Mr Lincoln's Army (11 page)

(Another might-have-been: there came to
McClellan's Ohio headquarters one day that spring a former infantry captain,
somewhat seedy, presenting himself as a one-time acquaintance of the general
looking for work; name of U. S. Grant. Was there a place for him, perhaps, on
McClellan's staff? The general was away that day, and Grant was told to come
back later. Instead of coming back Grant went west and finally wangled command
of a regiment of Illinois volunteers. McClellan would have given him a staff
job if he had seen him. What, one wonders, would Grant's future have been in
that case?)

Well, the might-have-beens didn't
happen. McClellan never did go to Harrisburg, command of the Pennsylvanians
went to someone else, and if McClellan himself ever mused about it in later
years there is no record of it. What did happen was that as soon as he got his
Ohio regiments mustered into United States service he found himself holding one
of the key jobs in the whole army. Ohio was on the frontier. The western part
of Virginia was just across the river and the Confederates had sent troops deep
into the mountains. It was correctly supposed in Washington that this part of
Virginia was strongly Unionist—the Confederate commander, getting no recruits,
complained that the inhabitants were full of "an ignorant and bigoted
Union sentiment"—and it seemed important to drive the Confederates out.
Also, the Rebels were cutting the Baltimore and Ohio railway, main traffic
artery from the capital to the West. So McClellan, by the end of May, found
himself across the Ohio River, commanding a substantial little force of sixteen
Ohio regiments, nine from Indiana, and two newly organized regiments of
Unionist Virginians from Parkersburg and Wheeling, together with twenty-four
guns. He moved carefully up into the mountains, found two Confederate detachments
drawn up in the passes, attacked one and caved it in, causing the other to
retreat posthaste, and moved on to the town of Beverly, taking prisoners,
securing everything west of the Alleghenies for the Union, and making possible
the eventual formation of the state of West Virginia.

It
had been neatly done, it was the North's first feat of arms, and the country
rejoiced at the news—the more so, perhaps, because it looked like a good deal
more of an achievement than it actually was. McClellan always knew how to make
his soldiers take pride in their own deeds, and he gave it to them strong after
they marched into Beverly, congratulating them in an official order which told
them that they had "annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and
experienced soldiers, entrenched in mountain fastnesses fortified at their
leisure." This was all right, and it was the sort of thing that built up
morale; but the "two armies" had in fact been separate parts of one
ill-equipped, untrained force that hardly numbered forty-five hundred men all
told, and the "annihilation" consisted in the retreat of this force
and the loss by it of about a thousand men. The order was reprinted in the
North, together with McClellan's dispatches to the War Department, which were
somewhat less flamboyant but which still made the conquest look like something
out of Napoleon's campaign in northern Italy. Also reprinted, and widely
admired, was the address McClellan had issued to his soldiers just before the
battle: "Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to
place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one
thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel. I know that I can
rely upon you."

All of this, remember, was happening in the
early summer of 1861, when the war was still spanking new and people were
hungry for heroes and for victories, and when the country was ready to take a
general at his own evaluation. Some of McClellan's officers, to be sure, were
just a bit baffled. One of his brigadiers wrote that McClellan's dispatches
and proclamations seemed to have been written by "quite a different person
from the sensible and genial man we knew in daily life and conversation"
and remarked that the young major general appeared to be "in a morbid
condition of mental exaltation."
²
But in the country at large
it went over big; and just then, before anybody had forgotten about it, the
news came in of the humiliating disaster at Bull Run, with untrained regiments
legging it all the way back to Washington, and carriage-loads of distinguished
sight-seers contributing to the rout. Everybody had been chanting, "On to
Richmond"; now came the realization that the war was not going to be a gay
parade of triumphant militia regiments, whose bright uniforms and martial
bearing would make up for any deficiencies in military experience and
leadership. The war was going to be long, mean, and bloody, and above all else
there was needed a really competent general who could turn the volunteer forces
into an army.

To be sure, Lincoln had at his elbow
Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the hero of two wars; but Scott was old and
nearly senile, he was too fat and infirm to mount a horse or even to review his
troops, let alone lead them into action, and his great reputation and his stout
old heart were all he could place at the government's disposal. Inevitable,
then, that everyone should look at McClellan. His achievement in western
Virginia took on an added shine when measured against Bull Run. His troops had
not fled in terror after a few random volleys; they had gone into action
coolly, scaling lofty mountains and annihilating two armies. This man knew
what he was doing, and knew how to make people believe that he knew what he was
doing, which was even more important just then; and the very depth of the
country's shame and disappointment at Bull Run helped to lift McClellan to the
peak. Overnight he was called to Washington and invested with the command.

No American general ever came to high command
under circumstances quite like these. He was thirty-five, and it was just
three months since he had sat in Governor Dennison's office and received the
tender of command of Ohio's volunteers. Now he was in Washington, with the
safety of the entire nation on his shoulders; and before he had even started on
this new job he was being universally acclaimed as a genius, with a fanfare
that built his brief Virginia campaign up into an achievement that would stand
comparison with the records of the great captains of history. He was "the
young Napoleon" to one and all—even to himself, apparently, for he permitted
himself to be photographed in the traditional Napoleonic pose, one arm folded
behind his back, the other hand thrust into his coat front, a look of intense
martial determination on his face. In a letter home, written the day after he
reached Washington, McClellan sounds like a man who can hardly believe that
what is happening to him is real: "I find myself in a new and strange
position here: President, cabinet, Gen. Scott, and all deferring to me. By some
strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land." A
few days later he went to Capitol Hill, to argue for a new law permitting him
to appoint aides to his staff from civil life if he chose. The experience among
the lawmakers was giddying—all experiences were, from the height he occupied
just then—and he unburdened himself in another letter to his wife:

"I went to the Senate to get it through,
and was quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received and the respect
with which I was treated. I suppose half a dozen of the oldest made the remark
I am becoming so much used to: 'Why, how young you look, and yet an old
soldier!' It seems to strike everybody that I look young. They give me my way
in everything, full swing and unbounded confidence. All tell me that I am held
responsible for the fate of the nation, and that all its resources shall be
placed at my disposal. It is an immense task that I have on my hands, but I
believe I can accomplish it."

And he added, bemused: "Who would have
thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my
country?"

He
was
young, for a conquering hero, and it was only natural
that he himself should have been impressed by his own eminence. And yet, in
these letters to the young wife he had married little more than a year earlier,
one presently begins to find something more than the natural blinking of a man
who is dazzled by his own good fortune; something more than the artless
self-congratulation a man is entitled to indulge in when he brags innocently to
the wife of his bosom. It gets said too often. There is too much lingering on
the adoration other men feel for him, on the wild enthusiasm he arouses, on the
limitless power and responsibility that are his. The perplexity of the
brigadier in western Virginia becomes understandable: this man, utterly winning
and modest and soft-spoken in all his personal contacts, simply could not, down
inside, look long enough at the great figure he was becoming, could not get
enough of the savor of admiration and love that were coming to him. Over and
over, from the day he left Ohio for the expedition into the lonely mountains to
his final days in the army, there is this same note. What buried sense of
personal inadequacy was gnawing at this man that he had to see himself so
constantly through the eyes of men and women who looked upon him as a hero out
of legend and myth?

Early
in June, before the great weight of national command had been placed upon him,
he was writing his wife of the huge crowds that met him at every stop in
Ohio—"gray-haired old men and women, mothers holding up their children to
take my hand, girls, boys, all sorts, cheering and crying God bless you!
...
I could hear them say, 'He is our own
general'; 'Look at him, how young he is';
'He
will
thrash them'; 'He'll do,' etc., etc., ad infinitum." In western Virginia
there was more of the same: "It is a proud and glorious thing to see a
whole people here, simple and unsophisticated, looking up to me as their
deliverer from tyranny." The weight of his own duties impressed him while
he still commanded this detached force on the slope of the Alleghenies: "I
realize now the dreadful responsibility on me—the lives of my men, the
reputation of the country, and the success of the cause." And he himself
must do it all. From Grafton he wrote that "everything here needs the hand
of the master and is getting it fast"; and, a little later, "I don't
feel sure that the men will fight very well under anyone but myself; they have
confidence in me, and will do anything that I put them at."

On his first day in Washington he was saying
confidently: "I see already the main causes of our recent failure; I am
sure that I can remedy these, and am confident that I can lead these armies of
men to victory once more." He had already, in less than twenty-four hours,
had to refuse dinner invitations from General Scott and from four cabinet
ministers; a few days later he dined at the White House, guest of the
President, with the British and French ministers and assorted senators
present, reported that the dinner was "rather long and rather tedious, as
such things generally are." Scott, the aging general-in-chief, had become
a nuisance within a week and would have to be quietly by-passed. "I am
leaving nothing undone to increase our force; but the old general always comes
in the way. . . . I have to fight my way against him. Tomorrow the question
will probably be decided by giving me absolute control independently of him. I
suppose it will result in enmity on his part against me; but I have no choice.
The people call upon me to save the country. I must save it, and cannot respect
anything that is in the way."

Undeniably, Scott was an obstacle, a
querulous fuss-budget, his greatness only a memory. It would be inadvisable, he
held, for the young general to organize the forces about Washington as an
army:
the regulations said
McClellan commanded the departments of

Washington
and northeastern Virginia, with all the troops that lay therein, and that was
sufficient. Inadvisable, too, to organize the new levies into divisions. He,
Scott, had simply had brigades in the army he took to Mexico City, and what was
adequate then would be adequate now. Nor should regular-army officers be
encouraged, or even permitted, to leave their own assignments in order to
command volunteers; the hard core of regular troops was needed and the volunteer
army must be grouped around it, and the strength of the regulars could not be
diluted by sending the officers out into the new regiments and brigades. And so
on and on; McClellan was entirely right—the job could not be done unless he
could find a way around the old gentleman.

Furthermore,
McClellan's boast was justified: the people
were
calling
upon him to save the country, and he
did
see "the main causes of our failure" very
clearly and was moving effectively to cure them. He began, simply enough, by
getting the disorganized officers and men off the streets and into camp. The
regulars who were available he formed into a provost guard, with a tough
colonel to take charge of scouring out the bars and herding the uniformed
wanderers back to their regiments. On the Washington side of the river, camps
were set up to receive the new levies as they came in from the states, and
provisional brigades were established to complete their training and
discipline. More seasoned regiments were sent across to camps on the Virginia
side, where they could help protect the capital while they were being turned
into fully disciplined troops. Lines were traced for a complete ring of
fortifications encircling Washington in a line thirty-three miles long;
enclosed forts on commanding hills, protected batteries covering the
intervals, chains of rifle pits in between, with particular attention to the
approaches on the Virginia side. Confederate Joe Johnston had pushed his
outposts up to within half a dozen miles of the river; McClellan had no
intention of trying to push him back just yet, but he made certain that the
enemy could not get any closer.