Grant had expected them to, and they started north with 50,000 men to strike Grant before Buell joined him.
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