by John Waugh
As for that “splendid young lady” Nelly had suggested he must be showering with his attentions, she did not exist. He reminded her that he had already had one bad experience along that line—perhaps she would remember it. “A burned child dreads the fire,” he wrote, and “it is difficult to catch an old bird with chaff.” Keep writing, he urged her. He had a foot in the door after all these years and he didn’t want it slamming shut again.36
She did keep writing. After four long heart-lonely years, McClellan was back in business with the beautiful Ellen Marcy. It was still a brother-sister relationship, but he was getting in some subtle hits. All she need do was read between the lines. Even in Chicago, half a continent away, he remained after all these years her most faithful and persistent admirer. Surely she could see that.
Another major window of opportunity opened for McClellan in the fall of 1859. Major Marcy had been promoted and reassigned to St. Paul, in the new state of Minnesota. Ellen and Mrs. Marcy had decided to travel with him and spend the winter with him there. McClellan immediately fired off an invitation for them to stop over in Chicago on the way—as his guests. He had recently moved into a large house at No. 1 Park Row on the lake, where he was living congenially with Ambrose Burnside, Benny Havens’s one-time best customer, and his wife. There was plenty of room. He sent the invitation to both Marcy and Ellen, to make certain at least one of them got it.37
Marcy hadn’t seen McClellan in years, but they had kept up a warm correspondence and Marcy had been pleased when McClellan had left the army. He made a point of telling Ellen so.38 Now he wrote McClellan that they would accept his hospitality. They intended to leave for St. Paul about October 10. They would stop a day or two with him on the way.39
As Ellen stepped down from the train in Chicago on October 20 she saw a new McClellan, but with that same desire for her still burning in his eyes. It had incredibly survived five long years forlorn of hope, but there it was, as undimmed as ever. Ellen had always liked him—there were few who didn’t—but had never loved him. But he had changed somehow. He was more mature, impressively prominent in the business world, with a home on the lake. And he obviously loved her with a doglike fidelity. There was no indication that he had ever loved anyone else.
She was wavering. Could she be in love with him after all?
When the Marcys left for St. Paul on October 24, McClellan put his private rail car at their disposal, and climbed aboard himself. A day out of Chicago on the way to St. Paul he risked it all again. He proposed. This time Miss Nelly said yes. A change had come over the spirit of her dream after all. It was a miracle.40
By some calculations it was Ellen’s ninth proposal of marriage, two of them from this one persistent suitor. And there were still others out there dreaming dreams. The field, therefore, required some tidying up. Ellen urged that they keep their engagement secret until after Christmas.
Only days before she left Washington, she had received a letter from one of her suitors telling her “how very dear you are to me, how much I love you.” For the past two years she had been his only thought, and the hope of being with her this winter had supported him during all that dreary time in Utah. Now he had arrived home to find her departing for the West. Disappointed, he asked if there was any hope for him.
“Please give me an answer soon,” he begged, “for I shall know no peace till I hear from you.”41
He was to know none after hearing from her, either. Even as she was stepping from the train in Chicago on McClellan’s arm, this latest reject was writing her from New York with a broken heart.
On the day McClellan was proposing to her on his private rail car to La Crosse, still another suitor was writing from the frontier. He had been expecting a letter from her for weeks, something “to cheer me on my lonely way.” But nothing had come and he had imagined a thousand reasons why she had not written. Perhaps she had been sick, perhaps she had forgotten how much he loved her. Could it be she couldn’t love him? Of all the disappointments in life, he wrote her, blighted friendship and unrequited love were the most fatal.42
He, and who knows how many others, had to be confronted now and their hopes dashed. It would take some time. It might be messy.
McClellan would have preferred to marry immediately, now that his dream was so wondrously close to coming true. He wrote her urging an early wedding; six years had been long enough to wait. How about February? “Now there is a programme that is feasible,” he argued, “sensible & all that sort of thing. Don’t talk to me about going East to ‘prepare to be married.’ As I’ve told you before I don’t want any preparation. I want you & you alone. I want you just as you are, in the clear blue dress or any other … we don’t need any trousseau. I want Nelly Marcy just as she is.”43
He wrote her unceasingly now, pouring out all of the love and thoughts he had held inside for all those years. He wrote of how his love for her had changed him: “My idea of happiness used to be rank & name! Now it is domestic happiness with my wife.” “Do you know that every letter of yours I receive, every thought I bestow upon you,” he wrote, “makes me respect you more & more? I can’t tell you how happy & proud I am that you are mine & all mine, mine forever.” The enthusiastic fiancé confessed that “we can’t tell what may be in store for us.… I may yet play my part on the stage of the world’s affairs and leave a name in history, but Nelly whatever the future may have in store for me you will be the chief actor in the play.… Why darling the wealth of India in its most fabulous times of yore the glory of the first Napoleon at the apogee of his career would be nothing absolutely nothing to me in comparison with what I feel now when I know & realize that I have gained your love. A heart so pure as yours, a mind so bright as yours—to gain these is better than to gain an empire. You are my empire.”44
By Christmas the field had been swept clean and Ellen was ready to announce their engagement. McClellan went to St. Paul for the holidays and with her at his elbow, he wrote his mother first. Elizabeth McClellan surely must have smiled as she read his joyous letter. For she wrote her future daughter-in-law immediately, for herself and McClellan’s sister Mary, speaking of the pleasure “the Captain’s most acceptable intelligence” had given them. It was the “best of news—not a surprise by any means … my surprise has been, that it should have not occurred before. From the unusually excited style of George’s letters a few weeks since, Mary & I put our heads together, & whispered to each other, what we hoped would most probably happen, provided always, the young lady ‘was willing.’ ”
To this gracious beginning, Mrs. McClellan wrote this gracious ending: “Dear Miss Nelly, I know Mary & I need not now, offer great protestations of affection, for, from the earliest times of our acquaintance, our hearts warmed to you, & you have ever since been thought & spoken of by us both, as one to be dearly loved.”45
Most of McClellan’s classmates were already married. But it is unlikely that any of them had loved the same woman another classmate had loved. Few had probably found it necessary to court the mother to win the daughter.
Even Old Jack had married, not once, but twice. Uttering words of tender endearment in Spanish, which he had picked up in Mexico and which he considered a loving tongue, Jackson had won the heart first of the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and president of Washington College. He was by then teaching artillery and natural philosophy at neighboring VMI in Lexington. When his bride died not long after they married he mourned for a time and then courted and won Mary Anna Morrison, the daughter of another Presbyterian minister and university president. Jackson, as always, was consistent.
But in the matter of love, McClellan had demonstrated a Jacksonlike doggedness unmatched by any of his classmates. He had laid an endless, apparently hopeless, but in the end successful, siege on the only woman he ever loved. And at last she had surrendered.
The wedding was in New York City on May 22, 1860, in the Cavalry Protestant Episcopal Church at the corner of 21st Street and 4th Avenue, the Reverend Francis
H. Hawks officiating. The New York Herald the next day reported the “fashionable commotion” under the heading, “Personal Intelligence. Marriage among the Elite.” Many of the elite attended. General Scott was there. Ex-Governor Thomas H. Seymour of Connecticut was there. Colonels Delafield and Joseph E. Johnston were there. Legs Smith was there. George Granger, one of the rejected rivals for Miss Nelly’s hand, was there. Cadmus Wilcox was there. A. P. Hill was even there.46
And McClellan was very much there. He made only one trumpet-call of an entry in his diary that day. “!!May 22!!” he wrote. “Le jour de ma vie.” Few could have begrudged him that in any language. He had earned the right to say it—the hard way.47
PART 3
AND
THE WAR
CAME
Our Men
at
Sumter
The army had been good to Truman Seymour. But as he stared at the angry crowd facing him on the dock at the U.S. arsenal in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 7, 1860, he must have wondered if his luck had run out.
In the fourteen and a half years since the class of 1846 had graduated from West Point, Seymour had won two brevet promotions for gallantry in Mexico, fought the Seminoles for two years in Florida, become an accomplished artillerist, and married the boss’s daughter. He had experienced none of the hard, lonely, isolated garrison life of the western frontier. Indeed, he was now in his second tour of duty at one of the poshest posts in the army, old Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor.1
Seymour had always been a man who enjoyed himself with his pencils and paints. His skill along that line had won him a return to West Point in 1850 as an assistant professor of drawing under Robert Weir. By 1852, he had won the heart of the professor’s daughter, Louisa, and they had married that year in the little Gothic Revival church of the Holy Innocents in Highland Falls.2
It is understandable that this daughter of the great artist would have been attracted to this sensitive young officer. They were well matched. Seymour was from Vermont, the son of a Methodist preacher. Letters of endorsement in his application papers to West Point had praised him as a young man “destined for eminence.” He was gifted, they said, with “literary and scientific acquirements … quite superior to his years.”3
In the years since, he had become what his fellow company commander at Fort Moultrie, Abner Doubleday, considered “an excellent artillery officer, full of invention and resource, a lover of poetry, and an adept at music and painting.”4
But at the moment he was in a tight spot. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, since Charleston had been losing much of its charm as a duty assignment over the past few months, with angry talk of secession turning the air ugly from one end of the harbor to the other. His being there on the dock, and in this particular fix, had been mostly of his own making. He had convinced his commander at Fort Moultrie, Lieutenant Colonel John L. Gardner, that given the hostile mood in the city, something must be done. The thirty thousand rounds of musket ammunition and cartridges housed at the arsenal in Charleston ought to be reclaimed and carried to Fort Moultrie, to prevent it from falling into unfriendly hands and turned against the garrison. Gardner had taken Seymour’s advice and ordered his adjutant, Lieutenant Norman J. Hall, to see to it the next morning. But when Hall overslept, Gardner ordered Seymour to go instead.
At about nine o’clock on November 7, Seymour and his detachment boarded the little schooner in civilian dress, to avoid agitating the public mind any more than it already was. Arriving at the arsenal about 3:00 in the afternoon, they tied up at the wharf on the Ashley River and Seymour went to explain his mission to the ordnance storekeeper, A. A. Humphreys, who cheerfully agreed to release the ammunition. But as soon as Seymour’s men began carrying boxes out to the schooner, they were stopped by an indignant committee of Charlestonians. The townsfolk told Seymour flatly that he was to take nothing from that arsenal; they would prevent it by force if necessary.
These were very tense and touchy times. The troubled nation had just voted for a new president the day before, and had elected the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln. South Carolina had vowed that if that happened it would secede from the Union and demand that the forts in Charleston Harbor be surrendered to the new nation. Meanwhile, they didn’t want any Yankee soldiers taking out any guns and ammunition. If it wasn’t their arsenal and their ammunition yet, it soon would be.
Seymour was a stubborn Yankee with strict views in the opposite direction. We will see about that, he told the angry crowd. He demanded a carriage to take him to the mayor, a neighbor of his and Louisa’s on Sullivan’s Island. But no carriage was available, it was too far to walk, it was already near sunset, and the tide was dropping so fast that the schooner would soon be aground. So Seymour decided to give it up temporarily. He ordered the ammunition boxes carried back into the arsenal, and set sail again for Fort Moultrie, arriving about 9:00 that night.
The next morning Seymour convinced Gardner to let him return to Charleston. In town he found the mayor to be genial, sympathetic, and neighborly. Removing the ammunition seemed perfectly proper; after all, both it and the arsenal still belonged to the U.S. government. The mayor said he would advise the police to that effect and the ammunition and cartridges could be removed whenever Gardner wished.
When Seymour returned to Fort Moultrie with this good news, he found that Gardner was now waffling. The colonel feared that if Seymour returned for the ammunition now the mob might get out of hand despite the mayor’s orders. The mood in town was just too ugly.5
The mood in the town was one of the first things John Gray Foster noticed three days later when he arrived in Charleston. The army had also been good to Seymour’s big, strapping classmate. After he recovered from the shattered leg wound sustained at Molino del Rey in Mexico—it had taken two years—Foster limped away from his mother’s home above the river in Nashua and picked up his career again. By November 1860 he was thirty-seven years old, of commanding presence, with a reputation in the army as a gifted administrator and one of its best engineers. He was also prized as a raconteur of talent with a vast and ready store of anecdote and story, and widely admired for his genial, sympathetic, and cordial nature. Moreover he sported one of the army’s most splendidly cultivated beards, silky and flowing. In Doubleday’s opinion, he was “one of the most fearless and reliable men in the service.”6
Foster arrived at Charleston on November 11, sent there by the Corps of Engineers to oversee repairs at Fort Moultrie and to complete work on Fort Sumter, which had been under construction since the late 1820s. He had been assigned the job in September, but unfinished projects in the north had delayed him. The day after the presidential election, however, he was ordered to give the forts at Charleston Harbor his immediate personal attention.7
Foster was no stranger to Charleston. He had been one of the engineers employed in Sumter’s construction. Now the fort at the mouth of the harbor was nearly finished—a pentagon-shaped shell of masonry needing more than anything else to have its guns mounted and ready to fire. When finished and fully manned it would be a perfect Gibraltar, with 146 guns and a garrison of 650 men.
Of the other two forts in the harbor, Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island was only minimally garrisoned. Castle Pinckney, the third fort and the one nearest the city, was manned only by an ordnance sergeant and his family. The undermanned, unfinished condition of these forts was, in fact, an embarrassment. The three together were built to house over a thousand soldiers and command enormous fire power. However, Sumter was unoccupied, Castle Pinckney virtually so, and Moultrie, ordinarily defended by a complement of three hundred men, was manned by but two understaffed artillery companies commanded by Seymour and Doubleday, and eight musicians—“sixty-four soldiers and a brass band,” grumped Doubleday.8
As Foster was opening up a little office in Charleston to begin hiring local help, he was appalled by the city’s angry mood. Its agitated condition seemed unbecoming to such a beautiful and serene setting. Bu
t there it was, in an “unsettled state of the public mind … the temper of which seems not to be improving.”9
Fort Moultrie was a particular headache—for everybody. The South Carolinians didn’t like it the way it was; now that Lincoln had been elected and they were about to secede, they wanted the army to hand it over and get out. The garrison didn’t like it the way it was, because under the circumstances it was almost impossible to defend.
Moultrie was an old Revolutionary War fort, a creaky relic of cracked masonry built to defend against invaders from the sea; never in anybody’s wildest fancy was it ever believed it might have to defend itself against Charleston. Its walls were hardly higher than an ordinary room—about twelve feet. Sand from the surrounding hills had drifted up against it almost to its parapets. Anything from a cud-chewing cow to a drunken derelict could just walk over the top and into the place. “A child ten years old can easily come into the fort over the sandbanks,” an officer had said of it, “and the wall offers little or no obstacle.”10 Some of the officers and men of the garrison wouldn’t live in it, but had taken houses in nearby Moultrieville. Even the hospital had moved out.11
Foster began immediately correcting its more glaring drawbacks. He removed the sand that had overtopped the scarp wall and repaired the walls all around. He threw up some temporary obstructions and defenses, and built a glacis—a gentle slope down which attackers could be swept with fire. Then he dug a wet ditch fifteen feet wide around the perimeter. There wasn’t much he could do about the range of sand hills that commanded the approach, or the houses beyond, whose roofs overlooked the parapets and could conceal riflemen.12
For the seventy-five soldiers whose duty it was to defend Charleston Harbor—from any quarter—the real threat to their well-being came neither from the sea nor from Charleston, but from Washington. Abner Doubleday believed this emphatically. Another outspoken Yankee, Doubleday had been at Fort Moultrie for nearly two years and had watched with alarm what he considered the treasonous behavior of the Buchanan administration in Washington. He was not alone. The president appeared to many in this troubled time as a weak and vacillating figurehead, clearly under the sway of a cabal of perfidious southerners who dominated his cabinet. Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian, believed it was the duty of the South to dissolve the Union. His hope was that each southern state would secede separately on March 4, the day Lincoln was to be inaugurated. Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson was ready to follow any secessionist course his state, Mississippi, might chose to take. The assistant Secretary of State, W. H. Trescot, a South Carolinian, was openly abetting secession, and in Secretary of State Lewis Cass’s absence from June to October—a critical five months—had been acting secretary. These men packed weight with the president, who was from Pennsylvania, and was not only indecisive and easily manipulated, but sympathetic to the southern cause.13 There was a word for his kind; he was a “doughface.” As one critic had put it, “Old Dr. Buchanan does not certainly know yet whether he wants to see his patient perish, or be cured by remedies alien to his school.” It seemed to many in the north at that moment that the government was in the malignant hands of a gang of southern traitors working openly for its destruction.14