Mr Lincoln's Army (15 page)

But if concern over the possible hanging of
prisoners was ended, there was no quick ending for the concern over the tragedy
of Ball's Bluff. The state of Massachusetts had seen her sons sacrificed to no
purpose and had influential spokesmen in Washington; also, the state of
Massachusetts—through her governor and her senior senator —had already had
trouble with this General Stone who was responsible for the whole Ball's Bluff
business in the first place. Stone was a pro-slavery man—or at least he was not
anti-slavery, and that might be much the same thing—and there were queer
stories afloat. He went out of his way to protect Rebel property—
Rebel
property,
the property of men who were trying to destroy the government. There had been
flags of truce between his headquarters and Confederate headquarters across the
river. Mysterious messengers had been seen going and coming; there was a
question about passes that had been issued, allowing Southern sympathizers to
go through the lines: was not this general actually in league with rebellion?
Might it not be that the regiments sent across the river into a deadly trap had
been designedly sacrificed? Should not Congress look into it: Congress, whose
own hero had been slain in this affair? Should not Congress be alert to make
sure that there was no sympathy with treason in high places in the army?

Congress should. Congress acted accordingly.
And there grew out of all of this a new force in government, a force which was
to have a great effect, for good or for evil, on the way the war was run and on
the men who ran it: the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, with the
bitter-end anti-slavery radical Republicans in complete control and with
Senator Ben Wade of Ohio as chairman. Wade was as tough as Allegheny nails, and
he hated slavery and all of slavery's spokesmen; had brought his rifle to
Washington when he was elected to the Senate, daring the fire-eating
Southerners to challenge him to duel, and had given back bitterness for
bitterness, hatred for hatred, on the floor of the Senate, doing all that one
man might do to make the coming conflict a war to the knife, utterly determined
now that it should be a war to end slavery and destroy the slave-owning class
as well as a war to save the Union.

The committee held hearings and broke General
Stone. A mass of vague and mysterious evidence was collected—indefinite,
unanswerable, and damning—and it was passed along to the War Department,
accompanied by strong subsurface pressure. The evidence was just strong enough
so that McClellan himself could not save Stone, just strong enough to make
Lincoln, who had trusted Stone so deeply, admit that there seemed to be grounds
for action; and Stone was removed from his command and locked up for long
months in Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. No formal charge was ever placed
against him. He could not answer his accusers because he never knew quite what
he was accused of; he could not be brought to trial because nobody else knew
either. He was simply encased in a cloud of doubt and suspicion. One day he was
a general in charge of a division, honored among men, and the next day he was a
prisoner in a cell, walled away from the world. Months later he was quietly released;
many months after that, when Grant came to the top command, he was given a
combat assignment again, heading a brigade in the Army of the Potomac. But for
the moment he was completely ruined.
⁷

And this, if anybody had bothered to see it
that way, was more than just a rough deal for General Stone. It was a flaming
portent in the sky for all soldiers who might come to command in the armies of
the Union: the civil authority was going to ride herd on the generals, and woe
unto the man in shoulder straps who failed to please it. A new and unlooked-for
complication was entering the ancient science of war. It was not going to be
enough for a general simply to have military ability. He would have to show
that his heart was in the cause, and the definition of "the cause"
was going to be in the hands of men who had ideas never taught at West Point.

3.
I
Do
Not
Intend
to
Be
Sacrificed

That was the point General McClellan never
quite understood. How could he? No general had ever had to understand anything
of the kind before. He was not merely the commander of an army in a nation at
war; he was the central figure in a risky new experiment which involved nothing
less than working out, under fire, the relationships that must exist between a
popular government and its soldiers at a time when the popular government is
fighting for its existence.

Nothing in the country's previous
history shed any light on the problem. The Revolution itself had simply been a
great act of creation—an inspiration, from which both sides could draw
equally, but not an object lesson. Eighteen-twelve and Mexico had hardly been
more than episodes—sudden, angry outbursts of the energy of growth and
development, absorbing enough but bringing no problems that could not for the
most part be left to the regular military establishments. But this war was
different. It went all the way to the heart and it could not be left to the
regulars. Nobody had yet discovered how a democracy puts all its power and
spirit under the discipline of an all-consuming war and at the same time
continues to be a democracy. Here was where everybody was going to find out,
and the only safe prediction was that it was going to be a tough time for
soldiers.

One
thing, to be sure, had been made clear: no simple outpouring of undisciplined
and untrained men was going to win. Bull Run had taught that much. The
tradition of Lexington and Concord no longer applied. The embattled farmer,
leaving his plow in the furrow and taking his musket from the wall to go out
and whip the King's soldiers, had to sign up for three years now, and the bark
of the drill sergeant—heard all day long on every field around Washington —was
the audible symbol of the fact that until the war ended the freeborn American
was going to be taking orders. That fact had been accepted, the young general
had it well in hand, and everybody was happy about the way he was doing the
job. But what came next?

What
came next was the fact that nobody trusted anybody, which put a terrible new
factor into the military equation: an unknown, packed with explosive force.

By all standards of military common sense,
General Stone had been quite right in squelching Governor Andrew, and the
governor had been absurdly wrong. But military common sense wasn't enough now,
unless it was linked to an understanding of the overwhelming pressures which
could be created by purely political considerations. Right though he might have
been, according to the books, General Stone had in fact been wrong. By the
purely pragmatic test—how does a general act so that he can get his job
done?—he had made a huge mistake. He might have been perfectly correct in
insisting that the civil authority must not reach inside the military machine
to interfere with the discipline, but in the end the civil authority did reach
into the machinery long enough to pluck General Stone out of it. That was
doubtless very unjust, but it was the way things were and it behooved every general
to take the fact into account. The war could be won without generals like
General Stone, worthy as the man was, but it could not be won without war
governors like John Andrew, wrongheaded and obstreperous though such men might
frequently be.

There
was also the Cabinet. Specifically, there were men like the honorable Salmon
Portland Chase, Secretary of the Treasury and a power in the land. Secretary
Chase was not a particularly lovable character; he was humorless and more than
slightly sanctimonious and he was cursed with a burning, self-centered ambition
which he could always justify somehow, to himself, as a simple passion for
God's own righteousness, with which he identified his every motive. He was away
outside the field of military operations, his concern being—in theory, at
least—exclusively with currency and loans and taxation and the ins and outs of
wartime finance. But he was also a man the generals had to reckon with. He was
not in the Cabinet because he was a genius of finance; he was in there because
he was a power in politics, leader of a certain group in the electorate, spokesman
for an important number of the American people. He concerned himself directly
and immediately with military matters, and when he raised his voice on those
subjects it was listened to. So McClellan found himself, rather against his
will, closeted with the Secretary of the Treasury now and then, explaining
military plans to him and listening, with such grace as he could muster, to the
military ideas the Secretary had evolved.

There is something almost grotesque, to
modern eyes, in the recorded spectacle of Chase solemnly bending over a map of
Virginia and with pudgy forefinger tracing the proper line of operations for
the Army of the Potomac. But it is quite beside the point to say that Chase
should not have been bothering his head about such matters. There he was, one
essential element in the government of the country, embodying a popular voice
which might indeed be tragically confused but which had to be heard if the
country was to be held together. He was a part of the unknown new factor in the
problem which the young general had to solve, and there was no sense in simply
complaining that he ought not to be in it at all: he
was
in
it and he was going to stay in, and that was that.

Then there was such a man as Edwin M.
Stanton, the prominent lawyer and Democratic politician, recently Attorney
General in the dying months of Buchanan's administration, who was entering the
intimate circle around the young general as a species of unofficial legal
counselor, and who a little later was to become Secretary of War. Mr. Stanton
was irascible, with a nature which was a singular blend of a habit of blunt
speech and a fondness for devious intrigue. He had hard eyes behind steel-rimmed
spectacles and he had a talent for savage criticism—a man who could plunge into
sudden pessimism so deep as to resemble abject panic, but who could also drive
for a chosen goal with uncommon ruthlessness. Right now he was deeply disgusted
with everything the Lincoln administration was doing—with Lincoln himself, whom
he spoke of bitterly as "the original gorilla," and with all of
Lincoln's official family, which he suspected would be turned out of office
before long by the arrival in Washington of Jefferson Davis and his minions. He
was complaining that the administration was trying to give a strict
Republican-party cast to the war; a complaint which comes very strangely from
the man who, a few months later, was bending every effort to have the war conducted
by the most extreme Republican principles. He was also urging McClellan to
ignore the cackling politicians and make himself dictator. Of McClellan he
wrote despondently to Mr. Buchanan: "If he had the ability of Caesar,
Alexander or Napoleon, what can he accomplish? Will not Scott's jealousy,
cabinet intrigues, Republican interference, thwart him at every step?"
¹

With this McClellan unquestionably would have
agreed; most particularly with reference to General Scott. Scott was in the
way, and it was clear that he would have to go. He belonged to an earlier day,
and he was now hardly more than a great reputation bearing up a showy uniform.
McClellan was pointedly keeping him in ignorance of the number and assignments
of the new troops that were arriving, even though the old general was, at least
nominally, the commander of the country's armies. McClellan also was conferring
with senators and cabinet members about matters which legally fell within
Scott's purview. Painfully Scott confessed that "I have become an incumbrance
to the army as well as to myself"—for he was, as he wrote, "broken
down by many particular hurts, besides the general infirmities of
age"—and he could see that it was time for him to leave and let a younger
man take over. He hoped that the younger man might be Henry Halleck, who had
written military textbooks and who could put down on paper elaborate and
beautifully reasoned treatises on strategy, and who was casually but on the
whole respectfully known in the army as "Old Brains." But the White
House was cool to the idea. General Scott had to admit that McClellan seemed to
be in line for the place; had to admit, also, that he unquestionably had
"very high qualifications for military command"; and so in mid-August
the old general finally requested that he, Winfield Scott, be placed on the
retired list.

The President went to him and tried to
talk him out of it, and when he failed the application was simply pigeonholed,
and Scott stayed on for a time as a pathetic supernumerary, ignored and
absent-mindedly honored for what he used to be. It hurt the old man acutely,
for he was intensely vain; but Scott wrote that no matter how or where he spent
the rest of his life, "my frequent and latest prayer will be, 'God save
the Union.' "
²
And at last, in November, a couple of weeks
after the Ball's Bluff disaster, Scott's plea for retirement was accepted, and
McClellan got up in the half-light of a rainy morning to go clattering down to
the station with his mounted escort to see the old man off. There they stood on
the wet platform, formally bidding each other Godspeed, the worn-out old
soldier, grotesque with his feeble fat body bulging in its uniform, and the
dapper youngster, erect and confident, with the lesser brass standing at
attention all around; and McClellan himself felt the force of the contrast.
"It may be," he wrote to his wife, "that at some distant day I,
too, shall totter away from Washington, a worn-out soldier, with naught to do
but make my peace with God. The sight of this morning was a lesson to me which
I hope not soon to forget. I saw there the end of a long, active and ambitious
life, the end of the career of the first soldier of his nation; and it was a
feeble old man scarce able to walk; hardly anyone there to see him off but his
successor. Should I ever become vainglorious and ambitious, remind me of that
spectacle."