by Bruce Catton
But tomorrow brought no fight. Getting abreast of Yorktown, Keyes met an unexpected obstacle—the Warwick River, a pesky, inconsiderable stream which had been thought to lie somewhere off to the left, well clear of the Army’s line of march. Keyes found that the Warwick rose near the Yorktown fortifications and lay squarely across his road; the Confederates had built a series of little dams which turned much of the low ground into gummy swamps, and they had put up trenches, rifle pits, and batteries to bar the way. The advance came to a halt, while McClellan studied the situation and took thought.
To study the situation the Army command had an untried military instrument—an observation balloon, with Professor T. S. C. Lowe, aeronaut, as airborne military observer. The “aeronautic train,” consisting of four wagons carrying the deflated balloon and the apparatus for generating hydrogen gas, was trundled forward to the hamlet of Cockletown, the apparatus was unloaded, and early in the evening the balloon was inflated and sent aloft. From an altitude of one thousand feet Professor Lowe found that he could see a good deal, and on the following day there were more ascensions, with Army officers making maps and taking copious notes. Confederate artillery, of course, fired at the balloon repeatedly, but without effect; the gunners had to invent the whole science of antiaircraft fire on the spot, and anyway they had no high-angle guns.15
McClellan concluded that the Confederate works along the Warwick were too strong to be carried by assault. He appears to have reached this conclusion quickly. On April 4, before the aerial observations were finished, he notified McDowell (of whose detachment he had not yet been informed) that he was going to have to move forward to “invest” Yorktown, which meant siege operations; and the next morning he sent back to Fort Monroe for his heavy guns and siege mortars. He also told McDowell that he was going to bring McDowell’s corps down to attack Gloucester by way of the Severn River.
It was precisely at this point that McClellan was told by Washington that McDowell’s corps was no longer his to command. Its 33,000 men could not be included in any strategic design pursued by the Army of the Potomac. Bitterly, McClellan wrote later that this “left me incapable of continuing operations which had begun. It compelled the adoption of another, a different and less effective plan of campaign. It made rapid and brilliant operations impossible. It was a fatal error.”16
McClellan would have been more than human if he had not complained. Yet his assertion that the withdrawal of McDowell compelled him to adopt “a different and less effective plan of campaign” and “made brilliant and rapid operations impossible” is obviously a rationalization devised after the event. It finally took him a month to take Yorktown, instead of the hours specified in his March 19 letter to the Secretary of War, but this delay cannot be ascribed to the fact that he learned, after his army had made contact with the Confederates around Yorktown, that he could not use McDowell’s corps.
For the clear fact is that when this news reached him McClellan had already consented to delay. He had sent back for his siege train and was preparing to shatter the Confederate works by bombardment, and the one thing certain about this operation was that it would take a great deal of time.
McClellan’s siege train then included seventy-one pieces of ordnance, ranging from a few imported Whitworth rifles and some ordinary 20-pounders and four and one half inch rifles all the way up to immense cannon which could fire 200-pound projectiles, and a large number of 10-inch and 13-inch siege mortars. The lighter pieces would go by road, horse-drawn, much as field artillery moved, but the heavy ones—the really important pieces—were altogether too ponderous to be handled that way. They had to be brought up by water, in barges, with derricks, sling carts, rollers, jacks and specially built wagons to move them into position at the end of the trip; and then they had to be placed on wooden firing platforms, in massive earthen emplacements, with ramps of log-and-earth construction leading up to the platforms, before they could be put into action. Simply to get these pieces into position was a long and laborious process, never resorted to unless the army was prepared to sit down in front of a fortified position and be spendthrift of time.
It took the army, thus, five days simply to make the necessary reconnaissances and pick the sites for the batteries; after which it took more than three weeks to prepare the emplacements and get the guns and mortars into position. (Along with everything else, it was necessary to haul more than seven hundred wagonloads of powder, shells, equipment, and small stores from the tip of the peninsula to McClellan’s lines.) Inevitably, the program was a certified time-killer.17 The notion that the delay in front of Yorktown was due to McClellan’s last-minute discovery that he could not use McDowell loses most of its gloss when it is matched against two things—what was originally planned with respect to McDowell, and what was actually done about him.
McClellan’s schedule called for McDowell’s corps to be brought down to the peninsula last of all. This corps was to tarry in the Washington area (as McDowell explained the scheme to President Lincoln) “until it was ascertained that the whole of the enemy’s force was down below; and then, when he” (McClellan) “had their whole force in hand down below, this remaining corps was to go down also.”18 It undoubtedly made conservative good sense to hold back this fourth of the army until the enemy had been made to display his hand, but it undeniably had a wait-and-see quality; there was nothing in it to make anyone suppose that the army could not act until this last segment of it reached the scene.
Furthermore, McDowell’s corps was between one and two weeks away from McClellan in any case. If the President and the Secretary of War had kept their hands off altogether, McClellan would not have had these troops before the middle of April at the very earliest. What he would then have done with them is a matter for speculation, no doubt, but the record is eloquent.
As soon as he learned that this corps was being withheld, McClellan wrote asking Mr. Lincoln to reconsider. The Gloucester move, he said, was crucial; if he could not have all of McDowell’s corps, could not he have two divisions from it—or, if no more could be done, just one division? If he had to, he said, he could make do with one.
One division he got, at last—12,000 men, under Brigadier General William B. Franklin; and, as Mr. Lincoln pointed out afterward, it took ten days for this division to make the trip. In addition, when the division reached the lower bay, on April 20, McClellan was not ready to use it. After its arrival the division stayed on transports for two weeks while McClellan, his staff, and the Navy people steamed about making arrangements to get it ashore in rear of Gloucester.
In the end, just as things were about to begin to happen, the unfeeling Confederates evacuated the entire Yorktown line and marched off up the peninsula, leaving McClellan free title to Yorktown, to Gloucester, and to everything else. The Prince de Joinville, that stoutly loyal French ornament on McClellan’s staff, wrote mournfully: “The Confederates had vanished, and with them all chance of a brilliant victory.”19 Once again, Joseph E. Johnston had confounded McClellan by beating a retreat. But the chance for a brilliant victory had vanished long before.
CHAPTER FIVE
Turning Point
1: The Signs of the Times
There had been a good deal of artillery fire along the Yorktown lines during the night, and there had also been a good deal of rain, but both died out before dawn; and although the morning of May 4 was undeniably damp it was strangely and disturbingly silent. Joe Johnston had gone, leaving empty trenches, a number of abandoned cannon, and a set of live shells with trip-wires attached buried in the works to discourage Yankee patrols. Although his retreating army moved slowly in the heavy mud it had plenty of time. The Army of the Potomac had at last made itself ready to bombard—it had, this morning, forty-eight heavy guns and mortars in six prepared batteries, and a few of these had already opened fire—but it was not ready to pursue. The situation was both pleasing and embarrassing.
General McClellan sent a wire to the War Department announcing that he now
possessed Yorktown, and when Secretary Stanton sent congratulations, spiced with the remark that he hoped soon to hear that General McClellan had taken Richmond as well, the general replied that “our success is brilliant,” said that its effects would be of great importance, and declared that he would pursue with fervor and would in fact “push the enemy to the wall.”1
The rain began afresh, the bad roads grew worse, and the army’s advance guard went with difficulty toward Williamsburg, where the Confederate rear guard might possibly be overtaken. The rear guard, it developed, was waiting, protected by a series of modest field fortifications, and on May 5 there was a savage, costly, and rather pointless battle which went on until twilight, at which time the Confederates resumed their retreat. The Union Army lost some 2200 men, the Confederates lost perhaps 1700, and the battle might as well not have been fought except that it gave part of each army some combat experience, which may conceivably have been worth the price paid. McClellan was in Yorktown during the fight, embarking troops to go to the head of the York River, and before the day ended Johnston went riding up the peninsula to prepare to meet such a move, and to a large extent the battle fought itself.2
President Lincoln, meanwhile, was getting busy.
It struck him now that when the Confederates lost Yorktown and the peninsula they also lost all chance to hold Norfolk, and if they lost Norfolk they would automatically lose that fearsome ironclad, Virginia, whose existence had made it impossible for McClellan to use the James River; and so on May 6 the President came down the Chesapeake accompanied by Secretary Stanton and Secretary Chase and went into conference with Flag Officer Goldsborough and with Major General John E. Wool, Army commander at Fort Monroe. In his original campaign plan McClellan had remarked that Norfolk would fall when Richmond fell, which was true enough, but Mr. Lincoln did not want to wait that long and so he was on the scene to try his own hand at running a campaign.
The task presented only moderate problems, because once Yorktown was gone the Confederates were quite ready to leave Norfolk as soon as somebody hustled them. The President got the Navy to bombard the Confederate batteries at Sewell’s Point, with the two cabinet members he went here and there on a tugboat looking for a good place for troops to disembark and march toward Norfolk, and a fascinated Army officer wrote about seeing the President giving orders to somebody from the deck of Goldsborough’s flagship: “dressed in a black suit with a very seedy crape on his hat, and hanging over the railing he looked like some hoosier just starting for home from California with store clothes and a biled shirt on.” Norfolk was abandoned, Union troops marched in on May 10 to find the business district stagnant and the old navy yard destroyed; and the Confederate Navy realized that there was nothing on earth it could do with Virginia. The famous ironclad was much too unseaworthy to go out into the open ocean and drew too much water to go up the James to Richmond. In the end her own crew blew her up, on May 11, and McClellan—who told Stanton that if this happened he could base himself on the James—telegraphed his congratulations and remarked that this would enable him to make his own movements “much more decisive.”3
Decisive movements were just what Mr. Lincoln wanted, and McClellan would have been well advised to pay a little more attention to these energetic civilians who bustled about on gunboats and tugs, giving orders to Army and Navy officers and looking at times like remnants from the gold rush. To be specific, he would have been wise to go down to Fort Monroe to confer with them as soon as they got there. He was told of their arrival by Secretary Stanton and was invited to come down for a talk, and on May 7 he replied that this unfortunately was impossible. He was then at Williamsburg, making arrangements for a continued advance toward the head of the York, and he notified the Secretary that “in the present state of affairs … it is really impossible for me to go to the rear to meet the President and yourself.” He repeated the substance of this later in the same day: “I regret that my presence with the army at this particular time is of such vast importance that I cannot leave to confer with the President and yourself.”4 The distance from Williamsburg to Fort Monroe is approximately thirty miles.
If there was in this refusal a faint echo of the evening in November when McClellan had returned to his Washington headquarters and had gone straight to bed, leaving the President (who had come to headquarters to see him) to cool his heels in the waiting room on the ground floor, nobody commented on it; and the most that can be said is that McClellan now lost an excellent chance—possibly his last chance—to improve his relations with his superior officers. This relationship had been deteriorating for months; here and now, with the army ready to resume its march on Richmond, the general might have welcomed an opportunity to sit down with the President and the Secretary of War, explain his plans and problems, listen while they explained theirs, and restore mutual understanding and faith.
It seems a pity that McClellan could not find time for it. An Army commander who is about to undertake a climactic campaign needs above everything else the confidence of his government. If he lacks this he is tragically isolated and his army is dangerously handicapped. The Lincoln government’s confidence in McClellan, to say nothing of his own confidence in the government, had been fading for months, and the long delay in front of Yorktown had made matters worse. Early in April Mr. Lincoln had written to McClellan, trying to explain that forces which neither President nor general could long resist made determined action necessary. “Once more let me tell you,” the President had written, “it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.… I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment I consistently can. But you must act.”5 That letter had been written on April 9. Now, a month later, the general and the President could sit down together and talk things out; could do this in the light of the occupation of Yorktown, the seizure of Norfolk, the death of the Virginia, the rising surge of Federal victories on other fronts—could do it, in short, under circumstances which might have made it possible for civilians and soldiers to understand one another and to work together in harmony. But it did not happen.
The tragedy of the long delay at Yorktown was that attitudes and habits of mind developed earlier had begun to harden; in the mind of the commanding general, and in the collective mind of the army itself. The unique separateness of this Army of the Potomac, like that of no other American army either then or later, was becoming fixed; a separateness reflected partly in a nervous irritability that would respond instantly to any real or imagined slight. Four days after his army took possession of Yorktown, McClellan found it necessary to chide his wife for her failure to appreciate what a great thing he and his army had done.
“Your two letters of Sunday and Monday reached me last night,” he wrote. “I do not think you over much rejoiced at the results I gained. I really thought that you would appreciate a great result gained by fine skill & at little cost more than you seem to. It would have been easy for me to have sacrificed 10,000 lives in taking Yorktown, & I presume the world would have thought it was brilliant.… I am very sorry that you do not exactly sympathize with me in the matter.”6
It is necessary to emphasize that this was not just the outburst of a spoiled egotist. McClellan had begun to reach a point at which his own government looked like an enemy. It wanted him to fail; it was playing politics with the war, trying to turn a war for reunion into an abolitionist crusade. When he won something, he won because pure military skill had triumphed over sordid political scheming; to doubt the genuineness of his achievement was to line up, however unintentionally, with the enemy. This attitude was being instilled in him by the men in whom he had most confidence. S. L. M. Barlow, the New York lawyer and financier who was immensely influential in Democratic politics, sounded the keynote in a letter he sent McClellan during the first fortnight at Yorktown: “The dastardly conduct of those in Washington, who s
eek to drive you from the Army, or into a defeat, to serve their own selfish ends, is beginning to be understood and when the people know the facts, as they will, when it becomes necessary, the ambitious scoundrels in Washington will wish they had never been born.”
Writing thus, Barlow simply reflected a thesis which Democratic party leaders were more and more beginning to embrace. While the Yorktown siege was still going on, Barlow got a letter from Samuel Ward, Washington lobbyist and financier, suggesting that Secretary Stanton ought to be impeached for treason “in having interfered with the progress of the war, & its organization by competent authority, to the detriment & probably the destruction of the north.” Ward advised him: “Circulate the story or rumor of bets that Stanton will be in Fort Lafayette in less than 60 days.” (Fort Lafayette was the prison for men suspected of disloyalty. It was where General Stone was lodged.) When Yorktown at last fell, Barlow wrote McClellan jubilantly: “I cannot express to you the intense satisfaction caused by your triumphant success at Yorktown & on the peninsula. I feel like laughing & crying alternately. The hounds who had pursued you so bitterly are now in despair and they know it. The most noisy abolitionists now fear to say anything openly & the politicians among them are trying to get on your side without delay.”7
This would not have been so bad if it had concerned McClellan alone. But the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac was tied closely to him, and the point of view of the commanding general went down through brigadiers, colonels, and field officers, like a subtle infection running into the bloodstream, to all ranks. Above all, it affected the Regular officers; the professionals, who wanted to have as little as possible to do with Washington politics and now found that General McClellan stood for everything they stood for and that his political enemies stood for everything he and they were against. A glimpse of the way this went is afforded by a letter which Barlow got in April from Brigadier General Thomas F. Meagher, commander of the Irish brigade in Sumner’s II Corps. Meagher was an Irish patriot—a man just under forty who had been born in Waterford, had been condemned to death in 1848 for sedition, had seen his sentence commuted to transportation to Tasmania, had escaped from that lonely place and had come at last to New York, where he became an American citizen and the recognized leader of the New York Irish. Ten days before Yorktown was taken he wrote to Barlow telling how things looked to the Army of the Potomac.