Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  To the cabinet and military leaders, Mr. Lincoln said that the march to Annapolis would probably be acceptable if McClellan could just send one or two divisions down the Potomac first. There were, of course, those batteries, but the Navy could silence them until the transports had passed, which was all that mattered. The Navy had just commissioned a new warship named Monitor, some sort of ironclad with a revolving turret, about to leave New York for Hampton Roads. Might not Monitor lead a flotilla up the Potomac to silence those batteries? The business would be considered.

  Next came General McClellan. Talking to him in private on the morning of March 8, Mr. Lincoln appears to have been blunt. Not only did the move to Annapolis seem to leave Washington in danger, he said, but men who had to be listened to were beginning to say that that was the purpose of it—that it reflected a treasonous design looking toward defeat by prearrangement. McClellan, of course, grew angry (just as General Stone had grown angry) and demanded an immediate retraction. The President tried to explain that the accusation was not his and that he was simply imparting some unwelcome information which was bound to affect the general’s course of action, but McClellan was not appeased.5 He undoubtedly realized the President was talking about the radical Republicans. It was no secret that the members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War were demanding an immediate opening of the lower Potomac, and their pertinacity in sniffing out traitorous intent was a matter of recent record. McClellan’s friends had just warned him of “a powerful cabal that will overthrow him if he does not move within a few days,” and now the President was trying to tell him that the business was extremely serious.6 But when he looked back on it, all McClellan could remember was that the President had used insulting language.

  Then came a meeting of the President with McClellan and a round dozen of McClellan’s generals, at which the generals were polled on the question of the move to Urbanna. Of the twelve who were questioned, eight favored following McClellan’s plan and four were opposed, two with reservations; which led Mr. Stanton to remark bitterly, “We saw ten generals who were afraid to fight.”7 Any comments Mr. Lincoln may have made at the time are not recorded, but as soon as the meeting was over he composed and issued two General War Orders which showed precisely how the whole affair impressed him.

  General War Order No. 2 directed that the Army of the Potomac be at once organized into army corps, and named the officers who were to command the corps. The officers named were Generals Irvin McDowell, Edwin V. Sumner, Samuel P. Heintzelman, and Erasmus D. Keyes. The first three of these had voted against the move to Urbanna, and Keyes, who had voted for it, had done so with the proviso that the Rebels should first be driven away from the lower Potomac. In addition, the troops around Harper’s Ferry were designated a fifth corps, command of which was given to Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, former member of Congress and former governor of Massachusetts, a good Republican but a soldier whose military capacities were wholly untested. To top it all, the troops that were to be retained in Washington to defend the capital were put under command of Brigadier General James Wadsworth, a wealthy Republican who was designated Military Governor of the District of Columbia.

  Close on the heels of this came General War Order No. 3, which directed that the Army of the Potomac must depart on no campaign without leaving in and around Washington a force large enough—in the opinion not only of the commanding general but also of all of his corps commanders—to keep the city perfectly secure. Not more than two of the new corps could be moved until the lower Potomac was entirely clear of Confederate batteries; and no matter what move the army made, it must begin to make it not later than March 18, ten days hence.8

  All in all, the President had had a busy day. He had given McClellan the warning about the political dangers which surrounded him; he had attended the council of war, which went as if no warning had been given; he had then reorganized the Army of the Potomac, naming the men who were to be McClellan’s principal lieutenants; and, finally, he had ordered the army to move and had set up the conditions under which the movement was to be made.

  This had no sooner taken place than the bottom fell out of the Urbanna plan, once and for all. Joe Johnston evacuated his position at Centreville on March 9 and marched south to a new position below the Rappahannock River.

  Johnston had been making his preparations ever since his Richmond conference with Mr. Davis and the cabinet, just before Washington’s Birthday. He had in the Centreville area some 36,000 effective troops, with 11,000 more divided between the Shenandoah Valley and the lower Potomac, and he had no intention of waiting for McClellan to attack him or of letting McClellan steal a long march and get between him and Richmond. He spent a little more than two weeks moving his supplies to the rear; then, at the end of the first week in March, he concluded that this chore could never be completed and ordered the army to burn everything that was not already on the road—food, camp equipment, private baggage, and all. His troops began to move on March 7, and two days later the fortified lines which had been held so long were empty.

  The bonfires were spectacular. At Thoroughfare Gap, not far behind Johnston’s lines, the commissary department had built a huge meat-packing plant—much too far forward, General Johnston had always insisted—and this, with more than a thousand tons of bacon, was burned. One soldier remembered piles of bacon “as high as a house” sending up queer yellow and blue flames, spreading a smell of fried bacon for twenty miles around. In the camp itself mountains of baggage went up in flame and smoke. Johnston complained that in the easygoing days when the army first established itself at Centreville every private soldier had brought a trunk full of clothing, and all of these trunks were burned; a serious loss, since many of the men had enough clothing there to last the rest of the war if they could have saved it. There was spirited complaint, especially by the commissary department, and Mr. Davis wrote that the destruction made “a painful impression on the public mind,” but Johnston was relentless. He had at least got his army down to marching trim, and now he established it on a line running from Rappahannock Bridge to Culpeper Courthouse, just south of the Rappahannock River, and awaited developments.9

  These came without delay. News of the retreat reached Washington on a Sunday evening, March 9, while McClellan was in conference with the President and the Secretary of War, and the general hurried off to headquarters and began issuing orders. Couriers went spattering through the muddy camps around Washington, and the next morning the Army of the Potomac was in motion—making, at last, the advance to Centreville which the President had been urging all winter long—and immense columns of infantry and artillery crossed the Potomac and went slogging forward along muddy roads. A cold rain came down, dampening the enthusiasm of the crowds that looked on; dampening also, it seemed, the spirits of the commanding general, who was moving from one anticlimax to another. An aide who saw McClellan riding to the front felt that the man looked glum, and wrote afterward: “He who could that day have read the General’s soul would have seen there already something of that bitterness which subsequently was to accumulate so cruelly upon him.”10

  At Centreville there was plenty to see: long lines of trenches, flimsy enough (a newspaper correspondent felt) but obviously laid out by engineers who knew their business; mounting, in many redoubts, imitation cannon made of painted wood. The pervasive whiff of scorched bacon floated in from Thoroughfare Gap, and the camp itself held a dull odor of smoke and wet ashes. At Manassas Junction storehouses were still smoldering, machine shops had been destroyed, a wrecked locomotive and some half-burned boxcars stood on a siding, and there was an indescribable mess caused by the breaking-up of hundreds of barrels of flour, vinegar, and molasses. A plant which had been built to render tallow had been burned and gave off its own dismal odor, and broken casks of beef and pork lay all about. The soldiers poked around amidst all of the rubbish and seemed to feel let down; they had nerved themselves for a great march into battle and had written their last letters home, and
now they faced nothing but this abandoned camp with its Quaker guns and its malodorous combination of scents. General McClellan set up headquarters at Fairfax Courthouse and called in those new corps commanders to talk about what ought to be done next.11

  The field of choice was narrow. The Urbanna plan was dead beyond recall. There did not seem to be much point in just sitting down at Centreville, and nobody cared for the idea of taking to the muddy roads in direct pursuit of the absent General Johnston; clearly there was nothing to do but leave a guard to look after the Centreville-Manassas area and get the army back to Washington, bring up the transports, and move down the Potomac for a campaign against Richmond along the sandy peninsula that lay between the York and James Rivers.

  While the generals reflected on this there was still another change in the picture. On March 11 Mr. Lincoln issued one more War Order, removing McClellan from his position as general-in-chief and reducing him to the post of commander of the Army of the Potomac. Until further notice there would be no general-in-chief; all Army commanders would report directly to the Secretary of War—in effect, to Mr. Lincoln himself—and the order specified that “prompt, full and frequent reports will be expected of each and all of them.” In addition, the order enlarged the responsibilities of General Halleck, the one Department commander who seemed to be getting a little action, giving him control of everything west of a north-and-south line through Knoxville, Tennessee, thus making cautious General Buell a Halleck subordinate. Also, and significantly, it resurrected the somewhat shopworn hero of the abolitionists, General John Charles Frémont, giving him command of a newly created Mountain Department roughly comprising western Virginia and eastern Tennessee.12

  This order was no sooner issued than the President heard from General McClellan, getting an outline of the projected move down to Hampton Roads. Back to General McClellan from the White House came this prompt reply, dated March 13:

  “The President having considered the plan of operations agreed upon by yourself and the commanders of army corps, makes no objection to the same but gives the following directions as to its execution:

  “1st. Leave such force at Manassas Junction as shall make it entirely certain that the enemy shall not repossess himself of that position and line of communication.

  “2nd. Leave Washington secure.

  “3rd. Move the remainder of the force down the Potomac, choosing a new base at Fortress Monroe, or anywhere between here and there; or, at all events, move such remainder of the army at once in pursuit of the enemy by some route.”13

  On January 24, Mr. Adams in London had warned that what happened during the next six weeks would probably be decisive, adding that if nothing happened that also would be decisive: European recognition could hardly be averted unless the Federal government by spring looked like a winner. The six weeks were up, and the warning was being heeded. The command system had been reshuffled, with promotion for a general whose armies were in action and demotion for generals who seemed unhurried; an encouraging gesture had been made to the abolitionists; and General McClellan had been told bluntly to put his new base wherever he chose but at all events to get moving and chase the foe.

  General McClellan learned about his demotion through the newspapers, which got to Fairfax Courthouse before the official dispatches did, and long after the war he wrote that this “proved to be one of the steps taken to tie my hands in order to secure the failure of the approaching campaign.”14 This, to be sure, was one way to look at it, but at the time McClellan saw it quite differently. To his friend Barlow he wrote: “I shall soon leave here on the wing for Richmond—which you may be sure I will take.… The President is all right—he is my strongest friend.”15

  There were political angles to this business, on both sides. The abolitionists were openly moving to assume direction of the war. What they had done to General Stone was one illustration of the fact; another was an act of Congress approved on March 13 which had an unmistakable anti-slavery cast. It read:

  “All officers or persons in the military or naval service of the United States are prohibited from employing any of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning fugitives from serivce or labor, who may have escaped from any persons to whom such service or labor is claimed to be due, and any officer who shall be found guilty by a court-martial of violating this article shall be dismissed from the service.”16

  Conservative Democrats like Barlow were rallying behind McClellan; whether he liked it or not, the general was in politics. If the President sustained him, the abolitionist surge might expend its force harmlessly. In December, Barlow had written Stanton that the abolitionists must sooner or later discredit themselves and that the Democrats could then assume control of the government’s war policy. Now, even though the President had been acting with a good deal of severity, he still stood between McClellan and the radicals. The demotion mattered little. McClellan still commanded the country’s most important army. There was some reason for him to assure Barlow that the President was still his strongest friend.17

  Yet the ground under his feet was getting shaky. Attorney General Bates was a conservative, who was warning Mr. Lincoln to watch out for the machinations of the radicals and to stand firm against “the pressure brought to bear for the entire prostration of McClellan.” But Mr. Bates was getting badly disillusioned about General McClellan, feeling that the advance to Centreville and the return therefrom was not unlike the uphill-downhill march of the noble Duke of York, and in his diary he made the wry comment: “Upon the whole it seems as if our genl. went with his finger in his mouth on a fool’s errand and that he has won a fool’s reward.”18

  On March 17, one day ahead of the deadline set by Mr. Lincoln, the advance elements of McClellan’s army embarked at Alexandria for Hampton Roads.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stride of a Giant

  1: The Ironclads

  The two warships swung to their cables off Newport News Point, riding easily to the incoming tide at the three-fathom line. The spring sky this morning held neither wind nor clouds, and men who saw these ships said that they made an unforgettable picture. Their black hulls had the final buoyant perfection of the last designs before steam; their raked masts, going aloft just off the perpendicular, carried yards precisely squared, with tarred rigging making unobtrusive India ink patterns against the blue. U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress were enforcing the blockade at the mouth of the James River, and if the job was important it was also simple. It could be done at anchor, lower booms swung out, a cluster of small boats alongside, crews indolently busy with odd jobs. On Cumberland the men had been doing their washing, and they hoisted long fore-and-aft lines of scrubbed clothing to add a homely touch to this naval picture.

  Before the day ended a good many people looked at these ships, because each ship was about to die, dramatically and in the center of the stage. This was the last morning: last morning for the ships, for many of their people, and for all that the ships represented—a special way not merely of fighting on the sea but of moving on it and understanding it, of combining grimness and grace in one instrument. In a war that destroyed one age and introduced another, these ships stood as symbols of the past.

  They had no engines and they were made all of wood, and of course they were entirely out of date. But even obsolete warships can be useful as long as they are stronger than anything the enemy has, and the rickety Confederate flotilla that lived somewhere up the James was far too weak to come down and fight. So Cumberland and Congress rode the tide, on a morning so still that Cumberland loosed her sails and let them hang for a thorough drying. The morning was warm, and inshore some soldiers from the 20th Indiana infantry stripped off their uniforms and went splashing about in the shallows: it was not every year that an Indiana boy could go swimming as early as the eighth of March. Noon came, and the warships piped their crews to dinner: roast beef and potatoes, and very good, too, an old salt on Cumberland remembered.

  Whil
e the men ate, lookouts scanned the horizon, for routine, and just as the messcloths were being put away they saw something: a businesslike pillar of black smoke going skyward over the Craney Island flats at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, five miles off to the southeast. There was a film of haze over the water and the low shores that day, making a mirage, and officers studied this development carefully with their telescopes. The pillar of smoke looked stationary, at first, but at last it could be seen that it was moving north out of the mouth of the river and into the wide reach of Hampton Roads, and the base of the pillar rested on a black hull. Cumberland’s dangling sails were brailed up and the lines of washing came down, the small boats were dropped astern and the booms were rigged in. The drummers beat to quarters, and officers passed the word along the decks: Merrimack is coming out!1

  Merrimack had been a legend all winter, and the lower deck had grown somewhat skeptical. It was known that the burly steam frigate which had been burned and scuttled the previous spring, when Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk was abandoned, had been raised, rebuilt, and renamed; she was now C.S.S. Virginia, she had been remodeled so radically that she looked like no ship that had ever floated before, and she was sheathed all over in iron so that it just might be that there was not a warship in the United States Navy that could do her any harm. Now she was coming out, and the matter would be put to the test. Cumberland and Congress cleared for action and stood by.