by Bruce Catton
Congress should. Congress acted accordingly. And there grew out of all of this a new force in government, a force which was to have a great effect, for good or for evil, on the way the war was run and on the men who ran it: the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, with the bitter-end anti-slavery radical Republicans in complete control and with Senator Ben Wade of Ohio as chairman. Wade was as tough as Allegheny nails, and he hated slavery and all of slavery's spokesmen; had brought his rifle to Washington when he was elected to the Senate, daring the fire-eating Southerners to challenge him to duel, and had given back bitterness for bitterness, hatred for hatred, on the floor of the Senate, doing all that one man might do to make the coming conflict a war to the knife, utterly determined now that it should be a war to end slavery and destroy the slave-owning class as well as a war to save the Union.
The committee held hearings and broke General Stone. A mass of vague and mysterious evidence was collected—indefinite, unanswerable, and damning—and it was passed along to the War Department, accompanied by strong subsurface pressure. The evidence was just strong enough so that McClellan himself could not save Stone, just strong enough to make Lincoln, who had trusted Stone so deeply, admit that there seemed to be grounds for action; and Stone was removed from his command and locked up for long months in Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. No formal charge was ever placed against him. He could not answer his accusers because he never knew quite what he was accused of; he could not be brought to trial because nobody else knew either. He was simply encased in a cloud of doubt and suspicion. One day he was a general in charge of a division, honored among men, and the next day he was a prisoner in a cell, walled away from the world. Months later he was quietly released; many months after that, when Grant came to the top command, he was given a combat assignment again, heading a brigade in the Army of the Potomac. But for the moment he was completely ruined.7
And this, if anybody had bothered to see it that way, was more than just a rough deal for General Stone. It was a flaming portent in the sky for all soldiers who might come to command in the armies of the Union: the civil authority was going to ride herd on the generals, and woe unto the man in shoulder straps who failed to please it. A new and unlooked-for complication was entering the ancient science of war. It was not going to be enough for a general simply to have military ability. He would have to show that his heart was in the cause, and the definition of "the cause" was going to be in the hands of men who had ideas never taught at West Point.
3.I Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed
That was the point General McClellan never quite understood. How could he? No general had ever had to understand anything of the kind before. He was not merely the commander of an army in a nation at war; he was the central figure in a risky new experiment which involved nothing less than working out, under fire, the relationships that must exist between a popular government and its soldiers at a time when the popular government is fighting for its existence.
Nothing in the country's previous history shed any light on the problem. The Revolution itself had simply been a great act of creation—an inspiration, from which both sides could draw equally, but not an object lesson. Eighteen-twelve and Mexico had hardly been more than episodes—sudden, angry outbursts of the energy of growth and development, absorbing enough but bringing no problems that could not for the most part be left to the regular military establishments. But this war was different. It went all the way to the heart and it could not be left to the regulars. Nobody had yet discovered how a democracy puts all its power and spirit under the discipline of an all-consuming war and at the same time continues to be a democracy. Here was where everybody was going to find out, and the only safe prediction was that it was going to be a tough time for soldiers.
One thing, to be sure, had been made clear: no simple outpouring of undisciplined and untrained men was going to win. Bull Run had taught that much. The tradition of Lexington and Concord no longer applied. The embattled farmer, leaving his plow in the furrow and taking his musket from the wall to go out and whip the King's soldiers, had to sign up for three years now, and the bark of the drill sergeant—heard all day long on every field around Washington —was the audible symbol of the fact that until the war ended the freeborn American was going to be taking orders. That fact had been accepted, the young general had it well in hand, and everybody was happy about the way he was doing the job. But what came next?
What came next was the fact that nobody trusted anybody, which put a terrible new factor into the military equation: an unknown, packed with explosive force.
By all standards of military common sense, General Stone had been quite right in squelching Governor Andrew, and the governor had been absurdly wrong. But military common sense wasn't enough now, unless it was linked to an understanding of the overwhelming pressures which could be created by purely political considerations. Right though he might have been, according to the books, General Stone had in fact been wrong. By the purely pragmatic test—how does a general act so that he can get his job done?—he had made a huge mistake. He might have been perfectly correct in insisting that the civil authority must not reach inside the military machine to interfere with the discipline, but in the end the civil authority did reach into the machinery long enough to pluck General Stone out of it. That was doubtless very unjust, but it was the way things were and it behooved every general to take the fact into account. The war could be won without generals like General Stone, worthy as the man was, but it could not be won without war governors like John Andrew, wrongheaded and obstreperous though such men might frequently be.
There was also the Cabinet. Specifically, there were men like the honorable Salmon Portland Chase, Secretary of the Treasury and a power in the land. Secretary Chase was not a particularly lovable character; he was humorless and more than slightly sanctimonious and he was cursed with a burning, self-centered ambition which he could always justify somehow, to himself, as a simple passion for God's own righteousness, with which he identified his every motive. He was away outside the field of military operations, his concern being—in theory, at least—exclusively with currency and loans and taxation and the ins and outs of wartime finance. But he was also a man the generals had to reckon with. He was not in the Cabinet because he was a genius of finance; he was in there because he was a power in politics, leader of a certain group in the electorate, spokesman for an important number of the American people. He concerned himself directly and immediately with military matters, and when he raised his voice on those subjects it was listened to. So McClellan found himself, rather against his will, closeted with the Secretary of the Treasury now and then, explaining military plans to him and listening, with such grace as he could muster, to the military ideas the Secretary had evolved.
There is something almost grotesque, to modern eyes, in the recorded spectacle of Chase solemnly bending over a map of Virginia and with pudgy forefinger tracing the proper line of operations for the Army of the Potomac. But it is quite beside the point to say that Chase should not have been bothering his head about such matters. There he was, one essential element in the government of the country, embodying a popular voice which might indeed be tragically confused but which had to be heard if the country was to be held together. He was a part of the unknown new factor in the problem which the young general had to solve, and there was no sense in simply complaining that he ought not to be in it at all: he was in it and he was going to stay in, and that was that.
Then there was such a man as Edwin M. Stanton, the prominent lawyer and Democratic politician, recently Attorney General in the dying months of Buchanan's administration, who was entering the intimate circle around the young general as a species of unofficial legal counselor, and who a little later was to become Secretary of War. Mr. Stanton was irascible, with a nature which was a singular blend of a habit of blunt speech and a fondness for devious intrigue. He had hard eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles and he had a talent for savage criticism
—a man who could plunge into sudden pessimism so deep as to resemble abject panic, but who could also drive for a chosen goal with uncommon ruthlessness. Right now he was deeply disgusted with everything the Lincoln administration was doing—with Lincoln himself, whom he spoke of bitterly as "the original gorilla," and with all of Lincoln's official family, which he suspected would be turned out of office before long by the arrival in Washington of Jefferson Davis and his minions. He was complaining that the administration was trying to give a strict Republican-party cast to the war; a complaint which comes very strangely from the man who, a few months later, was bending every effort to have the war conducted by the most extreme Republican principles. He was also urging McClellan to ignore the cackling politicians and make himself dictator. Of McClellan he wrote despondently to Mr. Buchanan: "If he had the ability of Caesar, Alexander or Napoleon, what can he accomplish? Will not Scott's jealousy, cabinet intrigues, Republican interference, thwart him at every step?"1
With this McClellan unquestionably would have agreed; most particularly with reference to General Scott. Scott was in the way, and it was clear that he would have to go. He belonged to an earlier day, and he was now hardly more than a great reputation bearing up a showy uniform. McClellan was pointedly keeping him in ignorance of the number and assignments of the new troops that were arriving, even though the old general was, at least nominally, the commander of the country's armies. McClellan also was conferring with senators and cabinet members about matters which legally fell within Scott's purview. Painfully Scott confessed that "I have become an incumbrance to the army as well as to myself"—for he was, as he wrote, "broken down by many particular hurts, besides the general infirmities of age"—and he could see that it was time for him to leave and let a younger man take over. He hoped that the younger man might be Henry Halleck, who had written military textbooks and who could put down on paper elaborate and beautifully reasoned treatises on strategy, and who was casually but on the whole respectfully known in the army as "Old Brains." But the White House was cool to the idea. General Scott had to admit that McClellan seemed to be in line for the place; had to admit, also, that he unquestionably had "very high qualifications for military command"; and so in mid-August the old general finally requested that he, Winfield Scott, be placed on the retired list.
The President went to him and tried to talk him out of it, and when he failed the application was simply pigeonholed, and Scott stayed on for a time as a pathetic supernumerary, ignored and absent-mindedly honored for what he used to be. It hurt the old man acutely, for he was intensely vain; but Scott wrote that no matter how or where he spent the rest of his life, "my frequent and latest prayer will be, 'God save the Union.' "2 And at last, in November, a couple of weeks after the Ball's Bluff disaster, Scott's plea for retirement was accepted, and McClellan got up in the half-light of a rainy morning to go clattering down to the station with his mounted escort to see the old man off. There they stood on the wet platform, formally bidding each other Godspeed, the worn-out old soldier, grotesque with his feeble fat body bulging in its uniform, and the dapper youngster, erect and confident, with the lesser brass standing at attention all around; and McClellan himself felt the force of the contrast. "It may be," he wrote to his wife, "that at some distant day I, too, shall totter away from Washington, a worn-out soldier, with naught to do but make my peace with God. The sight of this morning was a lesson to me which I hope not soon to forget. I saw there the end of a long, active and ambitious life, the end of the career of the first soldier of his nation; and it was a feeble old man scarce able to walk; hardly anyone there to see him off but his successor. Should I ever become vainglorious and ambitious, remind me of that spectacle."
It was to be just a year, plus three or four days, before McClellan himself would take the train out of Washington to retirement. But for the moment that day was deeply hidden in the future, and there were the problems of the present to worry about. And while McClellan took Scott's high place and became general of all the country's armies, his most pressing problems seemed to be chiefly two: the presence of General Joe Johnston's army in Centreville and Manassas, with outposts so far north that Confederate pickets could see the unfinished dome of the Capitol, and the existence along the Potomac River of highly effective Rebel batteries of artillery.
These latter created an immediate pinch. During the weeks before Bull Run the Confederates had edged forward to the river below Washington and had put up fortifications at three places—at Quantico, at Mathias Point, and at Aquia Creek, northern terminus of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad. In addition, they had removed all lights, buoys, and channel markers from the stream. Nobody much came down to molest them, and they had plenty of time that summer to make the positions strong and to mount heavy guns; and by early autumn the Lincoln administration was forced to realize that the capital was effectively blockaded as far as its water approach was concerned. To be sure, the railroad line was open, and troops and supplies could come in freely; but the water route was closed—warships could run the gantlet without too much trouble, but merchant vessels couldn't—and this was not only a big nuisance but a flaming humiliation as well. While Secretary Seward was assuring European nations that the Federal government was getting the insurrection well under control, the uncomfortable fact remained that the government could not open the waterway to its own capital.
The navy did what it could to restore the situation, without effect. It simply had no good ships to spare for operations on the Potomac. Practically everything that would float and carry a gun was needed on the blockade, or on the inland rivers, or on the high seas hunting commerce destroyers. At the beginning of the summer the navy's Potomac flotilla consisted of one small side-wheel steamer and two converted tugs, the three mounting a total of seven light guns. In June this hopeful little squadron steamed down to attack the works at Aquia Creek, retiring after a five-hour bombardment in which a good deal of powder was burned and a grand racket created but in which nobody on either side was hurt. Later in the month, stiffened by the arrival of the U.S.S. Pawnee—which was at least a regular warship, although only a second-class sloop—the navy returned to the fray, going down to Mathias Point and sending a landing party ashore, under the cover of gunfire, to seize the works and spike the batteries. This was playing into the Rebels' hands; they had infantry there, brought it up, drove the landing party off, and killed Commander James H. Ward, who had charge of the venture. After that the batteries were allowed to stay there undisturbed. In February of 1862, when the navy began mounting the expedition that was to capture New Orleans, David Dixon Porter came under fire while going downstream in the ex-revenue cutter HarrietLane, which took a round shot through one of her paddle wheels.3
Clearing the Potomac, then, was up to the army—which of course meant that it was up to McClellan. McClellan pointed out, sensibly enough, that the existence of the Rebel batteries along the Potomac depended on Johnston and his army at Centreville and Manassas; as long as Johnston stayed there they would remain, but they would go automatically when he retreated. The Manassas-Centreville stronghold was the real objective, then. The young general would presently put his army in motion and clear this stronghold out?
He would. Riding out in the Virginia countryside with McDowell, McClellan used to gesture toward the eastern end of the Confederate line at Manassas and say, "We shall strike them there." He eased some troops forward a few miles "by way of getting elbow-room" and wrote confidently to his wife: "The more room I get the more I want, until by and by I suppose I shall be so insatiable as to think I cannot do with less than the whole state of Virginia." Joe Hooker, who had his division in training over on the eastern shore of Maryland, was lined up to prepare for a river crossing that would clear the Virginia shore of all graycoats. But McClellan refused to be precipitate about it. The lines around Centreville and Manassas were strong. The army's secret service assured McClellan that Johnston had something like ninety thousand men behind t
hose entrenchments—men well drilled and well armed, and all athirst for Yankee blood. The more McClellan thought about it, the less did a frontal assault on those lines appeal to him.
He was in this mood when he took over Scott's job and became responsible for the strategy of the entire war; and a day or so after that he attended a cabinet meeting, sitting alone and somewhat silent at one end of the long council table. At the meeting this day was a young colonel of the 9th New York, one Rush Hawkins, who had just come back from the expedition which had seized Hatteras Inlet on the Carolina coast, and who was making a report on the situation there. When the meeting ended McClellan beckoned Hawkins to his side and began to ask questions, not about Hatteras but about conditions around Norfolk and Hampton Roads. Hawkins was all primed; he had been telling old General Wool, who was in command at Fortress Monroe, that what the government ought to do was land an army at the tip of the Virginia peninsula and move on Richmond from the east, and he quickly sketched out a rough map of the terrain, showing where the roads led and pointing out how gunboats could provide transportation and flank protection for an invading army by steaming up the York and James rivers.
McClellan pumped him dry and pocketed his sketch map. The young colonel's idea meshed with an idea of his own—was it really necessary to attack the Confederate fortifications at Manassas at all? The North had sea power and the South did not; despite the batteries along the Potomac, a properly convoyed fleet of transports could ascend and descend the river at any time. Why not take the army down the bay by water, land somewhere east of Richmond just as Hawkins was suggesting, and move in on the Confederate capital from that direction, completely by-passing Joe Johnston and his defensive works? The move would compel Johnston to retreat at once. Unless he retreated swiftly, the Federal army might even get to Richmond before he did. In any case, it could get clear to the gates of the Rebel capital without a contest and could fight its great battle there where victory would be decisive.