The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Just how and when the hallucination began that he was always astronomically outnumbered by the Confederates—as much as three to one, when the reverse was generally true—had to do with E. J. Allen. The tendency to overestimate enemy numbers was present with McClellan in western Virginia, where he also supposed the Confederate force to be far larger than it actually was. But it blossomed when Allen followed him to Washington.

  One of the first things McClellan did—three days after arriving in the capital city—was to wire Allen in Cincinnati to come immediately and bring two or three of his best men. Allen was the nom de guerre of detective Allan Pinkerton, whose skills McClellan admired and whom he intended to put in charge of military intelligence-gathering for his Army of the Potomac.10 Pinkerton-alias-Allen had come with his two or three best men as ordered, together with a talent for estimating enemy troops at two or three times their actual numbers. His inflated figures, and McClellan’s desire to believe them, began dictating Union military policy from the start.

  On August 8, McClellan wrote Winfield Scott, now decrepit, but still the commanding general of the Union armies, that he believed one hundred thousand Confederates were “in front of us.” In scary contrast, McClellan could count only half that number of his own, entirely insufficient for the emergency and deficient in all the arms of the service—infantry, artillery, and cavalry. He petitioned the old general to strip other commands wholesale to bring the strength of his army in Washington up to parity with this huge Confederate juggernaut, and to do it “without one hour’s delay.”11 In McClellan’s mind nowhere else counted. Warfare in any other theater was “a mere bagatelle” compared with what was about to happen in his front.12

  By August 19, McClellan and Pinkerton were estimating enemy strength before Washington at one hundred fifty thousand, and rising. He was still unable to count more than fifty-five thousand troops of his own to throw against those legions. Reinforcements were streaming in from the North and he was becoming stronger every day, but he was still not being reinforced fast enough to deal with the peril of the times. Not only were the Confederates terrifyingly superior in numbers, but far better organized and entrenched, and preparing at any moment to sweep his inadequate little army from the face of the earth. For days he had been expecting the blow to fall, not getting a minute’s rest, sleeping with one eye open at night, “looking out sharply for Beauregard.”13

  Scott meanwhile was looking sharply at McClellan’s apprehensions, and finding them nonsense. He didn’t believe his young commander’s estimate of enemy numbers, nor did he believe there was any imminent danger. “I am confident in the opposite opinion.…” he told Secretary of War Simon Cameron. “I have not the slightest apprehension for the safety of the Government here.”14

  It was at that point that McClellan’s second hallucination began to set in—that the Lincoln administration north of the Potomac was as dangerous to his well-being as the Confederate army south of it. He was surrounded by enemies. This paranoia about a perfidious administration at his back centered first on Scott, but then spread rapidly. By mid-August it included the entire cabinet and the president himself. As he was to write his mother, “ ‘the Young General’ has no bed of roses on which to recline.”15

  Scott had begun to aggravate the young general within a week after he arrived from western Virginia. On August 2 McClellan confided to Nelly that “the old man … is fast becoming very slow & very old.” At a White House state dinner two days later Scott had hobbled in leaning on McClellan’s arm. McClellan had found this tellingly significant—“the old veteran … & his young successor; I could see that many marked the contrast.”16

  But after August 8, when Scott wouldn’t buy McClellan’s assessment of enemy strength and the imminence of doomsday, it was plainly war between them. “I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor!” McClellan grumbled. “I can’t tell which. He cannot or will not comprehend the condition in which we are placed & is entirely unequal to the emergency.” He assured Nelly that he was “leaving nothing undone to increase our force—but that confounded old Genl always comes in the way—he is a perfect imbecile. He understands nothing, appreciates nothing & is ever in my way.”17

  By the next week McClellan was certain that the old general was his most dangerous antagonist, and that “either he or I must leave here—our ideas are so widely different that it is impossible for us to work together much longer—tant pour cela [‘so much for that’]!18

  They began to fight publicly—open rows, one of them in a cabinet meeting. McClellan began making end runs around his general in chief, taking his differences with the old man to powerful cabinet members, telling them he must have a free hand if he was to save the Union. Disgusted, Scott told the secretary of war he was too old for such guerrilla operations and asked Lincoln to permit him to resign. While McClellan favored that, Lincoln refused to hear of it. But the signs of the times seemed clear. McClellan was confident the day would soon come when he would displace the old man, unless in the meantime he lost a battle, which he didn’t intend to do.19

  Indeed, McClellan did not intend to fight one at all—at least not soon—if he could help it. Not until he was perfectly ready and prepared, which meant not until there was not the slightest doubt that he would win. That was far from certain now, considering the enemy’s imagined superiority.

  By mid August he was still expecting to be attacked at any moment. It hadn’t happened yet, but McClellan credited that to heavensent rains that had bloated the Potomac and made the roads impassable. If they remained impassable, then he believed “we are saved.” “Give me two weeks,” he wrote Nelly, “& I will defy Beauregard—in a week the chances will be at least even.”20

  In the scale of dangers, however, the threat within now more than equaled the threat without in McClellan’s mind. He was not just menaced from abroad, but surrounded by imbeciles at home. “I am here in a terrible place—” he complained to Nelly, “the enemy have from 3 to 4 times my force—the Presdt is an idiot, the old General in his dotage—they cannot or will not see the true state of affairs.” It wore on him. “I am weary of all this,” he wrote her. “I have no ambition in the present affairs—only wish to save my country—& find the incapables around me will not permit it!”21

  The president and Scott weren’t the only two incapables. McClellan was beginning to lump the entire cabinet into that company. By October he was telling Nelly how disgusted he had become with the whole set of them. “Some of the greatest geese” he had ever seen, was the best he could say of them in a more charitable moment, “enough to tax the patience of Job.” When he wrote her again the next day they had become “wretched politicians … a most despicable set of men.” Secretary of State Seward was “the meanest of them all—a meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy,” who has “done more than any other one man to bring all this misery upon the country & is one of the least competent to get us out of the scrape.” The President was little more than “a well-meaning baboon.” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was “weaker than the most garrulous old woman you were ever annoyed by.” Attorney General Edward Bates was “a good inoffensive old man—so it goes.” The only man of courage and sense in the cabinet as far as he could see was Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, “& I do not altogether fancy him!”22

  McClellan was even convinced that his old Mexican War buddy, Beauregard, now his enemy across the Potomac, was also some kind of a fool, because, incredibly, with his overwhelming numbers, he had not yet attacked. The possibility that his old friend had never intended to attack in the first place did not seem to occur to McClellan. The fact that in truth, General Joseph E. Johnston, Beauregard’s immediate superior, was himself too undermanned and unprepared to attack would have struck McClellan as preposterous. He could show them both Pinkerton’s estimates that the rebel force under their command was approaching one hundred seventy thousand well-trained troops. But the Confederates on a good day could only count about forty-five t
housand—and not all that well trained and entrenched.

  By August 20, McClellan was telling Nelly that if Beauregard continued giving him time, “in a week I ought to be perfectly safe.” Before the week was up, he was telling her that Beauregard had missed his chance and that he now had gained the time he had most desperately needed. He had sixty-five thousand effective men and would have seventy-five thousand by the end of the week. Even though he believed the rebels certainly had double that number, the threat had passed; the danger was over.23

  He could breathe a little easier now, maybe stop merely existing. For days he had worked and worried himself half to death, enjoying no privacy, no leisure, and no relaxation, except writing and receiving letters from Nelly. Maybe he could now begin taking his meals more often at Wormley’s, the old colored gentleman’s restaurant around the corner on I Street. Often as not during the crisis he had been having breakfast sent over and letting dinner take its chances.24

  His sole joy in the whole difficult few weeks had been the love he felt from the soldiers of his growing army. “You have no idea how the men brighten up now, when I go among them—” he told Nelly. “I can see every eye glisten.” The scamps, he told her, had taken it into their heads to call him “our George.” “I ought to take good care of these men,” he said, “for I believe they love me from the bottom of their hearts.”25

  Scott could have told our George that he might have been enjoying life and taking his meals at Wormley’s all along, if it was the thought of the rebel threat that kept him from it. But it didn’t matter anymore. Lincoln had finally agreed to let Scott retire. And on November 3 the old general went to catch the train that would take him to New York and away from all this. McClellan, at his most endearingly gracious now that the old pest was leaving, rode out with his escort in the predawn rain to see him off. Scott was polite, with kind messages for Ellen and little May, the baby girl born to the McClellans on October 12. The tender heart in McClellan was moved with sympathy for the old general. “I saw there,” he wrote Nelly, “the end of a long, active & ambitious life—the end of the career of the first soldier of this nation—& it was a feeble old man scarce able to walk—hardly any one there to see him off but his successor.”26

  But McClellan could afford to be charitable; he now had what he wanted, command of the entire Union army, east and west, north—and such as it was—south. He had come a long way since 1846. Nobody was surprised, of course; his West Point classmates had all expected it. They hadn’t thought it would happen so soon, in only fifteen years. But such are the fortunes of war.

  Lincoln, whose rise to the top had also been cometlike, although far less expected, elevated McClellan to the sublime pinnacle of army ambition with some misgivings.

  “I should be perfectly satisfied if I thought that this vast increase of responsibility would not embarrass you,” the president told him.

  “It is a great relief, Sir,” McClellan answered. “I feel as if several tons were taken from my shoulders today. I am now in contact with you, and the Secretary. I am not embarrassed by intervention.”

  “Well, draw on me for all the sense I have, and all the information,” Lincoln said. “In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the army will entail a vast labor upon you.”

  “I can do it all,” said McClellan quietly.27

  McClellan intended to do it all without drawing on any of Lincoln’s sense or information, mainly because he didn’t believe he had any. The only thing this haughty young general found to admire even remotely in the lanky backwoods lawyer who had inexplicably become president, was his ability to tell a story. “I never in my life met anyone so full of anecdote as our friend Abraham—” he wrote Nelly one day, “he is never at a loss for a story apropos of any known subject or incident.” But if McClellan found Lincoln’s stories ever apropos, he also found them “ever unworthy of one holding his high position.”28

  Indeed, McClellan found Lincoln unworthy of McClellan, and in every way his intellectual, social, and moral inferior. Soon after he arrived in Washington the general began calling Lincoln what Buchanan’s acid-tongued attorney general, Edwin Stanton, had called him: “the original gorilla.”29

  “What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” he told Nelly. He gave Lincoln credit for being honest and well-meaning, but for not much else. “I suppose our country has richly merited some great punishment,” he wrote her, “else we should not now have such wretched triflers at the head of affairs.” His contempt for Lincoln, of course, applied even more pointedly to that “poor little varlet Seward” and the rest of the cabinet. “It is perfectly sickening to have to work with such people,” he told Nelly, “& to see the fate of the nation in such hands.”30

  Feeling this way about it, McClellan resented any kind of advice or interference from the president, and avoided him whenever he could. When he wanted to get some work done he concealed himself at his friend Stanton’s, “to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt etc.”31 He slighted the president without compunction. When Lincoln set up a conference in his office between McClellan, another general, and Ohio Governor William Dennison, McClellan didn’t show up. Lincoln’s two guests were outraged, but the president said, “Never mind; I will hold McClellan’s horse if he will only bring us success.”32

  McClellan’s most brazen snub of the long-suffering president was on an evening in mid November, not two weeks after Lincoln had elevated him to command of the Union armies. The president, Seward, and John Hay had come to the general’s quarters to see him. McClellan’s servant told them McClellan was at a wedding, but would return soon. So they waited. An hour passed and McClellan still hadn’t returned. When finally he did, he appeared to pay no particular attention when told that the president was waiting. He simply went upstairs, passing the room where they sat, without saying a word. They waited another half hour, and sent again for the servant to tell the general they were there. But McClellan had gone to bed.

  On the way home Hay fumed, denouncing through clenched teeth this “unparalleled insolence of epaulettes.” But Lincoln appeared not to have taken any offense, telling his young secretary that it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity. However it was the last time the president was ever to call on McClellan in his quarters; hereafter the general would be sent for.33

  There were many times in the weeks to come that Lincoln itched to see McClellan under any circumstances—to talk with him, prod him, urge him, convince him, reason with him, anything to get him moving. A disturbing characteristic had surfaced in the new general in chief. He seemed not to want to fight. He now had this powerful army, trained and ready and huge, the biggest and best-equipped ever assembled on the continent. But there seemed to be no plans now to take it out and fight the Confederates with it. Many, particularly the impatient and ill-humored Republican Radicals in Congress, who had liked McClellan in the beginning, were outraged. They began to ask angrily when this great army planned to attack Richmond. Five months had now passed since the Young Napoleon had come out of the West on the wings of such hope and expectation. The only thing to show for it was organization, dress reviews, drills, one unfruitful reconnaissance, and a minor Union disaster at Ball’s Bluff near Leesburg.

  Everything had seemed perfect for a fall offensive. The weather had been splendid, the air clear, the roads dry. Even the Confederates looked northward and wondered why they hadn’t been attacked. The Union army was twice the size of theirs and here was this long, lingering Indian summer, with roads firmer and skies more beautiful than Virginia had seen in years. The gods seemed to be inviting an enemy advance, but none had come.

  The gods could not keep things beautiful and dry forever. The rains fell, the cold and the mud came, and the opportunity left. The Young Napoleon had seemed to have forgotten what the first Napoleon and Professor Dennis Hart Mahan had said about celerity.

  McClellan blamed everything but the weather on the
“incapables” who were thwarting and deceiving him at every turn. “It now begins to look as if we are condemned to a winter of inactivity,” he admitted. “If it is so the fault will not be mine.”34

  The Radicals, not conceiving who else’s fault it might be, began to visit the White House on a regular basis to worry the president into action. Even Lincoln, manfully trying to defend and protect his general and to buy him time, began to wonder when McClellan planned to move.

  McClellan had continued to resist—to ignore, rather—all of this insistent pressure to fight. He still wasn’t ready. “Festina lente,” make haste slowly, was his policy,35 and he wasn’t going to be stampeded by a bunch of imbecile politicians. They were all incompetents as far as he was concerned.

  “Don’t let them hurry me, is all I ask,” McClellan urged the president in October.

  “You shall have your own way in the matter, I assure you,” Lincoln had told him.36

  But as the weeks wore on Lincoln grew more restless and uncomfortable. He deprecated the senseless popular impatience to storm Richmond. But at the same time the pressure from the country to do something had to be taken into account.

  However, Lincoln continued to reassure McClellan that “you must not fight til you are ready.”

  “I have everything at stake,” McClellan agreed. “If I fail, I will not see you again or anybody.”

  The idea of not seeing anybody again—particularly those pesky and humorless Radicals—appealed to Lincoln’s antic fancy. “I have a notion to go out with you and stand or fall with the battle,” he told McClellan.37

  When McClellan came down with typhoid fever two days before Christmas and all hope of an early offensive went to bed with him, it was almost more than even Lincoln could endure. At just the time when the public howl for action was at its shrillest, the army simply rested, “almost with folded hands,” waiting for its general to recover—or die.38