by Bruce Catton
New uniforms were issued, and there were reviews: a grand series of reviews, presently, with President Lincoln himself on hand to sit on his horse, lanky and ungainly, beside McClellan to watch the men march past. A boyish lieutenant on the staff of General Taylor, of the New Jersey brigade, hadn't managed to get in on the issue of new uniforms. His pants were unspeakably ragged and dirty—he confessed that he had not had them off for upward of a week—and he was excused from the review. That evening he went to General Taylor's tent on business, entered, and found Lincoln himself there, chatting with Taylor. Abashed, he tried to withdraw; no man in pants like his had any business lingering in the presence of the President of the United States. But Lincoln told him not to leave and asked
Taylor to introduce him. Taylor did so, explaining about the regrettable pants worn out in the country's hard service. Lincoln shook hands, rested his left hand on the boy's shoulder, and said: "My son, I think your country can afford to get you a new pair of breeches."7
Lincoln hadn't come all the way down from Washington just to review troops, of course, nor did he spend much time chatting with brigade commanders. He was there primarily to see McClellan and to find out for himself, if possible, just what could be done next with the Army of the Potomac. The war was approaching an unexpected crisis, and much more had been lost than a few square miles of swampland along the Chickahominy. What was fast disappearing was the last chance for a relatively short war; going with it, or soon to go, was the high hope and confidence with which the country had faced the summer's fighting. Unless the war could be won quickly it would become a new kind of war, creating its own objectives, exacting a fearful price; no longer an affair of esprit de corps and hero worship and the elan of highhearted volunteer fighters, but a long, brutal, grinding, and totally unpredictable struggle to which all the agony and heartbreak of the Seven Days' fighting would be only a prelude.
The sky had been so bright that spring, and final victory had not appeared to be far away. In the West, Kentucky and most of Tennessee were safe and New Orleans was taken, and it looked as if the whole length of the Mississippi would soon be open. In the East, amphibious expeditions had seized much of the Confederacy's coast line, and McClellan's army had seemed ready to drive straight through to Richmond. Secretary Stanton had been so encouraged in April that he had blithely closed all of the recruiting offices, which was a black item against him in McClellan's book. Now the brightness was gone and dark clouds were climbing up the sky. The armies in the West were stalled—no actual repulse anywhere, but no victories, either. Every detail of the Virginia campaign had gone awry, and men were thankful because the Army of the Potomac had not actually been destroyed. John Pope had been brought on from the West to make an army out of the scattered commands north of the Rappahannock—McDowell's, Sigel's, and Banks's—but McClellan's army still represented most of the muscle, and it was the big question mark. What could it do now? Or, considering that it was McClellan's army, what would it do? Lincoln had to find out.
When the bad news first came in from in front of Richmond, Lincoln had been consoling. In his first message to McClellan he told him: "Maintain your ground if you can, but save the army at all events, even if you fall back to Fort Monroe. We still have strength enough in the country, and will bring it out." Next day he wired McClellan: "If you think you are not strong enough to take Richmond just now, I do not ask you to just now," and promised reinforcements; a new levy of three hundred thousand volunteers was to be raised at once. On the following day he wired that he was satisfied that "yourself, officers and men have done the best you could" and conveyed "ten thousand thanks for it." A day later he repeated his acknowledgment of "the heroism and skill of yourself, officers and men" and assured McClellan: "If you can hold your present position we shall hive the enemy yet." In a letter Lincoln went into detail about reinforcements, again urged the general to hold on and make his army safe, and added in a postscript: "If at any time you feel able to take the offensive, you are not restrained from doing so." Confidently McClellan replied: "Alarm yourself as little as possible about me, and don't lose confidence in this army."
So far, so good; President and general seemed to understand one another. Now the President was on the ground to talk things over.
Yet how could they talk, those two men, even with incalculable matters depending on their coming to agreement? We know both of them by now; we have had two generations to study them and find out what they really meant. But they could never see each other clearly. Too many shadows lay between them. On each man was a pressure; in each man was an ignorance which kept him from understanding just what the other man's pressure was like—ignorance of politics, for the one, and of military affairs, for the other. Behind each man, subtly influencing him, were the suspicions his colleagues held, including on each side the dim half belief that perhaps the other man did not really wish a speedy end to the war. (Among the "war Democrats," who had no use for anti-slavery agitation, was the feeling that the Republicans did not want the war to end until it could be made into an instrument to crush slavery. Among the Republicans was the conviction that men like McClellan wanted the war to drag out into an indecisive peace-without-victory which would leave slavery intact. These two feelings were in the backgrounds of the President and the general who were to confer with each other.)
McClellan had bluntly accused the administration of infamous conduct. He had not been rebuked for it. He had had nothing from Washington since then but kind words. How could he interpret that, except as clear proof that there was infamous conduct in Washington and that the authors of it—the men who gave him his orders—felt so guilty that they dared not resent his angry words? He had invited them to cashier him and they had not done it; instead, Stanton had sent a note assuring him that "you have never had from me anything but the most confiding integrity," followed by another asserting: "No man had ever a truer friend than I have been to you and shall continue to be. You are seldom absent from my thoughts, and I am ready to make any sacrifice to aid you."
And Lincoln? Among his trusted cabinet members was Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, who has been described as an irascible Santa Claus with his stern face and his bushy white whiskers, and who was eminently level-headed, taking no part in the frantic factional efforts to tell Lincoln how to run the war. Welles had visited McClellan on the peninsula shortly after Yorktown fell and had had a long and oddly revealing talk with him. McClellan had confided his great desire to capture Charleston, South Carolina, a city which he would like "to demolish and annihilate." (The general must have been really worked up that day. It is impossible to imagine him demolishing and annihilating any city: for better or for worse, he completely lacked the Sherman touch.) In his diary—that marvelous depository for acid comments—Welles went on with the tale:
"He detested, he said, both South Carolina and Massachusetts, and should rejoice to see both states extinguished. Both were and always had been ultra and mischievous, and he could not tell which he hated most These were the remarks of the general-in-chief at the head of our armies then in the field, and when as large a proportion of his troops were from Massachusetts as from any state in the Union, while as large a proportion of those who were opposed, who were fighting the Union, were from South Carolina as from any state. He was leading the men of Massachusetts against the men of South Carolina, yet he, the general, detests them alike."8
It is easy enough at this day to see McClellan's outburst as a variant of "a plague on both your houses," directed at the fire-eaters of North and South alike, and it is hard to get very disturbed about it. But there was a war on then, and a detached attitude was hard to come by, and, as Welles said, that was an odd way for a Northern general to talk. A Northern newspaper correspondent, summing up the Seven Days' Battles, had written that "Massachusetts mourns more dead soldiers, comparatively, than any state's quota in the Army of the Potomac." It is fair to assume that Welles had told Lincoln about McClellan's words. Would not tho
se words inevitably get in between the two men as they talked about the future course of the war?
If those words wouldn't, there were others that would. Phil Kearny had been free in his comments. His insistence that he could march his own division into Richmond, after Lee struck his first blow north of the Chickahominy, and his angry denunciation of McClellan for ordering a retreat were by no means army secrets. Brigadier General Hiram G. Berry, who commanded one of Kearny's brigades, had been present when Kearny sounded off, and Berry, who came from Maine, was in steady confidential correspondence with Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin. Even earlier, Kearny had been writing to a friend in the North that "McClellan is a dirty, sneaking traitor," and was suggesting that back of McClellan's strategy "there is either positive treason or at least McClellan or the few with him are devising a game of politics rather than war." At this distance it is fairly easy to recognize Kearny as a tolerably familiar type in the long history of the American Army—the ardent, hard-fighting, distinguished soldier who just has to blow off at the mouth every now and then. But Lincoln was conferring with McClellan in 1862, and all he could be expected to see was that the most slashing fighter in the army was doubting the loyalty of his commanding general.
And Lincoln was in the mood to heed the words of a hard fighter. At bottom his whole problem was summed up in the fact that the North had the power to win the war but lacked the slugging, driving generals who would use that power. He could form his own judgments of men, and he was not persuaded by all the whispers about McClellan's loyalty; what did bother him about McClellan, from first to last, was McClellan's reluctance to crowd the enemy into a corner and punch until somebody dropped. Perhaps the most revealing remark Lincoln ever made about his relationship with McClellan was one concerning an entirely different general. Earlier that spring Grant fought the battle of Shiloh—fought it inexpertly, suffering a shameful surprise, losing many men who need not have been lost. There was a great clamor against him, he was denounced as an incompetent and a drunkard, and tremendous political pressure was put on Lincoln to remove him. A. K. McClure, the Pennsylvania politician who was intimate with Lincoln, was convinced that Lincoln, as a matter of practical politics, "could not sustain himself if he attempted to sustain Grant," and late one night he went to the White House to argue the point. He told Lincoln "with all the earnestness I could command" that he simply must get rid of Grant. Then, as McClure described it: "Lincoln remained silent for what seemed a very long time. He then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget: 7 can't spare this man; he fights.'" Lincoln had warned McClellan that there were political pressures which even the President could not resist; but to uphold a fighting general he was ready to resist any pressure whatever.9
However all of that may be, Lincoln and McClellan had their conference. And McClellan there made his crowning mistake. Having failed to understand that political considerations could modify the best plans of the best military men in a democracy at war, he suddenly switched from military planning to political planning—with disastrous results.
Here he was, barely a week after the battle of Malvern Hill, with the whole future of the war depending on the speed and energy with which the army could be repaired and thrown into a new campaign, with all of the involved problems growing out of that fact resting chiefly on himself for solution, with his own career, the fate of the army, and the safety of the country itself depending on what might come out of his talks with the President: and to the President he gave, not a plan for renewing the fighting, but a long letter telling him how he should shape the high policy of the war.
It was his desire, McClellan wrote, to expound his views regarding the rebellion, even though those views "do not strictly relate to the situation of this army or strictly come within the scope of my official duties." But the policy he was arguing for must be adopted by the
President and put promptly into effect "or our cause will be lost." It was a policy, he said, both "constitutional and conservative," which would "receive the support of almost all truly loyal men" and which, it might be hoped, would even "commend itself to the favor of the Almighty."
Specifically: "neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment." In the fighting, Federal armies should protect private property and unarmed persons, and there should be no "offensive demeanor by the military toward citizens"; there should be no military arrests, except in areas where actual fighting was going on, and where military government was set up it should be confined to preserving order and protecting political rights. Military power should never be used to interfere "with the relations of servitude"; if contraband slaves were pressed into service, the rights of their owners to compensation should be recognized. Unless some such policy as this were adopted, the effort to get new recruits for the army would fail; and if the government should adopt "radical views" on the slavery issue, the existing armies would disintegrate.
To put through such a policy, McClellan added, the President would need a sympathetic general-in-chief for the armies. He did not ask that place for himself but would willingly serve "in such position as you may assign me."
Now it is probably true that at least a part of this letter was aimed at the egregious General Pope, who had celebrated the assumption of his new command by issuing ferocious orders regarding the treatment of Rebel civilians within his lines—orders so unduly restrictive that the government quietly let them become a dead letter. To that extent McClellan was on sound ground. But there can be no doubt whatever that the final effect of the letter was to convince Lincoln that McClellan was not the general he could use to win the war.
For two reasons.
To begin with, Lincoln was reluctantly concluding that the war could not be won on the first simple flush of enthusiasm for saving the Union. That would remain the one dominant motive, to be sure: he was presently to write his famous letter to Horace Greeley declaring that he would save the Union in any way he could, whether by freeing no slaves, by freeing just a few, or by freeing all. It was a motive to which he had remained true despite tremendous pressure from his own party. He had disciplined General Fremont, first presidential candidate of the Republican party, for issuing a premature proclamation of emancipation. He had rebuked former Secretary of War Cameron when that slippery individual, deep in trouble because of slovenly administration of his office, tried to wrap the anti-slavery cloak about his bent shoulders. He had disavowed the act of General David Hunter, another hero of the abolitionists, who tried to proclaim abolition along the Southern seacoast that spring. Painfully and patiently he had tried to bring forth some solution for the terrible slavery problem aside from outright, forcible emancipation. He had persuaded a reluctant Congress to adopt a joint resolution for compensated emancipation; there had been something fairly pathetic in his appeal to the people of the slave states to support such a settlement— "I do not argue; I beseech you to make the arguments for yourselves. You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times."
But the sands were running out. By the end of the first week of July 1862, the President had just about made up his mind that some sort of emancipation program was essential as a war measure. (It was less than a week after this talk with McClellan that he first told Secretary Seward and Secretary Welles that he had come to this conclusion.) In a sense, Lincoln had gone down to Harrison's Landing with a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his pocket. Yet here was the general of his most important army saying that the one thing which he, the President, had decided must be done to win the war could not and must not be done; telling him, in so many words, that if the slavery issue were raised the army would not fight—McClellan's army, made in his own image, bound to him by battle-tested ties of devotion.
And in the second place, McClellan's letter forced Lincoln to ask just who was running the country, anyway—the civil administra
tion or a general? Obviously, if he accepted McClellan's advice, the general was running it. At that early date Lincoln was bumping into the ominous fact that when democracy makes all-out war the way is always open for military persons to take control on the plea that the military problem can't be solved unless all related political problems are adjusted, Procrustes-fashion, to fit. There had been plenty of talk for a year and more about the need for a dictator, whether in shoulder straps or frock coat. Some of it had been pumped into McClellan's own ears by none other than his present bitter enemy, Mr. Stanton. McClellan was by no means the only general who had been beguiled by such talk, nor was Stanton the only beguiler, and Lincoln knew it. Indeed, Lincoln's administration had not been a month old before Secretary Seward had given the President a letter, blandly offering to take over the job of running the government himself; did this letter of McClellan's, closing with the courteous disclaimer of any personal ambition, remind the President of that earlier letter of Seward's? The parallel is striking.
Whatever Lincoln might have thought as he read the general's remarkable letter, he gave nothing away. He thanked McClellan politely for it, put it in his pocket, and went back to Washington. Three days later he plucked General Halleck out of the lines along the Mississippi, brought him to Washington, and made him general-in-chief of the nation's armies.
And McClellan wrote to his wife that he had given the President the letter and that "if he acts upon it the country will be saved." He sent her a copy, asking her to preserve it as a document important to the record—a document proving, McClellan felt, "that I was true to my country, that I understood the state of affairs long ago, and that had my advice been followed we should not have been in our present difficulties."