Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Presidential patience ran out at last, and, on October 30, Buell was sent into retirement, command of his Army of the Cumberland going to Major General William S. Rosecrans—red-faced, excitable, “Old Rosey” to his admiring soldiers; an officer who had served with McClellan in western Virginia early in the war and who then and later had shown a considerable talent for two-handed fighting.

  As far as Washington could see, Rosecrans had in fact done very well. Commanding troops under Grant in northern Mississippi, he had this fall repulsed General Price in a sharp fight at the town of Iuka, when Price apparently meditated taking his army up to Kentucky to help Bragg. Then Rosecrans had gone to Corinth, that undistinguished railroad junction town which Beauregard had evacuated in Halleck’s favor in the spring, and there had fought a tremendous fight against Earl Van Dorn, a battle involving small armies and huge casualty lists; Van Dorn attacked furiously and was driven off in retreat, and what amounted to a third Confederate offensive, to go with those of Lee and Bragg, had failed. If the administration wanted a hard fighter for the Army of the Cumberland it could not help thinking about Rosecrans. His appointment represented something of a rebuff for George Thomas, to whom the command had been offered in September. At the time Thomas had declined the offer, on the ground that a change just then would be fair neither to Buell nor to him, but he had not intended to decline for keeps, and when Rosecrans got the appointment Thomas filed a dignified protest. He withdrew it when Halleck pointed out that Rosecrans ranked him, and if he felt any soreness he kept it to himself, and he gave Rosecrans loyal service as second-in-command; but the fact remained that he had been passed over. Washington seems to have forgotten that he was the one western general who had really wanted to carry out Mr. Lincoln’s plan for an invasion of eastern Tennessee. Finding a good fighting man, the government had failed to notice a better one.7

  The important fact, however, was that the government was replacing a cautious man with an aggressive one. Rosecrans was marching back into Tennessee, and off to the southwest Grant was getting ready to march overland to Vicksburg, and Major General John A. McClernand, the Illinois Democrat, had confidential orders that contemplated the raising of a new army for an amphibious drive down the Mississippi. In the west the Federal power was about to begin tightening the screws once more. If the same thing could be done in the east the Federal pressure might become irresistible.

  This led the administration to think anew about General McClellan.

  Ten days after Antietam, McClellan told Halleck that his army was not in condition to make a campaign or fight a battle unless Lee made a glaring mistake (which was most unlikely) or “pressing military exigencies render it necessary.” It seemed to him that he must reorganize, get much new equipment, watch the Confederates lest they come back north of the Potomac, and get the army into top condition. The fall rains would probably raise the level of the Potomac, making the fords unusable and ending the danger that Lee would make a new invasion. Once that happened, “I propose concentrating the army somewhere near Harpers Ferry and then acting according to circumstances, viz, moving on Winchester, if from the position and attitude of the enemy we are likely to gain a great advantage by doing so, or else devoting a reasonable time to the organization of the army and instruction of the new troops, preparatory to an advance on whatever line may be determined.”8

  This was not good enough. The Confederacy after all was on the defensive again, and the Federals needed men who would take full advantage of that fact; to call for a long refit and to say that the offensive might some day be resumed according to circumstances was to miss the point entirely. The Army of the Potomac had had a rough time, it needed everything from shoes to horses, and new recruits could hardly be fitted overnight into the veteran divisions; but Lee’s army was in much worse shape. It was far smaller, its equipment was deplorable, and in relation to its strength it had been much more badly bruised by the recent battle; it needed a breathing spell far more than the Army of the Potomac did, and it stood to gain more by delay. Its stragglers were returning—by October to the present-for-duty strength stood at more than 64,000, and others were coming in daily9—and it was rapidly getting back into fighting trim. To give this army a month or two for recuperation was dangerous.

  About a fortnight after the battle Mr. Lincoln paid McClellan a visit, trying to get the general to see that it was time for action, and the two men seem to have had trouble understanding one another. The general wrote that he urged the President to follow “a conservative course”—which could only mean that he opposed the antislavery war which the President had just announced—and he said that he understood the President to agree with him. He went on confidently: “He told me that he was entirely satisfied with me and with all that I had done; that he would stand by me against all comers; that he wished me to continue my preparations for a new campaign, not to stir an inch until fully ready, and when ready to do what I thought best.”

  The President remembered it differently. He told John Hay that he “went up to the field to try to get him to move, and came back thinking he would move at once.” For confirmation, there is a wire Halleck sent McClellan on October 6: “The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south. Your army must move now while the roads are good.” For Hay, Lincoln summed up what came next: “I peremptorily ordered him to advance. It was nineteen days before he put a man over the river. It was nine days longer before he got his army across, and then he stopped again, playing on little pretexts of wanting this and that. I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy.”10

  Obviously, President Lincoln and General McClellan were not talking the same language. The month of October brought extended bickering between army headquarters and the War Department; McClellan was calling for new equipment and the War Department was calling for action, and neither was satisfied with what was being delivered. On October 9 the Confederate cavalryman Jeb Stuart made this strained relationship worse by setting out on a spectacular raid, in which he got all the way up to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, destroyed Yankee supply depots and shops, seized a number of good Pennsylvania horses, and got back safely without a man killed and with only a few slightly wounded; once again he had ridden entirely around McClellan’s army. It was sheer bad luck that McClellan shortly after this filed a request for more horses, saying that his cavalry mounts were “absolutely broken down from fatigue and want of flesh”; which drew from Mr. Lincoln a dispatch asking, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”11

  In private, McClellan fumed, and he wrote to Mrs. McClellan: “If you could know the mean character of the despatches I receive you would boil over with anger. When it is possible, misunderstand, and when it is not possible; whenever there is a chance of a wretched innuendo, then it comes. But the good of the country requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be greatly my inferior socially, intellectually and morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’ ”12

  Halleck was fuming, too. At the end of October he expressed himself in a letter to Governor H. R. Gamble of Missouri: “I am sick, tired and disgusted with the condition of military affairs here in the east and wish myself back in the western army. With all my efforts I can get nothing done. There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass. I have tried my best, but without success.”13

  This sort of thing could not go on. No matter where the rights and the wrongs lay, the situation had become impossible; McClellan and the administration could no longer work together, and at last the boom came down. Late in October McClellan began to cross the Potomac, and during the first week of November he marched his army down into Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, heading for a general concentration in the neighborhood of Warrenton. Lee took Long
street and Longstreet’s corps to Culpeper to face him and left Jackson temporarily in the Shenandoah Valley, on the off chance that the old game could be played once more, and, on November 5, Mr. Lincoln concluded that enough was enough. According to one interpretation, he had made up his mind to remove McClellan if the general allowed Lee to get between the Army of the Potomac and Richmond; according to another he had just been waiting for the fall elections to be over; and the point can be argued at anybody’s leisure. What is certain is that the War Department, “by direction of the President,” issued orders relieving McClellan of his command and turning the army over to Major General Ambrose E. Burnside.

  The Was Department handled this most carefully, because to remove McClellan was to wrench out of the Army of the Potomac something that went to the very heart, and nobody was sure just what the response was going to be. Secretary Stanton, having heard the loose talk about marching on Washington, suspected that McClellan might not let himself be removed, and he wanted the orders delivered personally by Brigadier General C. P. Buckingham, a staff man assigned to the Secretary’s office. He told Buckingham to go to army headquarters at Rectortown, not far from Warrenton, and to see Burnside first. If Burnside flatly refused to take the job Buckingham was to come back to Washington without serving the papers on McClellan; only after Burnside had agreed to serve was McClellan to be notified that he was relieved. The Secretary wanted to have someone legally in command when the removal became effective.

  It turned out that Mr. Stanton worried needlessly. General Buckingham had no trouble. He got to headquarters in a snowstorm, late on the night of November 7; Burnside agreed to take the command—reluctantly, for he had a justifiably modest opinion of his own capacity—and McClellan accepted the removal like a good soldier. Stoutly, McClellan wrote to Mrs. McClellan: “As I read the order in the presence of Gen. Buckingham I am sure that not the slightest expression of feeling was visible on my face, which he watched closely. They shall not have that triumph.”14 At Burnside’s request, McClellan stayed for a couple of days, to go over headquarters papers with him and explain the plans on which the army had been moving; then he went around the camps to say goodbye to the soldiers.

  The soldiers gave him an almost hysterical farewell, cheering themselves hoarse, and doing a power of cursing as well. McClellan said that “many were in favor of my refusing to obey the order and of marching upon Washington to take possession of the government,” and European officers who were present muttered that Americans were simply incomprehensible—why did not this devoted army go to the capital and compel the President to reinstate its favorite general? But there never had been much danger that this might really happen, regardless of the loose words that had been uttered; it is extremely hard to imagine McClellan actually leading an armed uprising, even though the idea had haunted him, and it is quite impossible to imagine the Army of the Potomac taking part in one.15 The goodbyes were finished at last, the echoes of the shouting died away on the wintry plain, and McClellan went off to his home and the army saw him no more. His active part in the war was over.

  His departure marked not so much a change in commanders as another change in the war itself. So far the war had been chaotic, formless, a vast tumult which might conceivably be won, lost, or adjusted before it got altogether beyond control. It had been what McClellan always supposed it to be, a limited war for a limited end. Now it was going to be unlimited, and the people who fought it would have to look far into the future for a guiding light because they were bidding goodbye to the past.

  It would take a while for them to see this. The fall elections in the North had gone against the administration. The Democrats carried New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois—states that had voted Republican in 1860—and although the administration retained its control of both houses of Congress its majorities were sharply reduced. Whether this was the normal off-year reaction against the party in power or the expression of some deep dissatisfaction with the way the war was being fought, it was highly discouraging; it was quite possible to argue that it reflected widespread opposition in the North to the Emancipation Proclamation. Colonel James A. Mulligan, the stout fighter who had unsuccessfully defended the Missouri town of Lexington against Price’s army a year earlier, wandered about Washington in a mood of unrelieved dejection.

  “This town is filled with littleness,” he wrote. “There is not a man in the nation destined to endurance. This great Republic, late the wonder and the envy of the nations, is crumbling into bloodstained fragments because there is no head and hand to guide and light it through the peril.… There’s no human granite nowadays. It’s all clay.”16

  All clay: out of which the spirit might rise, if evoked. The only certainty was that the incalculable was going to happen. To make the slave free was to go on into the unknown; all that could be said was that there was no other place to go. History, as Mr. Lincoln remarked in his message to Congress, was inescapable, and whether they liked it or not people were caught up in something greater than themselves. America was going into the future rather than back into the past, and there was no signpost in anything that had happened earlier. There was nothing but tomorrow to count on; tomorrow, and what people of today really meant.

  In his annual message Mr. Lincoln tried to explain it:

  “We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of the earth.”17

  So the armies began to march. In Mississippi, Grant was going south toward Vicksburg, and, at Nashville, Rosecrans would presently set out for an appointment on the banks of Stone’s River. And in Virginia, General Burnside was taking the Army of the Potomac down to Fredericksburg.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE: The Leaders and the Led

  1. Tornado Weather

  1. Congressional Globe, 1st Session, 37th Congress, 1861; 222–23. John J. Crittenden as Senator from Kentucky worked fruitlessly during the first three months of 1861 to bring about a war-averting compromise. His term in the Senate expiring, he immediately won election to the House and sponsored there the resolution which defined Federal war aims.

  2. Albert Gallatin Riddle, Recollections of War Times, 42.

  3. Diary of Charles Francis Adams, quoted in Charles Francis Adams, by Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 176, 178. This book, an item in the “American Statesmen” series edited by John T. Morse, Jr., is cited hereafter simply as Adams. See also Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: an Autobiography, 104.

  4. Letter of Henry Adams in A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford; Vol. I, 16.

  5. For the text of Seward’s letters, showing the changes made by President Lincoln, see Roy Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. IV, 376–80. This compilation is cited hereafter as Basler.

  6. Adams, 145–46.

  7. Ibid., 175, 178, 197–98; A Cycle of Adams Letters, Vol. I, 19; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. IV, 276–77. (Cited hereafter as Nicolay & Hay.)

  8. A Cycle of Adams Letters, Vol. I, 14, 39.

  9. Basler, Vol. IV, 380.

  10. Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington, Vol. II, 575.

  11. John B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War, 7–16.

  12. Charleston Mercury, Aug. 29, 1861; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (cited hereafter as O.R.) Series Four, Vol. I, 505–6; Richmond Examiner, Sept. 24, 1861.

  13. O.R., Series Three, Vol. I, 167–70.

  2. A Mean-Fowt Fight

  1. Lyon’s activities in the spring and early summer are detailed in The Coming Fury, 373–87. For Blair’s comments, see the Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1863, Part III, 160–61. (This extensive work is cited hereafter as C.C.W.)

  2. Frémont’s testimony, C.C.W., 1863, Part III, 33–34. See also his article,
In command in Missouri, in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (cited hereafter as B. & L.), Vol. I, 279 ff.

  3. For Lyon’s strength and his appeals for help, see O.R., Vol. III, 394–97. (Series I, unless stated.) There is a good analysis in Wiley Britton, Civil War on the Border, Vol. I, 72–73, 75, 77.

  4. Frémont to Montgomery Blair, Aug. 9, 1861, in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies (cited hereafter as N.O.R.) Vol. XXII, 297. On July 30 Frémont wrote to Lincoln: “I have found this command in disorder, nearly every county in an insurrectionary condition, and the enemy advancing in force by different points of the Southern frontier.… I am sorely pressed for want of arms.… Our troops have not been paid, and some regiments are in a state of mutiny, and the men whose term of service is expired generally refuse to enlist.” (Letter in the Robert Todd Lincoln papers, Library of Congress.)

  5. C.C.W., 1863, Part III, 35–36; Frémont Memoirs, 238–39, typescript, by Jessie Benton Frémont, in the John C. Frémont papers, Bancroft Library, University of California. For Confederate strengths and intentions at this time, see the report of Gen. Leonidas Polk to Secretary of War L. P. Walker, O.R., Vol. III, 612–13.

  6. Lyon to Frémont, Aug. 9, 1861, O.R., Vol. III, 57.

  7. Holcombe and Adams, An Account of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, or Oak Hills, 19, 21–22. A description of Lyon’s council of war, appraising the difficulties and outlining the arguments that led to the decision to attack, is contained in a report written by Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sweeney, in the Sweeney Papers at the Huntington Library. See also the report of Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield, O.R., Vol. III, 59. In his book, Forty-six Years in the Army, 39, Gen. Schofield wrote that Lyon was greatly depressed by his general situation, by the non-arrival of reinforcements and supplies and by “an evidently strong conviction that these failures were due to a plan to sacrifice him to the ambition of another.”