Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  The problem with McClellan—and by late autumn it was a large and growing problem—was that, for all his talk of ending the war quickly with a single decisive blow, and in spite of the army of half a million men he now commanded, he refused to advance against the enemy, or even to come up with a coherent plan of attack. This was in spite of continuous prodding from Lincoln, the cabinet, Republicans in Congress, and newspaper editors such as the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley. It was, indeed, their criticism of him—“meddling” with army affairs, as he saw it—that made him so contemptuous of them. He had blamed the delays on Scott. But after November 1 Scott was no longer in command, and still no plans for an advance materialized, in spite of a warm, dry autumn that was favorable to the movement of large armies.

  McClellan’s reasons for refusing to march were constantly shifting. His position was first that the men were not ready, which was in many ways accurate. Then, as months rolled by and soldiers were trained and dazzling public reviews were staged, he retooled his arguments, now insisting that he was woefully undermanned and outgunned by Confederate forces. This was to be his plaint for the rest of his war career: he was being forced to send vastly outnumbered troops to their deaths because shortsighted politicians would not give him enough men or guns. This position also had the effect of shifting blame for inaction from him to Lincoln and the War Department. In November, McClellan complained bitterly that “I cannot move without more means . . . I have been thwarted and deceived by these incapables at every turn. . . . It now begins to look like a winter of inactivity. If it is so, the fault will not be mine.”16

  It should be noted that whether McClellan is considered by history to be a morally admirable character or not—most historians have seen him as pompous, egotistical, and self-defeating, largely the result of his own self-indicting letters to his wife and others—in his caution, conservatism, and desire for perfect preparedness before making a move, he was absolutely in step with many other commanding generals early in the war, on both sides. The sort of headlong, man-wasting aggressiveness that generals such as Grant, Sherman, Lee, and Jackson later brought to the war was not yet seen as sound strategy. Who, after all, had won at Manassas, the defense-minded Johnston and Beauregard, or McDowell, with his elaborate and daring end run around the Confederate flank? McClellan, in fact, argues his biographer Ethan Rafuse, was squarely in a larger, post-Enlightenment military tradition that placed “an emphasis on logistics, sieges, and carefully executed maneuvers whose costs and risks could be rationally calculated.”17 That tradition saw its fullest flowering in the Army of the Potomac, just as it was being rendered almost completely obsolete.

  Whatever the reason, in a country clamoring for war, the blame for inaction rested largely with McClellan. In November 1861 he had three times the troops and three times the artillery of the Confederates in his front. That he did not credit this was partly because he was receiving grossly inaccurate intelligence from Allan Pinkerton, a McClellan hire from Chicago whose private detective agency seemed to specialize in exaggerating its clients’ peril. In October, Pinkerton’s operatives estimated that there were 150,000 well-supplied Confederates near Manassas. The reality was that McClellan had 120,000 against 45,000, a numerical superiority so crushing that, had he advanced, rebel forces would have been forced to retire behind the Rappahannock, if not to Richmond itself. In November Pinkerton made the ridiculous assertion that Joe Johnston had been reinforced with 75,000 fresh troops and was preparing to attack Washington.18 But these absurd bits of intelligence were only half the problem; they required some extremely credulous person to believe them. That was McClellan, who was turning out to be one of the most timid military commanders in American history. He wanted to believe Pinkerton because Pinkerton reinforced his own instinctive caution. Manassas had shown McClellan and everyone else just how much was at risk in a single battle, and how serious, well-intentioned, sober men with military experience could be made to look like fools in a matter of hours.

  A grisly reminder of this new phenomenon had taken place that fall near Leesburg, Virginia, about forty miles northwest of Washington on the Potomac River. In response to unusual Confederate troop movements, McClellan had ordered his local division commander, Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, to make a “slight demonstration” to feel the enemy out. Stone passed the order on to Colonel Edward “Ned” Baker, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln’s and a US senator from Illinois. On October 21, 1861, Baker crossed the Potomac with most of a brigade to reinforce a small raiding party, collided with Confederate forces under Nathan “Shanks” Evans, of Manassas fame, and was badly beaten at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Baker was killed, and his men were sent reeling back down the muddy, hundred-foot bluff and into the river, where they were shot in the back as they tried to swim away. For the size of the expedition, Union losses were staggering: 223 killed, 226 wounded, and 553 prisoners taken. Evans’s forces suffered less than 200 casualties.19 The disaster at Ball’s Bluff resulted in the formation in the Federal Congress of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate it, and in the rapid destruction of the reputation and career of Brigadier Charles P. Stone, the committee’s first victim. In addition to bearing responsibility for the defeat, Stone, as it turned out, had been a little too cooperative in returning escaped slaves to their owners, and this was thought to reflect on his patriotism; he was thrown in jail as a traitor. It was believed by many in the Union, and later by Stone himself, that to protect himself, General McClellan had thrown him to the wolves.

  The risks of command were equally apparent that autumn in the Union West, where another romantic egotist, General John Frémont, in a job fully as large-scale and important as McClellan’s, was presiding over a different sort of disaster. On August 10, in the first big fight in the western theater, a Union army in southwestern Missouri had been soundly defeated by Confederates at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, losing 2,500 killed and wounded. A month later, 3,500 Union soldiers surrendered at the town of Lexington, Missouri, after a brief siege. Frémont himself, famous as the “Pathfinder of the West” and the Republican candidate for president in 1856, turned out to be a miserable failure, from the ridiculous imperial pomp of his St. Louis headquarters, awash in corrupt army contracts, to his issuance, on August 30, of an unauthorized proclamation in which he declared martial law and assumed all powers of the state, announced the death penalty for all Confederate guerrillas caught behind Union lines, and freed the slaves and seized the property of all Confederate activists in Missouri. It was a breathtakingly stupid move. As Lincoln pointed out to him, shooting guerrillas would immediately prompt Confederates to retaliate by shooting Union prisoners, man for man. Lincoln also told him that freeing the slaves—which Union elected leaders had taken pains in the Crittenden-Johnson resolution of July 1861 to assure the country was not the goal of the war—could, among other things, cost the Union the support of Kentucky, one of the Union-friendly slaveholding “border states.” The price of rebellion could not be the emancipation of slaves. Not yet. Frémont compounded his error by sending his wife, Jessie, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, to inform Lincoln that her husband refused to withdraw his proclamation unless the president ordered him to, and to point out that, were the Northern electorate to choose between Frémont and Lincoln, it would certainly choose Frémont. Lincoln ordered Frémont to withdraw his proclamation. In October he relieved Frémont of command.

  Between the legendary Pathfinder in St. Louis and the dashing Young Napoléon in Washington, by December 1861 Union morale had been brought to its lowest point since the days immediately after the defeat at Bull Run. The international community, meanwhile, so crucial to the fate of the Confederacy, was beginning to sound more and more convinced of the South’s viability as an independent nation. In the late fall, the correspondent for the Times of London in Washington made an astonishing diary entry that read, “All the diplomatists [foreign diplomats], with one exception, are of the opinion t
hat the Union is broken forever, and the independence of the South virtually established.”20

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A PRETERNATURAL CALM

  The South, meanwhile, sitting smugly on its various victories, was in no hurry to make war, either. In the long, dry, warm autumn of 1861, while McClellan painstakingly built the prodigious war machine he refused to engage, the Confederate army quaintly built breastworks around Centreville, did little to reinforce Johnston’s army, basked in the sun of its own supposed invincibility, and waited for recognition or intervention from the European powers, which most Southerners supposed would surely come. Furloughs were freely granted. Officers and privates alike returned to tend the harvests at their farms and plantations.1 If European and other foreign diplomats in Washington believed that the Union was irretrievably broken, why shouldn’t the Confederates themselves? Though Jefferson Davis’s top generals in the East—Beauregard, Johnston, and G. W. Smith—pleaded with him to reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia and order a northward advance, the Confederate president, like McClellan but for vastly different reasons, steadfastly refused. There would be no great offensive strikes. Instead, armies would be recruited and dispersed over a vast defensive perimeter—a theory of war, propounded by the famed military tactician and historian Antoine-Henri Jomini and studied closely at West Point, that favored the holding of cities and other real estate over the mass destruction of enemy armies.2 That theory would soon be discredited.

  Jackson, predictably, was horrified. Camped with his brigade just a few miles from the Manassas battlefield, the man who had advocated total war even before the first shot at Fort Sumter was fired waited with growing anxiety and frustration as the weeks and months passed and no advance was ordered. “It does not appear that he was at all elated by the early successes of the Confederacy,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas, who was on his staff. “Nor did he concur in the opinion which so extensively prevailed in the fall of 1861, that the war would be a short one and our independence easily gained.”3 On September 30, Jackson and three of his colonels paid a call on President Davis, who was visiting at General Beauregard’s headquarters. It was not a casual call. Jackson was no longer a shy college professor with unusual ideas. He was a general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, and he had an agenda.

  It was his second encounter with the Confederate president. The first, which the thin-skinned, grudge-holding Davis would certainly have remembered, occurred when he arrived moments after the rout of the Federal army at Manassas, pale with rage and under the mistaken impression that all was lost. Jackson had loudly and unceremoniously informed him that he was completely mistaken. That meeting set the tone for much of their prickly relationship. Surprisingly, the two men had many traits in common. Davis had attended West Point, graduating in 1828. He had been a hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican-American War, advancing and fighting gallantly with a bootful of blood. He had spent time at various outposts in the regular army. Though as a senator from Mississippi he had emerged as one of the ideological leaders of the South, like Jackson he had been a moderate, opposing secession until his home state actually seceded. He was fair, paternalistic, and progressive in his relations with his slaves. He was like Jackson in other ways, too. He could be warm and kindhearted around friends and allies, but his public persona was often stiff, cold, and unemotional. He was known for refusing to compromise. Like Jackson, he was a chronic dyspeptic. And he was a stickler for detail, once challenging General Winfield Scott, to the latter’s everlasting chagrin, over $300 in mileage expenses on his army report. Unlike Jackson, he was transparently ambitious. “He is not a cheap Judas,” said Winfield Scott of Davis, who as secretary of war from 1853 to 1857 had been Scott’s boss. “I do not think he would have sold the Savior for thirty shillings. But for the successorship to Pontius Pilate he would have betrayed Christ and the Apostles and the whole Christian Church.” Sam Houston of Texas found Davis “ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.” That fall Davis had been engaged in a public fight with Pierre Beauregard over the latter’s self-aggrandizing and misleading battle report. Davis argued, with justification, that Beauregard had attempted “to portray himself as the sole designer and executant of the Manassas triumph.”4 (Beauregard would lose, and be shipped to the western theater in January.) Davis also fought with the hypersensitive Joe Johnston, who, outraged that he had been ranked fourth on the list to be promoted to full general, wrote Davis a long and shockingly intemperate letter.

  Though we have no record of what Davis thought of his meeting with Jackson, the latter was deeply disappointed. “I called on him this morning at about half-past ten o’clock,” Jackson wrote Anna. “He looks thin, but does not seem as feeble as yesterday. His voice and manners are very mild. I saw no exhibition of that fire which I had supposed him to possess.”5 Davis asked about the status of Jackson’s homeland—the northwestern part of Virginia. Thus cued, Jackson made his case for a strong military campaign in the region. Though it had strong Union sympathies, he believed it could be saved for the Confederacy. But Davis demurred. According to Jackson, he “did not even so much as intimate that he designed sending me there.”6 Davis changed the subject, instead chatting about what a fine general Robert E. Lee was. If Jackson’s reaction was disenchantment, Davis took away something else entirely. From these two meetings, he got the not altogether inaccurate idea that Jackson was an offense-crazed fanatic—a notion that would soon have unfortunate consequences for Jackson’s career.7

  By October, when the Confederate army retreated from a position nearer the Potomac, Jackson could no longer contain his anxiety. He took his concerns to his superior officer, Major General G. W. Smith. A Kentuckian by birth, Smith was a smart, literate, illness-prone West Pointer and a veteran of the Mexican-American War who, from 1858 to 1861, had served as streets commissioner in New York City. Jackson, who found Smith sick in his tent, sat down on the ground near the head of Smith’s cot and began talking. He was concerned, he said, that by spring the huge numbers of new recruits streaming into the Union ranks would become “an organized army” and would “have greatly the advantage over us.” His solution was to march north immediately. “We ought to invade their country now,” he said, “and not wait for them to make the necessary preparations for them to invade ours.” He believed strongly, he said, that “McClellan’s raw recruits could not stand against us in the field.”

  But Jackson had come with more than just vague nostrums for an offensive war. He had been busy doing what newly minted brigadiers were not supposed to do: thinking in sweeping geopolitical, military, and economic terms. He proceeded to lay out for the amazed Smith a full-blown plan to lay waste to the North, its armies, its industries, and its cities that would see Philadelphia in flames and Confederate armies camped on the shores of the Great Lakes. “Crossing the Upper Potomac, occupying Baltimore, and taking possession of Maryland,” he told Smith,

  we could cut off the communications of Washington, force the Federal government to abandon the capital, beat McClellan’s army if it came out against us in the open country, destroy industrial establishments wherever we found them, break up the lines of interior commercial intercourse, close the coal mines, seize and, if necessary, destroy the manufactories and commerce of Philadelphia, and of other large cities within our reach; take and hold the narrow neck of country between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie; subsist mainly on the country we traverse, and making unrelenting war amidst their home, force the people of the North to understand what it will cost them to hold the South in the Union at the bayonet’s point.8

  The vision was as prescient as it was breathtaking: the last quoted sentence is a nearly perfect summary of the logic behind the brutally destructive, punitive late-war campaigns of Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia and South Carolina, and Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.9 Jackson’s proposal to have Southern armies operate without their supply lines deep in enemy territory was made fully eighteen months b
efore Grant stunned the nation by doing that very thing—which he and Jackson had both learned from Winfield Scott in Mexico—on the way to his critical victory at Vicksburg in the summer of 1863. When he had finished, Jackson asked Smith to use his influence with Johnston and Beauregard to sell them on the idea. Smith said he didn’t think that would work, whereupon Jackson launched into another lengthy discourse, pointing out again the advantages of his plan. Such impassioned advocacy would have been unimaginable from Jackson the VMI professor. The new rank was opening him up, giving him a new sense of his own abilities, of how far he could push things. He was flexing new muscles. At length he said, “General, you have not expressed any opinion in regard to the views I have laid before you. But I feel assured that you favour them, and I think you ought to do all in your power to have them carried into effect.” Smith then told Jackson “a secret”: a plan to advance north of the Potomac had been “laid before the Government” at a meeting in early October by Johnston, Beauregard, and himself, he said. That plan had been rejected.