by Bruce Catton
He did not have a great deal of time to get ready for his military operations, for his objective was visibly taking shape before everyone’s eyes this June. This objective, of course, was to be the Confederate capital, whose capture, as hopeful Northerners believed, secession and the Confederacy could not long survive; and the Confederate capital now was the city of Richmond, not more than 100 miles away and apparently ripe to be taken. A New York Tribune correspondent, near the end of May, found Richmond “in the most fearful state of agitation.” Troops from the South were arriving at the rate of 500 or 600 a day, but most of them were very young, “entirely inexperienced, ill-clad and ill-armed,” and they would need a great deal of drill “before they will be able even to present a respectable front in a pitched battle.” Venturing into an expression of personal opinion which gives him rank as one of the very worst prophets of the entire war, the Tribune man wrote that General Lee, who commanded at Richmond, was “an inferior officer in vigor of mind and energy of character” and he predicted that “the mildness of his disposition will lead him to prefer negotiations to battles.” He added that recruits with and without uniform were parading the streets at all hours, and that nearly all of the soldiers chewed tobacco.10
McDowell’s troops could have been described in practically the same terms; which is to say that they were very young, totally without experience, untrained, poorly equipped, and in all conceivable respects quite unready for campaigning; a fact which, at the beginning of June, seemed to be apparent to no one in the high command except to McDowell himself. Adam Gurowski, the caustic and intransigent émigré who held down a small job in the State Department and wrote copiously in a diary meant for early publication, was writing now in lofty disparagement about Northern military preparations. “Weeks run, troops increase,” he wrote, “and not the first step made to organize them into an army, to form brigades, not to say divisions; not yet two regiments maneuvering together. What a strange idea the military chief or chiefs, or department, or somebody, must have of what it is to organize an army.” As a result of this, he believed, “the loss in men and material will be very considerable before the administration will get on the right track.”11
He was not the only pessimist. Secretary Seward himself, taking stock in the middle of May, felt a certain gloom, partly because he was not allowed to control things. To his wife Seward wrote sadly that he was “a chief reduced to a subordinate position” and that he was under attack because he had been working for the organization of a powerful army, although “it is only from an army so strong as to dishearten the traitors that we can hope for peace or union.” The military secretary to the governor of Ohio, noting that excellent men of business were eager to make money out of the war, wrote in disgust that “scoundrels get contracts because they have money; have money because they are scoundrels.” The word was out that Pennsylvanians with good connections were getting a good deal from Secretary Cameron; it was said that already “there is evidently much feeling between Lincoln and Cameron” and that Lincoln had received so many complaints about Pennsylvania contracts that he “intended to have the matter examined.” William T. Sherman, brought east and given a colonel’s commission, meditated gloomily about the likelihood of “absolute national ruin and anarchy,” and wrote that Americans might “degenerate into a new brand of men, struggling for power and plunder.” Mr. Stanton told former President Buchanan that “the peculation and fraud” so visible in Washington “have created a strong feeling of loathing and disgust”; Stanton felt the country early in June was in greater danger than ever before.12
Jefferson Davis, meanwhile, had arrived in Richmond. He was unwell, and the long trip up from Montgomery had been an ordeal; he tried to keep to his bed while the slow train clanked along, but had to rouse himself at each whistle stop and show himself, responding to cheers and serenades and the salutes of military companies. Physically very trying, the trip at least showed the President that his country was enthusiastic for the war. The wife of Senator Wigfall recorded that the whole country looked like a military camp, “all as jubilant as if they were going to a frolic instead of a fight,” and the Richmond Enquirer believed that the trip “has infused a martial feeling in our people that knows no bounds.” At Richmond there was a parade, with much handshaking, and the weary President had to go to a hotel balcony and address an enthusiastic crowd. He said what was expected of him, said it gracefully and with spirit: “I look upon you as the last best hope of liberty.… Upon your strong right arm depends the success of your country … remember that life and blood are nothing as compared with the immense interests you have at stake.… To the last breath of my life, I am wholly your own.” He was at last permitted to retire and get a little rest.13
He was on the frontier, and although serious fighting had not yet begun, it would obviously come in the near future; it would come in Virginia first of all, and Virginia was full of vulnerable points. The state formally turned its armed forces over to the Confederate government—which, for the moment, left General Lee with an empty title and nothing much to do—and the President must begin by taking stock. He found that he had between 35,000 and 40,000 troops immediately available. There were 7000 in and around Norfolk, where the great naval base must be made secure, and where engineers were already raising and preparing to refit the sunken steam frigate Merrimack. Five thousand or more were on the lower peninsula, guarding the approach to Richmond between the James and York rivers, there were perhaps 2700 in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, and between 7000 and 8000 were at Manassas, a day’s march from Washington; Beauregard had come up from Charleston, his arrival in Richmond the occasion for a great ovation, and he was in command at Manassas, where much was expected of him. Harper’s Ferry and the lower Shenandoah Valley were held by nearly 8000 men, and there were between 5000 and 6000 in Richmond itself, the number rapidly increasing as new levies arrived for organization and training.14
All of these points needed immediate attention. In Richmond a captain of engineers named E. Porter Alexander, who would become a notable artillerist in the years just ahead, wrote that Governor Letcher had done little to prepare the state for proper defense and said that “Davis was greatly deceived before his arrival here about the state of affairs.” The President, Alexander believed, was moving fast, making many improvements; Richmond was “so full of men & uniforms you could hardly walk the streets,” and if the Yankees would hold off just a little longer, things would work out all right—“I don’t think the Yanks can ever get to Richmond now. Should they try it they would be ‘feted.’ ” Lee himself, his occupation for the moment gone, wrote to his wife that he did not know what his own position would be: “I should like to retire to private life, if I could be with you and the children, but if I can be of any service to the State or her cause I must continue.” At Manassas, Beauregard was calling Virginians to arms, announcing that Lincoln, “a reckless and unprincipled tyrant,” was invading Virginia’s soil with irresponsible “abolition hosts” which had abandoned all rules of civilized warfare; “they proclaim by their acts, if not on their banners, that their war-cry is ‘beauty and booty.’ ” One of his staff officers believed that Davis’s appearance at Richmond had put fresh energy into war preparations, said that reinforcements were coming, and wrote: “Our regiments here are superbly drilled & equipped.”15
… There still was daylight, but it would not last much longer. There was abroad, in the North and in the South, an odd expectancy, a feeling almost of exaltation. From a Confederate troop camp at Lynchburg, Virginia, Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Kirby Smith sensed it and was moved and disturbed by it. Writing to his mother, he spoke of what he felt: “Surrounded by military preparations, with troops arriving and departing daily, with the tramp of armed men and the rapid roll of the drum ringing hourly in my ear, I feel as if the realities of war were fast closing upon us—and when I see the best blood of our country enrolled, the youth of sixteen and the aged side by side, the statesman, planter and minister
of the gospel in the ranks, my heart throbs with anxiety. I deprecate a contest which must be baptised in the blood of all we hold dear and good in the land.” Out on the Illinois prairie, a young man preparing to enlist wrote that “it is worth everything to live in this time,” and stated his reliance on a faith he could not define: “It seems to me almost like a disgrace not to be in the ranks when there is so much at stake.” From the Shenandoah Valley, a very youthful Virginia recruit wrote to his mother that he too saw great things in the balance: “If the North subjugates the South I never want to live to be 21 years old; when I am at that age, to be regarded as an effective citizen of my state, I want to breathe the breath of a freeman or not breathe at all.” The historical society which preserves this letter records that its writer, presumably before reaching his majority, was killed in action.16
CHAPTER SEVEN
To the Fiery Altar
1: War in the Mountains
George Brinton McClellan had almost all of the gifts. He was young, sturdy, intelligent, and up to a certain point he was very lucky. A short man with a barrel chest, a handsome face, and the air of one who knew what all of the trumpets meant, he won (without trying much more than was necessary) the adoration and the lasting affection of some very tough fighting men who tended to be most cynical about their generals. He had too much, perhaps, and he had it too soon and too easily; life did not hammer toughness into him until it was too late, and although many men died for him, he never quite understood what their deaths meant or what he could do with their devotion. For a time he served his country most ably.
Born in Pennsylvania, McClellan was thirty-five when the war began. He had been graduated from West Point in 1846, number two in his class, a magnetic and brilliant young man; he won three brevets for gallant and meritorious conduct in the Mexican War, served as War Department observer in the Crimea in the middle fifties, and then resigned from the army, as a captain, to go into business. In business he did well, had been successful as vice-president of the growing Illinois Central Railroad, and in the spring of 1861 was president of the Eastern Division of the Ohio & Mississippi. He found himself, in the middle of May, major general of volunteers (and, a short time afterward, major general of regulars as well) commanding the Department of the Ohio—the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, along with a part of western Pennsylvania and the dissident section of western Virginia. It was up to him to organize and then to use the troops raised in this area, and he did these things with smooth competence.1
McClellan had an observant gaze, and at the end of May there was much for him to look at. Across the Ohio River, going eastward from Kentucky, was Virginia. Virginia was basically a tradition and a state of mind, but it was also a vast geographical expanse, running from the Atlantic beaches and the Chesapeake capes west beyond the Blue Ridge and along the Ohio River; a huge territory of immense strategic importance, offering to the young general and to the national authority both a threat and an opportunity.
The threat was self-evident. To get west from Washington it was necessary to use the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and this road lay almost completely at Virginia’s mercy. It entered Virginia at Harper’s Ferry, followed the Potomac past Cumberland, Maryland, and at last plunged into Virginia’s western mountains on its way to the Ohio Valley. At the town of Grafton, Virginia, the railroad forked, sending one branch northwest to the Ohio at Wheeling and the other, almost due west, to the same river at Parkersburg. Thus it ran through secession territory, and was subject to interruption; was totally interrupted, in fact, at the end of May, with armed Confederates holding the line from Harper’s Ferry to Cumberland, and with the prospect that everything west of Cumberland would also be lost just as soon as the Richmond government could get a substantial force over into the Alleghenies. The section east of Cumberland would of course be regained by the Union forces, sooner or later, in the natural course of things; it was close to the capital, and if the Federal armies could do anything at all, they could eventually make this part of the line tolerably secure. But this would do the Union cause no good if the Confederates continued to hold western Virginia, and to the people of Ohio this was a matter of great importance. They not only wanted direct communication with the national capital; even more they wanted to be able to send their produce to the eastern market at Baltimore. Since Ohio was the most populous state in the West, and had furnished most of McClellan’s troops, Ohio could make its wishes felt.
But although western Virginia menaced the Federal cause, it also promised it substantial gains. Its people were largely Unionist. For years they had felt like Virginia’s stepchildren, believing that the state was run by tidewater folk for tidewater’s benefit; a great many of them had ceased to identify themselves strongly with Virginia, precisely as Virginia itself had lost its feeling of identity with the Federal Union, and they had voted against secession. Now they were planning a secession of their own; they would break away from Virginia and become either a brand-new state or, if the war lasted, the legally dominant section of the old one. Either way they mean trouble for Jefferson Davis, and the Lincoln administration would help them if it could.
All of this was as clear to McClellan as anything needed to be. He got, in addition, a slight nudge from General Scott. Late in May a detachment of Confederate infantry moved into the railroad junction town of Grafton, and Scott telegraphed McClellan to do something about this, if he could—to protect the railroad and also to “support the Union sentiment in western Virginia.” McClellan got under way without lost motion. From his headquarters in Cincinnati on May 26 he issued a proclamation, inviting mountaineer Virginians to “sever the connection that binds you to traitors” and to show the world that “the faith and loyalty so long boasted by the Old Dominion are still preserved in western Virginia.”2
He got a good response. The Wheeling Intelligencer, strong for the Union, reported that the arrival of the first Federal troops “has been one continued ovation” and said that people in every house greeted the soldiers by cheering and by waving hats and handkerchiefs, women who could do nothing better waving sun bonnets and aprons. The Federal soldiers who made up the advance responded with cheers and hat-wavings of their own, and concluded that this was going to be a fine war—an innocent conclusion which they modified later. By May 30 they had occupied Grafton, and four days later, led by an Indiana volunteer, Brigadier General T. A. Morris, they attacked and routed a small Confederate force at Philippi, fifteen miles south.
The fight at Philippi was a very small thing, as battles went—no Unionists were killed, and hardly any Confederates—but it was a propaganda victory of some magnitude. The western Virginia Unionists were so encouraged that they held a convention at Wheeling on June 11, voted to nullify the ordinance of secession, declared that the offices of the state government at Richmond were vacated, and named Francis H. Pierpont governor of the “restored” government of Virginia. To the Confederates the fight was a combination of tragedy and abysmal farce. Their untrained troops at Philippi had been caught entirely by surprise and fled in utter disorder, leaving behind almost all of their equipment and, in some cases, their very pants, and a cold rain came down to complete the dampening of their spirits. The Federals referred exultantly to the affair as “the Philippi races”; the Confederate government sent in a new commander, Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett, and ordered a court of inquiry, which found that the surprise that had been suffered was inexcusable. General Lee wrote that he hoped the thing “will be a lesson to be remembered by the army through the war.”3
McClellan wanted to keep moving. In a broad way he had two objectives—to protect the Unionists and the railroad in western Virginia, and to drive a column across the Alleghenies and into tidewater Virginia by the back door—and he would use two principal columns of attack. One would go on from Philippi, and this column he himself would accompany. The other would leave the Ohio River farther south, moving up the valley of the Great Kanawha River and aiming, ultimately, at the
town of Staunton, at the upper end of the Shenandoah Valley. On the map, this latter route looked like a promising avenue of invasion; actually the difficulties of moving across a thinly settled mountainous country were so great that to the end of the war the Federals were not able to make effective use of it. This column he entrusted to a new brigadier, an Ohio-born politician who would display some talent for military affairs, Jacob D. Cox.
McClellan himself joined the northern column late in June. He had a knack, common among generals on both sides in the early days of the war, for issuing inspiring proclamations, and he unloaded one now: “Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel. I know that I can rely upon you.” He went on, more soberly, to warn his men that they were not to make war on civilians, announcing that looters and marauders “will be dealt with in their persons and property according to the severest rules of military law.”4