Mr Lincoln's Army (10 page)

The two generals impassively returned the
salute. McClellan gave a few directions about the positions the troops should
take when they reached the fortifications. On the horizon there was a dull
bump-bump of gunfire, and McClellan asked what that might be. Pope answered
that it was probably some attack on Sumner's corps, coming up as flank guard;
meanwhile, did General McClellan object if Pope and McDowell rode on in to
Washington? McClellan replied that he had not an objection in the world, but
for himself he was going to ride to the sound of the firing and see what was
going on in the way of fighting. . . . One gathers that the interchange did
McClellan a great deal of good.

Hatch had heard all that he needed to hear.
He had a score to settle with Pope, whom he hated. When Pope had first come
east, Hatch had been in command of the cavalry attached to Banks's corps, and
when Pope had made his first thrust down to the Rapidan, Hatch had been ordered
to go in advance to seize the important railroad junction of Gordonsville and
destroy Rebel supplies and connections there. The march had been delayed; while
Hatch waited for infantry and artillery to go with him, the delay gave the
enemy time to occupy Gordonsville in force, and the move had been a failure. A
few days later Pope ordered him to try again, this time taking cavalry alone
and cutting the railroad line from Gordonsville to Charlottesville. Hatch crossed
the Blue Ridge in a pelting rain, got mired in muddy mountain roads, and came
stumbling back a few days later, his mission unaccomplished; Pope gave him an
angry dressing-down, relieved him of his command, and sent him to King's
division to lead a brigade of infantry. Hatch felt that he had been unfairly
treated. Now was his chance to get even.

He
trotted back the few yards that separated the generals from the head of his own
infantry. In a loud voice—easily to be heard by Pope and McDowell—he shouted:
"Boys, McClellan is in command of the army again! Three cheers!"
⁵

There was a brief, stunned silence; then a
wild, hysterical yell went up from the soldiers. Hats, caps, and knapsacks were
tossed into the air. The roar swept back along the column as men to the rear
heard the news, and the men still farther back joined in without waiting to be
told: they knew there was only one man alive who could make the army cheer like
that. The cheering did not stop; men capered, thumped each other on the back,
yelled themselves into hoarseness. Far back down the highway, out of sight,
went the noise, officers joining with the men. One of Hatch's staff came
spurring back to John Gibbon and gave him the news. As an old regular, Gibbon
took it as just another camp rumor and said so. No, insisted the officer, this
time it was true: he himself had
seen
McClellan,
just up the road, giving orders to Pope and McDowell. Gibbon swung in his
saddle and raised his own voice: "Men, General McClellan is in command of
the army!" The air was filled with tumult. Men broke ranks, danced,
howled, laughed hysterically, wept; and, Gibbon wrote later, "the weary,
fagged men went into camp cheerful and happy, to talk over their rough
experience of the past three weeks and speculate as to what was ahead."
⁸

It
was a big army and it covered a lot of ground, and it took time for the word to
get around. Sykes's regulars, pushing on to get into the lines before midnight,
were still on the road by starlight. They had fallen out for a short breather,
and the dead-exhausted men had dropped in their tracks and were dozing. Two
officers stood by their horses, looking ahead in the darkness, and saw a few
horsemen approaching. One of the officers gaped: if he didn't know better, he
said, he would say one of those riders was McClellan. This, said the other
officer, was nonsense. McClellan had been relieved days ago, and anyhow, what
would he be doing out here, at this time of night, without an escort? The first
officer continued to stare, hope rising. Then some other officer saw, and
recognized; and over the silent roadway, where men slept in the dust under the
stars, he raised a strong, clear voice that could shout orders above the din of
battle: "Colonel! Colonel! General McClellan is here!"

Ten seconds later every man was on his feet,
sending a long cheer up to the night sky; "such a hurrah," a
participant wrote later, "as the Army of the Potomac had never heard
before. Shout upon shout went out into the stillness of the night; and as it
was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division and
corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance. The effect of this
man's presence upon the Army of the Potomac—in sunshine or rain, in darkness or
in daylight, in victory or defeat—was electrical, and too wonderful to make it
worthwhile attempting to give a reason for it."
⁷

The men who were there that night seem to
have spent the rest of their lives trying to make people who were not there
understand what it was like. About all they could say was that there was mad
cheering and hysterical happiness and a sudden feeling that everything was
going to be all right, so that every man forgot that he was tired and hungry
and dirty, forgot that he had been miserably beaten, and looked forward with a bright
certainty that all mistakes would presently be redeemed. And it is clear that
some sort of miracle had happened; the most amazing and dramatic one, perhaps,
in American military history, with an entire army completely transformed between
the hot dust of mid-afternoon and the quiet coolness of starlight. But exactly
why this miracle took place, and precisely what it was that this man did to
make the soldiers love him as no general in the army's history was ever
loved—this they could not seem to tell, probably because they did not quite
know themselves. One veteran, trying to explain, finally let it go by saying:
"The love borne by soldiers to a favorite chief, if it does not surpass,
is more unreasoning than the love of woman."
⁸

Whatever it was, there it was: an intangible,
like so many of the important things in the life of an army, or a nation, or a
man, indefinable but of tremendous power. The men who cheered and exulted and
went gladly forth to the bloodiest field of all because they saw this man at
the head of the column are all gone, and the man himself, with the hatred and
the adoration that he inspired, is gone with them, and the cheers and the
gunfire of that army echo far off, in old memories, unreal and ghostlike, the
passion and the violence all filtered out, leaving the inexplicable picture of
an army transfigured. And it seems that this man, with his yellow sash and his
great black horse and his unforgettable air of parade-ground trimness and dash,
somehow was in his own person the soldier every soldier had longed to be, the
embodiment of the gaiety that had been lost and the hope that had been given
up. He was what the army and the impossible, picture-book war itself had meant
back in the army's youth when innocence had not yet died. And when he came back
men split their throats with cheering, and tilted their battle flags proudly
forward, and forgot that they had been starved and misused, and became a great
army once more and went off to define the shape and purport of the war on the
sunlit fields and glades that were waiting for them around a little Dunker
church in the Maryland hills.

TWO

The
Young General

1.
A
Great
Work
in
My
Hands

He
was trusted to the point of death by one hundred thousand fighting men, but he
himself always had his lurking doubts. The soldiers firmly believed that where
he was everything was bound to be all right. They would gladly awaken from the
deepest sleep of exhaustion to go and cheer him because they felt that way.
After Malvern Hill an entire division, underfed for days, deserted the sputtering
campfires where in a gloomy rain it was cooking the first hot meal of the week,
in order to splash through the mud and hurrah as he galloped down the road, and
felt satisfied even though all the fires went out and breakfast was sadly
delayed. But it seems that McClellan was never quite convinced. An uncertainty
tormented him. It was almost as if some invisible rider constantly followed
him, in the brightly uniformed staff that rode with him, and came up abreast
every now and then to whisper: "But, General, are you
sure?"
Every man tries to
live up to his own picture of himself. McClellan's picture was glorious, but
one gathers that he was never quite confident that he could make it come to
life.

Perhaps this was partly because too much had
happened to him too soon. Long afterward he remarked: "It probably would
have been better for me personally had my promotion been delayed a year or
more"; and he was probably quite right. Fame came early, and it

came like an explosion, touched off before he
had had a chance to get set for it. He found himself at the top of the ladder
almost before he started to climb, and the height was dizzying. One day he was
leading a diminutive army of volunteers in an obscure campaign far back in the
wild mountains; the next day—almost literally, the next day—he was the savior
of his country, with President and Congress piling a prodigious load on his
shoulders, and with every imaginable problem arising from the most confusing
and pressing of wars seemingly coming straight to him, and to him alone, for
solution. He bore himself with a confident air and he said calmly, "I can
do it all," but somewhere far down inside there was a corroding unease.

He
was thirty-five when the war started. A West Point graduate, he had done well
as a young subaltern in the Mexican War, and later he had been sent to the
Crimea by the War Department to watch the British and the French fight the
Russians. Then, with the rank of captain, he had resigned from the army to go
into business. A capable engineer, by the spring of 1861 he had become a
ten-thousand-dollar-a-year railroad president, and he was working in Cincinnati
when Fort Sumter fell and the war began. The war reached out for him without delay.

It began with the governors. State governors
were of great importance in the war machinery of that era—considerably more
important than the War Department itself, at first. Under the law, all
volunteer regiments were raised, officered, and trained by the state
authorities, and the regiments were sworn into Federal service only after they
had been completely organized in the states. This threw a heavy load on the
governors—men of peace and politics, whose military staffs consisted of
militia colonels and brigadiers, ardent persons but utterly ignorant of any
warlike activity beyond a peacetime militia muster. The governors, as a result,
were frantic to get a few West Pointers around them, and a retired army officer
with an excellent record, like McClellan, was an obvious prize. So by
mid-April, McClellan, who was a Pennsylvanian by birth, had received a message
from Governor Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania, inviting him to come to
Harrisburg at once and take charge of the Pennsylvania troops. He wound up his
business affairs in Cincinnati as quickly as he could and took off for
Harrisburg, stopping at Columbus en route to see Ohio's Governor William
Dennison, who wanted his advice. The stopover made all the difference.

McClellan appeared at Dennison's office,
wearing civilian garb and a soft felt hat, impressing the governor and his
advisers as a quiet, modest, self-possessed man and looking, as one of them remarked,
exactly like what he was—"a railway superintendent in his business
clothes." The governor explained what he was up against. He had what
looked like the impossible job of getting ten thousand men ready for the field,
and there was no one around who knew the first thing about the military arts.
The state arsenal contained nothing in the way of equipment but a few boxes of
ancient smoothbore muskets, badly rusted, plus a couple of brass six-pounder
field-pieces, somewhat honeycombed from the firing of salutes and devoid of any
auxiliary equipment except for a pile of mildewed harness. The recruits were
already beginning to show up—a few companies, gaudy in old-style militia
uniforms, had got to town and were sleeping in uncomfortable elegance in the
legislative chambers in the state-house—and so far the state had not even
picked a site for a training camp. Under these circumstances the governor had
no intention of letting a good West Pointer slip through his fingers, and he
then and there offered McClellan the command of Ohio's troops—the command of
them, plus the task of getting them housed, fed, clad, trained, and organized.
McClellan promptly accepted, moved into an office in the statehouse, and got
down to work, a major general of volunteers.
¹

It is interesting to speculate about the
difference there would have been in McClellan's career had he gone on to
Harrisburg and taken command of the Pennsylvania troops instead of staying in
Ohio. Fame would have come much more slowly, and he would have had a chance to
adjust himself to it. Pennsylvania sent a solid division down to Washington
shortly after Bull Run. It was the division McClellan would have commanded had
he gone to Harrisburg; it contained good men and had some first-class
officers, and it was just the right organization to build a solid reputation
for its commanding general—it brought George G. Meade up to the command of the
Army of the Potomac in 1863, after giving him plenty of time to prove himself
and to find himself in battle. What would McClellan's luck have been with that
division? No immediate limelight, comparative obscurity during the army's
early days—what would have become of him, anyway?