Terrible Swift Sword (64 page)
Jackson's men on rolling ground near a
country estate called Chantilly, a few miles directly north of Pope's camp at
Centreville.
It was a racking, bruising fight while
it lasted. Brigadier General Isaac Stevens, leading one of Burnside's
divisions, picked up a battle flag and rode into action at the head of the
column to inspire his men and was shot dead. His battle line wavered to a halt,
and the rain began to come down in blinding sheets, and the Federals were not
eager to renew the attack. Then Phil Kearny came splashing up through the mud
to try to get things in motion once more. The men did not respond, and Kearny
cursed them for laggards, and galloped down the line to find more spirited
troops. The storm was growing worse, the rain was so heavy that no one could
see anything, and Kearny rode into a group of Confederate skirmishers and was
killed before he could get away. There was a fire fight after that, with no
particular result except that a number of soldiers on each side lost their
lives . . . and at last the storm was so bad that even Jackson was willing to
call it quits, and the battle came to an inconclusive end. The Federals had
lost two of their best generals and about a thousand of other ranks, but they
had at least brought the flanking movement to a halt. Pope could stay in
Centreville if he wished.
While
Jackson was moving off toward Chantilly, Long-street's corps remained on the
Bull Run battlefield to bury their dead, bring in the wounded and pick up small
arms and other abandoned Yankee property. The private soldiers, being
necessitous, spent as much time as they could looking for food, finding quite a
lot of it in the haversacks of dead Federals. One gaunt Virginian, who held
that "you cannot hurt the dead by anything of this kind," came upon
an apparently lifeless Zouave with a full haversack, and drew his knife to cut
the haversack straps and get the rations. The Zouave opened his eyes and
begged, "For God's sake don't kill me." Horrified, the Confederate
went away, and in a letter to a friend he confessed: "I don't believe I
ever felt so bad in my life."
8
After a day of this, Longstreet's corps
followed Jackson, and on September 2 the whole army rested—which, all things
considered, is not hard to understand. Stuart's cavalry probed south and east
to examine Yankee intentions, and found that Pope's men seemed to be
withdrawing to the fortified lines around Washington; which compelled General
Lee to take thought about his next move. The Washington lines were too strong
to be attacked, and lack of supplies made it impossible for Lee to remain where
he was; as he wrote to President Davis, "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." The surest way to harass the enemy,
obviously, was to cross the Potomac and go into Maryland. The army could
provision itself there, the people of Maryland were believed to be strongly pro-Confederate
and might provide the army with many recruits, and if the army got into
Maryland the war would at least be removed for a while from the ravaged state
of Virginia. In preparing for this movement Lee had no intention of trying to
take and hold a position on northern soil, he was not specifically aiming at
the capture of Baltimore or any other city, and he was well aware that his army
was not really equipped to invade enemy territory: all of his men were ragged,
thousands of them lacked shoes, supplies of food were very low and most of the
horses were badly worn down. But the move would harass the foe and relieve
Virginia, and there was one additional possibility which Lee never lost sight
of. With a Confederate Army in Maryland the Federals would most certainly leave
the Washington fortifications and come out looking for a fight. Then the
genuinely decisive victory which Lee had been looking for ever since Gaines's
Mill might at last be won.
9
But for the moment
the pieces on the chessboard stopped moving. These pieces were living human
beings, and the amount of sheer misery some of them endured during the days
just after the battle is not pleasant to think about. Many Federal wounded, for
instance, were brought back to Fairfax Courthouse, wagon after wagon jolting in
along the deeply rutted highways, and at Fairfax there was nothing resembling a
hospital; just a huge open field, where people tore apart bales of hay and
covered the ground so that the wounded men could lie on something besides bare
earth. It was dark and there were no medicines, nothing much in the way of
food, and hardly any doctors. There were a few civilian helpers, among them a
woman named Clara Barton, and she and a few like her went briskly to work. They
found three thousand wounded men lying on the hay in midnight darkness. There was
a gusty wind that blew out most of the candles the nurses were carrying,
"and the men lay so thick we could not take one step in the dark."
The attendants had two water buckets, five dippers and a few boxes of crackers
to minister to the wounded men, and as they worked they were haunted by the
fear that someone would drop a candle into the hay and burn everyone alive.
They managed to get through the night, doing the little they could do to ease
suffering; and when morning came the army managed to bring up ambulances and
move most of the men back to the capital.
10
3.
To Risk Everything
Balance the two campaigns, second Bull
Run and the Seven Days. In each case Robert E. Lee first deluded an opponent
and then beat him. The retreat from Bull Run was like the retreat from the
Chickahominy; the defeated army was led away rather than driven away. The men
in the ranks had done their part but the man at the top never quite understood
what happened to him. There was a strange similarity in the post-battle
protests of the beaten generals. Each man said that he had been foiled by
designing men who should have helped him and did not; each asserted that by
heroic efforts he had escaped destruction, thereby putting the country in his
debt, and each insisted that he would have won if he had been properly
reinforced. Even the casualty lists were about the same. In two weeks'
campaigning around Manassas the Federals lost almost exactly the number lost in
seven days near Richmond. And because these battles had been lost the crisis of
the war was at hand at the end of August, and the administration in Washington
had to face a baffling problem in leadership.
It
was obviously necessary to get rid of General Pope, and that would be attended
to promptly. It seemed to many of the administration leaders—among them
Secretary of War Stanton—that it was equally necessary to get rid of General
McClellan, and it presently developed that this was impossible.
The effort to put McClellan on the shelf
had been going on all summer and no one was more aware of it than McClellan
himself. He had regarded the elevation of Halleck with suspicion and that of
Pope with outright horror, and when he came north from the peninsula he knew very
well that his official existence was at stake. The odds seemed to be against
him. Most of the cabinet would be glad to see the last of him, and so would the
leaders of the Republican majority on Capitol Hill. Mr. Lincoln was aloof;
since receiving McClellan's letter of advice at Harrison's Landing he had been
withdrawn, and practically all of the general's subsequent communication with
the administration had been conducted through General Halleck.
Nevertheless,
survival was possible, even probable. If McClellan were removed somebody would
have to take his place, and no good candidate was in sight. Pope was out of the
question, partly because he was not big enough but also because the Army of
the Potomac simply would not have him. Among his many problems, so many of them
self-created, Pope also had that one, and it had been a powerful handicap. What
had happened to Pope might very well happen to another man. The army's devotion
to General McClellan was something the administration could not ignore. It
actually seemed possible that at this particular moment no other general could
use the Army of the Potomac.
1
To
an extent, the army's devotion for this man had grown up naturally. McClellan
had taken thousands of untrained recruits and had made them feel like
soldiers. They had been used to confusion and he had given them order and had
taught them to be proud of themselves. It could almost be said that he had
given ancient traditions to an army that had no past. The long stay in
Washington, extended month after month while Congress and the press demanded
action, had led the men to feel that this general was on their side, protecting
them against the pressure of ignorant politicians. McClellan's personality was
magnetic; at the innumerable grand reviews that played so large a part in the
first months of the army's life it had been easy to greet him with cheers. This
habit of cheering was actively promoted. A Massachusetts officer noted that
when the army took to the road McClellan would remain in camp until the entire
column had been formed. Then he would ride to the head of the column, preceded
by a staff officer who went galloping along the line crying "McClellan's
coming, boys! McClellan's coming! Three cheers for McClellan!"
2
The officer who wrote about this considered it "claptrap and
humbug," but the men did not; one great reason being that McClellan quite
sincerely returned the affection they felt for him. His response to their
cheers came from the heart; he identified himself with them just as they
identified themselves with him. In their belief that McClellan had their
interests at heart and wanted to save and protect them in every possible way
the soldiers were entirely correct.
But it went beyond
that. Loyalty to McClellan was built up in the army as deliberately as loyalty
to a leader is built up in a political organization, and in much the same way.
It came down from the top, actively generated by the officers, and one veteran
saw the parallel clearly. "His generals," wrote this man,
"appointed and promoted through his influence, thoroughly infused a
McClellan element into their commands. An army of generals bear very much the
same relation to their chief that office holders do to the head of their party.
By maintaining him in his position they insure their own, and in promoting his
interests they promote themselves." John Pope assured the governor of
Illinois that "the praetorian system is as fully developed and in active
operation in Washington as it ever was in ancient Rome"; and although Pope's
verdict is subject to discount he touched reality in his remark that to encamp
a large army around Washington for the better part of a year was to risk
corrupting both the army and the government. In its formative period this army
had been kept too long too near the capital, and it had been incurably infected
with politics. Abner Doubleday believed that Porter was the lieutenant through
whom the McClellan influence was most actively promoted, and he wrote bitterly:
"The history of everyone who opposed McClellan has been a history of the
decline of individual fortunes."
3
Both by natural predisposition and by
good management the army was deeply, passionately attached to its general, and
the administration had to take this into account when it planned for the
future. McClellan was advised of this while he was on his way up from the
peninsula. Allan Pinkerton, who had given him such detailed information about
Rebel manpower in front of Richmond, had been in Washington taking soundings,
and on August 25 he sent McClellan an appreciation of the political situation.
President Lincoln, he said, was already growing disillusioned with Pope—this of
course was before the big battle at Bull Run made disillusion complete—and
Pinkerton felt that "unless some other military genius appears soon they
cannot do otherwise than appoint you to the command though there is no doubt
but that this will be very unpalatable and greatly against the wishes of
Lincoln, Stanton and Halleck."
Pinkerton went on to underline the
moral: "I learn that the rulers more than ever dread doing anything with
you since the Army of the Potomac began to arrive at Alexandria. I find that
many of the general officers are expressing themselves very strongly in favor
of your having moved on Richmond instead of coming here . . . rumors from
Alexandria say that the field and regimental officers are very outspoken on
this point—all of which tends to increase the fears of Lincoln and his
coadjutors, and this is the only point to hope from now."
4
With
this advice in his pocket McClellan opened headquarters in Alexandria on
August 27 (the day Jackson destroyed Pope's supplies at Manassas) and wired a
report of his arrival to Halleck, who was half a dozen miles away, in
Washington; and during the rest of August the general-in-chief and the army
commander carried on a long argument, by telegraph, over the matter of
reinforcing Pope and making Washington safe. What gave this correspondence a
slightly unreal quality was that it nowhere mentioned the one point that
neither Halleck nor McClellan ever lost sight of—the question of what
McClellan's future status in the army was going to be.
Franklin's army corps was in Alexandria
and Sumner's corps would arrive in twenty-four hours, and Halleck greatly
wanted them sent on at once to help Pope. A twenty-five-mile march would
accomplish this, and McClellan accepted the idea, in principle. Principle,
however, was subject to delays. The march was ordered; then the order was
countermanded; then it was ordered anew, and delayed again, while McClellan
sent to Halleck a record of his doubts. Franklin had no cavalry, his artillery
lacked horses; would he be of any use if, thus crippled, he did reach the
front? Was Halleck quite sure he wanted him to march? Then McClellan reported
that neither army corps was in shape to move and fight, and asked if Sumner
should not be retained for the defense of Washington; after which he reported
hearing that Lee was in Manassas and that 120,000 Confederates were about to
move on Arlington. Again he wanted to know if the advance should be made.