by Bruce Catton
He might have had it if there had been more drive and determination in the forty-eight hours immediately after the finding of the lost order. Later, he might have had it by attacking one day earlier at the Antietam. Still later, he might have had it by co-ordinating his blows so that they came together instead of in succession, by using instead of husbanding the ten thousand fresh troops Longstreet was brooding about, by driving Porter's column into Sharpsburg at the close of the action, or by renewing the battle vigorously the next day. Lastly, all else failing, he might have used his own unique magnetism to evoke in his soldiers a sustained enthusiasm to sweep Lee's army off the smoking ridges and drive it into the river. If, just once, he could have transcended his own limitations, he might have won the kind of victory which would have ended the war in the fall of 1862. A peace made then would not have been an abolitionist's peace. It would have been the kind of peace McClellan wanted.
But those are might-have-beens. McClellan did what he did, not what he can be imagined having done. And because his victory was exactly the kind of victory it was—no bigger and no smaller—his own military career had to end. The battle and what it brought with it left him no room to stand.
McClellan himself seems to have had some dim inkling of this when the Proclamation first came out. The day after it was published he told his wife that it was doubtful if he would remain in service much longer—"the President's late proclamation, the continuation of Stanton and Halleck in office, render it almost impossible for me to retain my commission and self-respect at the same time." A fortnight later he told her how a friend had been urging him that "it is my duty to submit to the President's proclamation and quietly continue doing my duty as a soldier"; he was not sure that this advice was sound, but he would at least think it over very fully. What held him in the service seems to have been a deep, mystic feeling that he and the army had become part of each other. To a member of his staff, about this time, he said: "The Army of the Potomac is my army as much as any army ever belonged to the man that created it. We have grown together and fought together. We are wedded and should not be separated."5
Lincoln came up early in October to talk to McClellan and to review the troops. The dead men were all underground by now, and the review seems to have been successful, as such things go, although the troops were somewhat subdued: President and general together did not quite draw the spate of cheers and applause that had come on former occasions. One veteran wrote that Lincoln was melancholy: "He rode around every battalion and seemed much worn and distressed and to be looking for those who were gone"—who were, heaven knows, numerous enough to distress a much less sensitive person." McClellan, who was subtle enough in most ways although never subtle enough to understand Lincoln, found the President in good spirits. Their conversation would seem to have had a vaguely unreal quality. McClellan recorded that "I urged him to follow a conservative course, and supposed from the tenor of his conversation that he would do so"—a conservative course, in the jargon of that day, meaning one which would go directly counter to everything said or implied by the Emancipation Proclamation—and this two weeks after the paper had been signed and published.
The melancholy which a soldier thought he saw in the President was genuine enough. Lincoln was at grips with the problem of just whose army it was that he had been reviewing. Every general always says "my army" in ordinary speech. It is no more than easy shorthand for "the army which I am now commanding." Yet when McClellan said it, it seemed to mean more than that. Lincoln dispiritedly told a friend just after this review that it was not the Army of the Potomac he had been looking at—it was "General McClellan's bodyguard." From the record it looked as if that might be the case. The amazing, hysterical transformation that had taken place on the Virginia hillsides after the second battle of Bull Run meant that the men had for this general a devotion which they gave no other man; it might easily mean that he was literally irreplaceable. That devotion had compelled the administration to reinstate McClellan, much against its will; at that point he had been the only man alive who could turn the mob of disorganized soldiers into an army again. That he had done it, with his own peculiar magic, events proved. The men had instantaneously pulled themselves up from the depths of complete demoralization when he came back to them, and they had come up here to Sharpsburg to fight as they had never fought before. He had made this army, he spoke of it as "my army," and the men themselves seemed to feel exactly the same way about it. They were boys who had gone out blithely to fight a picture-book war, victims of a nationwide innocence, filled with a boyish yearning for impossible romance and adventure; nothing was left of that early spirit now except their love for McClellan. He remained as the justification of their early hopes, their last defense against complete disillusionment. Could the war go on if he were taken away? And yet could it be fought, in the only way now remaining, if he stayed?
For a time the wheel remained at dead center, and if Lincoln came to any final conclusion during his visit he kept it to himself. He went back to Washington, and McClellan busied himself with the job of reorganization. He needed much new equipment and he was not getting it fast enough; he argued endlessly with Halleck and the supply people in Washington, refusing to move until he felt the army was fully ready, insisting again that he must be heavily reinforced because Lee still outnumbered him. Lincoln prodded him ineffectually to get him to advance; lost his patience once, and when McClellan reported his cavalry horses worn out asked sarcastically just what his cavalry had been doing lately that would tire anybody's horses. Once Halleck sent peremptory orders, in Lincoln's name, to cross the river. McClellan ignored them; and while he was continuing to re-equip and reorganize, Jeb Stuart got north of the river with his cavalry and rode gaily clear around the army, getting back unhurt, while Federal detachments ran all over western Maryland looking for him. The bickering became sharper, much of it due to the old two-way misunderstanding—Washington's inability to see the need for proper organization and supply, and McClellan's own inability to realize that the enemy was in worse shape than himself and needed to be crowded a bit. But at last, seven weeks after the battle, the great army slipped down the river, crossed to the Virginia side, and started south.
McClellan seems to have planned this campaign intelligently. He took his army down the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, evidently aiming to box Lee up in such a way that Lee would have to come out and fight at a disadvantage, and there is some reason to believe that he might have had the Rebel army in a bad spot had he been allowed to continue. But his number was up. It was a different war now, and he was due to go out of it, and it was really only a question of time. Lincoln appears to have made up his mind that he would remove him if he let Lee get east of the Blue Ridge and stand in his path to Richmond; and when Lee got his army—or part of it, at any rate—to Culpeper Courthouse ahead of McClellan, that pulled the trigger. But that was only the immediate excuse. If it had not been that it would have been something else. Whenever the actual decision was made, it had been in the cards for weeks. So . . .
November 7, near midnight; a snowy night, with a cold wind out of the mountains, and everybody huddled under shelter; McClellan in his headquarters tent, writing a letter to his wife. A special train had come down from Washington that afternoon, and a War Department functionary had left it and had ridden several miles in a snowstorm, not to see the commanding general, but to call on General Burnside. This much McClellan knew, and he had a fair idea what it meant, but he said nothing and stayed in his tent, his staff all asleep. Finally there came a knock on his tent pole, and on his invitation two men came in—Burnside, looking very troubled and embarrassed, and the War Department's General Buckingham, powdered snow lying in the folds of his neat, unweathered uniform. McClellan was cordial and seemed unworried; sat them down and chatted pleasantly about this and that, quite as if a midnight call like this were an everyday occurrence. Buckingham at last remarked that maybe the general had better know what they were there for, and
handed over the papers. Letter to McClellan from Halleck—"you will immediately turn over your command to Maj.-Gen. Burnside and repair to Trenton, NJ. [McClellan's home], for further orders"; and an order from the adjutant general setting forth that "by direction of the President of the United States" the command of the army was passing from McClellan to Burnside.
McClellan read them, seeming quite unruffled—apparently the man could take it when he had to—and looked up at Burnside with a little smile. "Well, Burnside, I turn the command over to you." Almost tearfully, painfully conscious that he was not qualified to command the army, Burnside begged him to delay the transfer for at least a day or two so that Burnside might be brought up to date on troop movements, intelligence reports, campaign plans, and the like. McClellan agreed and the visitors left, and McClellan went back to the letter he was writing. He gave his wife the news and added: "Alas for my poor country! I know in my inmost heart she never had a truer servant."
True servant or false, it was all one now, and his part was finished. There were a couple of days of earnest activity at headquarters while Burnside was fitting his own staff into place—something of a scramble for assignments going on, with many jobs open for new men and with the men who were being displaced trying to find suitable billets, every officer who had a wire to pull yanking on it for all he was worth. Burnside conscientiously went to work to study the intricate web of facts, pending orders, and strategic plans which he was inheriting. Evidently they were just too much for him; he hesitated for a time, and all army movements were halted, while off to the south Lee's officers wondered briefly why the Yankees had stopped moving just when they seemed to be maneuvering effectively. Then Burnside canceled everything and decreed that the army should move east. It is hard to tell just what he had in mind, the sure professional touch at GHQ having departed with his arrival, but he seems to have had some notion of slipping unobserved around the Confederates' right flank—the one maneuver which no Federal general ever succeeded in accomplishing against Robert E. Lee. So the army pulled itself together and made ready to move.
Meanwhile, one little ceremony remained: to say good-by to General McClellan. On November 10, the order of removal having been published, McClellan rode through the camps around Warrenton, and for the last time the fighting men raised their shouts to the wintry sky as the jaunty little man on the great black horse came riding down the lines.
There they were, brigade after brigade, desperately yelling their farewell: the men who had been a loose militia muster until he made them an army, the men who had found pride and strength in being soldiers because it was he who taught them soldiering, the men who, for all their hard knowledge of battle, could still see a shine and a color in war as long as he led them. They had struggled in the Chickahominy swamps and sweltered in the noisome camp at Harrison's Landing, they had gone laughing under the flags at Frederick and had stormed through the smoke to the Dunker church, and he was part of it all; he had lived through those things with them and somehow had given them meaning, so that endurance and hope had been easier because of him. And now he was going away and they would never see him again, and if they were to have endurance and hope they would have to find them for themselves because no one at the top was going to provide them any more.
McClellan passed by the long ranks, and the cheers went up as long as his figure was in sight; and in his wake there rang out yells of "Send him back! Send him back!" Here and there a regiment threw down its arms, swearing angrily, saying it would fight no more. One general was heard (or was reported to have been heard) to call out: "Lead us to Washington, General—we'll follow you!" He came down the Centreville pike at last—that already historic road of battle, the road that had led Pope and McDowell to Bull Run, the road along which the Iron Brigade had found its first experience of combat— and Sumner's corps was lined up on one side of the road, Porter's corps on the other. (Porter himself was doomed now, a sure sacrifice to the vindictive charges filed by Pope; only with McClellan in command could he be protected, and the same officer who brought down the orders relieving McClellan had brought other orders relieving Porter. He was to be court-martialed and cashiered before the winter ended.) These two corps, where affection for McClellan ran higher than anywhere else in the army, stood in long ranks facing the roadway, batteries of field artillery drawn up here and there in the intervals between brigades. They snapped to present arms as the general came up, and then the rigid rows of muskets jerked all askew as the men began to yell, and there was a great cry all along the road.
He passed by and went out of sight, and came finally to the railroad station, where a guard of two thousand men had been drawn up for a final salute. McClellan got on the special train, the guns boomed out—and then the men broke ranks, swarmed about the car, uncoupled it, swore that he should not leave them. McClellan came out on the rear platform and raised his hand, and they all fell silent.
"Stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well" he said. The demonstration stopped. Silently the men re-coupled the car, the conductor waved a signal to the engineer, and the train clanked out of the station. A veteran recorded: "When the chief passed out of sight, the romance of war was over for the Army of the Potomac."7
Washington seems to have breathed a collective sigh of relief when he went. There had been fears that the army would mutiny—fears that seemed well grounded, if the loose talk that had been flying around army headquarters was listened to. Young Lieutenant Wilson noted that staff officers had been drinking heavily and had been "talking both loudly and disloyally," and there was a good deal of campfire chatter to the effect that the army ought to "change front on Washington," oust the government, and put McClellan in control of civil and military affairs alike. But this was just staff talk, after all, and it reflected the hysteria of individuals rather than the temper of the soldiers. The men who yelled and wept and threw down muskets were expressing grief and anger, but it does not appear to have entered their heads that the order from Washington might actually be disobeyed by one hundred thousand trained men who had weapons in their hands. Washington need not have worried; they just were not that kind of army.
Indeed, there were mixed feelings among the men here and there. In Burnside's IX Corps the change was actually welcomed; those men had not served under McClellan very long, they did not yet realize how Burnside had misused and wasted them on the hills southeast of Sharpsburg, and they felt that their likable corps commander should do very well indeed at the head of the army. In the New England regiments, where abolitionists were numerous, there was very little grumbling. Some soldiers comforted themselves with a tale that McClellan was really being called back to Washington to replace Halleck. And there were a few men who had seen enough of the final thinness of the Rebel lines at the Antietam to feel that McClellan had failed them there: men who recorded that after that battle the army's cheers for the general had not quite had the warmth they had had before.8
It was left for a campfire group in the 17th Michigan to provide the characteristic soldier's comment. These men discussed pros and cons that evening. They were profoundly depressed—the regiment had fewer than three hundred men now, and it had left Detroit in August a thousand strong; the boys had learned a lot these last three months. They suspected that the worst would come of this change in generals, and now that they thought about it they concluded that none of their generals really amounted to very much. So, said their historian, they finally agreed that Lincoln ought to retire all of the generals "and select men from the ranks who will serve without pay, lead the army against Lee, strike him hard, and follow him until he fails to come to time." Having expressed this crude front-line wisdom, they grinned ruefully, wagged their heads, and went off through the sleety rain to their pup tents.9
And presently the army began to move again; not down the line of the railroad, where McClellan's plan would have taken it, but southeast along the Rappahannock toward Fredericksburg, where Burnside wanted to go. The
bugle calls spattered through the camps, wagons were loaded, and regiment after regiment swung into column and marched out into the muddy road. The veteran who put it down on paper was right: the romance was gone from the war now. They had left it behind them, with the lemonade and fried chicken of the ladies' committees at the railway stations, with the brightness of the uniforms that had never known mud or smoke, with the lighthearted inconsequence of those early days when it seemed as if the war might be more than half a lark, when the sky was bright with wonder and the chance of death was only a challenge to set vibrant nerves tingling.
The romance had gone—inevitably, because the war itself was not romantic. The young soldiers were veterans at last. They were not McClellan's army any longer, and they never could be again; they were Lincoln's army now, or the country's, or the army of some inscrutable tide that was flowing down the century to change everything they were used to and break the way for something unimaginable. They had been that army all along, as a matter of fact, and now the war was something that could not be fought on tag ends of youthful hero worship. Now it was going to be ugliness and dirt and pain and death, with the good men getting all the worst of it while the shirkers went straggling off to safety; and the men knew it, and put their feet on the Virginia road to go where it might lead them.
The road ahead was long, and it was to lead them to worse than they had had: to Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, to Gettysburg and the Wilderness, to the sickening meadows at Cold Harbor and the squalid trenches around Petersburg; to the ultimate misery and bleak wisdom that lie at the end of all the roads of war. They were on their own now, fighting for something they had not been asked about; they had made the victory through which the war had been given its lasting meaning, and now they would have to go on to the end of it, marching doggedly to the dark fields where they would be called on to give the last full measure of a devotion which they themselves could never understand or define.