The speech certainly rallied majorities in Congress, which responded the next day by appropriating $50 million for a one-hundred-thousand-man army and soon approved earlier measures that Lincoln had taken to secure the nation. With just five Democrat votes short of unanimity, Congress resolved that “all the acts, proclamations, and order of the President . . . respecting the army and navy of the United States, and calling out or relating to the rebellion are hereby approved and in all respects legalized and made valid . . . as if they had been issued and done under the . . . express authority of the Congress of the United States.” However, they did draw the line at Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the legality of which they left for the Supreme Court to decide.
The vast majority of Americans were just as inspired. Tens of thousands of volunteers lined up across the northern states to enlist in the cause of restoring the Union. These troops had to be organized into regiments, trained, equipped, supplied, and transported where they were needed. All this demanded the mobilization of enormous resources. A one-hundred-thousand-man army on campaign was accompanied by thirty-five thousand riding or draft animals and daily consumed six hundred tons of supplies hauled by twenty-five hundred wagons. The tooth-to-tail ratio was approximately one to twelve. In other words, each soldier armed with a rifle needed roughly two other uniformed men and ten civilians to support him in the field. Corruption and incompetence compounded this challenge. Many contractors sold the federal government shoddy, overpriced provisions, munitions, uniforms, shoes, tents, rifles, medicine, and scores of other essential items. Many quartermasters did not know how to properly store or transport those goods. The result was enormous waste and profiteering.33
Another major weakness was the Union practice of organizing volunteers into new regiments rather than replenishing the ranks of existing regiments. With time, disease, desertion, and combat whittled each regiment’s ranks. In 1862, of the 421,000 men who volunteered for three years in the American army, only 50,000 joined existing regiments where veterans could swiftly teach them the rudiments of army life and warfare. Each new regiment had to suffer the same brutal learning curve.34
During the war’s first few weeks, as camps swelled with volunteers, the number of experienced officers capable of turning them into soldiers steadily diminished. By one estimate, three of four officers in the American military in 1860 were Democrats, among whom many were southerners who defected to the rebels. In early 1861, 313 of 1,080 army officers and 373 of 1,554 navy officers resigned. Among the War Department’s civilian employees, thirty-four of ninety departed. No defection to the rebel cause would be more calamitous for America than that of Robert E. Lee. General Scott actually offered Lee command of the American army, but the Virginian put his state before his country. Scott himself was also a Virginian, but he put America first. When a delegation from Richmond asked him to commit treason, he angrily warned them, “Go no farther. It is best we part before you compel me to resent a mortal insult.”35
Lincoln was under enormous pressure from Republican politicians, newspaper editors, and the volunteer regiments to launch the army south as soon as possible. The battle cry of “Forward to Richmond!” was penned in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune on June 26, 1861, and swiftly resounded through other newspapers and the halls of Congress.
Lincoln’s two highest-ranking professional soldiers rejected that notion. Gen. Winfield Scott continued to press Lincoln to enact his Anaconda Plan. To command what would be known as the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln tapped Gen. Irwin McDowell, a forty-two-year-old West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran. McDowell insisted that his thirty-four-thousand-man army was not ready to fight and he pleaded for more time to train and mass more troops. Lincoln tried to reassure him: “You are green, it is true, but they are green, also; you are all green alike.”36
McDowell dutifully drew up a plan that Lincoln and his cabinet approved on June 29. The strategy was simple enough. Two rebel armies were massing in northern Virginia, one of twenty-four thousand under Gen. Pierre Beauregard at Manassas Junction, about twenty-five miles south of Washington, and the other of eleven thousand under Joseph Johnston at Winchester at the Shenandoah Valley’s north end. Facing Johnston were fifteen thousand troops led by Gen. Robert Patterson, a distinguished veteran of the 1812 and Mexican Wars now weighed down by his sixty-nine years. McDowell and Patterson would simultaneously attack the rebel armies before them.
Unfortunately, the enemy soon learned of this plan. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a society lady who knew many prominent politicians and officers. She was also a rebel spy who extracted intelligence from her loquacious friends and secreted it to the rebel leaders. Beauregard promptly called on Johnston to give Patterson the slip and join him at Manassas.
McDowell did not get his army on the road south until July 16. It took these troops four days to march the twenty-five miles to Bull Run, the stream beyond which the rebel army was encamped. Not just inexperience slowed his army’s march. By now his campaign plan had been leaked to the press and a cavalcade of spectators, including entire families of the elite armed with picnic baskets, accompanied the Union army’s march.
McDowell launched his attack early on the morning of July 21, with feints at fords across Bull Run, while he sent most of his troops around the enemy’s left flank. At first the Union troops drove back the rebels in confusion. But Johnston arrived just in time to counterattack and rout the American forces. The Union and Confederate armies suffered 2,950 and 1,750 casualties, respectively, figures that horrified northerners and southerners alike.37 The catastrophe sobered most northern politicians, newspaper editors, and other citizens. The war clearly was not going to be an easy, quick, and glorious romp after all. Yet Bull Run’s results could have been far worse. Had Beauregard immediately followed up his victory with a swift march against Washington, the rebels might have captured much of the demoralized American army along with the capital.
With General McDowell discredited, Lincoln searched desperately for someone who could transform the demoralized troops into a professional army and lead it south to crush the rebellion. The person he found would be as disastrous at the latter task as he was brilliant at the first. On July 22, the day after the battle of Bull Run, the president ordered George McClellan to hurry to Washington and take command.38
For a nation desperate for victories and heroes, McClellan appeared to be the only man then available. As is so often the case, first impressions were highly deceptive, as his initial burst of boldness soon dissolved into an unrelenting timidity. From his headquarters at Cincinnati, he commanded the Department of the Ohio that embraced the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. On May 26 he sent two forces into western Virginia, sixteen hundred troops under Col. Benjamin Kelly and fourteen hundred under Col. Ebenezer Dumont, to secure the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Each of those commands brushed aside much smaller rebel forces along the way and converged at Philippi on May 30. There Confederate colonel George Porterfield awaited them with eight hundred troops that he had scrapped together. With the odds favoring them more than four to one, the Federals attacked and routed the rebels on June 3. McClellan arrived to take command on June 21. By early July, he massed twenty thousand troops to march against forty-five hundred led by Gen. Robert Garnett at Beverly. McClellan sent Gen. William Rosecrans and his brigade to encircle the enemy. Garnett shifted part of his force to block Rosecrans at Rich Mountain. On July 13 Rosecrans launched his troops against thirteen hundred Confederates led by Col. John Pegram. The Federals routed the outnumbered rebels and took 550 prisoners at the cost of 12 killed and 49 wounded. This battle could have been an even more decisive victory had McClellan joined the attack with the troops under his command. But he held back, fearing that Rosecrans had been repulsed. Rosecrans and his men spearheaded the advance up the Kanawha River Valley. By early August, Union forces had secured most of western Virginia. Gen. Robert E. Lee arrived to unite the remnants of Confederate forces into a ten-thousand-man army
, but his first campaign of the Civil War ended in defeat as Rosecrans’s forces repulsed his probes at Cheat Mountain in mid-September. A month later Lee tried to sidestep Rosecrans in the Kanawha Valley but Rosecrans again blocked his path. Lee withdrew his forces into the Shenandoah Valley.
McClellan took credit for a success that clearly rested on the shoulders of his officers who did all the fighting, especially Rosecrans. Thus did public relations trump hard facts. In retrospect this is hardly surprising. If McClellan was truly gifted at anything it was at projecting images that exalted himself and denigrated his rivals. If one were casting for a photogenic general, McClellan looked the part, with his handsome face, neatly trimmed mustache, lean, erect carriage, and crisply pressed, tailored uniforms. He turned his diminutive height into an advantage by having the word spread that he was the “Young Napoleon.” In reality, his snaillike pace of warfare that avoided battle was the antithesis of Napoleon’s strategy of rapid movements and overwhelming sledgehammer attacks against the enemy. McClellan was bright, personable, and confident and exuded a charisma that dazzled many an audience. He had an impressive resume. He graduated near the top of his West Point class, served in the Mexican War, and was part of an American delegation that observed the Crimean War at the British and French headquarters. In 1854 he retired from the military to serve as president of the Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, where he proved to be a very able administrator and engineer who often put in fifteen-hour work days. He took these same skills to the Union force that he soon dubbed the Army of the Potomac. Given his genuine attributes, McClellan would have made a very good chief of staff as long as his commanding general kept him on a very short leash.
Then there was the increasingly evident downside. In a profession not known for humility, few commanders have matched and none have exceeded McClellan in egomania and arrogance as vast as his generalship was disastrous for America. He fervently believed that “God has placed a work in my hands. . . . I was called to it; my previous life seems to have been unwittingly directed to this great end.”39 Exacerbating his messiah complex were his political ambitions as a devote Democrat who favored reunification and the continued tolerance of slavery. At some future point he hoped to capitalize on his military fame with a run for the White House. Of course, before he did that he actually had to win fame on a grandiose scale. And there his wretched generalship trumped his ambitions.
McClellan’s first probe south of the Potomac ended in a humiliating defeat that he typically blamed on others. After months of pressure from the White House, Congress, and newspapers to advance south, he finally authorized several regiments to cross the river at Ball’s Bluff on October 21. The Confederates immediately massed, attacked, and routed the Union forces, inflicting eight hundred casualties. Once again Lincoln suffered a personal loss when Col. Edward Baker, his old friend and fellow Springfield lawyer, recent Oregon senator, and deceased son’s namesake, was killed.
But rather than fire McClellan, Lincoln promoted him. When Gen. Winfield Scott resigned on November 1, Lincoln assigned McClellan to command the entire American army. When the president asked him whether those duties might be too much, McClellan jauntily replied, “I can do it all.”40
Meanwhile the Union chalked up victories elsewhere, although not without controversy. Having secured Maryland, Lincoln sought to anchor the other two critical border slave states of Kentucky and Missouri to the United States. He recognized that, so far, unique political circumstances had kept each state loyal. Any federal measures that worked in one state might well push the others into the Confederacy’s arms. Nor were these three states equally important, although events in one reverberated to the others. He explained, “To lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri nor . . . Maryland. These all against us, and the job of our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capital.”41
This was no exaggeration. The strategic position of these three states was crucial. Together they presented a wedge of hard power to whoever won them over. Had these states seceded, the Confederacy’s manpower would have risen by 45 percent and its factory output by 80 percent. These states also had 420,000 slaves. With 19.5 percent of its population enslaved, or nearly one in five people, Kentucky had the largest proportion of slaves to the total population, followed by Maryland with 12.7 percent, and Missouri with 9.7 percent.42
Throughout the early spring, Missouri teetered at the brink of violence between Union- and rebel-leaning forces.43 The governor was Claiborne Jackson, a slaveholder and former border ruffian, and the militia general was Sterling Price, a slaveholder and former governor. While they tried to mass a secessionist army in Jefferson City, the capital, they assigned seven hundred militiamen to occupy Camp Jackson on St. Louis’s outskirts.
Gen. William Harney commanded the vast Department of the West, headquartered at St. Louis. Shortly after arriving with a small contingent of regular troops from Fort Leavenworth, Capt. Nathaniel Lyon urged Harney to round up any armed secessionists, first in St. Louis, then around the state. Harney refused, insisting that his role was to be a neutral force that tried to reconcile the opposing parties. Lyon complained of Harney to his friend Frank Blair, the attorney general’s brother and one of Missouri’s representatives in Congress. Montgomery Blair talked the president into recalling Harney to Washington for consultations.
Lyon took advantage of Harney’s absence to act. He raised four volunteer regiments devoted to the United States and deployed them around the federal arsenal, with its 60,000 firearms, 1.5 million cartridges, 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, and score of cannons. Then, on May 10, he led his regiments to surround Camp Jackson and force the rebel militia to surrender. Although he pulled this off without a shot being fired, as he paraded his prisoners through the streets a riot broke out that left two soldiers and thirty civilians dead and numerous others wounded. Eventually Lyon restored order. When Harney returned on May 12, he endorsed all of Lyon’s decisive acts. On May 29 Lincoln replaced Harney as the Department of the West’s commander with Lyon and promoted the captain to brigadier general.
Lyon marched at the head of seventeen hundred troops to Jefferson City. Jackson and Price fled to Booneville, fifty miles up the Missouri River, where they gathered rebel forces and tried to form a government. Lyon pursued and scattered them on June 17, the Civil War’s first large-scale skirmish. Jackson and Price found refuge in Springfield, the largest town in Missouri’s southwest, leaving the state’s central and northern regions in Union hands. Meanwhile, in St. Louis a convention of mostly Republicans and Unionists convened to establish a government and elect Hamilton Gamble the new governor.
Unfortunately, Lyon’s tenure as the Department of the West’s commander was brief. Lincoln succumbed to political pressure and replaced Lyon with John Frémont, famed for leading four exploration expeditions across the West and being the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate, as commander of the Department of the West. Shortly after he reached St. Louis on July 25, the power went to Frémont’s head. He set up his headquarters in a mansion for which he billed Washington $6,000 a year. When Frank Blair publicly criticized him, Frémont had him arrested and held indefinitely.
Meanwhile Lyon, who remained the army’s field general, cleared rebels from most of Missouri and in early August set up his headquarters at Springfield. For his succession of valiant and decisive acts, Lyon became the war’s first northern hero. Tragically, he died a hero’s death.
Lyon’s army amounted to only fifty-five hundred troops and their supply line stretched 215 miles to St. Louis. Ever more rebel guerrillas infested this route. Meanwhile Gen. Sterling Price commanded thirteen thousand Confederate troops at Fayetteville, Arkansas, seventy-five miles south. In early August Price led his army north and by August 10 was encamped at Wilson’s Creek, half a dozen miles from Springfield. Lyon was aware that he was outgunned two to one. With these odds again
st him, he could have defended Springfield or withdrawn toward St. Louis. Instead he conceived a bold plan to attack the rebels from two directions. Like McDowell at Bull Run, Lyon nearly won the battle of Wilson Creek, but the rebels rallied, counterattacked, and routed the Union troops. The northerners and southerners suffered 1,317 and 1,230 casualties, respectively; Lyon was among the dead. Price followed up his victory by marching north to Lexington on the Missouri River. Although his army swelled with recruits along the way, he eventually withdrew to Springfield as superior Union forces massed at Kansas City and St. Louis.
Rather than lead an army against the invaders, General Frémont remained ensconced in his St. Louis mansion. On August 30 he proclaimed martial law and warned that any rebel civilians caught with firearms would be summarily shot and all slaves of rebels would be liberated. Lincoln feared this policy would provoke rather than deter Missouri’s secessionists. On September 2 he wrote Frémont a private letter asking him to rescind the measures, and when the general refused, on September 11 Lincoln issued a public order to do so. He patiently explained the practical and thus moral reasons behind his order. If “you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best men in their hands in retaliation; and so, man for man, indefinitely.” Likewise Frémont’s emancipation policy “will alarm our southern Union friends and turn them against us.” However, Frémont could and should comply with the Confiscation Act that permitted commanders to take any property, including slaves, from rebels.44
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 14