Terrible Swift Sword (70 page)

This led the administration to think
anew about General McClellan.

Ten days after Antietam, McClellan told
Halleck that his army was not in condition to make a campaign or fight a battle
unless Lee made a glaring mistake (which was most unlikely) or "pressing
military exigencies render it necessary." It seemed to him that he must
reorganize, get much new equipment, watch the Confederates lest they come back
north of the Potomac, and get the army into top condition. The fall rains would
probably raise the level of the Potomac, making the fords unusable and ending
the danger that Lee would make a new invasion. Once that happened, "I
propose concentrating the army somewhere near Harpers Ferry and then acting
according to circumstances, viz, moving on Winchester, if from the position
and attitude of the enemy we are likely to gain a great advantage by doing so,
or else devoting a reasonable time to the organization of the army and
instruction of the new troops, preparatory to an advance on whatever line may
be determined."
⁸

This was not good enough. The Confederacy
after all was on the defensive again, and the Federals needed men who would
take full advantage of that fact; to call for a long refit and say that the
offensive might some day be resumed according to circumstances was to miss the
point entirely. The Army of the Potomac had had a rough time, it needed everything
from shoes to horses, and new recruits could hardly be fitted overnight into
the veteran divisions; but Lee's army was in much worse shape. It was far
smaller, its equipment was deplorable, and in relation to its strength it had
been much more badly bruised by the recent battle; it needed a breathing spell
far more than the Army of the Potomac did, and it stood to gain more by delay.
Its stragglers were returning—by October 10 the present-for-duty strength
stood at more than 64,000, and others were coming in daily
⁹
—and it
was rapidly getting back into fighting trim. To give this army a month or two
for recuperation was dangerous.

About
a fortnight after the battle Mr. Lincoln paid McClellan a visit, trying to get
the general to see that it was time for action, and the two men seem to have
had trouble understanding one another. The general wrote that he urged the
President to follow "a conservative course"—which could only mean
that he opposed the antislavery war which the President had just announced—and
he said that he understood the President to agree with him. He went on confidently:
"He told me that he was entirely satisfied with me and with all that I had
done; that he would stand by me against all comers; that he wished me to
continue my preparations for a new campaign, not to stir an inch until fully
ready, and when ready to do what I thought best."

The
President remembered it differently. He told John Hay that he "went up to
the field to try to get him to move, and came back thinking he would move at
once." For confirmation, there is a wire Halleck sent McClellan on
October 6: "The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give
battle to the enemy or drive him south. Your army must move now while the roads
are good." For Hay, Lincoln summed up what came next: "I peremptorily
ordered him to advance. It was nineteen days before he put a man over the
river. It was nine days longer before he got his army across, and then he
stopped again, playing on little pretexts of wanting this and that. I began to
fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy."
¹⁰

Obviously, President Lincoln and General
McClellan were not talking the same language. The month of October brought
extended bickering between army headquarters and the War Department; McClellan
was calling for new equipment and the War Department was calling for action,
and neither was satisfied with what was being delivered. On October
9
the Confederate
cavalryman Jeb Stuart made this strained relationship worse by setting out on
a spectacular raid, in which he got all the way up to Chambersburg,
Pennsylvania, destroyed Yankee supply depots and shops, seized a number of
good Pennsylvania horses, and got back safely without a man killed and with
only a few slightly wounded; once again he had ridden entirely around
McClellan's army. It was sheer bad luck that McClellan shortly after this filed
a request for more horses, saying that his cavalry mounts were "absolutely
broken down from fatigue and want of flesh"; which drew from Mr. Lincoln a
dispatch asking, "Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your
army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?"
¹¹

In private, McClellan fumed, and he
wrote to Mrs. McClellan: "If you could know the mean character of the despatches
I receive you would boil over with anger. When it is possible, misunderstand,
and when it is not possible; whenever there is a chance of a wretched
innuendo, then it comes. But the good of the country requires me to submit to
all this from men whom I know to be greatly my inferior socially,
intellectually and morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a
certain individual than that of the 'Gorilla.'"
¹²

Halleck was fuming, too. At the end of
October he expressed himself in a letter to Governor H. R. Gamble of Missouri:
"I am sick, tired and disgusted with the condition of military affairs
here in the east and wish myself back in the western army. With all my efforts
I can get nothing done. There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any
man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert
mass. I have tried my best, but without success."
¹³

This
sort of thing could not go on. No matter where the rights and the wrongs lay,
the situation had become impossible; McClellan and the administration could no
longer work together, and at last the boom came down. Late in October McClellan
began to cross the Potomac, and during the first week of November he marched
his army down into Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, heading for a general
concentration in the neighborhood of Warrenton. Lee took Longstreet and
Longstreet's corps to Culpeper to face him and left Jackson temporarily in the
Shenandoah Valley, on the off chance that the old game could be played once
more, and, on November 5, Mr. Lincoln concluded that enough was enough.
According to one interpretation, he had made up his mind to remove McClellan if
the general allowed Lee to get between the Army of the Potomac and Richmond;
according to another he had just been waiting for the fall elections to be
over; and the point can be argued at anybody's leisure. What is certain is that
the War Department, "by direction of the President," issued orders
relieving McClellan of his command and turning the army over to Major General
Ambrose E. Burnside.

The War Department handled this most
carefully, because to remove McClellan was to wrench out of the Army of the
Potomac something that went to the very heart, and nobody was sure just what
the response was going to be. Secretary Stanton, having heard the loose talk
about marching on Washington, suspected that McClellan might not let himself
be removed, and he wanted the orders delivered personally by Brigadier General
C. P. Buckingham, a staff man assigned to the Secretary's office. He told
Buckingham to go to army headquarters at Rectortown, not far from Warrenton,
and to see Burnside first. If Burnside flatly refused to take the job
Buckingham was to come back to Washington without serving the papers on
McClellan; only after Burnside had agreed to serve was McClellan to be notified
that he was relieved. The Secretary wanted to have someone legally in command when
the removal became effective.

It
turned out that Mr. Stanton worried needlessly. General Buckingham had no
trouble. He got to headquarters in a snowstorm, late on the night of November
7; Burnside agreed to take the command—reluctantly, for he had a justifiably
modest opinion of his own capacity—and McClellan accepted the removal like a
good soldier. Stoutly, McClellan wrote to Mrs. McClellan: "As I read the
order in the presence of Gen. Buckingham I am sure that not the slightest expression
of feeling was visible on my face, which he watched closely. They shall not
have that triumph."
¹⁴
At Burnside's request, McClellan stayed
for a couple of days, to go over headquarters papers with him and explain the
plans on which the army had been moving; then he went around the camps to say
goodbye to the soldiers.

The soldiers gave him an almost
hysterical farewell, cheering themselves hoarse, and doing a power of cursing
as well. McClellan said that "many were in favor of my refusing to obey
the order and of marching upon Washington to take possession of the
government," and European officers who were present muttered that
Americans were simply incomprehensible—why did not this devoted army go to the
capital and compel the President to reinstate it’s favorite general? But there
never had been much danger that this might really happen, regardless of the
loose words that had been uttered; it is extremely hard to imagine McClellan
actually leading an armed uprising, even though the idea had haunted him, and
it is quite impossible to imagine the Army of the Potomac taking part in one.
¹⁵
The goodbyes were finished at last, the echoes of the shouting died away on the
wintry plain, and McClellan went off to his home and the army saw him no more.
His active part in the war was over.

His
departure marked not so much a change in commanders as another change in the
war itself. So far the war had been chaotic, formless, a vast tumult which
might conceivably be won, lost, or adjusted before it got altogether beyond
control. It had been what McClellan always supposed it to be, a limited war for
a limited end. Now it was going to be unlimited, and the people who fought it
would have to look far into the future for a guiding light because they were
bidding goodbye to the past.

It would take a while for them to see this.
The fall elections in the North had gone against the administration. The Democrats
carried New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois—states that had
voted Republican in 1860—and although the administration retained its control
of both houses of Congress its majorities were sharply reduced. Whether this
was the normal off-year reaction against the party in power or the expression
of some deep dissatisfaction with the way the war was being fought, it was highly
discouraging; it was quite possible to argue that it reflected widespread
opposition in the North to the Emancipation Proclamation. Colonel James A.
Mulligan, the stout fighter who had unsuccessfully defended the Missouri town
of Lexington against Price's army a year earlier, wandered about Washington in
a mood of unrelieved dejection.

"This town is
filled with littleness," he wrote. "There is not a man in the nation
destined to endurance. This great Republic, late the wonder and the envy of
the nations, is crumbling into blood-stained fragments because there is no
head and hand to guide and light it through the peril. . . . There's no human
granite nowadays. It's all clay."
¹⁶

All clay: out of which the spirit might
rise, if evoked. The only certainty was that the incalculable was going to
happen. To make the slave free was to go on into the unknown; all that could be
said was that there was no other place to go. History, as Mr. Lincoln remarked
in his message to Congress, was inescapable, and whether they liked it or not
people were caught up in something greater than themselves. America was going
into the future rather than back into the past, and there was no signpost in
anything that had happened earlier. There was nothing but tomorrow to count on;
tomorrow, and what people of today really meant.

In his annual message
Mr. Lincoln tried to explain it:

"We—even
we
here
—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.
In
giving
freedom
to the
slave,
we
assure
freedom
to the
free
—honorable
alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly
lose, the last best hope of the earth."
¹⁷

So
the armies began to march. In Mississippi, Grant was going south toward
Vicksburg, and, at Nashville, Rosecrans would presently set out for an
appointment on the banks of Stone's River. And in Virginia, General Burnside
was taking the Army of the Potomac down to Fredericksburg.