The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  The Radicals, who had now established a joint committee of Congress to watchdog the conduct of the war—or lack of it—saw McClellan’s illness as a subterfuge. Lincoln tried to reassure them, but they continued to find the inaction inexcusable, and demanded to confront the general himself.39

  Lincoln had to confess that “delay is ruining us.” He looked westward to see if he could get anything started there. But that was no good either. “As everywhere else,” he concluded after consulting with his western generals, “nothing can be done.”40

  McClellan continued to lie in his sick bed through the early days of the new year, and Lincoln walked into Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs’s office and sat down dejectedly before the open fire.

  “General,” he asked the army’s able quartermaster general, “what shall I do?”

  Meigs listened sympathetically.

  “The people are impatient,” Lincoln explained. “Chase [Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase] has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”41

  Meigs suggested that he consult some of the other generals in the army, since McClellan was indisposed, and see what they thought. Lincoln did so, calling a meeting on January 13. This act got McClellan out of bed. Not only did some generals and cabinet members show up, but so did he, still wobbly, but there nonetheless, and in black ill humor. It was a stiff meeting, spoiled by McClellan’s refusal first to reveal his intentions, then by his refusal to say anything at all.

  Meigs moved his chair next to McClellan’s.

  “The president evidently expects you to speak,” Meigs whispered to him. “Can you not promise some movement towards Manassas? You are strong.”

  “I cannot move on them with as great a force as they have,” McClellan snapped.

  “Why, you have near 200,000 men, how many have they?”

  “Not less than 175,000 according to my advices.”

  Meigs was taken aback. “Do you think so?”

  Nevertheless, Meigs thought McClellan ought to say something. “The President expects something from you,” he persisted.

  “If I tell him my plans they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning,” McClellan rasped. “He can’t keep a secret, he will tell them to Tadd [Lincoln’s nine-year-old son, Tad].”

  “That is a pity,” Meigs sympathized, “but he is the President—the commander in chief; he has a right to know; it is not respectful to sit mute when he so clearly requires you to speak. He is superior to all.”42

  The best Lincoln was able to get out of McClellan at the meeting was the notion that he did have some plans, although he wasn’t going to tell anybody what they were. At least he was out of bed; that was something.

  McClellan was not a complete brick wall. When Lincoln’s young son, Willie, caught typhoid in February and died, the general’s basic decency and compassion welled up in a letter of sympathy. McClellan now had Nelly and little May in Washington with him, at the house he had taken for them at H and 15th streets. His new little daughter delighted him. “The baby is splendid,” he wrote his mother-in-law—“laughs inordinately & so loudly that it is almost a nuisance—converses intelligently in 3 languages.”43

  Now he was writing Lincoln, a fellow father, a grief-stricken note on the death of eleven-year-old Willie. The compassionate McClellan, the one everybody loved, sorrowed with the president over “the sad calamity that has befallen you & your family.” He told Lincoln that “You have been a kind true friend to me in the midst of the great cares & difficulties by which we have been surrounded during the past few months—your confidence has upheld me when I should otherwise have felt weak. I wish now only to assure you & your family that I have felt the deepest sympathy in your affliction.”44

  But tragedy didn’t serve to stir the general to action any more than anything else did. Early in the new year Lincoln had said, not joking, that if McClellan didn’t want to use the army, he would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.45 The general seemed absolutely without initiative. He answered every suggestion of advance with a demand for reinforcements, met entreaties and reproaches with arguments showing how much stronger the enemy was and how insufficient his resources were in contrast. Yet he continued to enjoy to a spectacular degree the enthusiastic devotion of his friends and the absolute confidence of the rank and file of his army. Lincoln kept on hoping that if he could just get him started he was indeed capable of great things.46

  By the end of January the president still hadn’t been able to get him started and, at wit’s end, he issued General Order No. 1, calling for a movement of all Union land and naval forces on February 22.47 This didn’t stir McClellan either. The teeth-gnashings—electric perturbations, Lincoln’s young secretaries called them—increased at the executive mansion and at the capitol, and didn’t seem to register at all with McClellan. February 22 came and went and there was no general movement.48

  McClellan had a better idea. He had been giving the whole thing a lot of thought, and had been hinting at a plan of campaign since early December that he didn’t think either the enemy or his friends could anticipate. On February 3 he sprung it on Lincoln and Stanton. Incredibly, the original gorilla had named Stanton as his new secretary of war replacing Simon Cameron in January, “a most unexpected piece of good fortune” as far as McClellan was concerned. Stanton had been McClellan’s sympathetic secret ally against the administration’s politicians for months. Now he was a friend within the gates.49

  McClellan’s proposal to the president and the secretary was for an end-around. Instead of a direct assault on the Confederates dug in at Centerville, which he did not favor, he would debark his army to the lower Chesapeake at Urbana, and strike the rebels from there. This, he thought, had every virtue. It would give him the shortest possible land route to Richmond. It would put him on the Confederate flank and force them to abandon their entrenched position at Centerville to defend their capital. This one bold stroke would likely give him Richmond, all of the enemy communications and supplies, the city of Norfolk, all of the waters of the Chesapeake, and all of Virginia. It would probably force the Confederates to abandon east Tennessee and North Carolina, and it would not put Washington in jeopardy. It would be the one decisive stroke that could end the war. If circumstances made Urbana undesirable then he would sideslip down to Mob Jack Bay, or if worst came to worst, land at Fort Monroe and strike up the Peninsula. He figured to need 110,000 to 140,000 men for the job—the latter number preferred. “Nothing is certain in war—” he told the president and Stanton, “but all the chances are in favor of this movement.” He would stake his life and reputation on it.50

  The plan worried Lincoln, raising serious questions in his mind. Was not McClellan’s proposal more costly in time and money than Lincoln’s own—a direct attack on the Confederates in front? Was it more certain of victory? Would the victory be more valuable? If it met disaster, would it not make a safe retreat more difficult?51 Lincoln finally gave reluctant approval despite his reservations, provided Washington was left amply protected.

  Then the Confederates themselves threw the plan into confusion by pulling out of their entrenched position in front of Manassas. It had never been a tenable position in their minds in the first place. This forced McClellan to abandon both Urbana and Mob Jack Bay. Worst had come to worst, and in mid-March he began loading his great army on transports, and on April 1 climbed aboard the steamer Commodore and left for Fort Monroe and the Peninsula.

  He was more than gratified to get away from Washington, “that sink of iniquity.”52 He believed the incapables had done their worst. The cabal in Washington had decided to take supreme command of all the armies from McClellan and leave him with only his Army of the Potomac—at least for the duration of the coming campaign. And they were withholding troops from him that he had been counting on. They had promised him Irvin McDowell’s force of forty thousand
men, without which he didn’t think he could make the invasion a success. Lincoln and Stanton felt that contrary to his promises, McClellan hadn’t left Washington adequately protected. Besides, McClellan’s classmate in the Valley, Tom Jackson, was making everybody nervous. Nobody knew what he would do next. He was a loose and loaded cannon pointed at Washington.

  McClellan had few friends left in Congress, and he knew it. A month earlier he had written Major General Henry Halleck in the West that “the abolitionists are doing their best to displace me & I shall be content if I can keep my head above water until I am ready to strike the final blow.”53

  The only thing he felt good about was his army. He wished it larger, far larger, although it was nearly double what the Confederates had. They were good men, these soldiers of his. He had organized and trained them well.

  As he prepared to take them to the Peninsula, he addressed them: “I have held you back, that you might give the death-blow to the rebellion that has distracted our once happy country.… The Army of the Potomac is now a real Army,—magnificent in material, admirable in discipline and instruction, excellently equipped and armed;—your commanders are all that I could wish. The moment for action has arrived, and I know that I can trust in you to save our country.” He had ridden among them many times and had seen “the sure presage of victory” in their faces and he knew “you will do whatever I ask of you.”54

  In the strength of that faith, he embarked at last to the seat of war.

  Maryland,

  My Maryland

  Being at the seat of war did not necessarily inspire George McClellan to fight, and Abraham Lincoln was alarmed.

  The first thing McClellan did on reaching the Peninsula was to organize a siege of Yorktown. That would take time, and time meant a great deal to Lincoln. “You now have over one hundred thousand troops.…” he wrote the general. “I think you better break the enemies’ line from York-town to Warwick River, at once. They will probably use time, as advantageously as you can.”1

  “I was much tempted,” McClellan snorted in a letter to Nelly, “to reply that he had better come & do it himself.”2

  Lincoln was now writing McClellan often. On April 9 he wrote him a long letter of fatherly advice, with a frank, heart-to-heart ending. Lincoln had always liked McClellan. He felt kindly toward him, had supported him and tried to protect him, but now the political heat was getting too much even for the patient president.

  “And, once more let me tell you,” he wrote McClellan on the ninth, “it is indispensible to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.… 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. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.”3

  Theoretically, the Confederates in McClellan’s front agreed with the president. Confederate Major General John B. Magruder, Tom Jackson’s artillery commander from the Mexican War, was now blocking McClellan’s way in Yorktown. He was astonished that McClellan didn’t just roll over him. He had only five thousand available troops with which to hold back the federal juggernaut. Instead McClellan prepared for a siege, and permitted days to pass without opening hostilities.4 Magruder was pleased to cooperate by staging theatrical march-abouts to make it appear he had far more men than he actually did.

  General Joseph E. Johnston, in overall command of Confederate forces on the Peninsula, was puzzled by McClellan as well. He had to admit that his old friend “seems not to value time especially.”5

  McClellan did value sieges, however. He had admired them for years. He had seen two of the best ever staged—at Vera Cruz in Mexico and at Sebastapol in the Crimea. He came to the Peninsula inclined to mount one of his own, and Yorktown seemed the perfect time and place for it.

  As he was installing his siege batteries, however, he learned that Lincoln and Stanton were not going to send him McDowell’s corps of forty thousand men as they had promised. The administration feared for the safety of Washington, and believed McClellan hadn’t adequately provided for it.

  But what of the safety of this army? protested McClellan. He saw in his mind’s eye the huge enemy force at his front and petitioned Lincoln to reconsider. He argued that depriving him of McDowell’s forty thousand troops imperiled the success of his campaign. He expected to have to fight the entire Confederate army not far from Yorktown. “Do not force me to do so with diminished numbers,” he begged the president.6

  To Nelly he vented his true feelings: what the president had done was “the most infamous thing that history has recorded.”7

  It only confirmed his worst suspicions: they were out to get him. But “dont worry about the wretches—” he assured Nelly a few days later, “they have done nearly their worst & can’t do much more. I am sure that I will win in the end, in spite of all their rascality. History will present a sad record of these traitors who are willing to sacrifice the country & its army for personal spite & personal aims. The people will soon understand the whole matter & then woe betide the guilty ones.”8

  McClellan continued to plead without ceasing for reinforcements. Stanton, now himself a Judas, the prince of traitors in McClellan’s mind, “without exception the vilest man I ever knew or heard of,” was disenchanted and disgusted.9 McClellan already had well over one hundred thousand troops by Stanton’s count, far more than the enemy. What else did he want? “If he had a million men,” the secretary fumed, “he would swear the enemy had two millions, and then he would sit down in the mud and yell for three.”10

  May rolled around and McClellan had not yet fired on York-town—he was still setting up. When he telegraphed asking for Parrott guns, Lincoln blanched. “It argues indefinite procrastination,” he wired McClellan.11

  “All is being done that human labor can accomplish,” McClellan assured the president.12 He expected to be ready to open on Yorktown by May 5, the sixth at the latest.13

  But on the fourth the Confederates pulled out; simply left. It was as if a raiding party with a huge battering ram had been pounding at full gallop toward a bolted door and at the last instant the door was flung open.

  Not a shot had been fired, but McClellan was ecstatic. “The success is brilliant,” he wired Stanton.14

  Two days later the Confederates had pulled back beyond Williamsburg with McClellan cautiously following. Now he occupied both of the historic old towns where General George Washington had broken the back of the British and won American independence eighty years before. Surely the all-ending battle in this second American revolution, “a life-and-death contest,” could not be far away. McClellan called again for reinforcements.15

  As he wrote his daily letter to Nelly late on the night of May 12 he listened dreamily as the distant strains of tattoo drifted softly into his tent. “A grand sound this lovely moonlight night …” he mused to Nelly. “Are you satisfied now with my bloodless victories?” he asked her. He had saved the lives of many men by his maneuvers. That was an accomplishment, and it pleased him more than anything that had happened. But now there was to be a great battle, and unavoidable bloodshed. The rebels were concentrating all of their mighty force against him, and his government, alas, was giving him no aid.16

  It was as it had been those first days at West Point so many years ago. He was as much alone as if in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.

  A battle finally came at Fair Oaks on the last day of May, and on the first day of June McClellan was within six miles of Richmond. His troops could hear the church bells tolling in the city. It hadn’t been the great rebellion-ending battle McClellan had been expecting, but it had taken one Confederate commander, his old friend Joe Johnston, out of the picture severely wounded, and raised another, Robert E. Lee, to field command of the rebel army.

  Lee was an old friend too, a fellow engine
er, but he wasn’t a commander the Young Napoleon feared. “Too cautious & weak under grave responsibility,” he had told Lincoln in an earlier assessment. Lee was personally brave and energetic to a fault, no question about that, but McClellan found him “wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility & is likely to be timid & irresolute in action.”17 Lincoln might have mused—and perhaps he did—that McClellan was perfectly describing himself.

  After Fair Oaks, McClellan believed the next leap would be the last one. But it had started to rain and all final leaps had to be postponed. For days he was checked by the weather. McClellan had what Lincoln thought was a one-sided view of weather. He seemed to regard it as exclusively hurtful to him and not the enemy. He seemed to think, the president said of him, that in defiance of Scripture, Heaven sent its rain only on the just and not on the unjust.18

  As the rain continued to fall on both the just and unjust indiscriminately, McClellan’s twin paranoias quickened. He continued to see folly in his rear and overwhelming numbers in his front. It all made him feel that the salvation of the country demanded he be prudent in the extreme, that he “must not run the slightest risk of disaster, for if anything happened to this army our cause would be lost.” He wrote Nelly words a loving and worried wife likes to hear, that “I feel too that I must not unnecessarily risk my life—for the fate of the army depends on me & they all know it.” He feared desperately for the lives of his men as well: “Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me!”19

  Jackson had arrived from the Valley and the enemy in McClellan’s front now numbered eighty-five thousand. It was the largest force the Confederates would ever assemble in one place in the entire war. But for every one rebel, McClellan counted at least two. He told Stanton that there were two hundred thousand Confederates between him and Richmond, a host twice the size of his own. He deplored his imagined inferiority in numbers, but it wasn’t his fault. Hadn’t he repeatedly asked for reinforcements, so often that there was no use asking for them again?20