Terrible Swift Sword (40 page)

Meanwhile McClellan was trying to get
the Army of the Potomac down to Fort Monroe. At the end of March his move was
well under way. In the four army corps commanded by General Keyes, Heintzelman,
Sumner, and McDowell— those commanders whom he had not chosen but who had been
thrust upon him by the President—he had 126,000 men, present for duty. Keyes
and Heintzelman were already on the peninsula, Sumner's corps was in transit,
and McDowell's was ready to leave. Now this disturbance at Kernstown knocked
McClellan's arrangements slightly out of line and led to a major
miscalculation.

President Lincoln had consented to the
peninsula move with grave misgivings, and had laid down two firm conditions to
govern it. First, there must be a strong force around Manassas to keep the
Confederates out of northern Virginia; second, there must be, in Washington and
its circling camps, a garrison powerful enough to make the city secure against
any sudden Confederate thrust. The arrangements by which McClellan made
provision for these two requirements while he also moved his army men to the
lower Chesapeake were necessarily intricate, and Kernstown deranged them;
revising them, McClellan invited trouble and speedily got it.

Departing
for Fort Monroe, McClellan sent Secretary Stanton a tabulation of his strength,
pointing out that he was leaving Banks with 35,000 men to hold northern
Virginia, and that General Wadsworth, commanding in Washington, had 20,000
more. The total thus remaining to meet President Lincoln's stipulation was,
accordingly, 55,000 men, which struck McClellan as ample and was only 10,000
short of th« number which the council of corps commanders had fixed as proper
to defend the capital.
⁷
Accordingly, on April 1, McClellan himself
left for Fort Monroe, and Stanton took the figures to the White House to show
them to the President.

When
the President and the Secretary of War examined the figures they felt that
there were serious holes in McClellan's arithmetic. The 55,000 who were to hold
northern Virginia had originally been figured as being in addition to General
Banks's corps. Now it developed that this corps made up the larger part of the
whole, and Banks had nearly all of his men over in the Shenandoah, moving down
west of the Massanutten Mountain far from the vital area east of the Blufe
Ridge. To be sure, McClellan had told Banks to bring everyr body but Shields
back to the vicinity of Manassas "the very moment the thorough defeat of
Jackson will permit it," but that moment had not arrived; as far as Mr.
Lincoln could see, the region which he had ordered held in force was hardly being
held at all. To make things worse, the 20,000 left with Wadsworth included some
levies that were already ticketed to go elsewhere and in any case were made up
largely of untrained troops, imperfectly equipped. Joe Johnston was known to
have his army somewhere below the Rappahannock, and it struck Mr. Lincoln that
what had been done would present to Johnston "a great temptation
...
to turn back from the Rappahannock and
sack Washington." He had accepted the plan McClellan gave him, but it
seemed to him now that "that arrangement was broken up and nothing was
substituted for it."
⁸

It seemed, in short,
that McClellan had simply disobeyed clear orders, and the President acted
promptly. On April 3 he ordered Stanton to have either McDowell's or Sumner's
corps held in front of Washington, to operate in the Manassas area. Since
Sumner's corps was already on the move, Stanton chose McDowell, and McClellan
was notified that this corps —33,510 men present for duty, by the latest
returns—was detached from his command and would not join him on the peninsula.
McDowell henceforth would get his orders not from McClellan but from the War
Department.
⁹
As far as McClellan was concerned, McDowell was an
independent operator, and the Army of the Potomac had just lost a quarter of
its strength.

.
. . which might not have been so serious if anyone at army headquarters had
been able to say how strong the army really was, either before or after this
loss. But it is just here that one begins to encounter that fantastic
uncertainty about numbers which was to hang over the Army of the Potomac like a
fog too heavy for the winds to lift. McClellan's headquarters was handicapped
by a singular inability to determine the size either of this army or of the
army which it was about to fight: a shortcoming which made victory impossible
and which bewildered no one as long or as profoundly as it bewildered the commanding
general himself—with whom, indeed, much of it originated.

On
April 7, three days after he had begun to move up the peninsula, McClellan was
unable to come within 17,000 of stating the number of men he actually had with
him. He told Brigadier General John E. Wool, the white-haired veteran of the
War of 1812 who commanded at Fort Monroe, that he had just 68,000 men present
for duty; on the same day he sent to President Lincoln a telegram stating that
"my entire force for duty only amounts to about 85,000."
¹⁰

To
be sure, this need not have mattered much, because the Army of the Potomac just
now had a prodigious advantage over its opponent. When McClellan's divisions
marched up from Fort Monroe, there were fewer than 15,000 Confederates on the
scene (fewer enemies, altogether, than the margin of McClellan's doubt about
the size of his own army) and more than a week would pass before that number
could be increased to any great extent. Yet this was of little help, because
army headquarters always credited Confederate commanders with having from two
to four times as many men as was actually the case. In addition to fighting the
tough Confederates who were physically on the scene with loaded weapons in
their hands, the Army of the Potomac had also to contend with scores and scores
of thousands of enemies who never existed. As a result, it tended to move very
slowly.

The
business began with the Army intelligence section— Secret Service, as it was
known then. McClellan had confided his Secret Service to a man who was carried
on the books as "E. J. Allen," but who in real life was Allan
Pinkerton, the first and most famous of America's great private detectives.

Pinkerton
was a diligent detective and a first-rate organizer, and he set up a network of
spies, messengers, and observers all over Virginia, submitting to McClellan
periodic reports which were highly convincing because they contained such a wealth
of detail. Running through each report that went to McClellan would be
revealing thumbnail comments:
"coffee
getting scarce . . . plenty of lead . . .
salt scarce
...
a good supply of
tents and camp equipment except camp kettles . . . plenty of wagons and teams,
generally impressed . . . on an average arriving at Richmond 3 companies daily.'
Here would be a note on the number of shooting galleries in and around Richmond
and on the extent to which Confederate soldiers used them; there, a remark
that Southern regiments averaged from 700 to 800 men in strength; next, a
statement that almost all fortifications were built with slave labor. From each
area came just the sort of detail that would show that methodical observers had
been taking notes on

the
spot.

With
these comments, of course, came the estimates of troop numbers. These were
based on the reports from the Pinkerton operatives, on the examination of
Confederate prisoners and deserters, and on things said by contrabands, the
figures finally presented being drawn up by Pinkerton himself. Pinkerton
carefully worked out percentages so that the totals assembled for any unit
could be reduced to a proper present-for-duty level, following his percentages
so faithfully that now and then this or that Confederate general would be
credited with having "6,346¾ men in his division. When he drew up his
grand totals Pinkerton arbitrarily raised the numbers slightly, on a system
previously discussed with McClellan, to make certain that there was a margin
for error to cover new arrivals or units that somehow had been missed.

He gets credit, nowadays, for having
been worse than he was, and some of his estimates indeed were grotesquely unreal—such
as an autumn report that Beauregard's command contained 100,000 men, and that
the Confederates had thirty-three regiments on the peninsula. But at times his
carefully calculated totals were fairly close to the mark. On November 15,
1861, for instance, Pinkerton worked it out that there were in Virginia, from
Norfolk all the way to the western mountains, approximately 117,100 armed
Confederates. The official returns for December 31 (six weeks later, in other
words) show an "aggregate present" for all Confederate forces in the
state of 118,306. On the face of it, Pinkerton late in 1861 was keeping very
fair track of Confederate numbers in Virginia.
¹¹

Yet the result was disaster. The
"aggregate present" figure, which came so close to the Pinkerton
total, actually had very little relation to the number "present for
duty": the number, that is, that would be of use in battle. It was always
substantially higher, including sick men, men under arrest or on non-combat
details, men from disorganized units awaiting reassignment, men without
weapons—all the multitude of military extras who had to be fed, paid and
reported on but whom no foe would ever have to face. Even when he came closest
to accuracy, Pinkerton made a paper army look real. In addition, his reports
got worse instead of better as time went on, and his estimates of the numbers
McClellan would have to face finally lost all touch with reality. In the end
Pinkerton was persuaded that the Confederacy had between 100,000 and 120,000
soldiers on the peninsula, and that their available forces around Richmond
came to more than 180,000.
¹²

These wild guesses would have done less
harm, however, if there had not been at army headquarters (where such matters
can be cross-checked) a will to believe them. This will McClellan had and never
lost. Long after the war, when the truth about Confederate Army strengths in
Virginia was clearj to everyone, he clung to the belief that he had been beset
everywhere by superior numbers: a belief which
had
no base in fact or in logic but which, if
held hard enough, might perhaps justify the paralyzing indecision which
governed
the
direction
of the Army of the Potomac.

Yet this indecision was more than the
simple result of a belief that the enemy was the stronger. It preceded that
belief, displaying itself in a baffling lack of capacity to drive a chosen plan
through to its conclusion, and it became visible before the spring campaign was
a week old.

On
March 19, McClellan had sent Secretary Stanton an outline of his strategic
design. He would go up the peninsula
to
make an advanced base
at West Point, where the Pamunkjey and Mattapony Rivers meet to form the York,
fifty miles northwest of Fort Monroe. Somewhere between West Point and
Richmond, he said, the Confederates would concentrate to fight the great,
decisive battle, and so it was all-important for him to reach West Point as
quickly as possible. About one third of the way up the river was the historic
town' of Yorktown, where Cornwallis had come to grief, and York-town was
powerfully fortified by the Rebels. It could be taken by siege, of course, but
that would involve a delay of weeks, and there were no weeks to spare; no days
to spare, even}. At all costs, Yorktown must be taken at once. This, said McClellan,
could be done by a joint Army-Navy attack. The Navy "should at once
concentrate upon the York River all their available and most powerful
batteries." If it did, Yorktown should fall in a few hours; if not, the
business might (take weeks. Since speed was essential, McClellan insisted, full
naval co-operation was "an absolute necessity"; Yorktown was the key
to the entire campaign.
¹³

What
McClellan was talking about, of course, was an operation after the Fort Henry
model—a pulverizing naval bombardment, with the Army coming in when the dust
settled to mop up pockets of resistance and take full possession. The plan was
definite enough and it made perfectly good sense— and nothing was ever done to
put it into effect.

McClellan appears to have assumed that
the President or the Secretary of War or somebody would tell the Navy that its
warships were supposed to reduce the fortifications at Yorktown, but nothing of
the sort happened.
Assistant
Secretary
Fox insisted afterward that the Navy had never been asked to bombard Yorktown,
and he added that the Confederate works there were so strong, and were
situated on such commanding ground, that they could not have been reduced by
naval gunfire anyway. Flag Officer Louis Goldsborough, commanding at Hampton
Roads, understood that Washington simply wanted
Monitor
to keep
Virginia
away from the transports and the
disembarkation area around Fort Monroe. Goldsborough talked to McClellan the
morning the general reached Fort Monroe, and McClellan said nothing to him
about any bombardment. Instead, he asked the Navy to help in the reduction of a
Confederate fort at Gloucester, which lay on the north side of the York just
opposite York-town.