Terrible Swift Sword (14 page)

To begin with, he was losing sight of
military realities. He believed that Beauregard was about to attack him, and in
mid-August he assured his wife: "Beauregard probably has 150,000 men—I
cannot count more than 55,000!"
¹¹
At this moment the
Confederate Army in his front (commanded, to be sure, by Joseph E. Johnston)
had a total present-for-duty strength of just over 30,000, and six weeks later
Johnston and Beauregard would abandon all plans for an offensive when they were
told that their strength could not possibly be raised to as much as 60,000.
McClellan believed that when he arrived on the scene Washington was all but
totally defenseless, and although he wanted to take the offensive he must
begin by taking massive precautions against disaster. Actually, the city had
never been open to a sudden Confederate thrust, and although he had moved
efficiently and swiftly to perfect the city's defenses he had after all had a
moderately good foundation on which to build; and the defensive effort, which
he properly put first, had begun to warp his understanding of the real
situation.
¹²

Even
worse, in some ways, was his inability to understand the political currents
that were swirling about him. He was engaging in an all-out struggle with
General Scott for control of the Army, and he wanted political support.
Understanding that the men who had made the Republican party and had put
Lincoln in office wanted a vigorous prosecution of the war, he courted their
help. He had been in Washington no more than a fortnight before he was inducing
Senator Charles Sumner to urge the Governor of Massachusetts to rush more
troops to Washington; he told Sumner that Scott did not share his own feeling
of urgency and that Scott, in fact, was an embarrassment to him.
¹⁸
But McClellan did not quite understand just what the Republican leaders really
wanted. They were demanding a hard war because they believed that to destroy
the Confederacy must also mean destruction of the slave power and the slave
system. They were as impatient with "the incapables" as McClellan
was, because they feared that the incapables would fumble and stumble their way
into some sort of a South-saving compromise. If they helped to create a new
commanding general, they would expect hard-driving action and an end to all
delays and all fuzziness of purpose; and if the commanding general did not
give this to them they would turn on him without mercy.

Viewing
the matter from London, Charles Francis Adams in mid-August wrote that the
nation had already gone through three stages of "this great political
disease." First, he said, there was "the cold fit, when it seemed as
if nothing would start the country." Then came the hot fit, "when it
seemed almost in the highest continual delirium." Now there was the third
stage, when the country was in the process of "waking to the awful reality
before it." He did not know what the fourth stage might be, but he felt
that there must be a high principle to contend for; "I am for this reason
anxious to grapple with the slave question at once."
¹⁴
John
Bigelow, who stopped this month in Washington to accept appointment as United
States consul in Paris, regretfully saw "a certain lack of
sovereignty" in President Lincoln, and wrote that he seemed to be "a
man utterly unconscious of the space which the President of the United States
occupied that day in the history of the human race." David Davis, the
stout Illinois jurist who had managed Lincoln's presidential campaign, heard
from a pessimistic friend in Washington that the cabinet was incapable and that
Seward was "leading Lincoln into a pit," and the correspondent gave a
blunter phrasing to Adams's thought: "I am no prophet, but it appears to
me we are only at the beginning of a mighty revolution."
¹⁵

The summer weeks passed. The army
constantly grew larger, showing its increased size and its improved drill in
periodic reviews which encouraged soldiers and spectators alike. The chain of
forts protecting Washington was made stronger, the task of piling up the
innumerable things which the new army would wear or eat or shoot made progress
despite woeful deficiencies in Secretary Cameron's organization . . . and the
contest for control between the young general and the old general went on
without a moment's letup, McClellan quietly contemptuous, Scott coldly furious.
In September there were new rumors of a Confederate offensive, and
Cameron—apparently forgetting that there was such a person as Scott—sent
McClellan a fatuous note begging him to say how the War Department could be of
service. McClellan asked for heavy reinforcements, including 25,000 of
Fremont's men and the whole of the Regular Army, saying that the Army of the
Potomac must be increased to 300,000 men even if this meant going on the
defensive everywhere else in the United States. He added that he wanted sole
control over the assignment of officers in his command.
¹⁶

Scott protested in vain. He decreed that
a general could communicate with a cabinet minister only through channels—that
is, through his superior officer—and he was ignored. He formally ordered
McClellan to give him a complete report on "the positions, state and
number of troops under him," and to submit day-by-day reports on new
arrivals and assignments. McClellan let the order lie for three weeks, then
casually sent over an inadequate reply. Scott thought of having McClellan
arrested and court-martialed, but concluded that "a conflict of authority
near the head of the army would be highly encouraging to the enemies and
depressing to the friends of the Union," and at length (having heard that
40,000 troops were being moved across the Potomac to the Virginia front) the
gen-eral-in-chief found himself writing to the War Department to ask if he
might be told "the meaning of the extraordinary movement of troops going
on in the city."
¹⁷

Nothing like this would have been
happening if Scott had not been slated for early retirement. He knew this as
well as anyone, and he was hanging on during the early fall in the hope that a
man of his own choice rather than McClellan might succeed him. He had settled
on Henry Wager Halleck, another of the studious officers whom Old Army people
labeled "brilliant," a West Pointer who had won a Phi Beta Kappa key
at Union College, who had published a work called
Elements
of
Military Art and Science,
and
had translated Jomini's classic four-volume
Vie
Politique et Militaire de Napoleon.
Halleek
had resigned from the Army in 1854 and had settled in California, prospering
mightily as a corporation lawyer. Late in August, Scott had had him appointed a
major general in the Regular Army, and when Cameron went to Missouri in October
to examine the decaying Fremont situation at firsthand Scott agreed to stay on
the job until the Secretary's return, hoping that Halleck would be with him by
that time.
¹⁸

It was a vain hope. By this time no one
could possibly replace Scott but McClellan. To the soldiers and to the Washington
public, McClellan was the martial spirit incarnate. William Howard Russell of
the
London Times
noted
that the young general had gone to elaborate lengths to make himself known to
the soldiers and especially to their officers. He was seen in the camps or on
the parade grounds every day, appearing in the morning and not disappearing
until after dark, seeing everything, being seen by everyone, playing to the
fullest the part of the general who carried the fate of the Republic on his
shoulders; and he did this, Russell felt, "either to gain the good will of
the army, or for some larger object."
¹⁹
The good will of the
Army he had won, beyond question; if a larger object was in view, McClellan had
only to wait.

He
did not have to wait much longer, for the Army of the Potomac was about to
suffer one more public disgrace, and the shock of it would force a change—and,
in the end, would arm and perpetuate a bitterness that would be felt to the
last day of the war and beyond. On October 21 a small Federal detachment was
routed in an engagement at Ball's Bluff, on the Virginia side of the Potomac
thirty-five miles upstream from Washington. The engagement had little military
significance, but it was one more dreary licking. The Confederates inflicted
heavy losses and they killed, in hot battle action, a prominent Union
commander—Colonel Edward D. Baker, an unskilled soldier but an orator and
politician Of much renown, a member of the United States Senate and for years
an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln.

Ball's
Bluff represented a fumble. Earlier in the summer the Confederates had occupied
Leesburg, Virginia, a few miles inland from Ball's Bluff, with a brigade under
the same Brigadier General "Shanks" Evans who had fought so well in
the opening hours of the Bull Run battle. There had been intermittent
skirmishes up and down the Potomac between Confederates and Federals, and
early in September Jeb Stuart's cavalry had won laurels by beating a party of
Federals near the Virginia hamlet of Lewinsville. On October 19, McClellan sent
a division under Brigadier General George A. McCall forward on the Virginia
side to Dranesville, fifteen miles below Leesburg, to find out what Evans was
doing. McCall was to send patrols out to tap at Evans's lines, and McClellan
ordered Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, commanding a division at
Poolesville, Maryland, to keep a sharp lookout along the river and see whether
McCall's advance made the Confederates evacuate Leesburg. He closed with the
suggestion: "Perhaps a slight demonstration on your part would have the
effect to move them." At the same time he told McCall to return to camp as
soon as his reconnaissance was finished.
²⁰

Out
of all of this came tragedy. On October 21, McCall completed his work and
withdrew. At the same time Stone, to make the "slight demonstration"
that had been called for, had Colonel Baker take his 1700-man brigade across
the river at Ball's Bluff to threaten Evans's left. Baker obeyed enthusiastically
but inexpertly. He floundered forward from the top of the bluff, ran into
Evans's main body, and got into a battle which he was unable to handle. His
force was routed, with some 200 men killed or wounded and more than 700
captured, he himself was shot dead, and the survivors came straggling back to
the Maryland side of the Potomac in woeful disorganization and dejection.
²¹

Exactly three months had passed since
Bull Run—three months of sober rededication, of immense effort, of hope rising
from the ashes: and the harvest of those months seemed to be this ignominious
defeat. It did riot even have the stature of the earlier disaster. Bull Run at
least came as the result of an honest effort to strike a blow; Ball's Bluff was
just a blunder, the sort of thing which—in the judgment of men whose impatience
was rising like a flood tide—came logically out of a timid defensive policy. It
was not to be endured, and some of the most forceful Republicans in the Senate
promptly undertook to bring about a change.

Their immediate target was old General
Scott, the living symbol of inaction and delay. (Scott, to be sure, had nothing
whatever to do with Ball's Bluff, but he was general-in-chief and if the Army
was not being used properly the fault must be his.) Less than a week after the
battle the opposition was in full cry.

Spearhead was a
triumvirate of three Senators—Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Zachariah Chandler of
Michigan, and Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio. Trumbull, the mildest-mannered
of the three, was a former Democrat just nearing fifty,
a
man
who had become a Republican during the anti-Nebraska fight,
a
member
of the Senate since 1855, an all-out war man always alert to uphold the
authority of Congress. Chandler, a wealthy merchant who had helped found the Republican
party and who had a dictatorial control over the party organization in
Michigan, was Trumbull's age but tougher and more rough-hewn, a man who had
declared during the spring that the Union would never be worth
a
rush
without a little bloodletting and who was working furiously now to bring that
bloodletting to pass. Wade, in his early sixties, was one of the most
determined of the anti-slavery men in Congress—he had tried, in 1852, to repeal
the fugitive slave law outright—and in the smoky Senate debates of the late 1850s
he had been ostentatiously defiant of the slave-state spokesmen; wholly grim,
wholly determined, altogether one of the rockiest men in Washington.

These three called on
Lincoln, and then on Lincoln and Seward, insisting that it was time for action
to drive the Rebels away from the vicinity of Washington. They also went to see
McClellan, in a meeting held at Montgomery Blair's house and lasting for three
hours, and McClellan convinced them that Scott was the great obstacle. To his
wife, immediately after the conference was over, McClellan summed it up:
"They will make a desperate effort to have Gen. Scott retired at once;
until that is accomplished I can effect but little good. He is ever in my way,
and I am sure does not desire effective action. I want to get through with the
war as rapidly as possible." Once Wade remarked that even an unsuccessful
battle would be better than continued delay, because "swarming
recruits" would come in to make good any losses; to which McClellan
quietly replied that he would rather have a few recruits before a victory than
a flock of them after a defeat. This was sober good sense, to be sure, but
sober good sense was not quite what these Republican "radicals" were
looking for, and Mr. Lincoln warned McClellan that this demand for action was a
political reality that had to be taken into account, adding: "At the same
time, General, you must not fight until you are ready." McClellan was
confident. "I have everything at stake," he replied. "If I fail,
I will not see you again, or anybody."
²²