by Bruce Catton
All up and down the line the volunteers began to find that this was an army, not just a disorganized aggregration of soldiers. Someone took the trouble to inspect the camps and teach the colonels how to lay them out so they were neat, tidy, and sanitary. The supply system was reorganized and the men ate regularly; regimental sick lists declined as sanitation and meals improved and soldiers were taught how to pitch their tents so that the first shower would not flood everything they contained, and the dreary discouragement that divitalized homesick boys began to lift. Regimental commanders found themselves answerable to brigadiers who inspected camp and drill ground and insisted on good performance—and who, when performance was not good, knew enough about their jobs to show how it could be improved. Brigades, in turn, were formed into divisions, with regular-army officers riding herd on them. The War Department was still buying quantities of amazingly shoddy goods—the tents were skimpy and leaky, many of the fine new uniforms lost their shape and color almost overnight, the New England boys noted that the shoes were poorly made and would never last, and the arms that were issued were sadly imperfect—but at least the stuff was coming in and being distributed. The air of the holiday militia outing was gone.
Then there were the reviews—reviews of regiments, of brigades, of divisions—with regimental officers nervously inspecting arms and equipments beforehand, with the bands zealously blaring out marching tunes, and with the new soldiers proudly performing their recently learned maneuvers on the smooth turf, while the flags streamed in the breeze and admiring civilians stood about the reviewing stand, the ladies bright with their hooped skirts and sunshades . . . and always, as the crowning feature, the young general himself, galloping down the lines on his great black charger at a pace his staff could never quite maintain, seeing everything, demanding good performance, and then glowing with happy pride when it was given. They cheered as he went by—how could they help it, when he was the living symbol of their regained self-respect?—and they cheered afresh when he acknowledged their cheers. Wrote one of his officers:
"He had a taking way of returning such salutations. He went beyond the formal military salute, and gave his cap a little twirl, which with his bow and smile seemed to carry a little of personal good fellowship even to the humblest private soldier. If the cheer was repeated he would turn in his saddle and repeat the salute. It was very plain that these little attentions to the troops took well, and had no doubt some influence in establishing a sort of comradeship between him and them."7
Not that there was any familiarity or easy-going softness in the relations between general and soldiers. There was a vast gulf fixed, then as now, between the major general commanding and the humble private, and McClellan did not narrow it. He did not live in camp, but stayed in the heart of Washington, in a fine big house where he gave elaborate dinner parties to glittering people, and wherever he went he was trailed by his staff, including two genuine French princes, and a trim cavalry escort. The troops did not see him during their workaday routine; when he came on the scene it was always a special event, surrounded by all of the formalities. He could apply a severe discipline when it seemed necessary. The 2nd Maine Regiment refused to turn out for duty one day in August. Camped near it were some ninety-day regiments whose time had expired, and they were going home, and the boys in the 2nd Maine, although they had enlisted for three years, felt that they ought to go home too—the war was going to last much longer than they had expected; if it was fair for one regiment to leave, why wasn't it fair for all? McClellan came down on them quietly but hard, and sixty-three men were presently shipped off to the dreaded fortress of Dry Tortugas—a frowning pile of masonry on a desolate sand key in the Gulf of Mexico, originally built as "the Gibraltar of the new world" but now used as a disciplinary barracks for hard cases—to break rocks for the rest of the war.
With another somewhat similar case McClellan tried a different tack. The 79th New York was a former militia regiment; called itself the "Highlanders," came to Washington in the bare-kneed glory of kilts, and had a crusty Scottish colonel named Cameron. It had been at Bull Run, where its colonel had been killed; it had long since abandoned kilts for the regulation sky-blue pants, and it was fed up with military life. Also, it was brigaded under William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a hard man and who at that time seems to have had something to learn about the way to handle volunteer troops. So one morning the 79th refused to do duty and demanded an adjustment of its grievances. McClellan rounded up a battalion of regular infantry, plus a squadron of regular cavalry and a battery of regular artillery—hard-boiled Indian fighters from the plains, filled with strong disdain for volunteer soldiers—and lined them up facing the 79th, firearms loaded and ready for use; whereupon the 79th was invited to stop being mutinous and return to duty. The New Yorkers blinked at the ominous array in front of them. These regulars, clearly, were perfectly willing to shoot volunteers if ordered, and the officer in charge had a frosty glint in his eye. The 79th had had no notion that it was committing mutiny; it was just exercising its democratic right of protest, as American citizens always did; but if the major general commanding saw it differently, what with all those regulars, why ... So the 79th returned to duty, and nobody was shot, and McClellan took the regimental colors away and kept them in his own office, restoring them a month later with a neat little flourish and the comment that the Highlanders had redeemed themselves by good conduct.
So McClellan was able to write to his wife truthfully: "I have restored order very completely already." Things were looking up, and the young general wrote, "I shall carry this thing engrand and crush the Rebels in one campaign. I flatter myself that Beauregard has gained his last victory." And how could he help feeling that way, when he drank daily of the adulation of his men? "You have no idea how the men brighten up now when I go among them. I can see every eye glisten. Yesterday they nearly pulled me to pieces in one regiment. You never heard such yelling."
Yet the Rebels were menacing, and there was cause for deep worry. Behind their fortified lines at Centreville and Manassas, who knew what dark plans were afoot? Washington was ill defended: "If Beauregard does not attack tonight I shall regard it as a dispensation of Providence." And in mid-August: "I cannot get one minute's rest during the day, and sleep with one eye open at night, looking out sharply for Beauregard, who, I think, has some notion of making a dash in this direction." Next day the danger seemed even worse: "I am here in a terrible place; the enemy have from three to four times my force; the President, the old general, cannot or will not see the true state of affairs."
It was very disturbing; especially so since the danger actually existed almost exclusively in the mind of the commanding general. The Confederates were well dug in near the site of their old Bull Run victory, but Joseph E. Johnston, their commander, and his flamboyant second-in-command, the famous Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—something of a young Napoleon himself, in ardent Southern esteem—were asking nothing more than that the Yankees would leave them alone for a few months. They had perhaps thirty thousand men with them—about a quarter of the number McClellan believed them to have—and their troubles in respect to organization, discipline, and leadership were quite as pressing as those of the Federals, if not a little more so, the Southern private being a rugged individualist not readily amenable to military rule. The lone Southerner who was talking in terms of an offensive in those days was the dour and warlike Stonewall Jackson, who figured that the North was still badly off balance and could be had even by untrained troops; but Jackson had not yet become famous, and his voice went unheard, and neither Johnston nor Beauregard was even dreaming of offensive action. Not until October would Johnston suggest an advance, and then he conditioned the suggestion with the stipulation that he be heavily reinforced. Reinforcements being denied, he dropped the idea. He was heavily outnumbered and he was perfectly well aware of it, even though McClellan saw him as having "three or four times my force." While Johnston was trying to get his own disorganized batt
alions into something resembling military shape, McClellan was anxiously writing: "I have scarcely slept one moment for the last three nights, knowing well that the enemy intend some movement and fully recognizing our own weakness."
But if there were anxiety, unease, and a deep awareness of weakness at GHQ in Washington, there was also that dazzling glimpse of greatness, the echo of strange promises of future fame loftier than any other American had ever had, mysterious whispers that could hardly be described even in the privacy of a letter to the general's own wife. On the ninth of August, 1861, McClellan was writing home:
"I receive letter after letter, have conversation after conversation, calling on me to save the nation, alluding to the presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be united with you forever in Heaven, I have no such aspiration. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved. I am not spoiled by my unexpected new position. I feel sure that God will give me the strength and wisdom to preserve this great nation; but
I tell you, who share all my thoughts, that I have no selfish feeling in this matter. I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands."
To which one can only remark that for a newcomer this young general had certainly been getting around. He had been in Washington less than a fortnight, and barely four months ago he had been an obscure Ohio civilian; but already there was talk of the presidency, and people were telling him he should become a dictator. It was a moment of infinite possibilities, the entire country was at his disposal, he could do as he liked with it: he would spurn the dictatorship, he would gladly lay down his life after taking the dictatorship, with God's help he would preserve the nation; and all the while, never to be forgotten, he could get those dark glimpses of unfathomable Rebel strength and schemings across the river, coiling and uncoiling in the dim light in movements of infinite menace. Secure in his own nutshell, he was king of infinite space. But there were those bad dreams.
2.Aye, Deem Us Proud
The war was very pleasant for a while, in the fall of 1861, for the soldiers who were guarding the line of the Potomac above Washington. The Maryland countryside there is open and gently rolling, with blue mountain ranges breaking the sky line to the west and with long vistas of cornfield and pasture and wood lot stretching away south to the river and beyond. The weather was mild and bright, and the business of learning how to be a soldier was engrossing and even rather exciting. Across the river there were unknown numbers of Confederates, whose pickets were often seen and frequently heard from in exchanges of long-range rifle fire. The 15th Massachusetts, picketing the shore near Edwards' Ferry, some fifteen miles upstream from the capital, felt that it was well acquainted with the Mississippi outfit on the other side. Northern boys and Southern boys used to exchange gossip across the river, and they finally agreed that "the shooting of pickets is all nonsense"—an agreement to which the Massachusetts soldiers came the more readily, as one of their number admitted, because they were armed with old smoothbore muskets which would barely carry across the stream, while the Southerners had rifles. One day a Mississippian crossed the river in a leaky skiff and had dinner with a knot of Massachusetts soldiers on the bank.1
Permanent camps were laid out, and soldiering was not too uncomfortable most of the time. There was a great deal to learn—about the war, and about the people who lived in a state where human beings were owned as slaves. Boys in the 27th Indiana felt that they had come to a foreign land; styles of architecture and methods of farming were different, here in Maryland, than they were back along the Wabash, and even the language seemed strange. The money, for instance, was spoken of in terms of sixpences and shillings, and the Hoosiers learned they weren't understood when they said "quarter" and "dime." The 21st Massachusetts found that the thrift and neatness of New England farms were not visible here, and the colored field hands seemed shockingly ragged, ignorant, and shiftless. To this abolitionist regiment, slavery seen at first hand was abhorrent. A little earlier, at Annapolis, a fugitive slave came into camp and was hidden, and after dark the soldiers stole a rowboat, fixed the slave up with hardtack and salt pork, and helped him steal off north by water. It developed that the slave was owned by the governor of Maryland, no less, and there were repercussions—Lincoln and the governor being engaged just then in a delicate game to keep Maryland in the Union, and the governor's good will being important.2 The slavery issue, indeed, was beginning to disturb a number of the Northern soldiers. By the end of September, Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, commanding the division which held this part of the Potomac, felt it necessary to issue general orders admonishing all hands "not to incite and encourage insubordination among the colored servants in the neighborhood of the camps."
In general, the Western troops were less disturbed than the New Englanders. To the Westerners, this war was being fought to restore the Union; to the New Englanders, the abolition of human slavery was mixed up in it too, and freedom was an all-embracing idea that included black men as well as white. Sentiment back home was strongly abolitionist, and it was felt in camp. Shortly after General Stone issued his warning, two fugitive slaves sought refuge within the lines of the 20th Massachusetts. Obedient to the general's orders, a young officer took a squad, hauled the slaves out of hiding, and returned them to their owner. The regiment was a bit upset, and some of the men wrote home about it. Shortly afterward the colonel of the regiment received a stern letter from John A. Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, officially reprimanding the young officer for returning the slaves and rebuking the colonel for countenancing it.
The colonel was William R. Lee, a doughty old West Pointer, one of whose classmates at the Academy had been a brilliant, ramrod-straight young Southerner named Jefferson Davis. Lee had simply been obeying orders, and he passed the governor's rebuke along to General Stone, who wrote the governor a sharp letter: this regiment was in United States service now and the governor had no business meddling with discipline, the young lieutenant and the colonel had properly done what they were told to do and were not subject to reprimand from any governor, and would the governor in future please keep his hands off? Governor Andrew, an executive whose strong support of the administration's war program in the dark days just after Fort Sumter fell had been an extremely important factor, was the last man in America to take a letter like that meekly, and he replied with some heat. The correspondence became rather extensive and passionate, and Governor Andrew finally passed it all along to the senior senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, who denounced General Stone on the floor of the Senate. The general, in turn, wrote to Sumner in terms so bitter that it almost seemed as if he were challenging the senator to duel.
General Stone was getting in a bit over his head here, with the war still in its swaddling clothes, and with both of these Massachusetts statesmen being men of vast influence with the administration. As a soldier, General Stone felt that he was on solid ground—as, in fact, he unquestionably was. Stone might have been influenced, too, by the fact that he himself had more or less of a stand-in at the White House. Early in 1861 he had been commissioned as a colonel by James Buchanan, made inspector general of the District of Columbia, and given responsibility for maintaining order and preventing any secessionist putsch before and during the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. He used to remark that he was the very first man mustered in to defend the country against rebellion. Lincoln had seen a good bit of him and had learned to trust him; indeed, if there was any substance to the story of secessionist plots to prevent the inauguration—and to the end of his days Stone believed that there was a great deal of substance to it—Lincoln had trusted him with his life. Now Stone was a brigadier commanding a division, he had the strong support of General McClellan, and he was quite willing to bark back at a senator, a governor, or anyone else if he had to do it to maintain discipline.
The flare-up over slavery, however, was not yet ready to come to a head. What was important now was perfecting the drill and trainin
g of the troops and guarding the line of the Potomac. Joe Johnston had a substantial outpost at Leesburg, over on the Virginia side, just a few miles away, and the commanding general was suspicious and wanted a good watch kept. Meanwhile, the boys still had a good deal to learn. There was a little trouble in the 15th Massachusetts over ambulance drill. The 15th had a nice twenty-four-piece band, and the bandsmen discovered that when they weren't tootling on their instruments they were ambulance men, required to put in at least one hour every day learning how to apply tourniquets, how to carry stretchers so as to give a wounded man the minimum of discomfort, how to get a casualty from a stretcher into an ambulance, and so on. They objected bitterly, refusing to turn out for drill and announcing, somewhat vaingloriously, that they would die before they would do any such duty. The colonel took them at their word; he had them locked in the stockade under guard and informed them that they would get food and water when they decided to obey orders, but not before. The bandsmen presently recanted.