The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  A weary Lincoln wired him on June 26: “I give you all I can, and act on the presumption that you will do the best you can with what you have, while you continue, ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would. I have omitted and shall omit no opportunity to send you re-enforcements whenever I possibly can.”21

  Even as Lincoln wrote, Lee attacked. For seven days the Confederate general whom McClellan thought too cautious, timid, and irresolute, struck for the jugular, unfazed by the Union army’s superiority in numbers. Lee could not seem to land a knockout blow, however, and he suffered galling losses trying. But he harried the Young Napoleon without letup, driving him back from Richmond, all the way to Harrison’s Landing twenty-six miles from Richmond, where McClellan ducked gratefully under the protective cannon of the navy’s gunboats on the James River and stopped to catch his breath.

  McClellan had waged a brilliant series of defensive battles and had parried some mighty blows. But since he had come to wage the great offensive battle that was to have won the war in a single massive stroke, it hadn’t lived up to expectations.

  “We have had a terrible time,” he wrote Nelly from Harrison’s Landing.22

  He knew exactly how and why it had happened—no doubt of it in his mind. It had not been his fault. He had been beaten by an enemy crushingly superior in numbers and stabbed in the back by the “set of heartless villains” in Washington.23

  Edwards S. Sanford, head of the war department’s telegraphic office in Washington, had read many messages from McClellan since the campaign opened on the Peninsula. But the sentence on the tag end of the one coming in as the Seven Days battles raged, made him start violently. It was addressed to Stanton.

  “If I save this Army now,” it read, “I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this Army.”24

  My God, thought Sanford, he couldn’t let the secretary see that. He ordered the rest of the message copied and given to Stanton, but with the venomous ending scissored out. It said everything McClellan believed about the administration in Washington, but if Stanton had seen it, it would likely have gotten him fired that day.25

  Even Lincoln’s bottomless reservoir of good will and patience was being stretched to the breaking point. When a few days later McClellan, on the run for Harrison’s Landing, asked for at least fifty thousand more men that didn’t exist, the president’s forbearance nearly snapped. He had sent, altogether, one hundred sixty thousand men to McClellan on the Peninsula and he had no more to send.26

  The president took up his tired pen one more time. “Allow me to reason with you a moment.…” he began. “The idea of sending you fifty thousand, or any other considerable force promptly, is simply absurd.… If you think you are not strong enough to take Richmond just now, I do not ask you to try just now. Save the Army, material and personnel; and I will strengthen it for the offensive again, as fast as I can.”27

  McClellan sat and simmered in the wilting heat at Harrison’s Landing through the early days of July. Lee had pulled his own tired and battered army back, and was leaving him alone for the moment. But Lincoln wasn’t. The president came down in the insufferable heat for a personal visit. But he seemed, as far as McClellan could see, “quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question & the magnitude of the crisis.”28

  Nelly sympathized with her husband’s outrage and anger. She wrote him that she thought Lincoln “an old stick”—“& of pretty poor timber at that,” McClellan agreed.29 Stick was perhaps not an inappropriate description of what the gaunt president looked like physically as he visited the army and inspected the troops. One soldier described the spindly chief executive on horseback as “nothing else than a pair of tongs on a chair back.”30

  There was now talk of withdrawing the army from the Peninsula altogether, and the idea chilled McClellan, despite the heat. He wished rather to be reinforced so that he might throw his army again upon Richmond and find redemption. But the administration was having none of it. As the prospects turned more and more sour, so did McClellan’s rancor, most of it now centering on his erstwhile friend and ally, Stanton. If Lincoln was an old stick of poor timber, Stanton was “the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard or read of.” He told Nelly that had Stanton lived in Jesus’ time he would have superseded Judas as the Savior’s betrayer. “I hate to think that humanity can sink so low.… it makes me sick to think of him! Faugh!!”31

  McClellan was now hearing through the grapevine that Major General Henry Halleck was about to be brought from the West and made general in chief of the armies. The post had been vacant since mid-March when McClellan was preparing to leave for the Peninsula. McClellan knew that the rumor was fact by July 20. He saw it as another terrible mistake by the incapables in Washington. In his view Halleck was just another incompetent, despite his nickname, “Old Brains.” This would fix in concrete McClellan’s displacement from overall command and leave him with only the Army of the Potomac. And considering his fall so far from grace, he didn’t know how long he would have even that.

  Not long, as it turned out. John Pope, another major general from the West, the hero of the Union victory at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi in early April, had just been put in command of a new Army of Virginia in front of Washington. McClellan was ordered in early August to close the book on the Peninsula, embark his army from Harrison’s Landing, and take it to the relief of Pope, who was now facing a major fight at Manassas.

  The order to leave the Peninsula caused McClellan “the greatest pain I ever experienced.” He objected in a message to Halleck that it would prove “disastrous in the extreme to our cause—I fear it will be a fatal blow.”32

  If McClellan disdained Halleck, he despised Pope—another man inferior to himself in every way, who had said some grating things about the way the army in the East had been handled. But McClellan believed Pope was about to get his comeuppance. Stonewall Jackson was after him, and that probably meant that “the paltry young man who wanted to teach me the art of war will in less than a week either be in full retreat or badly whipped.”33

  McClellan tried to warn Halleck about Jackson. “I don’t like Jackson’s movements,” he told the new general in chief as he was leaving the Peninsula. “He will suddenly appear when least expected.” It would develop that McClellan was a prophet.34

  In late August McClellan reluctantly brought his army back below Washington, and then watched it leave him to fight for Pope. This was almost more than he could bear. “I have a terrible task on my hands now—” he wrote Nelly who was away in New Jersey, “perfect imbecility to correct.… Two of my Corps will either save that fool Pope or be sacrificed for the country.”35

  Blue and disgusted, he lit up a cigar, listened to the distant thunder of artillery, and tried in vain to get into a better humor. “They have taken all my troops from me—” he moaned. “I have even sent off my personal escort & camp guard & am here with a few orderlies & the aides.”36

  Without an army, stripped of everything but his staff, he sat and listened and brooded and smoked his cigar as Jackson turned up where least expected as he had predicted—in the rear of the mystified Pope. For the second time in little more than a year, a Union army was retreating battered and beaten back into Washington from Manassas. For the North it was a depressing case of déjà vu.

  McClellan could have said I told you so. What he said was even worse. As Pope was sinking deeper and deeper into trouble and defeat, McClellan suggested that the president leave that unfortunate general to get out of his scrape as best he could and bend every effort to make the capital safe instead.37

  This uncaring proposal astonished Lincoln; he considered it mean-spirited. But he was now in a box. Pope had been soundly beaten and he had nowhere to turn but back to McClellan. The young general had dragged his feet shamefully before sending help to Pope, and had ungraciously suggested letting him shift for himself. He had acted b
adly, and the president was convinced he had the “slows” and was “good for nothing for an onward movement.” But McClellan was a wizard for reordering disordered armies, and for defending the capital at that moment he was the best the president had. He must use what tools were at hand.38

  Lincoln explained all that to his stunned cabinet, which wanted to cashier McClellan outright, not give him back his army. “Giving the command to him was equivalent to giving Washington to the rebels,” bristled Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, who had been circulating a petition to get rid of him.39

  The president argued that there was no man in the army who could “lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he.” He said that although McClellan couldn’t fight himself, he was a genius at getting others ready to fight. So he was going to give him back his army, and Pope’s with it. Washington needed saving again.40

  Ohio Senator Ben Wade, angrier than anybody in the cabinet, had taken up the subject of McClellan with Lincoln earlier in the summer.

  Get somebody else, Wade demanded.

  “Well, put yourself in my place for a moment,” Lincoln said. “If I relieve McClellan, whom shall I put in command?”

  “Why, anybody!” Wade suggested.

  “Wade, anybody will do for you, but not for me,” Lincoln answered wearily. “I must have somebody.”41

  McClellan could feel it coming. It has become a waiting game, he wrote Nelly. “Our affairs here now much tangled up & I opine that in a day or two your old husband will be called upon to unsnarl them.”42

  On September 2, as Pope fell back on Washington, McClellan was back in command of the army. It was an army a little worse for wear, but it was his again. “It makes my heart bleed,” he wrote Nelly, “to see the poor shattered remnants of my noble Army of the Potomac, poor fellows! and to see how they love me even now. I hear them calling out to me as I ride among them—‘George—don’t leave us again!’ ‘They shan’t take you away from us again.…’ ”43

  McClellan’s job was to defend Washington. But he found that to do that he must go to Maryland.

  After its stunning victory at Second Manassas, Lee’s army crossed the Potomac and began invading Maryland on September 4, Tom Jackson’s corps in the lead. It had been one of those incomparably beautiful, warm fall days. The sun had risen in a cloudless sky, bathing the summit of the mountains to the west. The broad river, bordered to its banks by lofty trees in full foliage, flowed languidly beneath the passing army. Autumnal wildflowers were everywhere, down to the very margins of the stream. The scenery reminded many of Jackson’s men of their own beautiful Shenandoah Valley.44

  The mood of the tattered rebel army matched the weather. As they crossed the river at White’s Ford above Leesburg, they laughed, shouted, and sang. “Maryland, My Maryland!” their voices roared out, booming across the river and fading into the trees. They were a spectral band, a scarecrow chorus, “coon-jawed” and “hollow-eyed.”45 At Leesburg as they passed through on the way to the ford, an old lady with upraised arms and brimming tears exclaimed, “The Lord bless your dirty ragged souls!”46

  They were to get no less ragged and dirty as the days went by. A resident of Frederick, named Kate, looked at them in disgust and wrote her friend Minnie in Baltimore: “Oh! they are so dirty! I don’t think the Potomac River could wash them clean; and ragged!—there is not a scarecrow in the corn-fields that would not scorn to exchange clothes with them; and so tattered!—there isn’t a decently dressed soldier in their whole army.”47

  There wasn’t a soldier in that whole army who would not have agreed with her. This was a threadbare, vermin-infested congregation of invaders, “as dirty as the ground itself and … nearly of the same color.”48 There was hardly a one of them without the “camp itch,” brought to them by grayback vermin. The vermin “followed Johnny Reb everywhere,” one of the inflicted moaned, “staid by him, refused to leave, resisted every effort of force, opposed every attempt at compromises.… where they came from and how they arrived were mysteries never solved.” They “had more lives than a cat, and bred and propagated faster than a roe-herring.” The problem had seemed worse than at any other time in the war, because most of them had not changed clothes in weeks.49

  But tattered, ragged, dirty, and vermin-ridden, they were happy to be in Maryland. It was such a rich, lush land—a cornucopia. Many of them would one day agree with the Yankee poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who would write of it: “Fair as a garden of the Lord,/ To the eyes of the famished rebel horde.”50

  As the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia passed over the river onto northern soil, the Union Army of the Potomac began filing out of Washington City in wary pursuit. It was an army still reeling from the beatings on the Peninsula and at Second Manassas. But it was still a huge fighting machine, one hundred thousand strong, and with George McClellan once more in command. McClellan’s object was “to feel the enemy—to compel him to develop his intentions … to cover Baltimore or Washington, to attack him should he hold the line of the Monocacy, or to follow him into Pennsylvania if necessary.”51

  McClellan believed he was still outnumbered by the Confederates by at least 25 percent—he put their strength at not less than one hundred twenty thousand. So as his army marched after Lee, McClellan wired urgently back for reinforcements.52

  It was a wonderful march. If he had not believed himself so seriously outnumbered in front and behind he would have enjoyed it more. Even so, he reveled in the country they were passing through. He thought it one of the most lovely regions he had ever seen, “quite broken,” he told Nelly, “with lovely valleys in all directions, & some fine mountains in the distance.”53

  After crossing the river at White’s Ford, the Confederates moved on into Frederick City where Lee stopped to promulgate a strategy. He had supposed that his advance on Frederick would cause Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry to be evacuated. That hadn’t happened. So he must forcibly dislodge them, for he couldn’t afford to have them menacing his rear and flank.

  He would send Stonewall Jackson to handle the matter—and with him Lafayette McLaws to seize Maryland Heights above Harpers Ferry and John G. Walker, who had buried Jimmy Stuart in the Rogue River Valley a decade before, to occupy Loudoun Heights. Then he would further divide his army—not large to begin with, not half the size of the army that McClellan was marching toward him out of Washington. He would position D. H. Hill’s division at Boonsboro as the army’s rear guard, and send James Longstreet temporarily to Hagerstown to investigate the rumor of an approaching federal force from that direction.

  This dividing of an army in front of a far larger foe was against all the rules of sound military strategy. But Lee knew McClellan. He believed he could divide and reassemble his army well before that overcautious general was ready to bring him to battle. Lee did not intend to stop McClellan’s coming through the passes at South Mountain. He wanted to lure him on as far as he could, fight him as far as possible from his base in Washington.

  That was the plan. And McClellan, approaching cautiously, as Lee knew he would, was soon privy to it. On September 13, the day McClellan arrived in Frederick, a copy of the orders detailing all of Lee’s dispositions was found by Union soldiers in a field, wrapped around three cigars. The found orders told McClellan that Lee’s army was perilously, perhaps fatally divided. Rarely if ever in the history of war had a general known so clearly the disposition of the enemy in his front. McClellan assumed, as he always did, that Lee’s army was twice the size of his own. Nevertheless, the plans wrapped around the three cigars were the key to the destruction of that army. If acted on it could end the war, and McClellan knew it.

  Late that evening in his tent he shared his find with his ex-West Point classmate John Gibbon. “Here is a paper,” he exulted, “with which if I can’t whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home.”

  He turned down one corner of the golden document for Gibbon, now a brigade commander in his army, to see. “I will not show you the documen
t now,” he told Gibbon. “But there is the signature.”

  Gibbon read it: “R. H. Chilton, Adjt. Gen.” The orders were genuine, no doubt about that.

  “It gives the movement of every division of Lee’s army,” McClellan said. “Tomorrow we will pitch into his centre and if you people will only do two good, hard days’ marching I will put Lee in a position he will find hard to get out of.”54

  The next day McClellan did march, faster than Lee had ever known him to march, up the slopes toward South Mountain. It was not as fast as Tom Jackson or Lee himself might have marched had he had the same blueprint of enemy intentions, but it was fast for McClellan, and it puzzled Lee. This was not the McClellan he knew. And it was fast enough to hearten Lincoln. “God bless you, and all with you,” the president wired McClellan. “Destroy the rebel army, if possible.”55

  That night Lee learned that McClellan had found the lost orders. It explained everything and it changed everything. It was trouble, “a shabby trick for fate to play us,” said one of his officers.56

  South Mountain was a long way from West Point in time and place for classmates Jesse Lee Reno and Samuel Davis Sturgis. They were a good deal alike in some ways—both short and stubby and brusque. But after their graduation in 1846 they had taken far different routes to get to where they were. They were now Union generals, but Reno, one of the stars of the class, had graduated eighth and gone on to become one of the army’s outstanding ordnance officers. Sturgis, graduating thirty-second, had found his home in the saddle and made his reputation on the frontier as one of the army’s premier Indian fighters.

  Now both were serving under the star of the class, George McClellan. And they were both hotly engaged on South Mountain, pushing against the force Lee had hurried there to stay McClellan’s advance until he could make new arrangements. Both Reno and Sturgis were in the left wing of McClellan’s advancing army, moving together toward Fox Gap. The center and right of the army was one mile north at Turner’s Gap before Middletown, the point of McClellan’s main attack.