The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  To Lincoln that looked like there would be no fighting and no rebel army destroyed. And he went to Antietam ostensibly to visit the Union army, but really to see if he could get McClellan to do something. McClellan wasn’t fooled by the visit. The president’s real purpose, he wrote Nelly, is “to push me into a premature advance into Virginia.… The real truth is that my army is not fit to advance.”5

  The president was affable as always. He sat in McClellan’s field tent, surrounded by trophies of the battle, and they talked. A day and night into the visit, Lincoln took an early morning walk with his friend from Illinois Ozias M. Hatch, who had accompanied the presidential party to Antietam. They paused on an eminence that overlooked the Union army and the president spoke.

  “Do you know what this is?” Lincoln asked, his gaze sweeping the vast encampment of white tents glistening in the morning sun.

  Hatch was surprised by the question. “It is the army of the Potomac,” he replied.

  “So it is called,” said the president sadly, “but that is a mistake; it is only McClellan’s body-guard.”6

  But Lincoln left Antietam on October 4 thinking McClellan would begin to move. When he got home and the general began to argue instead why he ought not do so, the president on the sixth sent him a peremptory order.7 It directed him to cross the Potomac immediately and give battle to the enemy or drive him south. “Your army,” the president told him, “must move now while the roads are good.”8

  Still McClellan did not move. For three weeks more he stayed where he was and argued instead for reinforcements and supplies. The army had suffered horribly at Antietam and was badly in need of rest and repair. It was without shoes and clothing—a situation the Confederates considered normal operating conditions. He wrote Washington that his cavalry horses were broken down with fatigue. Lincoln, in a rare outward show of his inward irritation, wired back curtly: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”9 This hit a nerve. “It was one of those dirty little flings that I can’t get used to when they are not merited,” he wrote Nelly.10

  But mostly the president continued to reason with his general. “You remember my speaking to you of what I called your overcautiousness,” he wrote him on October 13. “Are you not overcautious when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?”

  The president thought again about McClellan’s elation at having driven the enemy from northern soil. “We should not so operate as to merely drive him away,” he continued. “As we must beat him somewhere or fail finally, we can do it, if at all, easier near to us than far away. If we cannot beat the enemy where he now is, we never can, he again being within the intrenchments of Richmond.”

  Lincoln told McClellan he favored pursuing Lee on an inside track: “I should think it preferable to take the route nearest the enemy, disabling him to make an important move without your knowledge, and compelling him to keep his forces together for dread of you.”

  As Lee moved, McClellan could strike him, if the time seemed right, through gaps in the Blue Ridge. “For a great part of the way,” Lincoln wrote the general, “you would be practically between the enemy and both Washington and Richmond, enabling us to spare you the greatest number of troops from here. When at length running for Richmond ahead of him enables him to move this way, if he does so, turn and attack him in the rear. But I think he should be engaged long before such point is reached. It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy, and it is unmanly to say they cannot do it.”11

  This unsolicited tactical advice from the president depressed McClellan. Darius Couch, his West Point classmate, now a corps commander in his army, was surprised to see McClellan rein up at his corps headquarters at Harpers Ferry at about 10:00 in the morning on the sixteenth. Spreading a map of Virginia before them, McClellan began showing Couch the strategic features of the Shenandoah Valley, indicating the movements he intended to make to compel Lee to concentrate around Gordonsville or Charlottesville, and there fight a great battle.

  Then he turned to Couch. “But I may not have command of the army much longer. Lincoln is down on me.”

  He fished the president’s letter from his pocket and began reading it aloud. Couch was taken aback. McClellan had never before especially confided in him. Now he was telling everything. When he finished reading the letter, Couch tried to reassure him. He said he saw no ill feeling in the tone of it.

  McClellan believed there was. “Yes, Couch,” he said, “I expect to be relieved from the Army of the Potomac, and to have a command in the West.”12

  But still he didn’t act. Another ten days passed. Finally, on October 26, more than a month after Antietam, he began pushing his army across the Potomac on Lincoln’s inside track.

  But an unhappier general never crossed a river. As he passed over—it was November 1 before the movement was entirely complete—he wrote Nelly of “the mean & dirty character” of the dispatches from Washington. “When it is possible to misunderstand, & when it is not possible, whenever there is a chance of a wretched innuendo—there it comes.” What rankled most was that it came “from men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually & morally!” He was talking of Lincoln in particular: “There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’ ”13

  At least the epithet was something he could give Stanton credit for, although Stanton had by now probably changed his mind about that, too. McClellan’s great hope for the campaign he was now undertaking was that if it succeeded he might yet drive Stanton from office. “If I can crush him I will,” he wrote Nelly, “—relentlessly & without remorse.”14

  He would have to strike quickly, more quickly than he realized, more quickly than was his wont, for the Gorilla had by now decided on a final litmus test for the general. He had resolved that if McClellan permitted Lee to cross the Blue Ridge and place himself between Richmond and the Army of the Potomac, he would remove him from command.15

  By November 5 McClellan had worked his way to Rectortown—“thus far down into rebeldom,” he told Nelly.16 But the rebels had also put themselves between him and Richmond. And that day Lincoln wrote out a final order to George McClellan.

  Francis Preston Blair had been around Washington a long time. He had been one of Andrew Jackson’s confidants and he had been advising presidents ever since. He was Washington’s venerated old man of politics. He had a son, Francis, Jr., who was sometimes a general and sometimes a congressman; and another son, Montgomery, who was Lincoln’s postmaster general. Lincoln liked the old man and always treated him with the respect his years and experience commanded.

  Old man Blair liked McClellan, and he was worried about him. He knew Lincoln was considering sacking him, and he thought it would be a mistake. At Montgomery’s urging, he drove out to the Soldiers’ Home on the outskirts of Washington, where Lincoln was staying, to see what he could do.

  Lincoln listened respectfully to the old man, as he always did. When Blair was finished, he stood and stretched his long arms almost to the ceiling, and said: “I said I would remove him if he let Lee’s army get away from him, and I must do so. He has got the ‘slows,’ Mr. Blair.”17 He had tried long enough, he told the old man, “to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.”18

  Brigadier General Catharinus P. Buckingham was in his office adjoining Secretary Stanton’s private room, and it was late—10:00 at night on September 6. Everybody knew the secretary was a workaholic and Buckingham was finding it out firsthand. He hadn’t been at this desk job very long, but desk jobs were what he did in this war. That’s what he had done in the volunteer army in Ohio before he had come to Washington, and it was what he was doing now on special assignment to the secretary’s office.

  Buckingham was white-bearded, fifty-five years old, smart, studious, and scholarly—a mathematics instructor a
t West Point for a time, then a professor at Kenyon College. But iron was his thing. Before the war he had owned and run the Kokosing Iron Works in Knox County, Ohio. Robert E. Lee was one of his best friends; they had graduated from West Point together.19

  And here it was, two hours before midnight, and the secretary was sending for him. When Buckingham stepped into Stanton’s office, Halleck was also there. The secretary said he wished Buckingham to undertake a special assignment; he was to go by train to McClellan’s headquarters. Stanton told him in detail the route he should take, and handed him two unsealed envelopes. He was to take them to his office, read them, and seal them.20

  In the quiet of his office, Buckingham opened the two envelopes and was thunderstruck. One of them contained an order from Lincoln relieving McClellan from command of the army, and another from Halleck ordering him to repair to New Jersey and report by letter to the war department. The contents of the second letter were no less surprising—two orders for Ambrose Burnside, one from the president appointing him to command of the army, and the other from Halleck directing him to report his plans.

  Why me? Buckingham wondered. Why did he have to be the one to deliver these two explosive sets of orders? McClellan was his friend. Why did he have to be the one to do this to a friend? The next morning before leaving, the perplexed general saw Stanton at his house and the secretary explained. He was sending an officer of Buckingham’s rank because he feared Burnside would not accept the command, and Buckingham if necessary must use the strongest arguments possible to induce him not to refuse. Second, Stanton explained, not only did he have no confidence in McClellan’s military skill, but he very much doubted his patriotism, and even his loyalty. He was afraid that McClellan might not give up the command, and he wished, therefore, that the order should be delivered by an officer of high rank, direct from the war department, so it would carry the full weight of the president’s authority.

  Stanton’s orders were for Buckingham to find Burnside first and get his decision. If he agreed to accept the command, whatever that might take, Buckingham was then to confront McClellan. However if Burnside would not accept, despite Buckingham’s persuasions, then he was to return to Washington at once without seeing McClellan. This was a very delicate and precise assignment, even for a mathematician of Buckingham’s talents. Better perhaps that he had been a diplomat before the war rather than an iron manufacturer.

  The weather didn’t make the trip any more pleasant. Northern Virginia was in the grip of one of the worst snowstorms for that time of year on record. Buckingham’s special train chugged out toward Salem, where Burnside’s corps headquarters was believed to be, through driving snow and bitter cold. Buckingham found Burnside camped about fifteen miles south of Salem.

  Buckingham knew the universal feeling in the army about Burnside, and surely shared it. No sweeter, kinder, or truer-hearted man existed—loving, lovable, dashing, romantic, picturesque, with that spectacular growth of beard that circled his face like a halo. But he was not fit for the command of an army. Burnside himself knew he was not. He had publicly said he was not when offered high command earlier, and nobody had the least reason for believing otherwise, except perhaps Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck, who were desperate.21

  Lincoln had perhaps by now come around to Senator Wade’s way of thinking: anybody would do.

  Perhaps the most distasteful aspect of the whole matter for Burnside was the ghastly prospect of having to supersede his dearest friend. Buckingham was doubtless aware of all these ramifications as he entered Burnside’s chambers, closed the door, and made his loathsome errand known. Burnside declined the promotion at once, as Buckingham expected he would. Whatever his own private opinion might be, Buckingham now must somehow persuade Burnside to change his mind.

  Knowing Lincoln was set on removing McClellan at all events, Buckingham argued that Burnside must accept. Burnside cited his want of confidence in himself and his particularly close friendship with McClellan, to whom he felt under the strongest personal obligations. Buckingham countered that McClellan’s removal was foregone, and that if Burnside didn’t accept the command it would be given to Fighting Joe Hooker. Such a bleak prospect finally eroded Burnside’s opposition, and at length, after much arguing by Buckingham, and with a heavy heart, he gave in. Buckingham then asked the new commander of the Army of the Potomac to go with him to deliver the news to the old one. So they rode together back through the snowstorm to Buckingham’s train and took it on up the line to McClellan’s camp near Rectortown.

  At about 11:00 in the night they found McClellan’s quarters and knocked on his tent-pole. The general was writing Nelly his nightly letter. He was not surprised to see them, despite the weather. He had heard that a special train carrying Buckingham from Washington had arrived near his camp earlier in the day. He also knew that Buckingham had left the car, and without coming to see him first had proceeded on horseback through the driving snowstorm to Burnside’s camp on the Rappahannock. McClellan at once suspected the truth, but he had kept his own counsel. Now here they were, both looking very solemn.

  McClellan was nothing if not gracious. He received them in his usual kind and cordial manner. Buckingham found this part of his task particularly painful and distasteful. He had always entertained, as almost everybody did, very friendly feelings for McClellan. But if the blow had to come, he was now persuaded, he was glad it was not to be delivered by an unsympathetic hand in a mortifying way.

  The amiable McClellan began a conversation on general subjects, as if visitors in a heavy snowstorm in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere was an everyday occurrence. After a few moments Buckingham turned to Burnside.

  “Well, general,” he said, “I think we had better tell General McClellan the object of our visit.”

  “I should be glad to learn it,” McClellan said.

  Buckingham handed him the envelope with the orders from Lincoln and Halleck.

  As McClellan opened the envelope, he saw that both men, especially Buckingham, watched him intently. As he silently read, not a muscle quivered nor did his face show any expression. They shall not have that triumph, he thought.

  After a moment he turned with a smile to the miserable and mortified Burnside.

  “Well, Burnside,” he said. “I turn the command over to you.”22

  “I then assumed command,” the unhappy Burnside recounted later, “in the midst of a violent snow-storm, with the army in a position that I knew but little of.… I probably knew less than any other corps commander of the positions and relative strength of the several corps of the army.”23

  “They have made a great mistake,” McClellan wrote, picking up his pen again when his visitors had left and continuing his letter to Nelly, “—alas for my poor country—I know in my innermost heart she never had a truer servant.… Our consolation must be that we have tried to do what was right—if we have failed it was not our fault.”24

  Darius Couch knew nothing of this as he dismounted at about dark the next evening to oversee camp arrangements for his corps. As he stood there in the snow McClellan rode up with his staff, accompanied by Burnside.

  McClellan reined in and said immediately, “Couch, I am relieved from the command of the army, and Burnside is my successor.”

  Couch stepped up to him and took hold of his hand. “General McClellan,” he said, “I am sorry for it.”

  He then strode around the head of McClellan’s horse to Burnside. “General Burnside,” he said, “I congratulate you.”

  Burnside made a dismissing gesture. “Couch, don’t say a word about it.” His manner told Couch he didn’t wish to talk of it, that he thought it neither the time nor the place.25

  By nightfall the entire army knew. McClellan had told them. “In parting from you,” he wrote, “I cannot express the love and gratitude I bear to you. As an army, you have grown up under my care. In you I have never found doubt or coldness. The battles you have fought under my command will proudly live in our natio
n’s history. The glory you have achieved, our mutual perils and fatigues, the graves of our comrades fallen in battle and by disease, the broken forms of those whom wounds and sickness have disabled—the strongest associations which can exist among men—unite us still by an indissoluble tie.”26

  The army was staggered and enraged. “Our George” was being taken from them again—this time apparently for good. A spasm of anger, outrage, chagrin, and gloom swept it from top to bottom. It was “all as cold as Charity & dark as Egypt.…” wrote Brigadier General Marsena R. Patrick in his diary that night. “The Army is in mourning & this is a blue day for us all.” The next night, Sunday, November 9, he told his diary of “a feeling as deep as I have ever seen.” He reported the regulars “uproarious,” demanding that if McClellan be removed at all, it be to the command of all the armies.27

  There was dark talk, particularly among McClellan’s large staff, of defying the president’s order and marching on Washington to take possession of the government. McClellan anticipated this and moved quickly to quash it. He tacked a precautionary word to the end of his message to his soldiers announcing the change in command. “We shall ever be comrades in supporting the Constitution of our country and the nationality of its people,” he wrote.28 On the day he left for good, the eleventh, he would tell them, “I wish you to stand by Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well.”29

  His soldiers demanded to see him one more time. So on the morning of November 10 he rode out to say good-bye. As he rode past Marsena Patrick’s troops in this last farewell, they cheered him, but it was too irregular to suit Patrick. As they passed the front of his command, Patrick swung his cap over his head.

  “Once More and All Together!” he shouted.

  There was an explosion of cheers that Patrick found “magical.” Shouts rose from thousands of throats as the departing McClellan continued to ride through the army, past division after division and corps after corps, past troops drawn up in ranks on either side of the road for miles. Patrick marveled: “Such waving of tattered banners & shouts of Soldiery!”30