The fires at Manassas still smoldered on August 28 as the mass of Union troops arrived. Pope and his colleagues had no idea where the enemy had gone until word came that Confederates had been sighted on a ridge in the high hills to the west. The Federals did not know that Lee roamed nearby and that he had combined his force with the men under General James Longstreet, the devoted and talented leader referred to by Lee as “my old war horse.” Over the next two days, Federal soldiers received another pounding in fighting that came to be known as the Second Battle of Bull Run, or Second Manassas. Pope mishandled the fighting, but some in Lincoln’s Cabinet came to believe he was not entirely to blame. They felt that McClellan, with a portion of his army in Alexandria, could have done more to help. In response to a query from Lincoln as to the best course of action, McClellan wrote during the height of the battle that it might be advisable to leave Pope to “get out of his own scrape” while he focused on securing the capital. While the president pondered whether McClellan wanted Pope defeated, Cabinet members expressed fury. Chase privately called McClellan “an imbecile, a coward, and a traitor,” and a chorus of critics called on Lincoln to remove him. The president was not ready to take that step. “Unquestionably he has acted badly toward Pope! He wanted him to fail. That is unpardonable. But he is too useful just now to sacrifice,” he told an aide. “If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.” The president told Welles, “McClellan has the army with him.”
Lee prepared for another bold move. He thought the time was right for an invasion. The two Union armies still had not unified, their leadership appeared fractious, and the soldiers weakened and demoralized. “The purpose, if discovered, will have the effect of carrying the enemy north of the Potomac, and, if prevented, will not result in much evil,” he wrote to Jeff Davis from a base about thirty miles west of Washington. His ambition contrasted sharply with his army’s material circumstances. Just one year into the war, Lee’s men struggled with a shortfall of wagons and too few healthy horses to pull them. Many wore rags for uniforms and thousands marched barefoot. His biggest concern was a dwindling supply of ammunition.
“The army is not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory. It lacks much of the material of war,” Lee wrote Davis on September 3. “Still, we cannot afford to be idle, and though weaker than our opponents in men and military equipments, must endeavor to harass if we cannot destroy them.” Lee added another request for emphasis. “If the Quartermaster’s Department can furnish any shoes, it would be the great relief. We have entered upon September, and the nights are becoming cool.”
The next day, the army forded the Potomac and entered Maryland. Lee ordered all commanders to reduce their supplies to the minimum. This was in part to minimize the demands on the overtaxed animals the army needed to move cannons, ordnance, and food. “All cannoneers are positively prohibited from riding on the ammunition chests or guns,” General Orders No. 102 stated. Questions about supplies arose again on September 7. Though the rebels had been treated kindly by Southern-leaning Marylanders, they still did not have enough food or animals. Many residents were unwilling to accept Confederate money. Lee grew more concerned, aware that a lack of supplies could hobble his remarkable and dedicated force every bit as much as fire from the enemy. “I shall endeavor to purchase horses, clothing, shoes, and medical stores for our present use,” he wrote Davis, “and you will see the facility that would arise from being provided with the means of paying for them.”
* * *
Washington no longer had serious qualms about its supplies. With logistical systems taking hold, the shortfalls the year before had been replaced by abundance. The main challenge was moving the materiel to the men in the field. The main fear was that field generals would not use what they had to crush the enemy. Lincoln complained that McClellan suffered from an ailment he called “the slows.”
Meigs desperately wanted the army to make the most of what his department had made available. He obsessed over finding efficiencies. In September 1862 he turned his zeal on McClellan about the army’s use of wagons. Questions about such lowly transport might seem trivial against the spreading carnage. Meigs knew better. Steamboats and railway offered remarkable advantages to the North, but supplies still had to get from wharves and depots to soldiers in the field. The wagon was the way. Meigs admired the regulation army model known as the Conestoga. It had been refined over the years on the western plains. Stout and lumbering, it had interchangeable parts that could be repaired in camp with portable forges. Each wagon had a tool box in front, a feed trough in back, and an iron “slush bucket” for grease hanging from the rear axle. Freight was protected by a canvas cover. Drawn by four to six horses, a wagon could move 2,800 pounds of supplies over good roads in good weather. A team of six mules could carry more than 3,700 pounds, plus about 270 pounds of forage.
The army’s problem was that the wagons had to be managed properly, and in the rush to war, no one had established clear guidelines for their use. The wagon trains that followed the armies reached absurd proportions, causing chaos and slowing nearly every movement. They carried every kind of comfort: stoves, kettles, pans, chairs, desks, trunks, valises, knapsacks, tents, floorboards, and any other conveniences. Loaded in this way, the wagons could go about two and a half miles per hour over good roads. They could barely move on bad ones. By summer’s end in 1862, Halleck, Meigs, and McClellan realized that the wagon trains sometimes created as many problems as they solved. Meigs now fixed on the matter of how to respond to requisitions from McClellan’s officers. They had asked for far more stuff than their available wagons could deliver to the front lines. Meigs checked his ledgers. At Harrison’s Landing, McClellan had thousands of wagons and ambulances and about five times as many horses and mules to pull them. Yet since then, the army had ordered still more horses.
In a stern letter to McClellan, on September 9, Meigs insisted on reforms. He prescribed no more than three wagons for stationary regiments to carry daily rations. Remaining wagons should be set aside for supply trains. He said that officers had to curb their appetite for comfort, including their use of the voluminous Sibley tents. Meigs felt they should make do with smaller, more portable “shelter tents.” He was motivated in part by the cost of cotton, which was rising because of the war. Soldiers dubbed the small shelter a “dog tent,” because that’s what it seemed fit for; sometimes they stuck their heads out of the tents and barked like dogs. The name for the small shelters eventually became “pup tent.” The quartermaster pegged the ideal use of wagons at about one for every eighty men, roughly the standard adopted by Napoleon. He noted that the Army of the Potomac used about one wagon for every thirty-four men, an untenable arrangement. “The extra wagons, now filled with officers’ baggage, should be emptied, and the officers compelled to move without this unnecessary load,” Meigs wrote. “None but the stringent authority of the commander of the army can carry out this reform, and, until it is done, the army will not be a movable one, and will not be effective.”
In a related push for mobility, earlier Meigs had circulated a French proposal for the organization of a light, highly mobile “flying column” of troops that would lighten the burden on the army’s logistical system and diminish the need for wagons and animals. The paper, prepared by a contractor to the French army, prescribed columns with two thousand infantry, four hundred cavalry, two pieces of artillery, and fifty horses. Soldiers would carry eight days of their own rations, including coffee, tea, sugar, rice, seven pounds of “sea biscuits,” and “desiccated and compressed vegetables.” The paper said the soldiers would be divided into squads, the members of which would share the burden of carrying equipment, including sections of shelter tents. In theory, the flying columns created a nimbler force, at least in the short run. Wagons loaded with additional supplies could follow in the rear. “Alarm the enemy, break up his camps, and keep always advancing,” the paper said.
In distributing the document, Meigs
suggested further that such squads take along hand mills for grinding corn, with the aim of lessening the burden on the Quartermaster Department to provide flour for bread. He wrote that such innovations might prove interesting to “some of our intelligent officers” and “may bear fruit.” He was right. A year later, in Special Orders No. 65, the Army of the Potomac established a special board to examine the reforms. After experimentation and refinements, the board found the flying column system workable. At Meigs’s urging, Rufus Ingalls, chief quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac, began adopting variations of the system in future campaigns.
There’s no mistaking Meigs’s goal in all of this. He wanted to burn away the fat in a young army and render it a lean and fast-moving force.
* * *
As Lee moved north in early September 1862, Federal fighters needed to be more mobile than ever. Lincoln felt the rebel army had to be confronted and destroyed. The president had more than the military threat in mind. He wanted a victory to reassure despondent Northerners, whose confidence and support wavered precariously. As one New Yorker wrote in his diary, “The nation is rapidly sinking just now, as it has been sinking rapidly for two months and more.” The president also had to offset diplomatic efforts by the Confederacy to win recognition from France and England as an independent country. Lincoln saw a chance to crush the enemy, if only he could get McClellan to move. “God bless you, and all with you,” Lincoln wrote the general, “Destroy the enemy, if possible.”
For his part, Lee thought a thrust into Maryland might force the White House into a bind. The North could accept Confederate appeals for independence, or it could be blamed for continuing a devastating conflict. Lee hoped his maneuver would bolster the efforts of “Peace Democrats” in the North’s coming elections. But luck seemed to be on the Union’s side. On September 13 a Union corporal near Frederick, Maryland, saw an envelope on the ground that contained Lee’s plans for the campaign, Special Order 191, wrapped around three cigars. It was the greatest intelligence coup of the war, a single document spelling out the positions of Lee’s divided forces. About midnight, McClellan sent a dispatch to the president. “I have all the plans of the rebels, and will catch them in their own trap,” he wrote. “Will send you trophies.”
Had McClellan moved immediately, he might have decimated Lee, whose disjointed army still straddled the Potomac. Instead, McClellan hesitated under the impression that enemy forces outweighed his own. The delay gave Lee time to gather his troops near Antietam Creek, not far from the town of Sharpsburg. McClellan massed his men there as well. On September 16 he took still more time to examine Lee’s lines and put his units into what he considered proper positions. The bloodiest day of the war began the next morning with the pop-pop of occasional firing, a sound that soon blossomed into an encompassing roar. By sunset, the death toll set a single-day record for the conflict: more than 3,650 dead. Another 17,300 were wounded. Lee intended to plunge into the fight again the next morning, but his officers convinced him that would be misguided. He ordered a retreat back across the Potomac. No one on the Union side moved to stop him. McClellan claimed later that he had planned on resuming the fight but felt compelled to bury the dead. He also said his men needed rest and that he saw “long columns of dust” to the south that he said proved rebels were arriving to reinforce Lee. “This army is not now in condition to undertake another campaign nor to bring on another battle,” McClellan reported to Washington. “Not a day should be lost in filling the old regiments.”
Much of Washington writhed with the constricted hope that McClellan would go on the offensive. “The country is becoming very impatient at the want of activity of your army, and we must push it on,” Halleck wrote three weeks after the battle. “There is a decided want of legs in our troops. They have too much immobility, and we must try to remedy the defect.” Lincoln visited the army to try to understand McClellan’s hesitation. On his return to Washington, he directed Halleck to order McClellan to cross the Potomac, fight the enemy, or drive him south before the roads became impassable in fall rains.
And now McClellan turned to an old excuse, contending the Quartermaster Department had let him down. The army could not move because it had not received enough horses, clothing, or other supplies. McClellan said he had done what he could with what he had been given. The department had worked feverishly to support the force in Maryland. If some men did not have new boots, it was not for want of supply. One depot in Washington alone issued an average of 25,000 pairs a week from a supply of more than 116,000 on hand. McClellan’s well-provisioned men tarried while Lee’s forces moved swiftly south. The rebels were bloodied, exhausted, and in rags, but they moved. “History records but few examples of a greater amount of labor and fighting than has been done by this army during the present campaign,” Lee wrote Davis during the march south. “The number of bare-footed men is daily increasing, and it pains me to see them limping over rocky roads.”
Stanton felt compelled to examine McClellan’s claims. He put to Halleck a set of pointed questions. Halleck responded with a scathing report that defended Meigs and derided McClellan. He said the army had not made many of the requests that McClellan claimed were not fulfilled. Records showed forty-eight thousand pairs of boots and shoes had been delivered to McClellan at Harpers Ferry on the twenty-first and that ten thousand more were on the way. If they did not get to every man in time, some blame was due to the natural friction generated by large supply networks. “I am sick, tired, and disgusted with the condition of military affairs here in the East,” Halleck wrote a friend. “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of.”
For his part, Rufus Ingalls downplayed questions about a lack of clothing. In doing so, he also expressed unease about being stuck in the middle of a fight between Meigs and McClellan. Meigs gently upbraided him in a note that articulated the support role he thought quartermaster men ought to play in the war. “[T]he Quartermaster-General would regard it as a great misfortune, if not a great crime, to have any controversy grow up between it, or its officers, and the generals commanding armies,” Meigs wrote. “The Quartermaster-General desires to accomplish this, and will not allow any controversy to arise.”
For all the frustration, Lincoln could at least lay claim to a victory at Antietam. He had been waiting for such a moment all summer. He wanted to use a positive development to announce his plan to free the slaves living in rebellious states. On September 22, 1862, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, set to take effect at the beginning of the new year. The proclamation gave formal weight to a practice well under way in the field. Though Lincoln did not go into the war to emancipate, he turned to it now to accelerate the demise of the Confederacy. According to historian James McPherson, “Emancipation was a means to victory, not yet an end in itself.”
Meigs welcomed the announcement. His views about slavery had evolved, just as he had changed and grown over the last two years. His ambivalence was gone. He thought that freed black soldiers might spur slaves to rise up and join the Union, and he said so in clear terms. He hoped they would form “a dark & threatening cloud which will burst in tempest overthrowing Jeff Davis and his white ‘nation.’ ”
CHAPTER 26
Hope Wanes
On November 5, 1862, Lincoln ordered Halleck to relieve McClellan of command and named Major General Ambrose Burnside as his replacement. Although Burnside had performed poorly at Antietam, Lincoln hoped that he would take the fight to Lee. Burnside wanted to please the president, but he stumbled from the start. Instead of moving directly south as expected, Burnside decided to head east toward Fredericksburg, Virginia. He worried that a southern thrust could not be supported properly by the single-track railways available to him in the other direction. Halleck initially opposed the change and went to talk to Burnside, taking along Meigs and Brigadier General Herman Haupt, chief of construction and transportation for the US Military Rail Roads in Virginia, to weigh the logistical qu
estions. Halleck reluctantly agreed with Burnside, who then rushed his army toward Fredericksburg. Everyone felt that swift movement was essential to gaining an advantage. “Movement in everything and everywhere is essential. Trains must not stand still,” Haupt wrote Burnside. “[T]he time for this should be measured by minutes, not hours.”
Their plan was subverted by miscommunication. Burnside expected to receive pontoons from Meigs to support a temporary bridge across the Rappahannock River. Halleck and Meigs thought that Burnside intended to use a shallow ford upstream of Fredericksburg to cross the river. So they made no arrangements for the pontoons then. As a consequence of the confusion, Burnside’s advance was delayed for weeks, giving rebel forces time to gather behind the town, on a ridge known as Marye’s Heights. On December 13, 1862, two days after the army finally crossed the river, he ordered the troops to attack a sunken road at the base of the heights. Their target turned out to be a rebel stronghold. Burnside ordered wave after wave of troops against it. Union casualties soared by the hour, almost equaling the losses at Antietam. As one historian wrote, it was “a futile, wild, fantastic, direct slam by Federals against the exceedingly well entrenched Confederates.”
The hapless general later displayed a grace and humility that distinguished him from McClellan. In the aftermath, questions about the culpability of Meigs or Halleck in the planning mishap faded away. “For the failure of the attack, I am responsible,” Burnside said in a report about the fiasco. The bloodletting left him shaken. Weeks went by without any follow-through. Lincoln, Stanton, Meigs, and others in Washington grew impatient and angry. The public lost heart, meanwhile, and the newspapers howled for action. Meigs decided to cajole Burnside and on December 30 penned a letter that illuminated yet again the myriad roles he played during the war, including manager, accountant, planner, counselor, and scold. “My Dear General,” he wrote, “You were good enough to say that you would be pleased to hear from me, and I venture to say a few words to you which neither the newspapers nor, I fear, anybody in your army is likely to utter. In my position as Quartermaster-General much is seen that is seen from no other stand-point in the Army.”
The Quartermaster Page 17