Terrible Swift Sword (30 page)

Next
came General McClellan. Talking to him in private on the morning of March
8,
Mr. Lincoln appears
to have been blunt. Not only did the move to Annapolis seem to leave Washington
in danger, he said, but men who had to be listened to were beginning to say
that that was the purpose of it—that it reflected a treasonous design looking
toward defeat by prearrangement. McClellan, of course, grew angry (just as General
Stone had grown angry) and demanded an immediate retraction. The President
tried to explain that the accusation was not his and that he was simply
imparting some unwelcome information which was bound to affect the general's
course of action, but McClellan was not appeased.
⁵
He undoubtedly
realized the President was talking about the radical Republicans. It was no
secret that the members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War were demanding
an immediate opening of the lower Potomac, and their pertinacity in sniffing
out traitorous intent was a matter of recent record. McClellan's friends had
just warned him of "a powerful cabal that will overthrow him if he does
not move within a few days," and now the President was trying to tell him
that the business was extremely serious.
⁶
But when he looked back on
it, all McClellan could remember was that the President had used insulting
language.

Then came a meeting of the President
with McClellan and a round dozen of McClellan's generals, at which the generals
were polled on the question of the move to Urbanna. Of the twelve who were
questioned, eight favored following McClellan's plan and four were opposed,
two with reservations; which led Mr. Stanton to remark bitterly, "We saw
ten generals who were afraid to fight."
⁷
Any comments Mr. Lincoln
may have made at the time are not recorded, but as soon as the meeting was over
he composed and issued two General War Orders which showed precisely how the
whole affair impressed him.

General
War Order No. 2 directed that the Army of the Potomac be at once organized
into army corps, and named the officers who were to command the corps. The
officers named were Generals Irvin McDowell, Edwin V. Sumner, Samuel P.
Heintzelman, and Erasmus D. Keyes. The first three of these had voted against
the move to Urbanna, and Keyes, who had voted for it, had done so with the
proviso that the Rebels should first be driven away from the lower Potomac. In
addition, the troops around Harper's Ferry were designated a fifth corps,
command of which was given to Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, former member
of Congress and former governor of Massachusetts, a good Republican but a
soldier whose military capacities were wholly untested. To top it all, the
troops that were to be retained in Washington to defend the capital were put
under command of Brigadier General James Wadsworth, a wealthy Republican who
was designated Military Governor of the District of Columbia.

Close on the heels of this came General War
Order No. 3, which directed that the Army of the Potomac must depart on no
campaign without leaving in and around Washington
a
force large enough—in the opinion not only of
the commanding general but also of all of his corps commanders—to keep the
city perfectly secure. Not more than two of the new corps could be moved until
the lower Potomac was entirely clear of Confederate batteries; and no matter
what move the army made, it must begin to make it not later than March 18, ten
days hence.
⁸

All in all, the President had had a busy
day. He had given McClellan the warning about the political dangers which surrounded
him; he had attended the council of war, which went as if no warning had been
given; he had then reorganized the Army of the Potomac, naming the men who were
to be McClellan's principal lieutenants; and, finally, he had ordered the army
to move and had set up the conditions under which the movement was to be made.

This had no sooner taken place than the
bottom fell out of the Urbanna plan, once and for all. Joe Johnston evacuated
his position at Centreville on March 9 and marched south to
a
new position below the Rappahannock River.

Johnston
had been making his preparations ever since his Richmond conference with Mr.
Davis and the cabinet, just before Washington's Birthday. He had in the
Centreville area some 36,000 effective troops, with 11,000 more divided between
the Shenandoah Valley and the lower Potomac, and he had no intention of waiting
for McClellan to attack him or of letting McClellan steal a long march and get
between him and Richmond. He spent a little more than two weeks moving his
supplies to the rear; then, at the end of the first week in March, he concluded
that this chore could never be completed and ordered the army to burn
everything that was not already on the road—food, camp equipment, private
baggage, and all. His troops began to move on March 7, and two days later the
fortified lines which had been held so long were empty.

The bonfires were spectacular. At
Thoroughfare Gap, not far behind Johnston's lines, the commissary department
had built a huge meat-packing plant—much too far forward, General Johnston had
always insisted—and this, with more than a thousand tons of bacon, was burned.
One soldier remembered piles of bacon "as high as a house" sending
up queer yellow and blue flames, spreading a smell of fried bacon for twenty
miles around. In the camp itself mountains of baggage went up in flame and
smoke. Johnston complained that in the easy-going days when the army first
established itself at Centreville every private soldier had brought a trunk
full of clothing, and all of these trunks were burned; a serious loss, since
many of the men had enough clothing there to last the rest of the war if they
could have saved it. There was spirited complaint, especially by the commissary
department, and Mr. Davis wrote that the destruction made "a painful impression
on the public mind," but Johnston was relentless. He had at least got his
army down to marching trim, and now he established it on a line running from
Rappahannock Bridge to Culpeper Courthouse, just south of the Rappahannock
River, and awaited developments.
⁹

These came without delay. News of the
retreat reached Washington on a Sunday evening, March 9, while McClellan was in
conference with the President and the Secretary of War, and the general hurried
off to headquarters and began issuing orders. Couriers went spattering through
the muddy camps around Washington, and the next morning the Army of the Potomac
was in motion—making, at last, the advance to Centreville which the President
had been urging all winter long—and immense columns of infantry and artillery
crossed the Potomac and went slogging forward along muddy roads. A cold rain
came down, dampening the enthusiasm of the crowds that looked on; dampening
also, it seemed, the spirits of the commanding general, who was moving from one
anticlimax to another. An aide who saw McClellan riding to the front felt that
the man looked glum, and wrote afterward: "He who could that day have read
the General's soul would have seen there already something of that bitterness
which subsequently was to accumulate so cruelly upon him."
¹⁰

At Centreville there was plenty to see:
long lines of trenches, flimsy enough (a newspaper correspondent felt) but
obviously laid out by engineers who knew their business; mounting, in many
redoubts, imitation cannon made of painted wood. The pervasive whiff of
scorched bacon floated in from Thoroughfare Gap, and the camp itself held a
dull odor of smoke and wet ashes. At Manassas Junction storehouses were still
smoldering, machine shops had been destroyed,
a
wrecked locomotive and some half-burned
boxcars stood on
a
siding,
and there was an indescribable mess caused by the breaking-up of hundreds of
barrels of flour, vinegar, and molasses. A plant which had been built to render
tallow had been burned and gave off its own dismal odor, and broken casks of
beef and pork lay all about. The soldiers poked around amidst all of the
rubbish and seemed to feel let down; they had nerved themselves for a great
march into battle and had written their last letters home, and now they faced
nothing but this abandoned camp with its Quaker guns and its malodorous
combination of scents. General McClellan set up headquarters at Fairfax
Courthouse and called in those new corps commanders to talk about what ought to
be done next.
¹¹
The field of choice was narrow. The Urbanna plan was
dead beyond recall. There did not seem to be much point in just sitting down at
Centreville, and nobody cared for the idea of taking to the muddy roads in
direct pursuit of the absent General Johnston; clearly there was nothing to do
but leave
a
guard
to look after the Centreville-Manassas area and get the army back to
Washington, bring up the transports, and move down the Potomac for a campaign
against Richmond along the sandy peninsula that lay between the York and James
rivers.

While the generals
reflected on this there was still another change in the picture. On March 11
Mr. Lincoln issued one more War Order, removing McClellan from his position as
general-in-chief and reducing him to the post of commander of the Army of the
Potomac. Until further notice there would be no general-in-chief; all Army commanders
would report directly to the Secretary of War—in effect, to Mr. Lincoln
himself— and the order specified that "prompt, full and frequent reports
will be expected of each and all of them." In addition, the order enlarged
the responsibilities of General Halleck, the one Department commander who
seemed to be getting a little action, giving him control of everything west of
a north-and-south line through Knoxville, Tennessee, thus making cautious
General Buell a Halleck subordinate. Also, and significantly, it resurrected
the somewhat shopworn hero of the abolitionists, General John Charles Fremont,
giving him command of a newly created Mountain Department roughly comprising
western Virginia and eastern Tennessee.
¹²

This order was no sooner issued than the
President heard from General McClellan, getting an outline of the projected
move down to Hampton Roads. Back to General McClellan from the White House came
this prompt reply, dated March 13:

"The President having considered the
plan of operations agreed upon by yourself and the commanders of army corps,
makes no objection to the same but gives the following directions as to its
execution:

"1st. Leave such force at Manassas
Junction as shall make it entirely certain that the enemy shall not repossess himself
of that position and line of communication.

"2nd. Leave
Washington secure.

"3rd.
Move the remainder of the force down the Potomac, choosing a new base at
Fortress Monroe, or anywhere between here and there; or, at all events, move
such remainder of the army at once in pursuit of the enemy by some
route."
¹³

On January 24, Mr.
Adams in London had warned that what happened during the next six weeks would
probably be decisive, adding that if nothing happened that also would be
decisive: European recognition could hardly be averted unless the Federal
government by spring looked like a winner. The six weeks were up, and the
warning was being heeded. The command system had been reshuffled, with
promotion for a general whose armies were in action and demotion for generals
who seemed unhurried; an encouraging gesture had been made to the
abolitionists; and General McClellan had been told bluntly to put his new base
wherever he chose but at all events to get moving and chase the foe.

General McClellan learned about his
demotion through the newspapers, which got to Fairfax Courthouse before the
official dispatches did, and long after the war he wrote that this "proved
to be one of the steps taken to tie my hands in order to secure the failure of
the approaching campaign."
¹⁴
This, to be sure, was one way to
look at it, but at the time McClellan saw it quite differently. To his friend
Barlow he wrote: "I shall soon leave here on the wing for Richmond—which
you may be sure I will take. . . .
The
President is all right
—he is my strongest
friend."
¹⁵

There were political angles to this
business, on both sides. The abolitionists were openly moving to assume
direction of the war. What they had done to General Stone was one illustration
of the fact; another was an act of Congress approved on March 13 which had an
unmistakable anti-slavery cast. It read:

"All officers or persons in the
military or naval service of the United States are prohibited from employing
any of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning
fugitives from service or labor, who may have escaped from any persons to whom
such service or labor is claimed to be due, and any officer who shall be found
guilty by a court-martial of violating this article shall be dismissed from the
service."
¹⁶

Conservative Democrats like Barlow were
rallying behind McClellan; whether he liked it or not, the general was in
politics. If the President sustained him, the abolitionist surge might expend
its force harmlessly. In December, Barlow had written Stanton that the
abolitionists must sooner or later discredit themselves and that the Democrats
could then assume control of the government's war policy. Now, even though the
President had been acting with a good deal of severity, he still stood between
McClellan and the radicals. The demotion mattered little. McClellan still
commanded the country's most important army. There was some reason for him to
assure Barlow that the President was still his strongest friend.
¹⁷