Mr Lincoln's Army (17 page)

McClellan was beginning to realize, too, that
as general-in-chief of the armies he had some sort of responsibility in regard
to the slavery issue. He was moved to deep reflections on the evils of slavery
when he read the reports from the expedition that had captured Port Royal,
South Carolina, late that fall. As the troops seized portions of the Carolina
coast, great numbers of slaves came wandering into the Union lines with their
simple possessions tied up in bundles—infinitely wistful and confused, not
knowing what was happening but sensing, somehow, that a great day of change had
arrived. There was something in this spectacle "inexpressibly
mournful" to the young general as he sat at headquarters late at night and
poured out his inmost thoughts to his young wife. He wrote: "When I think
of some of the features of slavery I cannot help shuddering. Just think for one
moment, and try to realize that at the will of some brutal master you and I might
be separated forever! It is horrible; and when the day of adjustment comes I
will, if successful, throw my sword into the scale to force an improvement in
the condition of these poor blacks." And then the young general, so deeply
moved with a sincere, fundamental emotion, added the towering anticlimax:
"I do think that some of the rights of humanity ought to be secured to the
negroes. There should be no power to separate families, and the right of
marriage ought to be secured to them."

But these moments of self-communion, bringing
the bright vision of an all-powerful young conqueror using his great victory to
right profound wrongs, were after all relatively few. The more immediate
concerns left little room for them. Washington had become antagonistic to him.
There was afoot a subtle, implacable hostility, born of villainy, moving below
the surface to thwart the man who would save the country. Matters were not
going right, and it was because there were men in high places who did not want
matters to go right. Very late at night, worn by a hard day, McClellan told his
wife: ". . . the necessity for delay has not been my fault. I have a set
of men to deal with unscrupulous and false; if possible they will throw
whatever blame there is on my shoulders, and I do not intend to be sacrificed
by such people. I still trust that the all-wise Creator does not intend our
destruction, and that in His own good time He will free the nation from the men
who curse it, and will restore us to His favor." Specifically who might
these men be? They are not named, they are just there, the men who try to talk
strategy to a soldier, who insist on a quick stab at Manassas (where
ovewhelming foes lie in wait) instead of easily agreeing that it is more
sensible to wait and go round by the peninsula; the men who want the Potomac
opened at once; the frock-coated politicians who think they are somebodies even
though there is a great war to be fought, who commission ignorant civilians
like themselves as generals and entrust troops to them, who sometimes quite
openly do not want or expect a soldier to succeed unless he sees political
issues as they do.

The effect of all this was to drive McClellan
deeper in on himself— this sensitive, immeasurably introspective man, whose
high confidence rested on a dark substratum of doubt, where every problem,
every venture, had to be given prolonged study to make sure that inexplicable
dangers were not attached to it. The army was not only the instrument he had
created and was ready to use; it was his refuge as well, ready with cheers and
understanding to dispel those queer twinges of self-distrust that could come up
even without the nagging criticism of ignorant politicians. To this nagging he
could oppose obstinacy. He would handle the army according to purely military
principles, and he would not be hurried.

He presented at last his plan for taking the
army down the river by water (in the spring, when warm weather and the end of
winter damp had made passable the execrable unpaved roads of Virginia), and
there was endless to-do about it. Typhoid fever laid him up for a while.
Lincoln came to see him while he was convalescing, and once again couldn't seem
to get admitted to the presence; Lincoln then called into council General
McDowell and General William Franklin, explaining that he had to talk to
somebody, and remarking that if General McClellan did not intend to use the
army he would like to borrow it for a time. Recovering, McClellan found himself
involved with a good part of the Cabinet, plus the two generals, discussing
matters of strategy. He froze McDowell with icy politeness when McDowell tried
to express his embarrassment at having been called into consultation over the
head of the army commander, and listened in noncommittal silence while
Secretary Seward, slouching in his chair, said he didn't particularly care
whether the army beat the Confederates at Manassas or at the gates of Richmond,
just so long as it beat them somewhere. When Secretary Chase asked him bluntly
if he actually did plan to do anything definite with the army, and if so when
he proposed to do it, McClellan was equally blunt: said that he had a plan,
with a perfectly good time element in it, and if the President ordered him to
spill it in public he would do so, but that if he were not so ordered he would
prefer to keep quiet, feeling that it would be well to have as few civilians as
possible know about secrets of strategy. Whereupon, amid some hemming and
hawing, Lincoln adjourned the meeting.

They had come quite a distance now from the
day when Republican senators were flocking around the general with throat
noises of admiration, saying, "How young he is!"; quite a distance
from the day when four separate cabinet ministers craved the general's presence
at dinner, and all criticism was suspended while the young soldier had a free
hand. And it was all dreadfully complicated by the fact that suspicion and
fear—perfectly natural, considering that the country was at war with itself—had
been turned loose in the capital. That operated to intensify the handicap
which, under any circumstances, must rest on the shoulders of a democracy's
general. Of necessity, a democracy deeply distrusts its army, and in all
ordinary times it wears its distrust openly on its sleeve—especially a democracy
like that of 1861, which was still brash and crude and wore its hat in the
parlor. But when a democracy goes to war in a big way it is suddenly compelled
to rely on its army for its very existence. Then its instinct for
self-preservation forces it to watch the army very carefully, to be excessively
critical, to demand illogical and sometimes impossible things, and to be savage
if they are not quickly done. And it is up to the general in command to realize
all of this. A capacity for getting along with the civil authorities is just as
essential a part of his equipment as is the ability to plan campaigns and win battles.
(McClellan's opposite number, Robert E. Lee, could have told him about that:
Lee had this capacity to his very finger tips.)
⁴

And this capacity for getting along with the
civilians does not consist merely in an ability to butter people up
gracefully, to suffer fools in council with patience, and to yes the ignorant
officeholders along. What it really means is that the general must understand
that he is not a free agent and cannot hope to become one. He has to work
within the limitations imposed by the fact that he is working for a democracy,
which means that at times he must modify or abandon the soundest military plan
and make do with a second-best. McClellan's experience in that difficult autumn
and winter of inaction provides an illustration.

The administration desperately wanted him to
drive the Confederates out of northern Virginia and open the Potomac waterway.
For perfectly sound military reasons McClellan refused. What never entered his
head was the fact that his own ability to command the army and to control the
war was going to depend, at least in part, on the readiness with which he
satisfied the administration's demands. In the long run this civilian voice was
going to be heard, whether or no; if the general would not listen, there would
eventually be a general there who would.

It was the same in the matter of appointing
corps commanders. An army as big as the Army of the Potomac could not operate
very well with the division as the largest administrative unit. The divisions
had to be grouped into army corps, and generals had to be named to command
those corps. Lincoln and his Cabinet, spurred by a bookish understanding of
this, kept pressing McClellan to set the corps up and appoint the commanders.
McClellan kept refusing; he would name corps commanders, he said, only after
the test of battle had shown him which generals were best qualified for those
important jobs. Which was all right—except that one morning he came down to
work and found that the President had officially appointed the corps commanders
himself. McClellan complained bitterly about it, as well he might; but he never
saw that he really had himself to blame. The administration's insistence on
having corps commanders appointed meant that corps commanders were going to be
appointed —if not by the major general commanding, then by someone else. This
was probably wrong, but it was one of the facts of life which the major general
commanding needed to assimilate.

But by midwinter, in spite of all
disputes and misunderstandings, the War Department was collecting steamers,
ferryboats, tugs, canal barges, schooners—anything that would carry men or
supplies—and making ready for the great descent of the Potomac, for McClellan
had finally made his point. Richmond was to be attacked from the east, and a
tremendous amphibious operation was to be launched.

There
was a stir in the far-flung camps. Discipline was good, spirits were high; the
new system of corps command was creaking somewhat, but it was working. With
profound relief McClellan looked forward to getting out of the capital, away
from the scheming politicians, out into the field with his soldiers. To his
wife he wrote: "If I can get out of this scrape you will never catch me in
the power of such a set again."

And a young officer in the 7th Maine wrote
home: "We have no baggage with us but our blankets. I enjoy this kind of
life immensely. We expect to be in Richmond in a fortnight"
⁵

THREE

The
Era of Suspicion

1.
But
You
Must
Act

The point that is so
easy to overlook nowadays is that the men of the 1860s were living in the
center of a fiery furnace. It was not a tidy, clear-cut war against some
foreign nation that was being waged. It was a
civil
war,
a war not between men of two nations but between men of two beliefs, two
philosophies, two ways of considering human society and its structure and
purpose. The opposing beliefs were not sharply defined and clear so that no
man could mistake which camp he belonged in. On the contrary, there were a
dozen gradations of belief leading from one to the other, and a man might
belong in one camp on one issue and in the other camp on another; and the very
word "loyalty" might mean loyalty to a flag, to a cause, or to a
belief in some particular social and political theory, and "treason"
might mean disloyalty to any of these. Indeed, the war was peculiarly and very
bitterly a war of the tragically modern kind, in which loyalties and
disloyalties do not follow the old patterns even though those patterns may be
the only ones men can use when they try to formulate their loyalty. And so that
generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation
of a free society— the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the
contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal.
Because that element was lacking, the wisest man could be reasonable

with only part of his mind; a certain area
had to be given over to emotions which were all the more mad and overpowering
because he shared them with everyone else.

Hence the Civil War was fought and directed
in an air of outright melodrama. It was stagy and overdone, and the least
inhibited theatrical director nowadays would throw out large parts of the
script on the simple ground that it was too wild to be credible—but it was all
real, the villainies and dangers were all visible, and the worst things anyone
could imagine seemed quite as likely as not to be completely true. The confused
soldiers who imagined that General McDowell wore a fancy hat in order to have
traitorous communion with the Rebels were not out of their minds; they were
simply applying, on their own level, the same sort of panic suspicion that was
besetting their elders. All the way through there were two lines of action
going on: the visible one, out in the open, where there were flags and rumbling
guns and marching men to be seen, and the invisible one which affected and
colored all the rest. Sunlight and death were upon the earth in the spring of
1862, and no one was wholly rational.

On the surface, everything was fine. Nearly
two hundred thousand young men had been drilled, disciplined, clothed, armed,
and equipped. They innocently thought themselves veterans. They had roughed it
for a whole autumn and winter under canvas, knew what it was like to sleep on
bare ground in the rain, had learned the intricate, formalized routines by
which marching columns transformed themselves into battle lines, and they had
been brought to a razor edge of keenness. The great unpredictable that lay
ahead of them seemed a bright adventure, for in the 1860s cynicism was not a
gift which came to youth free, in advance; it had to be earned, and all
illusions had to be lost the hard way. Day by day the new divisions got ready
for the great move southward, discarding surplus gear, preparing wagon trains
for cross-country movement. The roads and docks and warehouses along the
Potomac were full of bustle and hustle, and the empty transports lay waiting on
the bright water.