by Bruce Catton
The Pennsylvania troops were beginning to know George Gordon Meade, even though he was as yet only a brigadier, and a new one to boot. He was a tall, grizzled man with a fine hawk's nose and a perfectly terrible temper, which would lash out furiously at any officer who failed to do his job. A war correspondent considered that Meade, on horseback, looked "like a picture of a helmeted knight of old"; one of his staff complained that he rode "in a most aggravating way, neither at a walk nor a gallop but at a sort of amble." He was notably cool under fire; sat his horse with his staff, one time, surveying the situation through glasses, while Rebel bullets whizzed wickedly all around and the staff earnestly wished the general would finish his reconnoissance so they could get out of there; lowered his glass at last, took in the staff's nervousness, and remarked sardonically that maybe they had better leave—"This is pretty hot; it may kill some of our horses." He lacked the ability to inspire troops; once remarked, without any rancor, that he had heard his men call him "a damned goggle-eyed old snapping turtle." He never drew the kind of cheers that Hooker and Kearny always got, but he kept his command in good shape and had a sharp eye for details. He was wholly admirable as a man, with no trace of self-seeking; would reach high place in the army, do his hard job to the best of his ability, and indulge in no argument or complaint when promotion and praise finally missed him.7
One by one the officers were beginning to stand out, for this virtue or that. Already noticeable was an extremely junior second lieutenant on McClellan's staff, to which he had recently graduated from Kearny's: a broad-shouldered six-footer with a slim waist and muscular legs, fresh out of West Point, known as one of the finest horsemen in the army—George Armstrong Custer, who was to survive hot actions of this war only to die under the guns of the Sioux on the Montana hills. Custer was familiarly known as "Cinnamon" because of the cinnamon-flavored hair oil he used so liberally; wore long glistening curls and a show-off uniform with a tight hussar jacket and black trousers trimmed with gold lace, and looked, as another staff member remarked, "like a circus rider gone mad." Like Confederate George Pickett, who also wore curls, and Jeb Stuart, who was also a show-off, he was all soldier. He first impressed himself on McClellan's attention when the general, accompanied by his gilded staff, rode up to the bank of the Chickahominy for the first time and remarked, "I wish I knew how deep it is." The staff exchanged glances, looked thoughtfully at the dark water, began to make estimates. Custer spurred up to the bank, muttering "I'll damn soon show him," and rode his floundering horse out to the middle of the river, where he turned in his saddle and called out, "That's how deep it is, General."8
But standing out above all of these, of course, was McClellan. He had become the general who could do no wrong, in the soldiers' eyes, and they blithely overlooked things that would have earned bleak hatred for any other general. Officers of an anti-slavery cast noted suspiciously that McClellan took uncommon pains to protect Rebel property from the moment the army landed on the peninsula. One of them complained bitterly that provost guards were to be found protecting every farmhouse, stable, kitchen garden, and well, and asserted that they stood guard even over the rail fences, regarded by soldiers as prime material for campfires. "I have seen our men," protested this officer, waxing warm, "covered with dust and overcome by the heat, try in vain to get water from wells overflowing, from which stringent orders drove them away because the supply of water for a Rebel family might be diminished. I have also seen them, covered with mud and shivering with the rain, prevented by orders of the general-in-chief from warming themselves with the fence rails of dry wood which were ready at their hands, because the cattie of a Rebel farmer might get out and eat the grass in his fields while he was rebuilding his fences."9 Another officer noted indignantly that the fanners admitted that McClellan protected their property against the men of his army better than Johnston had protected it against the Confederates.
But somehow all of this made no difference whatever. Up around Fredericksburg, at that time, General McDowell was winning the lasting enmity of his own soldiers by his care to protect civilian property; here was McClellan, right in the presence of the enemy, doing the same thing and rising even higher in popularity. How account for it? How, except by saying that one man had the magic touch and the other lacked it. But the magic touch is not entirely a mystery, even so. McClellan took extraordinary pains to make his men feel that they were good soldiers and that the commanding general knew they were good and was grateful to them for it. After the fight at Williamsburg he was prompt to visit the regiments which had been engaged and thank them for their fine work. In one newspaper dispatch we see him visiting, in succession, the 5th Wisconsin, the 7th Maine, and the 33rd New York, making a brief, graceful little speech to each: "I have come to thank you for your bravery and good conduct in the action of yesterday. . . . You acted like veterans! Veterans of many battles could not have done better!"
Then there was the time, a few days later, when the 4th Michigan, plus a squadron of cavalry and a few engineer troops, made a reconnoissance across the Chickahominy and collided with Rebel troops, driving them off and losing some eight men in killed and wounded while doing it. McClellan visited the regiment as soon as it got back to camp; in front of the men he shook hands with the colonel and congratulated him, shook hands also with a captain who had been mentioned for gallant conduct. Then he turned to the men themselves, not with a little speech this time but with an easy, friendly comradeship. "How do you feel, boys?" There was a quick chorus of "We feel bully, General!" Still casual, McClellan asked them: "Do you think anything can stop you from going to Richmond?" And the regiment yelled "No!" in a shout that Jefferson Davis might almost have heard, off beyond the swamps in the Confederate capital; and McClellan gave the men his gay little salute and galloped away, leaving the Michigan boys feeling almost as if they had married him.10
And if there is a mystery in the way McClellan's men could ignore his care to protect Rebel property while McDowell's men found the same care unforgivable when McDowell displayed it, there is equal mystery in the way those actions were regarded back in Washington. The anti-slavery Republicans, already suspecting that McClellan proposed to sell out the Union, found in his protection of Confederate civilian property strong corroboration of their suspicion. Yet McDowell, who was doing exactly the same thing, was the chosen hero of these men. They rejoiced when he was taken out from under McClellan's command and would have liked to see him in McClellan's place; to their minds he was the shining example of what a general ought to be. Again, the answer, to an extent, may be much the same in reverse: one general had the touch for dealing with political persons at the capital, and the other general did not.
Indeed, that queer riddle of what a general could and could not do goes even farther. At the time when McClellan was slowly pursuing Johnston up to the edge of Richmond, General Halleck, out in the Mississippi Valley, was pursuing General Beauregard, who was retreating down into northern Mississippi after the dreadful, mangling fight at Shiloh. McClellan was pursuing very cautiously. His reasons might have been good or they might have been bad; in any case, his pursuit was slow, which was a damning mark against him with Secretary Stanton and the radical group in Congress. Halleck, who had more of a numerical superiority over Beauregard than McClellan had over Johnston, was edging forward with a sluggish deliberation that made McClellan's advance look precipitate, averaging hardly a mile a day and entrenching up to the ears every evening. Yet Halleck, like McDowell, was a hero to Stanton and his crowd, rising in favor daily, destined before long to be brought to the capital as supreme commander. McClellan's hesitation was proof of his disloyalty; Halleck's hesitation, twice as pronounced and far less justified, was simply ignored—by everyone except Lincoln, who felt that both men ought to hurry a little more.
All of this proves nothing much except that the nation was running a high fever and had a touch of delirium now and then. But the effects were tragic, for in the end it was those amateur soldiers down
among the Chickahominy swamps who were going to have to pay for it. The relations between a general and his superiors can't be poisoned in just one direction; the poison works both ways, and if the radicals believed McClellan to be a villain, McClellan returned the sentiment with interest. His letters to his wife no longer showed merely the irritation and nervous strain of a young general who was being crowded a little too hard; they reflected downright fury, coupled with a conviction that the civilians who were working against him were scoundrels. The detachment of McDowell's corps was "the most infamous thing that history has recorded." When the President urged McClellan to break the Confederate lines, "I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself." Long before the siege of Yorktown ended he was writing: "Don't worry about the wretches; they have done nearly their worst, and can't do much more. I am sure that I will win in the end, in spite of all their rascality. History will present a sad record of these traitors who are willing to sacrifice the country and its army for personal spite and personal aims." He spoke of his predicament—a man with "the Rebels on one side, and the abolitionists and other scoundrels on the other"—and a few days later wrote that "those hounds in Washington are after me again."
The main collision with the Confederate Army had not yet taken place. Yet already there had developed this amazing situation: the Secretary of War, plus leading administration senators, believed the general commanding the army to be a traitor who would rather lose than win, and the general, in his turn, believed that they were traitors who would rather see the country lose than permit him to win. That word "treason," so rare in American history, was dancing back and forth like a tennis ball. Misunderstanding between the home office and the man in the field had become complete; had developed a breach not to be healed, with hatred and anger and terrible suspicions that would be incredible were they not all part of the record. Like a steaming, choking fog, this atmosphere hung over the army, poisoning its chances, staining its banners. Whoever was most at fault, this heavy intangible lay across the army's path, ready to take the lives of boys who had had no part in it and who would die not knowing that it existed.
Now there could be only one road to salvation for McClellan, for his soldiers, and for the country itself. McClellan had to win. Victory in front of Richmond would swallow up everything, leaving the hot accusations and recriminations as dry bones which the historians might pick over at their convenience. The weight that rested on the broad shoulders of the young general was heavier than he knew. For if the war itself was the supreme test of democratic institutions— "testing whether . . . any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure"—the fighting of it was testing the qualities of democracy's leaders. The unfathomable strength of the country had been placed at these leaders' disposal. If that strength could be used properly, the war could be won quickly and the country would be spared much suffering. If it could not, if leadership failed to measure up, then the people themselves would have to carry the whole load, and everything they had hoped for in this bright land of promise would depend on their finding within themselves enough endurance and heroism and patience to meet the unimaginable agony which their leaders had been unable to spare them.
To which it may be said that McClellan did the best he could and that he worked under terrible handicaps, some of which he created himself. One of them—in some ways, considering his own inner nature, the most damaging of all—was a matter of detail: selection of the wrong man to run G-2, Army Intelligence—Army Secret Service, as they called it in those days.
G-2 was handled by a short, stocky, bearded man who was known around headquarters as Major E. J. Allen, and who in reality was Allan Pinkerton, famous head of a famous detective agency in Chicago. First of the country's great private detectives, Pinkerton had genuine talent, coupled with a certain flair for publicity; he had handled many jobs for railroads, as a railroad man McClellan had known him before the war, and when McClellan became a major general he called in Pinkerton and put him in charge of military intelligence, espionage and counterespionage alike. Pinkerton built up quite an organization, and in the long run what McClellan knew about the Confederate Army that was facing him was mostly what Pinkerton told him.
As it turned out, Pinkerton was a fine man for running down train robbers and absconding bank cashiers but was completely miscast as chief of military intelligence. He had energy, courage, administrative ability, and imagination—too much imagination, perhaps, for he was operating in an era when a fine hairline separated the ridiculously false from the frighteningly true. Early in 1861, while he was still in civil life, he had gone into Maryland at the bidding of the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, who had heard of secessionist plots to sabotage the railroad leading to Washington and wanted to find out about them. Pinkerton planted operatives in Baltimore, Havre de Grace, Perryville, and other places, and presently reported that he had discovered not merely a plan to sabotage the railroad but a widespread plot to kill Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration.
Pinkerton's men lived with this plot; after the war, in his memoirs, Pinkerton told how they got into secret societies, mingled freely with secession-minded Baltimore blue-bloods, cultivated beautiful friendships with Baltimore belles "under the witching spell of music and moonlit nature," and uncovered a far-reaching, elaborately detailed conspiracy for assassination. It is something of a comedown to find that the leader of this conspiracy was a barber in a Baltimore hotel —the build-up about Southern aristocrats leads one to expect a Virginia Carter, at the very least—but so it was. One of Pinkerton's men sat in on a secret meeting where men drew lots to see who would actually do the killing, another one came up with information about plans for cutting telegraph wires and destroying railroad bridges (presumably so that the North could neither learn of the assassination nor do anything about it after it had happened), and Pinkerton submitted a full report while Lincoln was on his way east.
The report caused much excitement, quite naturally: it was either a perfect script for a theatrical thriller or an astounding revelation of deadly plotting which simply had to be frustrated. As a final result Lincoln changed his plans: slipped quietly out of Harrisburg and came into Washington by sleeping car a day ahead of time, thereby arousing much derision and criticism.
Lincoln seems never to have been quite certain whether Pinkerton had saved his life or induced him to make a fool of himself, and nobody since then has been able to be quite certain about it either. The plot itself, as Pinkerton described it in his book, has a wildly improbable sound, with the conspirators behaving in an impossibly stagy manner; but just as one concludes that the thing simply could not have been true, there comes the recollection that when the 6th Massachusetts Infantry passed through Baltimore just after Fort Sumter there was precisely the kind of riot that Pinkerton's men had mentioned as a projected stage setting for the murder of Lincoln: a riot in which angry men fired real guns and in which both soldiers and citizens of Baltimore were killed. Also, in 1865, a plot quite as harebrained as anything Pinkerton's men reported did result in Lincoln's death. Men were living in the center of a lurid and improbable melodrama in those days, and if it was fantastic, it was very real; just as the tale strains credulity to the breaking point somebody is killed—by pistol or by knife or by hangman's noose. They might have exaggerated their stage effects in a most inartistic manner, but their guns were not loaded with blank cartridges.
At any rate, Pinkerton took over McClellan's military intelligence problem and applied real ingenuity to the job. His men went fanning out behind the Confederate lines to some purpose; one of them actually got in with Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, in the days before McClellan took his army down to the peninsula, and carried a pass signed by that official and became a member of a Rebel counterespionage outfit that was trying to catch Yankee spies. Each of Pinkerton's men carried a pass through the Union lines written in invisible ink which became visible only on exposure to sunlight. T
hey got in touch with a secret organization of colored men in Richmond, the Loyal League, who met in cellars and attics and whose password was "Friends of Uncle Abe," and who helped the Union operatives in and out of the Rebel capital. One agent even joined a Confederate spy team and became a courier, carrying messages back and forth between Richmond and Baltimore—the messages, of course, all being copied for McClellan before delivery. Timothy Webster, the greatest of Pinkerton's spies, was finally caught and hanged. Other spies disappeared, as spies do in wartime; but all in all they had perfected a genuinely remarkable system for getting forbidden information out of Richmond.
But the incomprehensible part about it all is that with this elaborate espionage network, operated by experts and staffed by brave and intelligent men, the information that was brought to McClellan was so disastrously wrong. Disastrously, because it made the Rebel armies appear more than twice as large as they really were and because McClellan believed it and acted on it. Pinkerton's spy system was well organized, bold, successful—and McClellan would have been infinitely better off if he had had no spy system whatever.
While McClellan was waiting in front of Yorktown, Pinkerton proudly gave him a report showing that Joe Johnston had from 100,-000 to 120,000 men in line against him. This information, he said, came from "officers of their army and from persons connected with their commissary department," where they were issuing 119,000 daily rations—the only instance in history, probably, where the Confederates were accused of overfeeding their men. Pinkerton added that it was safe to assume that his estimate was under rather than over the real figure. Now the only trouble with that was that Johnston at the time had barely 50,000 men on the peninsula. He was shockingly outnumbered and he knew it, and the only hope that he could see was for Davis to strip the Southern coast line bare of troops, no matter what the cost locally, and reinforce him with every available man so that he might be brought near enough to McClellan's numbers to have some chance of fighting a successful battle.