Mr Lincoln's Army (18 page)

But beneath this enthusiasm and eager hope
there were doubt and bickering, and the men who knew the most were the men who
worried the most. A cloud somewhat larger than a man's hand lay upon the sky:
symbolized, as winter died, by a very literal cloud of black, oily smoke rising
from the burning supply depots of the Confederate encampments around
Centreville and Manassas. Confederate Joe Johnston, meditating on the fact that
McClellan had three times his numbers, had decided not to wait to be pushed. He
put the torch to all the goods he could not move—a million pounds of bacon, along
with much else, went to the flames—and he pulled his army out of its
entrenchments, marching back to a safer post behind the Rappahannock River.
And while this retreat was, in a way, what everybody had been hoping for—Rebel
vedettes could no longer gaze insolently down on the capital city, and the
troublesome batteries along the Potomac were all evacuated, leaving the
waterway clear—the move took the high command by surprise. It might be cause
for joy, but it was also very disturbing.

To General McClellan, among others. In the
elaborate chess game that was just beginning he had worked out a clever
sequence of moves, and this retreat joggled the board and displaced the men.
McClellan had planned to float his army down to the mouth of the Rappahannock,
landing at a town called Urbanna, some sixty miles due east of Richmond. That
would put him in Johnston's rear, the Confederate Army would have to retreat in
hot haste—and, being so hasty, very likely in considerable disorder—and the
Federal army would be where it could cut off this retreat and bring on a battle
under highly favorable circumstances. But now Johnston was not where he had
been, and the Urbanna move was no good. Committed to the water route, at the
cost of long, infinitely difficult wrangles with President and Cabinet,
McClellan realized that he would have to go to Fortress Monroe and make his way
up the long peninsula between the York and James rivers.

In a way, that was all right. His flanks and
his supply line would be protected, and he had been informed that the
peninsular highways were sandy, and hence readily passable in wet weather—a
thumping bit of misinformation, if ever there was one. But it meant a slow,
slogging drive, no chance to cut off the Rebel army, and a big, stand-up fight before
Richmond was reached. He had written earlier that the move via the peninsula
was "less brilliant." Still, he greatly preferred it to the overland
route, which was what Lincoln and his Cabinet wanted: the route straight down
the railroad track, supply fine getting longer each day and cruelly tempting
the Rebel cavalry raiders, and all sorts of mischance possible as the army got
deeper into enemy territory.

There had been trouble about that; much
trouble, the end of which was not yet. Out of it had come a singular
episode—fantastic, reflecting the temper of the times and the strange character
of the war they were fighting. It happened, oddly, on the very day General
Johnston started his gray columns south out of Manassas, when Lincoln sent for
McClellan early in the morning and asked him to come to the White House. When
McClellan got there he found the President sober, somewhat distraught. There
was, said Lincoln, an ugly matter to talk about. It seemed to be so ugly that
Lincoln hardly knew how to begin; McClellan finally had to prompt him by suggesting
that, the uglier the matter was, the better it would be to speak about it
frankly and openly. So Lincoln got into it.

People had been telling him, said the
President, that there was much more to McClellan's plan of campaign than met
the eye. The big objection to taking the army down the bay by water had always
been the fear that Washington would be left uncovered, defenseless against a
sudden Rebel stab—and a successful stab into the heart of the capital would
mean the end of everything, the Southern Confederacy a real nation, the mystic
union of the states dissolved forever. Now, the President went on, it was
being alleged, by men whose suspicions had to be taken into account, that
McClellan was planning to leave the capital unprotected on purpose—that he was
inviting the Rebel stab, that he wanted the Confederacy to win, that he was
moving according to stealthy and treasonous design.

McClellan sprang to his feet. He could permit
no one, he said, to couple his name with the word "treason." Years
later he wrote that he spoke "in a manner not altogether decorous toward
the chief magistrate." The President, said the general hotly, would have
to retract that expression. Lincoln tried to soothe him; the expression was not
his, he was merely telling McClellan what others were saying. For his part, he
did not for a moment believe that McClellan had any traitorous intent. (Which
should have been fairly obvious; otherwise, he was simply an imbecile to
retain him in command of the army.) McClellan's feathers, having been
thoroughly ruffled, were slow in settling back into place. He remarked that the
President might well be careful thereafter in his use of language. Again Lincoin
insisted that the offensive accusation was not his; according to McClellan,
Lincoln apologized, and the general finally took his leave, wondering how
"a man of Mr. Lincoln's intelligence could give ear to such abominable
nonsense."

Abominable nonsense it surely was. Lincoln
was no fool and McClellan was no knave, but they sat in the White House and
this monstrous accusation that the commander of the nation's armies was a
traitor had to be taken up and considered, dark suspicion being the order of
the day. What a change had taken place since the great days of the previous
July when all anybody wanted was to entrust the country's fate to the young
general from the West; what an unendurable tension must have been in the air,
to make such an interview possible!

Yet McClellan seems to have missed the real
point. He left the White House feeling that Lincoln himself more than half
believed the charge, and he was naturally full of deep resentment. But somehow
he never realized that the mere existence of this calumny must profoundly
affect his own course of action. Here again was that unknown quantity in the
military equation he had to solve, and there was nothing in the West Point
textbooks to prepare him for it. How does a general beginning a great campaign
act, when the men he must report to suspect that he wants to lose rather than
to win?

The one thing that is obvious is that such a
general does not act the way generals ordinarily act. For McClellan was not a
general out of the military histories, solving according to the best scientific
principles the problem which the civil power had handed him; he was a man
living and working in an era so desperately beset that "abominable
nonsense" could be believed by responsible public officials. What might
be permitted to a general in another era would not be permitted to him. The
existence of the deep and terrible suspicion and uncertainty which lay back of
Lincoln's summons to the White House would have to be as much a factor in
McClellan's calculations as would the strategic plans of General Joseph E. Johnston.
Lincoln had tried to tip him off, and McClellan could see only that a great
injustice was being done.

Events were not kind to him in the days
immediately after the interview. Johnston's retreat became known. McClellan
marched his troops down to Centreville and Manassas, partly for pursuit, in
case the Confederate withdrawal offered an opening to strike, and partly to
give the army practice in cross-country movements. Viewed by a military eye,
the defensive works which Johnston had evacuated were indeed strong; but in the
gun emplacements there remained large numbers of harmless wooden cannon—trimmed
logs, painted black and upended over wagon wheels, menacing-looking from a
distance but incapable of killing Union soldiers. Whether these Quaker guns had
been there all the time or had simply been put in place by the wily Confederate
leader (a man fertile in deceptive expedients) to cover the withdrawal, no one
knew—or much cared: for the obvious fact was that in nearly eight months of
command McClellan had never got his troops close enough to Johnston's lines to
find out whether Johnston's guns would shoot or not. The story of the wooden
guns went all across the land, and there was an uproar: so
this
was
the danger that had kept the great Federal army immobile all fall and winter.
Proper military caution was made to look like plain timidity. It was unfair,
but there was no help for it; and the men who doubted McClellan's desire to win
a victory had one more item to record against him.

None of this depressed the army itself. The
boys enjoyed the march, even though they had strong remarks to make about the
depth of the Virginia mud; and while they were innocently eager to go into
action they were willing to agree that the general who kept them from
assaulting the wicked entrenchments around Manassas had done them a good turn.
McClellan deftly reminded them of this in a spirited address issued at Fairfax
Courthouse in mid-March. After telling the soldiers that he was about to take
them "where you all wish to be—the decisive battlefield," and
remarking that the time of inaction was over, he declaimed:

"I am to watch over you as a parent over
his children; and you know that your general loves you from the depths of his
heart. It shall be my care, as it has ever been, to gain success with the least
possible loss; but I know that, if it is necessary, you will willingly follow
me to our graves for our righteous cause.
...
I shall demand of you great, heroic exertions, rapid and long marches, desperate
combats, privations perhaps. We will share all these together; and when this
sad war is over we will return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher
honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the
Potomac."
¹

The army was definitely going to move. With
the Manassas line evacuated, it was going to go to the peninsula rather than to
Urbanna, and the transports had been assembled. Lincoln was deeply dubious about
the move, and he laid down as the unalterable guiding principle that, no
matter where the army went or what it did, Washington must not for one minute
be left unprotected. The steps he took to make certain of that point were not
especially pleasing to McClellan. He first removed McClellan from command of
all the armies and limited him to command of the Army of the Potomac. (There
may be some reason to suppose that this was simply a precautionary measure—that
Lincoln intended to have a long look at McClellan in actual field operations
and was ready to restore him to supreme command if everything went well. No one
was named to the vacated job for some months. McClellan, of course, could see
it only as a demotion, and it rankled.)
²
As a second step, having
stipulated that the capital must at all costs be left secure, Lincoln called a
council of McClellan and his corps commanders—those new corps commanders, in
whose selection McClellan had had no voice—and asked them what force they, as
military men, thought adequate to insure such security.

The assembled generals, after taking thought,
reported that forty thousand men "in and about Washington" would be
adequate. Lincoln accepted this figure, stipulating in addition that a
substantial guard must also be left in the neighborhood of Manassas, to keep
the Confederates from reoccupying their abandoned works. This was agreed to.
There were men enough to provide this force and still leave McClellan ample
means for his campaign on the peninsula. But while the men were going aboard
ship and the first of the transports were dropping down the Potomac, high
strategy began to get all snarled up in a question of arithmetic, and the way
was paved for failure.

The plan was somewhat complicated. McClellan
was going to take upward of a hundred thousand men down to Fortress Monroe for
the march up the peninsula. In addition, McDowell, commanding one corps of the
army, was to assemble thirty thousand-odd at Fredericksburg, whence he could
take them down to join McClellan whenever McClellan summoned him. Up in the
Shenandoah Valley there was General Banks, whose primary function was to keep
the Rebels from cutting the line of the Baltimore and Ohio and erupting into
Pennsylvania. Banks had more men than he needed, the situation in the valley
being quiet, so he was instructed to leave part of his men there and bring the
bulk of them over to Manassas. Farther west, in the mountain country where
McClellan had made his first reputation, there was General John Charles
Fremont, the famous "Pathfinder" of California, the darling of the
abolitionists, and a hero to all ardent Republicans.

Lincoln was already aware of Fr6mont's
irritating eagerness to make high policy for the administration, and he knew
that he was hopelessly inept as an administrator, but he had not yet discovered
that the man was also completely incompetent as a soldier; and Fremont's
mission was to slide southwest through the mountains in the general direction
of eastern Tennessee, where there was strong Unionist sentiment that seemed
worth cultivating and where there was also an important Confederate railway
line that might profitably be seized. To give Fremont added strength, and also
to put under his congenial command more of the German regiments in which
anti-slavery sentiment ran so strong, Lincoln detached Blenker's division from
McClellan and sent it west; he admitted to McClellan that political pressure
which he felt unable to resist was chiefly responsible for this, and McClellan
bitterly wrote it down as a sign that the President was weak-willed.