by Bruce Catton
It is interesting to speculate about the difference there would have been in McClellan's career had he gone on to Harrisburg and taken command of the Pennsylvania troops instead of staying in Ohio. Fame would have come much more slowly, and he would have had a chance to adjust himself to it. Pennsylvania sent a solid division down to Washington shortly after Bull Run. It was the division McClellan would have commanded had he gone to Harrisburg; it contained good men and had some first-class officers, and it was just the right organization to build a solid reputation for its commanding general—it brought George G. Meade up to the command of the Army of the Potomac in 1863, after giving him plenty of time to prove himself and to find himself in battle. What would McClellan's luck have been with that division? No immediate limelight, comparative obscurity during the army's early days—what would have become of him, anyway?
(Another might-have-been: there came to McClellan's Ohio headquarters one day that spring a former infantry captain, somewhat seedy, presenting himself as a one-time acquaintance of the general looking for work; name of U. S. Grant. Was there a place for him, perhaps, on McClellan's staff? The general was away that day, and Grant was told to come back later. Instead of coming back Grant went west and finally wangled command of a regiment of Illinois volunteers. McClellan would have given him a staff job if he had seen him. What, one wonders, would Grant's future have been in that case?)
Well, the might-have-beens didn't happen. McClellan never did go to Harrisburg, command of the Pennsylvanians went to someone else, and if McClellan himself ever mused about it in later years there is no record of it. What did happen was that as soon as he got his Ohio regiments mustered into United States service he found himself holding one of the key jobs in the whole army. Ohio was on the frontier. The western part of Virginia was just across the river and the Confederates had sent troops deep into the mountains. It was correctly supposed in Washington that this part of Virginia was strongly Unionist—the Confederate commander, getting no recruits, complained that the inhabitants were full of "an ignorant and bigoted Union sentiment"—and it seemed important to drive the Confederates out. Also, the Rebels were cutting the Baltimore and Ohio railway, main traffic artery from the capital to the West. So McClellan, by the end of May, found himself across the Ohio River, commanding a substantial little force of sixteen Ohio regiments, nine from Indiana, and two newly organized regiments of Unionist Virginians from Parkersburg and Wheeling, together with twenty-four guns. He moved carefully up into the mountains, found two Confederate detachments drawn up in the passes, attacked one and caved it in, causing the other to retreat posthaste, and moved on to the town of Beverly, taking prisoners, securing everything west of the Alleghenies for the Union, and making possible the eventual formation of the state of West Virginia.
It had been neatly done, it was the North's first feat of arms, and the country rejoiced at the news—the more so, perhaps, because it looked like a good deal more of an achievement than it actually was. McClellan always knew how to make his soldiers take pride in their own deeds, and he gave it to them strong after they marched into Beverly, congratulating them in an official order which told them that they had "annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and experienced soldiers, entrenched in mountain fastnesses fortified at their leisure." This was all right, and it was the sort of thing that built up morale; but the "two armies" had in fact been separate parts of one ill-equipped, untrained force that hardly numbered forty-five hundred men all told, and the "annihilation" consisted in the retreat of this force and the loss by it of about a thousand men. The order was reprinted in the North, together with McClellan's dispatches to the War Department, which were somewhat less flamboyant but which still made the conquest look like something out of Napoleon's campaign in northern Italy. Also reprinted, and widely admired, was the address McClellan had issued to his soldiers just before the battle: "Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel. I know that I can rely upon you."
All of this, remember, was happening in the early summer of 1861, when the war was still spanking new and people were hungry for heroes and for victories, and when the country was ready to take a general at his own evaluation. Some of McClellan's officers, to be sure, were just a bit baffled. One of his brigadiers wrote that McClellan's dispatches and proclamations seemed to have been written by "quite a different person from the sensible and genial man we knew in daily life and conversation" and remarked that the young major general appeared to be "in a morbid condition of mental exaltation."2 But in the country at large it went over big; and just then, before anybody had forgotten about it, the news came in of the humiliating disaster at Bull Run, with untrained regiments legging it all the way back to Washington, and carriage-loads of distinguished sight-seers contributing to the rout. Everybody had been chanting, "On to Richmond"; now came the realization that the war was not going to be a gay parade of triumphant militia regiments, whose bright uniforms and martial bearing would make up for any deficiencies in military experience and leadership. The war was going to be long, mean, and bloody, and above all else there was needed a really competent general who could turn the volunteer forces into an army.
To be sure, Lincoln had at his elbow Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the hero of two wars; but Scott was old and nearly senile, he was too fat and infirm to mount a horse or even to review his troops, let alone lead them into action, and his great reputation and his stout old heart were all he could place at the government's disposal. Inevitable, then, that everyone should look at McClellan. His achievement in western Virginia took on an added shine when measured against Bull Run. His troops had not fled in terror after a few random volleys; they had gone into action coolly, scaling lofty mountains and annihilating two armies. This man knew what he was doing, and knew how to make people believe that he knew what he was doing, which was even more important just then; and the very depth of the country's shame and disappointment at Bull Run helped to lift McClellan to the peak. Overnight he was called to Washington and invested with the command.
No American general ever came to high command under circumstances quite like these. He was thirty-five, and it was just three months since he had sat in Governor Dennison's office and received the tender of command of Ohio's volunteers. Now he was in Washington, with the safety of the entire nation on his shoulders; and before he had even started on this new job he was being universally acclaimed as a genius, with a fanfare that built his brief Virginia campaign up into an achievement that would stand comparison with the records of the great captains of history. He was "the young Napoleon" to one and all—even to himself, apparently, for he permitted himself to be photographed in the traditional Napoleonic pose, one arm folded behind his back, the other hand thrust into his coat front, a look of intense martial determination on his face. In a letter home, written the day after he reached Washington, McClellan sounds like a man who can hardly believe that what is happening to him is real: "I find myself in a new and strange position here: President, cabinet, Gen. Scott, and all deferring to me. By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land." A few days later he went to Capitol Hill, to argue for a new law permitting him to appoint aides to his staff from civil life if he chose. The experience among the lawmakers was giddying—all experiences were, from the height he occupied just then—and he unburdened himself in another letter to his wife:
"I went to the Senate to get it through, and was quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received and the respect with which I was treated. I suppose half a dozen of the oldest made the remark I am becoming so much used to: 'Why, how young you look, and yet an old soldier!' It seems to strike everybody that I look young. They give me my way in everything, full swing and unbounded confidence. All tell me that I am held responsible for the fate of the nation, and that all its resources shall be placed at my disposal
. It is an immense task that I have on my hands, but I believe I can accomplish it."
And he added, bemused: "Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?"
He was young, for a conquering hero, and it was only natural that he himself should have been impressed by his own eminence. And yet, in these letters to the young wife he had married little more than a year earlier, one presently begins to find something more than the natural blinking of a man who is dazzled by his own good fortune; something more than the artless self-congratulation a man is entitled to indulge in when he brags innocently to the wife of his bosom. It gets said too often. There is too much lingering on the adoration other men feel for him, on the wild enthusiasm he arouses, on the limitless power and responsibility that are his. The perplexity of the brigadier in western Virginia becomes understandable: this man, utterly winning and modest and soft-spoken in all his personal contacts, simply could not, down inside, look long enough at the great figure he was becoming, could not get enough of the savor of admiration and love that were coming to him. Over and over, from the day he left Ohio for the expedition into the lonely mountains to his final days in the army, there is this same note. What buried sense of personal inadequacy was gnawing at this man that he had to see himself so constantly through the eyes of men and women who looked upon him as a hero out of legend and myth?
Early in June, before the great weight of national command had been placed upon him, he was writing his wife of the huge crowds that met him at every stop in Ohio—"gray-haired old men and women, mothers holding up their children to take my hand, girls, boys, all sorts, cheering and crying God bless you! ... I could hear them say, 'He is our own general'; 'Look at him, how young he is'; 'He will thrash them'; 'He'll do,' etc., etc., ad infinitum." In western Virginia there was more of the same: "It is a proud and glorious thing to see a whole people here, simple and unsophisticated, looking up to me as their deliverer from tyranny." The weight of his own duties impressed him while he still commanded this detached force on the slope of the Alleghenies: "I realize now the dreadful responsibility on me—the lives of my men, the reputation of the country, and the success of the cause." And he himself must do it all. From Grafton he wrote that "everything here needs the hand of the master and is getting it fast"; and, a little later, "I don't feel sure that the men will fight very well under anyone but myself; they have confidence in me, and will do anything that I put them at."
On his first day in Washington he was saying confidently: "I see already the main causes of our recent failure; I am sure that I can remedy these, and am confident that I can lead these armies of men to victory once more." He had already, in less than twenty-four hours, had to refuse dinner invitations from General Scott and from four cabinet ministers; a few days later he dined at the White House, guest of the President, with the British and French ministers and assorted senators present, reported that the dinner was "rather long and rather tedious, as such things generally are." Scott, the aging general-in-chief, had become a nuisance within a week and would have to be quietly by-passed. "I am leaving nothing undone to increase our force; but the old general always comes in the way. . . . I have to fight my way against him. Tomorrow the question will probably be decided by giving me absolute control independently of him. I suppose it will result in enmity on his part against me; but I have no choice. The people call upon me to save the country. I must save it, and cannot respect anything that is in the way."
Undeniably, Scott was an obstacle, a querulous fuss-budget, his greatness only a memory. It would be inadvisable, he held, for the young general to organize the forces about Washington as an army: the regulations said McClellan commanded the departments of
Washington and northeastern Virginia, with all the troops that lay therein, and that was sufficient. Inadvisable, too, to organize the new levies into divisions. He, Scott, had simply had brigades in the army he took to Mexico City, and what was adequate then would be adequate now. Nor should regular-army officers be encouraged, or even permitted, to leave their own assignments in order to command volunteers; the hard core of regular troops was needed and the volunteer army must be grouped around it, and the strength of the regulars could not be diluted by sending the officers out into the new regiments and brigades. And so on and on; McClellan was entirely right—the job could not be done unless he could find a way around the old gentleman.
Furthermore, McClellan's boast was justified: the people were calling upon him to save the country, and he did see "the main causes of our failure" very clearly and was moving effectively to cure them. He began, simply enough, by getting the disorganized officers and men off the streets and into camp. The regulars who were available he formed into a provost guard, with a tough colonel to take charge of scouring out the bars and herding the uniformed wanderers back to their regiments. On the Washington side of the river, camps were set up to receive the new levies as they came in from the states, and provisional brigades were established to complete their training and discipline. More seasoned regiments were sent across to camps on the Virginia side, where they could help protect the capital while they were being turned into fully disciplined troops. Lines were traced for a complete ring of fortifications encircling Washington in a line thirty-three miles long; enclosed forts on commanding hills, protected batteries covering the intervals, chains of rifle pits in between, with particular attention to the approaches on the Virginia side. Confederate Joe Johnston had pushed his outposts up to within half a dozen miles of the river; McClellan had no intention of trying to push him back just yet, but he made certain that the enemy could not get any closer.
After a week he was able to report proudly: "I have Washington perfectly quiet now; you would not know that there was a regiment here." No soldier was allowed to leave his camp without a pass, and passes were made hard to get. Similarly, civilians were prevented from visiting the camps without passes and were kept from crossing the bridges to the Virginia side unless they had legitimate business there. The bewildered men in uniform who had been disconsolately idling on the streets and in their tents suddenly discovered that they were going to be soldiers after all; they were kept busy, things moved with snap and order, there seemed to be a reason for the routine that had descended upon their lives.
The most incompetent and unfit of the regimental officers were weeded out by hastily organized selection boards. These selection boards were badly needed. The great weakness of this army lay in its officer corps, and the big problem of the high command always was to find officers who were worthy of the men they were leading. Later, as the test of battle helped to weed out the obvious misfits, and as hard experience developed qualities of natural leadership in others, this problem became simpler, but in the beginning it occasionally seemed beyond solution. The officers were in most cases as ignorant as the men they led, and they were usually ten times harder to handle. A few of them saw their own inadequacy and eliminated themselves, like the sixty-year-old Maine colonel who, learning that a selection board had been set up, came before it voluntarily and asked to be relieved. He had enjoyed militia work for forty years, he said artlessly, but he was finding actual warfare a different proposition and he felt that he was too old to learn; he would send in his resignation at once if they would suspend proceedings and spare him the humiliation of being officially weeded out.3
An idea of the size of the officer problem can be had from a glimpse at the diary of a member of the 75th New York, which regiment stopped over in Baltimore while on the way to Washington that summer. This man wrote despondently: "Tonight not 200 men are in camp. Capt. Catlin, Capt. Hulburt, Lt. Cooper and one or two other officers are under arrest. A hundred men are drunk, a hundred more are at houses of ill fame, and the balance are everywhere. . . . Col. Alford is very drunk all the time now."4
A diarist in the 11th Massachusetts told of one colonel who put the regimental chaplain in charge of his cooking arrangements and held him so strictly ac
countable for the quality of the meals that the poor man had no time for his priestly duties. After one particularly bad meal the colonel called the chaplain before him and barked: "If you don't cook a better dinner than this tomorrow, I'll have you tied to the flagstaff next Sunday and make you preach to the regiment for two hours!" As a result, the chaplain spent so much time in the kitchen next day that he was unable to officiate at a funeral, and the services had to be read by the regimental surgeon. The diarist added sadly that colonels who didn't insist on having regular devotional services usually failed to hold the respect of their men.5
There was a happy-go-lucky informality about the men in charge of some of these new regiments. The 19th Maine, being Yankees, sought to turn an honest penny by laying in a stock of fruit and flour and baking pies, which the regiment sold in surrounding camps. A sergeant in a Massachusetts regiment, being offered a pie by one such, asked the price. Twenty-five cents, he was told. "I won't pay it," he said promptly, being a Yankee himself. "Your colonel was just through here selling them for twenty cents."6
Somehow these officers were either taught their business or eliminated. The selection boards weeded out more than three hundred, but they couldn't begin to reach them all, deep questions of local politics being bound up in most of the original appointments; state governors were touchy, and the administration hated to offend them. But what a selection board couldn't do a good brigadier general could. Phil Kearny, for instance, got his regiments up to snuff in short order. The day he was assigned to his brigade he found most of the men lawlessly stripping an adjacent apple orchard. He immediately called in the field officers of his regiments and gave them a terrific blowing up in his crispest regular-army style. The officers, as freeborn Americans who weren't used to being talked to that way, answered back with heat; so Kearny switched his tactics, turned on the charm instead, took all the officers to an elaborate dinner party, transformed them into a little band of brothers before they knew quite what was happening, and by midnight had them all agreeing that for the honor of the brigade and their own heroic souls they would thereafter enforce discipline in the strictest military style. They did, too.