by Bruce Catton
“With regard to the rumors you mentioned to me as intimating a serious difference between our general in chief and the Government,” he wrote, “I heard of such (or something like such) a day or two after we disembarked. Since then have heard nothing—I understood that McDowell had played what the officers of the Regular Army and General McClellan’s friends regarded as a ‘scurvy trick’ in his taking advantage of the latter’s absence in this quarter to get a Corps d’Armee, and so withdraw some 50,000 men from this critical field of operations.… The officers of the Regular Army who spoke to me on this subject seemed greatly excited and indignant at what they considered to be ‘foul play’ on the part of General McDowell and the Administration, and one of them informed me that although General McClellan said nothing … yet that it was his determination after the siege and battle of Yorktown to resign his command.”8
This attitude had a profound political coloration. New York banker August Belmont, a power in the Democratic party, wrote to Barlow late in April: “The conduct of the Administration against McClellan is really disgraceful & wicked, it shows once more that instead of patriots & statesmen we have only partizans at the head of government.” Belmont foresaw “the most calamitous results” from the fact that “the chief command of the army was taken from the hands of the most unquestionable capacity to be put upon the weak shoulders of civilians.” McClellan’s most trusted subordinate in the army was Brigadier General Fitz John Porter, handsome, affable, well-born, a West Pointer with a good Mexican War record, now a division commander in Heintzelman’s III Corps. Porter was vigorous on the Democratic side. Some time in April he wrote to Manton Marble, editor of the strongly Democratic New York World, putting himself and the McClellan officers generally right in the middle of the political fight. “This army will cause a revulsion of opinion on its return home,” Porter wrote. “I hear that the most conservative opinions” (anti-abolitionist opinions; in short, conservative Democratic opinions) “are expressed everywhere and the few abolitionists in the armies of the U.S. are not looked upon as friends to the Union. The conservative element throughout the army will make itself felt at the next election.” A few weeks later he assured Marble: “Our men wish to go home—and wish the war to cease—but they say they will whip the abolitionists when they get home especially for trying to prolong this unnatural war. Our men will speak, and goodbye to the abolition traitors, who try now to defend themselves by publishing falsehoods.” A fortnight after Yorktown was occupied, a young New York officer asserted stoutly: “If McClellan is defeated it will be the fault of the administration, not his own.”9
McClellan and his devoted followers, obviously, had got themselves neck-deep in politics. They had a perfect right to do this, but it left them no room for complaint if the political pressures became irksome; and it was bound to have a crippling effect on the army itself. For the hot anti-slavery men—the Ben Wades, Zach Chandlers, and the rest, to whom the gantlet was being thrown down—were precisely the men who had felt all along that an officer’s professional training and capacity mattered less than his zeal for the cause. Knowing precisely how all of the political currents were flowing, these men now could consider their old suspicions confirmed. The anti-West Point faction and the anti-slavery faction were tending to become one group; and at the same time the ardent Democrats were becoming pro-West Point, and the inevitable rivalry between regulars and volunteers was becoming a political rivalry as well. Benjamin Stark, one of Barlow’s correspondents in Washington, was telling Barlow that it was up to “us of the reasonable party” to persuade the people that “war is a science which requires time and means for its successful development.”10
Meanwhile the slavery issue continued to assert itself. Mr. Lincoln was doing his best to keep it under control, but the task was getting harder. It had been made acute this spring by the action of a general named David Hunter, who commanded Federal troops along the south Atlantic coast and who abruptly conceived it his duty to proclaim emancipation in his domain. Without consulting Washington, General Hunter announced that all slaves in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina were now free; and this news reached Washington just when Mr. Lincoln was trying patiently, with scant success, to persuade the border state leaders to accept gradual and compensated emancipation. General Hunter’s proclamation was, to be sure, an indication that the institution was apt to be shattered forever by brute force if it were held onto too tenaciously, but it was not the sort of thing that helped Mr. Lincoln’s negotiations. On May 19 the President announced that whatever Hunter’s proclamation might consist of it was null and void, and that no general anywhere had been or would ever be authorized to end slavery by pronunciamento. He then went on to turn his rebuke of Hunter into a direct appeal to slave-holders.
Congress, he pointed out, had voted for compensated emancipation; would not the slave-holding states go along with this, of their own free will? “I do not argue,” he wrote. “I beseech you to make the arguments for yourselves. You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partizan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending nor wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?”11
The signs of the time were not everywhere visible: the signs of the terrible times of the spring of 1862, which said clearly that slavery was dying and that the only question for anybody was whether it should die quietly, in bed, with mourners tearfully consenting, or by unmitigated violence on the field of battle. McClellan read Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation, and wrote to his wife: “I am very glad that the Presdt had come out as he did about Hunter’s order—I feared he would not have the moral courage to do so.”12
It may have taken moral courage to rescind General Hunter’s proclamation: what General McClellan could not see—could not, in his most thoughtful moments, get so much as a glimmering of—was that it also took moral courage for a President beset by the strongest men in his own party to sustain a general who clearly, and to every politician’s knowledge, was the active favorite of the strongest men in the opposition party. McClellan could see only that the administration was reducing his status, taking away parts of his army and listening too attentively to politicians whose ideas were unlike the ideas of the politicians to whom he himself was listening. He could understand neither Mr. Lincoln’s deep desire to win the war before it became the kind of war in which victory itself might be indigestible, nor the fact that Mr. Lincoln was under an irresistible compulsion, which no general could lighten, to insist upon the absolute safety of the city of Washington. And it was everybody’s hard luck that these two points were of dominant importance during the campaign on the Virginia peninsula.
The time element had always been a sore point. McClellan had been given the supreme command largely because the administration wanted quick and decisive action, and he had lost it because he seemed too cautious; he could not move until everything was ready, until every possible mischance had been discounted in advance. But the same administration that wanted him to be swift and daring was itself the very soul of niggling caution as far as the capital was concerned. Risking everything with one hand, it would with the other risk nothing whatever; and the things that took place that spring make no sort of sense unless the reason for this extreme conservatism is understood.
The security of the national capital meant more than anything else. The Federal government was not fighting a foreign war, in which temporary loss of the capital could be atoned for later; it was fighting to prove that it could maintain its own political integrity, and loss of the capital city would be taken as the unmistakable sign that it had failed. The sign would be read abroad as quickly as at home. It would almost certainly lead Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy, and recognition was likely to end everything. So here was a point on which P
resident Lincoln would take no chances at all. He had to be certain that Washington was safe, and he could take no general’s word for it—unless that general had won the last ounce of his unreserved confidence, which no living general had yet done.
McClellan had collided with this fact before—after all, that was how he had lost McDowell’s corps—and he collided with it again, painfully, as he moved in pursuit of Joe Johnston.
The roads on the peninsula were bad, the maps were worse and the weather itself was not favorable, and army headquarters still believed that the Confederates had a great advantage in numbers; but in the fortnight following the battle of Williamsburg, McClellan’s advance went smoothly and with reasonable diligence, and there seemed to be good understanding between the general and the administration. When McClellan, who had little use for his corps commanders, asked permission to make new arrangements, Stanton told him that the President did not want the existing organization broken up but that since big battles were impending McClellan could do as he chose, at least on a temporary basis. McClellan reshuffled his troops and created two new army corps, giving one to his friend Fitz John Porter and the other to the General Franklin who had brought that division down from McDowell.13 McClellan also asked that the Navy open the river route to Richmond, after the Farragut manner, and the Navy at least tried; sent Monitor, a new ironclad named Galena and three gunboats steaming up the river to Drewry’s Bluff, a bit of high ground on a sharp bend in the James just seven miles below Richmond. Here the Confederates had hastily built a fort, with Virginia’s gunners to handle the heavy ordnance, and they had driven piles and sunk hulks in the river to block the channel, and if they lost this fort they lost everything because the Federal flotilla then could go straight to the Richmond wharves.
The fort held, and on May 15 the Navy got a bloody nose. The Confederate batteries were one hundred feet above water-level, Monitor could not elevate her guns enough to hit anything, the wooden ships dared not come to close quarters, and Galena turned out to be unexpectedly fragile. Her armor was not strong enough to stop heavy shot at close range, and what happened to her demonstrated an unhappy truth about naval warfare in the age of iron: inadequate armor was worse than no armor at all, because broken bits of iron flew about the decks like shell fragments. She was hit forty-three times, took heavy casualties, and was reduced almost to a wreck, and after a few hours the Federal flotilla drifted off downstream out of range. (When Galena reached dry dock her armor was stripped off and she eventually went back into service as an ordinary wooden gunboat.) It was clear that the Navy could not do below Richmond what Farragut had done below New Orleans.14
Still, this was no more than a check. The James at least was an open highway to within ten miles of the Confederate capital, and if General McClellan wanted to move his base over to that river he was able to do so. He considered the idea, but concluded that at least for the present he would move from the York, and by May 16 he had established a supply depot at a place called White House, on the Pamunkey, twenty-two miles due east of Richmond, on the Richmond & York River Railroad. And now, with Johnston pulling his men into the Richmond defenses behind the Chickahominy River, which meandered sluggishly from northwest to southeast a little more than half of the way from White House to Richmond, McClellan made an urgent call for reinforcements.
On May 8 he had written to Stanton pointing out that the Confederates would unquestionably mass their forces to defend Richmond and that the Federals ought to concentrate also; “all the troops on the Rappahannock and if possible those on the Shenandoah should take part in the approaching battle … All minor considerations should be thrown to one side and all our energies and means directed toward the defeat of Johnston’s army in front of Richmond.” On May 14 he reiterated this in a direct appeal to Mr. Lincoln. He would not be able to put more than 80,000 men into battle, he would have to fight perhaps double his own numbers, and he needed every man he could get. He went on, eloquently, the only general in American history who felt moved to assure his President that the country’s principal army, on the eve of battle, was actually loyal to the government:
“Any commander of the re-enforcements whom Your Excellency may designate will be acceptable to me, whatever expression I may have heretofore addressed to you on that subject. I will fight the enemy, whatever their force may be, with whatever force I may have, and I firmly believe that we shall beat them, but our triumph should be made decisive and complete. The soldiers of this army love their Government and will fight well in its support. You may rely upon them. They have confidence in me as their general and in you as their President.”15
The reinforcements McClellan wanted were McDowell’s men, recently strengthened to something like 40,000 by the addition of Shields’s division, which had just been moved over to the Rappahannock from Banks’s domain in the Shenandoah Valley; and the commander who would be acceptable in spite of past remarks was of course McDowell himself, whose headquarters at this time were at Falmouth, across the river from Fredericksburg, fifty miles north of Richmond. There was just one difficulty. McClellan hoped that “all minor considerations” would be ignored in the use of this force, and the chief of these considerations was Mr. Lincoln’s rigid insistence that McDowell, whatever else he did, remain at all times between the Confederate Army and Washington. As early as April 11, McDowell had been told that he was to consider the protection of Washington his essential responsibility and was to “make no movement throwing your forces out of position for the discharge of this primary duty.”16 In his appeal for McDowell’s corps McClellan was specifying that it ought to be sent to him by water, which would effectively take it off the board for a fortnight. Mr. Lincoln had McDowell come to Washington for a quick conference, and on the next day, May 17, Stanton sent a reply to McClellan.
The President, said Stanton, would not uncover Washington entirely, and thought that McDowell could reach the peninsula more quickly if he went by land. But McDowell definitely would be sent; he had been ordered to march down from Fredericksburg by the shortest route, keeping himself always in position to protect the capital but joining McClellan’s right wing as rapidly as possible. He would retain full command of his own troops, and although when he made contact he would come under McClellan’s control, McClellan was instructed to “give no orders, either before or after your junction, which can put him out of position to cover this city.”17
Rather more than half a loaf, presumably much better than no bread at all; McClellan was to get what he had asked for, although it would be given in a way he did not want, with attached conditions which he considered objectionable. And the fact that these conditions were attached, and that the reinforcements would move by road instead of by water, suddenly became new evidence of villainous bad faith on the part of the administration. To his wife, on the day after he received Stanton’s dispatch, McClellan burst out:
“Those hounds in Washington are after me again. Stanton is without exception the vilest man I ever knew or heard of.”18
2: Do It Quickly
The situation between Jefferson Davis and Joseph E. Johnston was strangely like that between Abraham Lincoln and General McClellan. Mr. Davis felt that his Army commander was unpredictable, hard to guide and much too secretive; General Johnston felt that the President gave him no support, nagged him with petty directives and opposed a politician’s deviousness to a soldier’s honest competence. The two men did not exactly distrust each other, but each man certainly looked at the other with a wary eye. If there had been a time for such a thing, the two Presidents doubtless could have sympathized with one another. The two generals could have done the same thing.
In all of this Mr. Davis had one advantage which Mr. Lincoln lacked.
Mr. Lincoln spoke to General McClellan (when he did not address him directly) through Secretary Stanton: an arrangement which originally was excellent and was at any rate unavoidable, but which by the middle of the spring of 1862 was unfortunately quite certain to increase
the difficulty of communication. Mr. Davis, on the other hand, spoke to General Johnston for the most part through General Lee, and this made all the difference in the world. General Lee had the complete confidence of both the President and the Army commander, he took elaborate pains to retain it, and he had a professional capacity of his own which neither man ever called in question. Although the Federal government all but lost touch with its principal army, a similar thing did not happen on the Confederate side.
As a matter of fact there never existed between President Davis and General Johnston the profound difference in fundamental attitudes which did so much to cut President Lincoln off from General McClellan. General Johnston was extremely cautious, defensive-minded, reluctant to put everything to the touch—as a soldier, indeed, he was in many ways somewhat like General McClellan—but up to a certain point any Confederate general defending Richmond had to have those qualities, and they were never the basis for his disagreements with Mr. Davis. These two men were estranged more by little things than by big ones. Each man was proud, touchy, quick to take offense and slow to forget about it afterward, and their bitterest exchanges came over comparative trivialities. They quarreled acridly, not over the sort of commitment the nation had made when it went to war, or over the way in which the war might best be won, but over such matters as why General Johnston ranked fourth instead of first among Confederate generals, and whether regiments from the same state should or should not be brigaded together. They might agree that the old lines at Centreville and Manassas could not be held, but they would wrangle at great length about who actually ordered the lines abandoned and who ought to be blamed for the loss of all that bacon. When Johnston at last evacuated the Yorktown lines (which he had never wanted to enter in the first place) Mr. Davis was disturbed not by the retreat but by the general’s tight-lipped refusal to say where the retreat was going to end. Both men believed that the ideal way to defend Richmond, once the peninsula was given up, was to assemble all the troops that could be found and boldly go north of the Potomac (a thing, incidentally, which formed the basis for Mr. Lincoln’s worst nightmares); when it proved impossible to do this, Johnston darkly suspected that the President refused to do for him what he might have done for another man.1