Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Three days after this letter, McClellan wrote that “Gen. Scott is the most dangerous antagonist I have,” adding that “our ideas are so widely different that it is impossible for us to work together much longer,” and on August 16 he summed it up: “I am here in a terrible place—the enemy have from 3 to 4 times my force—the Presid’t is an idiot, the old General is in his dotage—they cannot or will not see the true state of affairs.” He enlarged on this slightly: “I have no ambition in the present affairs; only wish to save my country, and find the incapables around me will not permit it. They sit on the verge of the precipice and cannot realize what they see. Their reply to everything is, ‘Impossible! Impossible!’ They think nothing possible which is against their wishes.”10

  Three weeks in Washington: the general-in-chief was either a dotard or a traitor and in any case was “the most dangerous antagonist,” and the President was an idiot; and talk about the presidency and a dictatorship was fluttering through the heated air. Yet the real problem was not so much General McClellan’s troubles with his superiors and with himself as it was the fact that the Washington atmosphere was clouding his vision.

  To begin with, he was losing sight of military realities. He believed that Beauregard was about to attack him, and in mid-August he assured his wife: “Beauregard probably has 150,000 men—I cannot count more than 55,000!”11 At this moment the Confederate Army in his front (commanded, to be sure, by Joseph E. Johnston) had a total present-for-duty strength of just over 30,000, and six weeks later Johnston and Beauregard would abandon all plans for an offensive when they were told that their strength could not possibly be raised to as much as 60,000. McClellan believed that when he arrived on the scene Washington was all but totally defenseless, and although he wanted to take the offensive he must begin by taking massive precautions against disaster. Actually, the city had never been open to a sudden Confederate thrust, and although he had moved efficiently and swiftly to perfect the city’s defenses he had after all had a moderately good foundation on which to build; and the defensive effort, which he properly put first, had begun to warp his understanding of the real situation.12

  Even worse, in some ways, was his inability to understand the political currents that were swirling about him. He was engaging in an all-out struggle with General Scott for control of the Army, and he wanted political support. Understanding that the men who had made the Republican party and had put Lincoln in office wanted a vigorous prosecution of the war, he courted their help. He had been in Washington no more than a fortnight before he was inducing Senator Charles Sumner to urge the Governor of Massachusetts to rush more troops to Washington; he told Sumner that Scott did not share his own feeling of urgency and that Scott, in fact, was an embarrassment to him.13 But McClellan did not quite understand just what the Republican leaders really wanted. They were demanding a hard war because they believed that to destroy the Confederacy must also mean destruction of the slave power and the slave system. They were as impatient with “the incapables” as McClellan was, because they feared that the incapables would fumble and stumble their way into some sort of a South-saving compromise. If they helped to create a new commanding general, they would expect hard-driving action and an end to all delays and all fuzziness of purpose; and if the commanding general did not give this to them they would turn on him without mercy.

  Viewing the matter from London, Charles Francis Adams in mid-August wrote that the nation had already gone through three stages of “this great political disease.” First, he said, there was “the cold fit, when it seemed as if nothing would start the country.” Then came the hot fit, “when it seemed almost in the highest continual delirium.” Now there was the third stage, when the country was in the process of “waking to the awful reality before it.” He did not know what the fourth stage might be, but he felt that there must be a high principle to contend for; “I am for this reason anxious to grapple with the slave question at once.”14 John Bigelow, who stopped this month in Washington to accept appointment as United States consul in Paris, regretfully saw “a certain lack of sovereignty” in President Lincoln, and wrote that he seemed to be “a man utterly unconscious of the space which the President of the United States occupied that day in the history of the human race.” David Davis, the stout Illinois jurist who had managed Lincoln’s presidential campaign, heard from a pessimistic friend in Washington that the cabinet was incapable and that Seward was “leading Lincoln into a pit,” and the correspondent gave a blunter phrasing to Adams’s thought: “I am no prophet, but it appears to me we are only at the beginning of a mighty revolution.”15

  The summer weeks passed. The army constantly grew larger, showing its increased size and its improved drill in periodic reviews which encouraged soldiers and spectators alike. The chain of forts protecting Washington was made stronger, the task of piling up the innumerable things which the new army would wear or eat or shoot made progress despite woeful deficiencies in Secretary Cameron’s organization … and the contest for control between the young general and the old general went on without a moment’s letup, McClellan quietly contemptuous, Scott coldly furious. In September there were new rumors of a Confederate offensive, and Cameron—apparently forgetting that there was such a person as Scott—sent McClellan a fatuous note begging him to say how the War Department could be of service. McClellan asked for heavy reinforcements, including 25,000 of Frémont’s men and the whole of the Regular Army, saying that the Army of the Potomac must be increased to 300,000 men even if this meant going on the defensive everywhere else in the United States. He added that he wanted sole control over the assignment of officers in his command.16

  Scott protested in vain. He decreed that a general could communicate with a cabinet minister only through channels—that is, through his superior officer—and he was ignored. He formally ordered McClellan to give him a complete report on “the positions, state and number of troops under him,” and to submit day-by-day reports on new arrivals and assignments. McClellan let the order lie for three weeks, then casually sent over an inadequate reply. Scott thought of having McClellan arrested and court-martialed, but concluded that “a conflict of authority near the head of the army would be highly encouraging to the enemies and depressing to the friends of the Union,” and at length (having heard that 40,000 troops were being moved across the Potomac to the Virginia front) the general-in-chief found himself writing to the War Department to ask if he might be told “the meaning of the extraordinary movement of troops going on in the city.”17

  Nothing like this would have been happening if Scott had not been slated for early retirement. He knew this as well as anyone, and he was hanging on during the early fall in the hope that a man of his own choice rather than McClellan might succeed him. He had settled on Henry Wager Halleck, another of the studious officers whom Old Army people labeled “brilliant,” a West Pointer who had won a Phi Beta Kappa key at Union College, who had published a work called Elements of Military Art and Science, and had translated Jomini’s classic four-volume Vie Politique et Militaire de Napoléon. Halleck had resigned from the Army in 1854 and had settled in California, prospering mightily as a corporation lawyer. Late in August, Scott had had him appointed a major general in the Regular Army, and when Cameron went to Missouri in October to examine the decaying Frémont situation at firsthand Scott agreed to stay on the job until the Secretary’s return, hoping that Halleck would be with him by that time.18

  It was a vain hope. By this time no one could possibly replace Scott but McClellan. To the soldiers and to the Washington public, McClellan was the martial spirit incarnate. William Howard Russell of the London Times noted that the young general had gone to elaborate lengths to make himself known to the soldiers and especially to their officers. He was seen in the camps or on the parade grounds every day, appearing in the morning and not disappearing until after dark, seeing everything, being seen by everyone, playing to the fullest the part of the general who carried the fate of the Republic on
his shoulders; and he did this, Russell felt, “either to gain the good will of the army, or for some larger object.”19 The good will of the Army he had won, beyond question; if a larger object was in view, McClellan had only to wait.

  He did not have to wait much longer, for the Army of the Potomac was about to suffer one more public disgrace, and the shock of it would force a change—and, in the end, would arm and perpetuate a bitterness that would be felt to the last day of the war and beyond. On October 21 a small Federal detachment was routed in an engagement at Ball’s Bluff, on the Virginia side of the Potomac thirty-five miles upstream from Washington. The engagement had little military significance, but it was one more dreary licking. The Confederates inflicted heavy losses and they killed, in hot battle action, a prominent Union commander—Colonel Edward D. Baker, an unskilled soldier but an orator and politician of much renown, a member of the United States Senate and for years an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln.

  Ball’s Bluff represented a fumble. Earlier in the summer the Confederates had occupied Leesburg, Virginia, a few miles inland from Ball’s Bluff, with a brigade under the same Brigadier General “Shanks” Evans who had fought so well in the opening hours of the Bull Run battle. There had been intermittent skirmishes up and down the Potomac between Confederates and Federals, and early in September Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had won laurels by beating a party of Federals near the Virginia hamlet of Lewinsville. On October 19, McClellan sent a division under Brigadier General George A. McCall forward on the Virginia side to Dranesville, fifteen miles below Leesburg, to find out what Evans was doing. McCall was to send patrols out to tap at Evans’s lines, and McClellan ordered Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, commanding a division at Poolesville, Maryland, to keep a sharp lookout along the river and see whether McCall’s advance made the Confederates evacuate Leesburg. He closed with the suggestion: “Perhaps a slight demonstration on your part would have the effect to move them.” At the same time he told McCall to return to camp as soon as his reconnaissance was finished.20

  Out of all of this came tragedy. On October 21, McCall completed his work and withdrew. At the same time Stone, to make the “slight demonstration” that had been called for, had Colonel Baker take his 1700-man brigade across the river at Ball’s Bluff to threaten Evans’s left. Baker obeyed enthusiastically but inexpertly. He floundered forward from the top of the bluff, ran into Evans’s main body, and got into a battle which he was unable to handle. His force was routed, with some 200 men killed or wounded and more than 700 captured, he himself was shot dead, and the survivors came straggling back to the Maryland side of the Potomac in woeful disorganization and dejection.21

  Exactly three months had passed since Bull Run—three months of sober rededication, of immense effort, of hope rising from the ashes: and the harvest of those months seemed to be this ignominious defeat. It did not even have the stature of the earlier disaster. Bull Run at least came as the result of an honest effort to strike a blow; Ball’s Bluff was just a blunder, the sort of thing which—in the judgment of men whose impatience was rising like a flood tide—came logically out of a timid defensive policy. It was not to be endured, and some of the most forceful Republicans in the Senate promptly undertook to bring about a change.

  Their immediate target was old General Scott, the living symbol of inaction and delay. (Scott, to be sure, had nothing whatever to do with Ball’s Bluff, but he was general-in-chief and if the Army was not being used properly the fault must be his.) Less than a week after the battle the opposition was in full cry.

  Spearhead was a triumvirate of three Senators—Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio. Trumbull, the mildest-mannered of the three, was a former Democrat just nearing fifty, a man who had become a Republican during the anti-Nebraska fight, a member of the Senate since 1855, an all-out war man always alert to uphold the authority of Congress. Chandler, a wealthy merchant who had helped found the Republican party and who had a dictatorial control over the party organization in Michigan, was Trumbull’s age but tougher and more rough-hewn, a man who had declared during the spring that the Union would never be worth a rush without a little bloodletting and who was working furiously now to bring that bloodletting to pass. Wade, in his early sixties, was one of the most determined of the anti-slavery men in Congress—he had tried, in 1852, to repeal the fugitive slave law outright—and in the smoky Senate debates of the late 1850s he had been ostentatiously defiant of the slave-state spokesmen; wholly grim, wholly determined, altogether one of the rockiest men in Washington.

  These three called on Lincoln, and then on Lincoln and Seward, insisting that it was time for action to drive the Rebels away from the vicinity of Washington. They also went to see McClellan, in a meeting held at Montgomery Blair’s house and lasting for three hours, and McClellan convinced them that Scott was the great obstacle. To his wife, immediately after the conference was over, McClellan summed it up: “They will make a desperate effort to have Gen. Scott retired at once; until that is accomplished I can effect but little good. He is ever in my way, and I am sure does not desire effective action. I want to get through with the war as rapidly as possible.” Once Wade remarked that even an unsuccessful battle would be better than continued delay, because “swarming recruits” would come in to make good any losses; to which McClellan quietly replied that he would rather have a few recruits before a victory than a flock of them after a defeat. This was sober good sense, to be sure, but sober good sense was not quite what these Republican “radicals” were looking for, and Mr. Lincoln warned McClellan that this demand for action was a political reality that had to be taken into account, adding: “At the same time, General, you must not fight until you are ready.” McClellan was confident. “I have everything at stake,” he replied. “If I fail, I will not see you again, or anybody.”22

  Chandler recorded his own thoughts in a letter to Mrs. Chandler the next day.

  “If Wade and I fail in our mission, the end is at hand,” he wrote. “If we fail I may take my seat in the Senate this winter, but doubt it.” He told about the meetings with McClellan and with Mr. Lincoln, and went on: “If we fail in getting a battle here now all is lost, and up to this time a fight is scarcely contemplated. Washington is safe now, and that seems to be all they care for.… If the South had one tenth our resources Jeff Davis would today be in Philadelphia and before a month in Boston.”23

  In the end, the mission succeeded. The Senators apparently were just a little skeptical about McClellan’s willingness to make a quick move, but they had reached something of an understanding with him and for the moment they were backing him. Scott’s resignation was formally accepted on November 1, his attempt to get Halleck as his successor was ridden down, and McClellan was announced as the new general-in-chief, with authority over the entire United States Army. Mr. Lincoln and cabinet paid a formal call on General Scott, and when Scott left the city McClellan and his staff went to the railroad station to see him off: a dark, rainy morning, the two soldiers preserving the amenities and parting with courteous farewells, McClellan inwardly touched by this melancholy close to “the career of the first soldier of his nation.” Then McClellan assumed his new responsibilities and the capital prepared for action.

  How the whole business looked to the radical Republican element is set forth in a confidential letter which the editors of the Chicago Tribune got from their Washington correspondent shortly after this change took place.

  “Matters have a better look,” wrote the Tribune man. “Scott is squelched and with him those who have been using his disloyalty to further and veneer their schemes for deadening the progress of the war. A stormy week in the counsels of managers of affairs here sees McClellan placed at the head of affairs. The people should be made to thoroughly acquit him of the Edwards Ferry affair.” (By “Edwards Ferry,” the writer referred to the Ball’s Bluff business.) “That, and the proposition to go at once into winter quarters here, and suspend
hostilities, broke the back of the opposition to him in the Cabinet and the Army.”24

  3: The Hammering of the Guns

  There were dimensions to national strength which the impatient men in Washington were slow to recognize. The armies perhaps could do it all, if they could be recruited, organized, equipped, and properly led, but getting them into action was a long process. Meanwhile, there were the ponderous black-hulled ships of the United States Navy, growing obsolescent as they swung to their anchor chains, inviting dry rot while lying “in ordinary”—vessels which before long would be as archaic as Noah’s Ark but which at the moment represented a hitting power which the Confederacy could not possibly match. Even while McClellan and Scott wrestled for mastery of the Army, this force went into action and began to constrict the windpipe of the South: moving, if anyone had noticed it, according to the design sketched out in Scott’s Anaconda Plan.

  Late in June, 1861, the Navy Department convened a board of officers to consider how the rebellion might best be stifled, and this board first of all cast its eyes on a 350-mile section of neglected coastline—the long, lonely, windswept strip of sand that ran down from the Virginia peninsula to the south of Cape Hatteras, cutting the North Carolina sounds off from the sea, pierced by irregular tidal inlets: “sterile and half-drowned,” the board felt, cursed with abominable gales, protecting a series of marshes and cedar swamps, protecting also a number of small seaports which were ideal havens for Rebel blockade-runners. It seemed to the Navy people that this long sandy emptiness ought to be possessed by the Federal authorities without delay.1

  Accordingly, on August 26 a flotilla left Hampton Roads bound south. It included five steam warships and one ancient sailing frigate, a revenue cutter, two chartered merchant ships carrying 900 seasick soldiers, and a tugboat named Fanny, sent along to be helpful wherever possible. The warships had a good deal of muscle. The leaders were the steam frigates Minnesota and Wabash, built of wood, until recently supposed to be able to lie in the line of battle against anything afloat; 3000-ton craft armed with twenty-eight 9-inch guns, fourteen guns of 8-inch caliber, and two 10-inch pivot guns. Next in line was Susquehanna mounting fifteen 8-inch guns and a few smaller pieces. The other craft were lighter, although they were a good deal stronger than anything the Confederates had afloat, and the whole was under the command of Flag Officer Silas Stringham, a lean sailor with clean-shaven face, a lengthy upper lip, cold eyes, and a stiff sense of duty. Army commander was Major General Benjamin F. Butler, the one-time pro-slavery Southern sympathizer from Massachusetts, whose recent suggestion that fugitive slaves be considered contraband of war was proving highly corrosive to the peculiar institution. Warships and transports, along with a couple of ancient hulks which were supposed to do duty as landing craft, headed for a place known as Hatteras Inlet, where the long sandy strip had been broken open by tidal currents and the force of strong southeast winds—a shallow gap leading into Pamlico Sound ten miles below Cape Hatteras, guarded by two makeshift forts, Forts Clark and Hatteras. On the morning of August 28 Stringham pulled his big steam frigates up and opened a bombardment.