Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (42 page)

Just when it appeared that the armies would be sealed in an icy tomb, temperatures spiked, shrouding the mountains in fog. “Dame nature is growing freakish,” wrote a Confederate in late January. Black clouds poured rain for days, then sleet, and then snow once more. Rain froze on every surface, rendering the turnpikes impassible and causing overcoats to “rattle like tin.”
⁶³⁰

Long days and nights in the shanties were passed with music and preaching—or with smuggled whiskey and gambling. Whiskey and crowded quarters did not mix. “Men are drunk as usual,” wrote a disgusted Confederate from Camp Allegheny. “Decent men must endure it—there is no escape. A feud…found vent this evening…. Men were throwing and flourishing knives, bleeding and swearing. It was with difficulty that quiet was restored.”

The soldiers learned to cope with winter's onslaught, as they had with previous trials. Pickets stacked rails in tipi fashion, creating elaborate wigwams to keep from freezing at their posts. On Cheat Mountain, tender flapjacks, mess pork, and coffee boosted spirits; interludes of violin and flute music, with homemade tambourines or a crooked bayonet as triangle, revived the soul. Yet every false alarm brought the armies out to mark time in snow-filled trenches, the wind “singing like minie balls” around their ears. “What a life,” declared one quaking Confederate. “Would give all I have to be rid of this miserable bargain.”
⁶³¹

Across the mountains in Washington, General George McClellan also felt an oppressive chill. The weather was far milder
there, but McClellan's huge Army of the Potomac remained idle, and the Radical Republicans—those anti-slavery zealots in Congress—grew impatient. Restless newspaper editors joined the politicians in a call for action. McClellan's once-reassuring bulletins of “All quiet on the Potomac” were now mocked by his critics.

President Lincoln stood behind his young general-in-chief. Lincoln had known McClellan from their old railroad days, as an attorney for the Illinois Central. More than once the two had spent long nights at lonely county seats during litigation, where Lincoln spun his many anecdotes. McClellan, however, did not reciprocate the president's support. With each passing day, he became more certain that the Radical leaders sought his ruin. They labored tirelessly, he believed, “sowing the seeds of distrust in Mr. Lincoln's mind.” The young general did his best to keep clear of all the “wretched politicians.”

McClellan returned home one night and was told that the president awaited, yet he passed the parlor without acknowledgment and retired to bed! Lincoln appeared to ignore the snub. “I will hold McClellan's horse,” the president said, “if he will only bring us success.”
⁶³²

Lincoln watched as McClellan's Army of the Potomac—the largest and best-equipped fighting force ever assembled on the continent—did nothing. As the clamor for action reached a crescendo at year's end, General McClellan came down with typhoid fever. By January 12, he had recovered enough to attend a council of war at the White House, but would not reveal his plans to subdue the Rebels. McClellan grumbled that neither army generals nor cabinet members could keep a secret, charging that Lincoln even shared them with Tad, his eight-year-old son.

A congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War fueled discontent with General McClellan. Radical Republicans questioned his courage and made subtle allegations of “treason.” Newsmen wondered aloud if political ambition clouded McClellan's military sense—that perhaps his heart was not in the war. Critics demanded his resignation.

Still, the Army of the Potomac army did not move. Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's newly appointed Secretary of War, insisted it was time for McClellan and his elegantly furnished troops to “fight or run away.” Even the president was heard to remark that if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to
borrow
it.
⁶³³

Lincoln urged McClellan to move against the Confederates at Centreville and Manassas Junction, only twenty-five miles southwest of Washington on the road to Richmond. Week by week, the critics grew louder. Frustrated beyond measure by McClellan's failure to act, the President finally gave February 22—Washington's birthday—as the ultimatum for an advance. But the young general urged another way. To avoid the huge Rebel force he imagined in Northern Virginia, McClellan proposed to ship his vast army down Chesapeake Bay to Urbanna, near the mouth of the Rappahannock River, and from there march west to Richmond before the Confederates could react.

Lincoln was troubled by the plan. If the Potomac Army sailed away, Washington would be left open to attack. When McClellan gave assurances that ample troops would be left to guard the capital, the president acquiesced. But on March 9, news of the withdrawal of Confederates from Centreville and Manassas—just a day's march from Washington—changed everything. General Joseph Johnston's Rebel army had quietly fallen back to new positions behind the Rappahannock River, ruining McClellan's carefully scripted plan to get to Richmond before the enemy did. Left behind for all to see were defenses not so strong as McClellan had feared. Some Confederate works had been armed only with logs painted black to look like cannons—harmless “Quaker guns.”

More unpleasant news arrived on March 11. The president had removed McClellan from the post of general-in-chief, ostensibly to focus his attention on the push to Richmond. For the time being, Lincoln and Secretary Stanton would run the war.

Revising his plan to claim Richmond, McClellan proposed to sail to the tip of the Peninsula, a prominent finger of Virginia real estate dividing the James and York Rivers. It had been the scene of
the climactic victory at Yorktown in the American Revolution. Landing his army at Union-held Fort Monroe, McClellan would strike overland for Richmond.

The Army of the Potomac was moving at last. From Alexandria, a huge armada set sail: four hundred ships, more than 121,000 men, forty-four batteries of artillery, and all the implements of war. The date was March 17, 1862. McClellan departed with his typical Napoleonic flair. He was thankful to be leaving Washington and his enemies in the rear.
⁶³⁴

Meanwhile, General Robert E. Lee confronted another fleet of Union invaders in his new assignment along the south Atlantic coast. Lee was charged with the defense of nearly three hundred miles of vulnerable South Carolina and Georgia coastline, including the ports of Charleston and Savannah. There were batteries to fortify and waterways to obstruct. It was an unromantic duty of dirt and drudgery. Lee's own competence was in doubt.
⁶³⁵

In January and February 1862, disaster stalked the Confederacy. General Felix Zollicoffer was killed and his defenses broken at Mill Springs, Kentucky. The irascible Henry Wise lost two-thirds of an army and his own son in defeat at Roanoke Island, North Carolina. On the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in Tennessee, Forts Henry and Donelson fell to Union General U.S. Grant. Wise's old antagonist John Floyd had abandoned the latter post, fearing execution as a traitor if captured. The Confederacy lost much of Kentucky and west Tennessee as a result. Southern defenses on the upper Mississippi were crumbling. Confederate hopes of foreign intervention were dashed.

On March 2, President Davis summoned General Lee back to Richmond. Once again, Lee was placed under direction of the Confederate president, serving as liaison with the military authorities. “I do not see either advantage or pleasure in my duties,” he admitted to Mary.
⁶³⁶
The
Charleston Mercury
charged that Lee had been reduced “from a commanding general to an orderly sergeant.”

The military situation in Richmond was critical. Badly needed shipments of ordnance had been chocked off by the Union blockade. Neither powder nor muskets were available to soldiers in the field. So desperate was the Confederacy that preparations were made to arm the troops with long-handled pikes!
⁶³⁷
The news from every front was chilling in the winter of 1861–1862.

“
[I] could take care of the wounded Federals as fast as brother Thomas could wound them.”

—attributed to Laura Jackson Arnold

A traveler halted for wagon repairs along the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, eight miles south of Beverly. While he waited, an elderly man appeared at the door of a log cabin opposite. The old fellow, a soldier in the War of 1812, was so crippled by rheumatism that he could scarcely walk.

“They took my two boys from me for the Southern army,” he said, “an me an’ the old woman are all alone. They promised the boys to take care of me an’ the old woman, but they haint done it. We're now livin’ on charity. I told the boys not to go an’ fight agin the Government.”

“Where are they now?” inquired the traveler.

“God only knows, sir,” choked the aged cripple, his eyes welling with tears.

“I don't know what's to become of me an’ the old woman,” he stammered. “We'll never see our boys, an’ we can do nothin’ for ourselves. I wish I could get clear of this plaguy rheumatiz. I was a
mighty good man afore I had this rheumatiz. But no boys, sick, and no money—good God, what'll become of [us]!”
⁶³⁸

Cruel were the fortunes of war. Many able-bodied men took up arms, leaving women to care for their families. “We meet very few men; the poor women excite our sympathy constantly,” wrote Major Rutherford B. Hayes of the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry from the mountains of Western Virginia. “A great share of the calamities of war fall on the women.”
⁶³⁹

Virginia Confederates marching along a road one day happened upon a forlorn family of refugees. The grim-faced matron, her five children, and all of their remaining possessions were strapped aboard a single, jaded horse. “A child's head was looking out each side,” recalled one amazed soldier. “Two children were on the horse behind her, and she held a baby in her arms. When she came into our midst…she broke down and commenced to cry.”

For civilians, the trials were severe. Andrew Yeager and his son, refugees from Travellers Repose, died from “camp fever” before the close of 1861. John Yeager of Allegheny Mountain was said to have died from being poisoned. Yeager's sons left home in early 1862 to join the Confederate army, but the women of his family remained. To survive, they concealed livestock in the mountains and buried meat, cakes, and jugs of syrup to keep them away from prowling soldiers.
⁶⁴⁰

A once-fertile land was devastated by war. “Virginia has suffered more than you could have any idea,” wrote an Indiana soldier from the town of Beverly. “Everywhere the army has gone it has been encamped upon the ground of some wealthy secessionist, and whenever it leaves a farm there is scarcely a fence rail upon it, every stalk of Wheat, Corn, Oats, Grass and everything else is completely trodden down or eaten up. We are at present encamped in an Oat field and our horses are grazing in a very large cornfield; and it has been thus all the way.”

“Our people will never feel the horrors of war until they have the enemy in their midst,” remarked a Confederate of conditions
in the upper Greenbrier Valley near Camp Bartow. “When we first passed here…the people of this valley were well fixed, joyful and contented. Now not one of them is to be seen, and their once happy homes are desolate wastes—Poor people!”
⁶⁴¹