Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Halleck assumed his new duties in Washington on July 23. Realizing that the first trouble spot to examine was at Harrison’s Landing, he left immediately for that place to have a talk with McClellan. Six months earlier he had assured McClellan that the Federals’ “want of success” came because politicians rather than soldiers were making mistakes;8 now he and McClellan, two generals who had done much to prove that this appraisal was wrong, would see if they could somehow manage to get the Army of the Potomac back into action.

  McClellan told Barlow that he had not been consulted about Halleck’s appointment and that the move was undoubtedly “intended as ‘a slap in the face’ ”; he believed that he himself was about to be relieved of his command, and since he was tired “of submitting to the whims of such ‘things’ as those now over me” he would be happy enough to go into retirement. He preserved the amenities, however, telling Halleck that he would have urged his appointment if he had been asked for his advice and assuring him that he felt not a particle of enmity or jealousy. This was perhaps stretching things a little, but at least the two generals conferred without striking sparks.9

  The interview was fairly brief, and neither man got much out of it. Halleck was informed that the Army of the Potomac was badly outnumbered—its latest report showed to 101,000 present for duty, but Lee had at least 200,000. (Halleck told Secretary Stanton when he got back to Washington that he had not been in the east long enough to know whether this estimate of Lee’s strength was correct.) The army would advance on Richmond if it could be strongly reinforced; meanwhile it would be bad to withdraw it from the peninsula, because the true defense of Washington was there. McClellan in turn was told that it was impossible to reinforce him to any great extent; if he could not move on Richmond with very moderate additions to his strength it would probably be necessary to withdraw his army. (If the Army of the Potomac and Pope’s army were made into one, Halleck wanted McClellan to command the whole.) Then Halleck returned to Washington, reflected that if McClellan was right about the size of Lee’s army it was mortally dangerous to approach that army with divided forces, and on July 30 he sent word that “in order to enable you to move in any direction” McClellan should at once send away his sick men, of whom there were about 12,000.

  Then, on August 3, the ax came down. Halleck formally notified McClellan that “it is determined to withdraw your army from the peninsula to Aquia Creek.” McClellan protested vigorously, but Halleck was firm: the decision was his own, he would risk his reputation on it, and McClellan must hurry the movement as fast as he could.10

  So the peninsula campaign was over, the first great campaign of the Army of the Potomac. It had lasted just about four months: a month at Yorktown, nearly a month spent moving from Yorktown to the lines along the Chickahominy, a month in front of Richmond ending in the agony of the Seven Days, and finally a month of dazed convalescence at Harrison’s Landing. The army had fought hard and endured much, it had pride and self-pity at the same time, and it was developing its own legend, which—like the profound emotional attachment which it had for its commanding general—would always set it apart from the other Union armies. It was acquiring what can only be called a sort of dogged pessimism, a fatalistic readiness to expect the worst, as if it sensed that its best efforts would be wasted but was not thereby made disheartened; and now as for months to come it would have to keep step with its rival, the Army of Northern Virginia.

  The Army of Northern Virginia was also developing its own distinctive character. It had a harder, more tragic fate, and yet there is more laughter in its legend—as if, in some unaccountable way, it worried less. Out of hardship, intermittent malnutrition, and desperately-won victories it was creating a lean, threadbare jauntiness. Beneath this was the great characteristic which it derived from its commander—the resolute belief that it could not really be beaten no matter what the odds might be. It had paid many lives for that conviction and it would pay many more before it reached the last turn in the road, but what it got seems to have been worth the price.

  In the middle of July its situation did not exactly look promising. The invading Federals had been beaten but they had not been driven away, and they were still camped within twenty-five miles of Richmond. With a Federal fleet in the James, Lee had never seen any chance to attack the Harrison’s Landing camp successfully, and for some weeks after Malvern Hill he believed that McClellan would be reinforced and would try again to capture Richmond. Pope’s concentration along the upper Rappahannock contained the threat of final disaster, for it hinted that the Federals might at last be trying to bring their overwhelming numerical advantage to bear at close quarters. The figures told the story. Pope’s strength had been raised to more than 50,000, although not all of these were at hand—one division lay far to the east, at Fredericksburg, and other units had not come down from the Shenandoah. Burnside was bringing 12,000 men up from North Carolina and would move to join Pope before long. Even if McClellan left 10,000 men to hold Fort Monroe, which was probable, it was clear that if he and Pope moved together the Federals could assemble more than 140,000 men at the gates of Richmond. Lee commanded fewer than 70,000 men of all arms. His only recourse was to put Pope out of action before the gigantic concentration could be effected.11

  He could do it if he moved fast and boldly—provided, of course, that the Army of the Potomac, which was close enough to put the clamps on at any time, permitted him to move at all. On July 13 he took the first step, sending Stonewall Jackson with 12,000 men off to Gordonsville, where the Virginia Central Railroad crossed the line of the Orange & Alexandria. (If his army planned to go north or if Pope’s army planned to come south, Gordonsville was a place the Confederacy had to hold.) This was bold enough, because Gordonsville was sixty miles from Richmond and if McClellan advanced suddenly Jackson could not get back in time; but anything was better than to remain inactive and await envelopment, and Lee took the risk. News of the move reached both Pope and McClellan, but nothing happened. Pope went on concentrating his army in the vicinity of Sperryville, twenty-five miles north of Jackson’s position, and McClellan stayed at Harrison’s Landing, demanding reinforcements. The first step having been taken successfully, Lee went on to take a longer one, sending A. P. Hill and his powerful “light division” off to join Jackson.

  Lee was gambling, having coldly weighed the odds. When Hill reached him, Jackson had nearly 30,000 of the best soldiers in Lee’s army. The Army of the Potomac, hardly two marches away from Richmond, now had a solid two-to-one advantage in numbers, and again if it saw its opportunity and acted on it the Confederacy might be ruined. Lee frankly told Mr. Davis that he disliked to reduce his own strength so drastically, but that Jackson’s original force was not big enough to attack Pope and that Pope “ought to be suppressed if possible.”12 Whatever risks this action might involve, the worst risk of all for a general in Lee’s situation was to try to play it safe; so Lee waited, with the controlled calm of a gambler who has everything riding on the next play, while Jackson marched north of the Rapidan to commence the suppression of General Pope.

  For a few hours it looked as if General McClellan might spoil everything. On August 5 he sent an infantry division forward to occupy Malvern Hill, a move which might easily be the first phase of a massive advance on Richmond. Lee ordered out the troops and came down to give battle if necessary, but he soon concluded that McClellan was just reconnoitering and he calmly wrote to Jackson, “I have no idea that he will advance on Richmond now.” Jackson’s own move, he added, looked sound, and he hoped Jackson could attack Pope before long.” Lee’s estimate of McClellan’s intentions was correct. After spending twenty-four hours surveying the scene from Malvern Hill, the Federal column called in its skirmishers and went back to Harrison’s Landing.

  Having learned that Pope had posted two undersized divisions near the town of Culpeper, Jackson marched north to pounce on this force before it could be strengthened or withdrawn. He encountered it on August 9, drawn up along a li
ttle stream near a hill known as Cedar Mountain, and perhaps it was reminiscent of the great days in the Shenandoah Valley because these 8000 Federals were commanded by the General Banks who had played such a large and unhappy role in the Valley campaign. Banks had been beaten there, and now he must be beaten here; Jackson immediately ordered an attack.

  He was just a little too immediate about it, as a matter of fact, because he attacked before half of his men were in position, and Banks’s soldiers put up a stiff fight. They killed Brigadier General Charles S. Winder, who commanded what was formerly Jackson’s own division, caught his men off balance, and drove the first Confederate assault back in disorder, routing the famous Stonewall Brigade which had won General Jackson a nickname at Bull Run. But Jackson rallied his men, brought up A. P. Hill’s division, and late in the day launched an overpowering assault that swept the field. Once again, Banks had to retreat; Jackson followed him a short distance, found that Pope with most of his army was not far away, and then withdrew behind the Rapidan. The battle meant nothing in particular, except that it raised Confederate morale and further depressed the Yankees; but it did give clear notice that a large part of Lee’s army was a long way from Richmond, and that a curious reversal of roles had taken place. Until this moment the focal point for all of the military activity in Virginia had been the city of Richmond; now it was the army of John Pope.14 Lee was on the offensive.

  Cedar Mountain was fought on August 9. On August 13 Lee sent James Longstreet and 25,000 men away from Richmond to Gordonsville, and two days later he departed for Gordonsville himself. He was leaving fewer than 25,000 men to protect the capital—infallible sign that he expected no trouble from General McClellan—and he was taking all the rest of his army, between 50,000 and 55,000 men, up to the Rapidan River. He had called his army the Army of Northern Virginia, and he was going to get it back to northern Virginia no matter what. The Federals could perhaps stop him, but time was running out on them; they had been prodigal of it all year, and they had used up their surplus; now they must act with speed. Specifically, they could keep Lee from doing what he intended to do—smash Pope and carry the war up to the Maryland border—only if the Army of the Potomac moved faster than it had ever moved before.

  There is a might-have-been here. The operation against Pope—the strategic combination which transferred the war from the suburbs of Richmond to the environs of Washington—could have been broken up late in July by a vigorous advance by the Army of the Potomac. No such advance was made or seriously contemplated. On July 26, long after Jackson had been detached, McClellan told Halleck that reinforcements were “pouring into Richmond” and suggested that he should have Burnside’s and Hunter’s men plus 20,000 fresh troops from the west so that he could renew his campaign. Two days later he reported that this story about Confederate reinforcements had been confirmed. Lee’s plans would never be interrupted by a general whose grip on reality was that infirm, and when McClellan finally realized what was happening and (on August 12) asked permission to advance on Richmond it was too late.15 His own orders to come north were more than a week old; Washington had made up its mind. He might, just conceivably, have marched toward Richmond without orders, and Mr. Lincoln almost certainly would have upheld him, but he did not do it and it is almost impossible to imagine him acting so. The only thing to do now was to get the Army of the Potomac up to join hands with Pope for a new campaign.

  The movement was made reluctantly. Eleven days passed between the receipt of orders and the beginning of their execution. To an extent this is understandable. To organize the withdrawal of a large army was an intricate business, and it took time to line up the transports, to schedule the embarkation of the various units and to arrange for debarkation along the upper Potomac. But under this there was the undeniable fact that the army command did not for one moment want to do what it was being forced to do, and it was moving with leaden feet, muttering furiously as it did so. The atmosphere around the headquarters tents was murky, with bitter resentment moving through sulkiness toward outright defiance. General Burnside visited Harrison’s Landing while Halleck was there and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs remembered that the staff officers who sat around a campfire outside the tent where Halleck and McClellan conferred said openly that the army ought to march on Washington “to clear out those fellows”—an echo, although Meigs did not know it, of the dark thought McClellan had toyed with in a recent letter. Burnside, honest and uncomplicated, listened to this for a while and then got to his feet and said: “I don’t know what you fellows call this talk, but I call it flat treason, by God!”16

  Staff talk, to be sure, is often frothy; but it does reflect a state of mind. Army headquarters was haunted by a brooding suspicion that disaster might even be a good thing. If Pope’s army came to grief, would not the policy of the Army of the Potomac (overruled by the malevolent incompetents in Washington) somehow be vindicated? Alexander Webb, a young staff officer, expressed this feeling bluntly in a letter written the day the first units of the army left for the north: “I have one hope left; when that ass Pope shall have lost his army, and when Washington shall again be menaced (say in six days from this time) then and only then will they find out that our little General is not in his right place and then they will call loudly for his aid.”17

  McClellan himself never put it quite that way, but he came fairly close to it. At the end of July he had expressed his gloom in a letter to Barlow: “If this army is retired from here I abandon all hope—our cause will be lost.” Three weeks later, just before he himself left the peninsula, he was able to see good fortune for himself in disaster for another, and he wrote to Mrs. McClellan: “I believe I have triumphed!! Just received a telegram from Halleck stating that Pope and Burnside are very hard pressed.”18

  5: The Pressures of War

  The letter from Lord Palmerston struck Charles Francis Adams as both irregular and ominous. It was irregular because the Prime Minister did not usually communicate directly with the representative of any foreign power; when he had anything to say to such a person he spoke through the Foreign Minister, Lord Russell. In addition, the letter was ill-tempered and unfriendly. Both in what it said and in the fact that it had been written at all it seemed to indicate that Her Majesty’s government was looking for trouble, and when he finished reading it Mr. Adams tossed it across the table to his son and asked: “Does Palmerston want a quarrel?”

  Dated June 11 and marked “confidential,” the letter read as follows:

  “I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honorable man by the general order of General Butler, given in the enclosed extract from yesterday’s ‘Times.’ Even when a town is taken by assault it is the practice of the commander of the conquering army to protect to his utmost the inhabitants and especially the female part of them, and I will venture to say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations, till the publication of this order, of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled license of an unrestrained soldiery.

  “If the Federal government chooses to be served by men capable of such revolting outrages, they must submit to abide by the deserved opinion which mankind will form of their conduct.”1

  The newspaper clipping, which had given upper-class England an exquisite case of the shudders, described the conduct of Major General Ben Butler, who was ruling occupied New Orleans with a maladroit and offensive efficiency. Not long after he got there Butler promised Montgomery Blair: “If I am let alone I will make this a Union city within sixty days.”2

  He was overconfident, because New Orleans was a big city with a deserved reputation for turbulence, and the occupation force was not large; still, he had restored order, and things had gone fairly well except that New Orleans did not in any sense become a Union city. General Butl
er had not been let alone. The women of New Orleans, who hated him and his soldiers and the whole Federal government, found a great many ways to show just how they felt, and the general feared that they might presently touch off a regular uprising. To prevent it he had issued, on May 15, General Orders No. 28, which reverberated near and far. This order announced that any woman who, by word or deed, insulted the Union flag, uniform, or army made herself liable to be treated as “a woman of the town, plying her vocation.” Having issued this order, the general sat back to let the world digest it; one result being the angry letter sent to Mr. Adams by Lord Palmerston.

  Admittedly, the situation had been difficult. Union officers had been spat upon as they walked along the sidewalks, household utensils had been emptied upon them, and there had been derogatory remarks and gestures. One woman was said to have rejoiced volubly when the funeral procession for a dead officer passed her house, and she had been arrested and given uncomfortable lodgings on desolate Ship Island, under guard; a scandalous punishment, for she was of gentle birth. An English merchant who was in New Orleans said that “a pretty Creole lady” told him: “Oh! How I hate the Yankees! I could trample on their dead bodies and spit on them!” Another lady wrote that Federal troops were by common report “the dirtiest, meanest-looking set that were ever seen—nothing at all of the soldier in their appearance,” and one spunky young woman asked indignantly: “And how did they expect to be treated? Can a woman, a Southern woman, come in contact with one of them and allow her countenance to retain its wonted composure? Will not the scornful feelings in our hearts there find utterance?”3