Never Call Retreat (11 page)

The next day the President let it be known that both Seward and Chase had submitted resignations, that neither resignation had been accepted, and that both men would remain in the cabinet. In the language of politics, a to-whom-it-may-concern: the President would continue to work with both conservatives and radicals, he had not yielded to the pressure of Seward nor to that of Chase, and he had not wilted under the heat applied by Senators. Regardless of what had been supposed previously, he and nobody else was running the administration.

It remained to be seen whether he could also control the Army of the Potomac.

As the new year began this army could hardly be said to be under anybody's control. General Burnside could not manage it effectively. This was partly because he lacked competence; far worse was the fact that some of his principal officers were grimly determined to make everyone in the army and out of it understand that he lacked it. The army's discipline, its morale, the very possibility of its future usefulness were beginning to collapse under pressure of resentments, enmities, personal shortcomings and thwarted ambitions even more sharply edged than the combination that had beset the cabinet. Mr. Lincoln began to see how things were going on December 21, when he got a singular letter signed by Major General William B. Franklin, commander of Burnside's Left Grand Division, and Major General William F. Smith, who led the VI Army Corps in that Grand Division.

Serenely going over their commanding officer's head, these two soldiers told the President that Burnside's present plan of campaign—an overland approach to Richmond, via Fredericksburg—was bound to fail: the line of supply would be too long and too exposed, and there were too many good positions south of Fredericksburg where the Confederates could post themselves strongly and repulse assaults. It would be better to take the army down to the James River, as McClellan had done. With an ample garrison retained to protect Washington and the Potomac River crossings, let 250,000 men be massed on both banks of the James, as close to Richmond as possible. Thus the Rebel army should be destroyed, and even if it escaped the capture of Richmond would be assured. The generals wrote that they submitted their views "with diffidence," but they felt it was their duty to present them as "suggestions to some other military mind in discussing plans for the future operations of our armies in the east."
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The letter was odd on two counts. To begin with it asked the impossible. Obviously, if the government could find the resources to put 250,000 men on the James, at the same time holding an adequate covering force in front of Washington, any general, even one with the most moderate capacities, could go on and take Richmond. As Mr. Lincoln was painfully aware, no such forces could be assembled. The other oddity lay in the fact that Franklin and Smith were the staunchest of McClellan men, fully representing the McClellan point of view-—which held that that professional soldier's campaign had been ruined because an amateur President insisted on reaching over the professional's shoulder to interfere with strategy. (After all, it was Mr. Lincoln who had held back Franklin's division, when McClellan wanted it in front of Yorktown in the spring of 1862.) Now they were urging the same amateur President to reach over the shoulder of another professional and interfere with strategy anew.

As professional soldiers they were taking a most unprofessional way of undercutting their commanding officer.

They were not the only ones. To the White House, two days before the end of the year, came two of their subordinates—Brigadier General John A. Newton, head of the 3rd Division in Smith's Corps, and Brigadier General John Cochrane, who led the 1st Brigade in Newton's division. (A former Republican Congressman, Cochrane was the only nonprofessional in the lot.) Having cleared the matter with Franklin and Smith, these two men told the President that Burnside planned a new movement and that the army was so thoroughly demoralized that the move could lead to nothing but disaster. Deeply disturbed, Mr. Lincoln, after they left, had an inconclusive talk with General Burnside—who unsuccessfully demanded that these talebearers be cashiered for their irregular conduct—and finally he sent a stiff note to General Halleck, giving that officer much the same assignment that Jefferson Davis gave to General Johnston: go down to the army, see what the situation really is, examine Burnside's plan and either tell the man to go ahead with it or forbid him to move at all. He closed the letter with the comment: "Your military skill is useless to me if you will not do this."

Halleck would not do it. Instead he offered to resign, and Mr. Lincoln's letter finally came to rest in the files with a notation in the President's hand: "Withdrawn, because considered harsh by General Halleck." Like Mr. Davis, Mr. Lincoln was finding that one of his principal armies was all but totally out of his reach. Without in the least intending to, his professional soldiers were confirming him in his belief that the President must take his responsibilities as commander-in-chief seriously and keep a firm hand on the military.
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Another malcontent was Major General Joseph Hooker— "Fighting Joe," hard, colorful, aggressive, chief of Burnside's Center Grand Division, a better combat soldier than those others but a man irrationally consumed by ambition. Hooker did not call at the White House. He simply talked— so loosely that the President's secretaries wrote him down as "the most indiscreet and outspoken of all." He was saying now that Burnside was incompetent, that President and administration were imbecile, and that "nothing would go right until they had a dictator, and the sooner the better." Hooker differed from the others in this: their basic complaint was that the army commander was not McClellan, and his was that the commander was not Joe Hooker. His words were heard in Washington, in the White House, and elsewhere . . . and meanwhile officers of lower rank were resigning "with insolent expressions against the government for its conduct of the war." Even those who did not resign had complaints. Among them was Brigadier General G. K. Warren, who led a good brigade in the V Corps and who wrote: "We
must
have McClellan back with unlimited and unfettered powers. His name is a tower of strength to everyone here; and the repose of winter is absolutely necessary. . . . The remedy must begin in Washington. No human intelligence can mend matters here till that is done."
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What could Burnside do? His army was being systematically and ruinously demoralized—not by its losses at Fredericksburg, but by the leaders who tried to capitalize on those losses. Before January ended Burnside learned that he could do nothing at all. On January 20 he led his army up the Rappahannock, planning to cross the river above Lee's left and strike the Confederate flank with irresistible force, and as military plans go his scheme was not bad. But by this time his army had become unusable.

The night before the move began an artillery officer at Franklin's headquarters found that Franklin's and Smith's staff officers were "talking outrageously," predicting failure, and he wrote: "Franklin has talked so much and so loudly to this effect ever since the present move was decided on that he has completely demoralized his whole command and so rendered failure doubly sure. His conduct is such that he certainly deserves to be broken. Smith and they say Hooker are almost as bad." (The trouble here was that Franklin and Hooker were leading the Grand Divisions which had the primary parts in this march.) The next day, when the march had begun, the same gunner wrote that "the disaffection produced by Franklin's and others' talk was very evident. The whole army seems to know what they have said, and their speeches condemning the move were in the mouths of everyone."

The next day, as a matter of fact, the high heavens intervened; there was a drenching rain, the roads turned to bottomless mud, and the army got irretrievably bogged down, unable to advance even if it had wanted to. Guns, horses, mules, and pontoons disappeared from view in the mire, the foot soldiers tried in vain to plod across open fields, and the same artillerist, visiting Franklin's headquarters, "found him, Smith and their staffs in quite a comfortable camp; doing nothing to help things on, but grumbling and talking in a manner to do all the harm possible." Major General George G. Meade, a sober regular with no ax to grind, wrote to his wife: "I am sorry to say there were many men, and among them generals high in command, who openly rejoiced at the storm and the obstacle it presented," and Franklin himself confessed that he considered the storm "almost a providential interference in our behalf." In any case, Burnside was defeated. He got his army back to camp, at last, and had to confess that the situation was beyond his control.
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He offered the President a choice: purge the officer corps of nine or ten troublemakers, starting with Franklin and Hooker, or accept Burnside's resignation and start over again with someone else. The President did not hesitate. The general purge was to be avoided, possibly because the army by now was too frail to survive a major operation, but there would be a new commander and certain other changes. On January 25 the War Department announced that Burnside had been relieved at his own request, that Sumner and Franklin were being sent to other duties . . . and that General Joseph Hooker had been appointed Burnside's successor.
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Along with his new appointment, General Hooker got a letter from Abraham Lincoln.

"I think," wrote Mr. Lincoln, "that during General Burnside's command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship. ... I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticising their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good of an army while such a spirit prevails in it. And now beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories."
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To give an officer a blistering rebuke and a prized promotion all in one breath was, to say the least, unusual. Mr. Lincoln seems to have been gambling that Hooker's driving energy, his qualities of leadership, his fame as a combat soldier and, not least, his insatiable ambition, would enable him to bring the army back to fighting condition. In addition (and it was a point of substantial importance) Hooker was not a McClellan man, and the McClellan faction in the officer corps, a source of so much of the current discontent, could take no comfort at all from his elevation. To put Hooker in command might be dangerous, but the President felt strong enough to run the risk; meanwhile, the appointment told all and sundry where final authority lay.

Four days before he turned the army over to Hooker, Mr. Lincoln did one other thing. To his desk came the findings of a court-martial which had convicted Major General Fitz John Porter of willful disobedience of General John Pope's orders at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Porter was alleged to have contributed to Pope's defeat by refusing to make an attack that—in Pope's belief, if not in everyone's—would have saved the day. Years later, a board of officers appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes reviewed the case in the light of fuller evidence and exonerated Porter, and in 1886 a special act of Congress relieved him of the burden imposed by the wartime court and restored his old rank in the Regular Army. But in 1863 the court-martial convicted him, ordering that he be stripped of his rank, dismissed from the service, and "forever disqualified from holding any office of trust or profit under the government of the United States." And on January 21 President Lincoln approved these findings. General Porter was cashiered.
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What made the Porter case important in the tangled story of army politics was that he had been closer to McClellan than any other officer and that during the period immediately before the Battle of Bull Run he had been deriding General Pope in much the same way Franklin had recently been deriding General Burnside. Now he was publicly broken—ostensibly for disobeying orders but at least partly as a warning to all malcontents. What was done to him may have been unjust, but it was at least a powerful object lesson. Any officer who doubted the firmness of the President's control over the army had only to think about General Porter.

CHAPTERTWO

Parting of the Red Sea Waves

1. The Land of Cotton

LOUISIANA LOOKED LIKE a storybook land, all color and warmth under the December sun. As the steamers came up the river the Federal troops could see endless rows of orange trees in fruit, groves of live oaks at the edges of sugar plantations, manor houses elegant and imposing with white pillars fronting broad lawns. Here and there, near the levee, were slave-quarter cabins, with Negro women waving a welcome. After ten days on the crowded transports the soldiers were willing to be pleased; they lined the rails and cheered, and as the convoy drew nearer to New Orleans they felt that "the scene went on increasing in richness." Major General Nathaniel P. Banks was bringing reinforcements to take over on the lower Mississippi. He was under orders to do many things- -among them, to close out the strange pro-consular reign of General Ben Butler—and as he reached the end of his journey it appeared that he was coming to a place that was rich, orderly, and contented.

The appearance was deceptive. Beautiful as the land was, New Orleans itself was almost lifeless. Few people were on the streets, little business was being done, and an officer on Banks' staff felt that the place "looked like a decayed city of the old world." General Butler received General Banks with much pomp, trim sentries guarding his doors, a well-drilled troop of dismounted cavalry to do the honors; yet the whiff of something spoiled and corrupt, which had drawn attention in faraway Washington, was inescapable, and it was clear that even the junior officers of the occupation forces had been doing themselves very well. Mere lieutenants of in-