Terrible Swift Sword (29 page)

He did not know who had accused him or
specifically what he was accused of. He could do nothing but make a general
statement of innocence, which he did, with hot eloquence: "This is a
humiliation I had hoped I should never be subjected to. I thought there was
one calumny that could not be brought against me. . . . This government has not
a more faithful soldier; of poor capacity, it is true, but a more faithful
soldier this government has not had.
...
If you want more faithful soldiers you must find them elsewhere. I have been as
faithful as I can be."
¹²

He might as well have
saved his breath. He was no longer Charles P. Stone, a man with honor to defend
and a life to live. He was just a counter on the board where an intense
struggle for power was going on; he had been played, and the contestants were
about to remove him and drop him in the box. Senator Wade was out to prove that
lack of drive on the field of battle probably came from an overtolerant
attitude toward slavery and slaveholders, and that this in turn might well
bespeak treason. He was sounding a grim warning for all Army officers who were
lukewarm on slavery and who also were failing to win victories.

Among these officers was General
McClellan, who apparently did not at once get the true drift of things.
Colonel J. H. Van Alen, an officer on the headquarters staff, told Attorney
General Bates that when it was learned that the committee wanted Stone removed
from command, McClellan remarked, "They want a victim," to which
Colonel Van Alen replied: "Yes—and when they have once tasted blood, got
one victim, no one can tell who will be next."
¹⁸
McClellan
evidently failed to see that the committee wanted not so much a victim as an
object lesson. This object lesson, indeed, was being set up primarily for the
instruction of the general-in-chief himself.

Anyway,
Stone's destruction proceeded without any protest from Army headquarters;
which, at last, piously lined up with the men who were destroying him. A week
after General Stone's second appearance before the committee, while the order
for his arrest was still in abeyance, McClellan's intelligence agents laid
hands on a refugee from Leesburg who had a tale to tell, and they sent
McClellan a report. As McClellan described the report later: "There were
in it statements which the refugee said he had heard made by the Rebel
officers, showing that a great deal of personal intercourse existed between
them and General Stone. I think it was also stated that General Evans, then the
Rebel commander there, had received letters from General Stone; and there was a
general expression on the part of those Rebel officers of great cordiality
towards Stone—confidence in him." General Mc-

Clellan doubted that this statement by
itself was enough to justify the arrest of General Stone, but he talked to the
refugee and felt that the man was sincere and so he took the report and showed
it to Secretary Stanton—who ordered him to arrest General Stone at once and
send him to Fort Lafayette, in New York Harbor.

Accordingly,
on February 8, McClellan sent an order to the provost marshal directing him to
arrest General Stone, retain him in close custody, and send him under guard to
Fort Lafayette for confinement, with the injunction: "See that he has no
communication with any one from the time of his arrest."
¹⁴
So
it was done. General Stone was locked up. There were no formal charges against
him anywhere. Try as he could, he was unable to get a hearing, or even a plain
statement of the reasons for his arrest; he simply stayed in prison, not to
emerge until many months had passed, his reputation a ruin.

Early in March, General McClellan
himself discussed the Ball's Bluff affair before the committee. He really knew
nothing about the disastrous move across the river, he said, except what
General Stone had told him. He himself had ordered a demonstration, and he insisted
that he had not meant that troops were to be sent across at Ball's Bluff;
General Stone might have met his instructions simply by moving troops down to
the river bank and displaying them there. For the rest, General Stone had given
discretionary orders to Colonel Baker, and to judge the matter by General
Stone's report Colonel Baker was responsible for the result. General McClellan
added that he knew of no good reason why General Stone could not have sent
troops to Colonel Baker's relief from the force he had at Edwards Ferry, a few
miles downstream from the scene of the action.
¹⁵
And that closed
the case. No matter how the committee allocated the blame, it was not going to
be able to award any of it to General McClellan.

It
was time for the Army of the Potomac to move, and when it moved there were in
the background these two seemingly unrelated factors: President Lincoln's
desperate attempt to get the slavery issue settled before it changed the
character of the entire war, and the radicals' implacable determination to
destroy any general who, being unsound on "the Negro question," was
not waging war with ruthless speed and effectiveness. Taken together, these
factors would affect every move the Army made and every decision its commander
reached. Unless he understood their implications the Army commander, like
General Stone himself, would be contending with incomprehensible shadows.

6.
Forward to Richmond

Mr. Lincoln had
formally ordered a general advance by all of the armies for February 22. On
that day Mr. Davis addressed a rain-drenched crowd in Richmond, while Bedford
Forrest was getting the last wagonloads of supplies out of Nashville and Joe
Johnston was reflecting on the folly of telling elected officials about
military plans; and the Army of the Potomac remained in its camps, idle except
for the firing of Washington's Birthday salutes. Two days later Mr. Lincoln
went to a funeral. His eleven-year-old son Willie had died, victim of the
tyhpoid fever that was so prevalent, and Mr. Lincoln rode out to the Oak Hill
Cemetery in a carriage with his oldest son Robert and the two Senators from
Illinois. Mrs. Lincoln, too broken to leave the White House, kept to her room,
and a February gale—a fragment of the same weather that had spoiled the
Confederate inauguration—ripped at the bunting with which patriotic merchants
had decorated the downtown streets of Washington. Then, a few days after this,
McClellan put part of his army in motion, taking approximately 40,000 men up
the Potomac to Harper's Ferry; a promising move which drew much attention and
which by unlucky chance came to look like a humiliating fiasco.

Before descending on Richmond (as he
planned eventually to do) McClellan wanted to re-establish and protect the
western line of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. To do this he proposed to
move a large force up the Shenandoah Valley, and to supply this army it was
necessary to have new bridges over the Potomac at Harper's Ferry. His engineers
quickly laid a pontoon bridge there, and on February 26 the advance guard
crossed the river, troops cheering, bands playing "Dixie," McClellan
and his staff looking on, all hands bubbling with enthusiasm. Then the
engineers got ready to build a second and more important bridge, big enough to
carry all of the traffic involved in the movement and supply of a substantial
army; a semi-permanent bridge, designed to rest on a number of canal boats,
which had been floated up the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and were now to be
moved over into the river so that they could serve as piers.
¹

Everything
had been carefully organized. Working parties were ready to begin. The long
column of troops was moving up the Maryland side of the river, and it was time
to get the boats out of the canal—at which moment it was discovered that the
boats were just a few inches too wide to go through the locks that would bring
them to the place where they were needed.

A high wind came up, endangering the
pontoon bridge, the approaches to which were already clogged by wagon trains.
The ponderous canal boats lay below the locks, as useless as if they had never
left Washington. The engineers and their working parties were able to do
nothing, and since they could do nothing the Army itself could not do very
much, and it was all most embarrassing. McClellan rode forward as far as
Charles Town, where old John Brown had been tried and hanged less than three
years ago, and he made up his mind to hold this town and the country
roundabout. The advance guard was moved forward, and arrangements were made to
build up supplies at Harper's Ferry so that this one-bridge army could
eventually move on to Winchester; with the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley
held the Baltimore & Ohio people could at least rebuild their own railroad
bridge. The general and his staff and all the rest of the army then went back
to Washington, which was chuckling over a new joke: this expedition, people
told one another, had died of lockjaw.
²