Mr Lincoln's Army (35 page)

This pressure by the leaders of his own party
was something Lincoln could by no means ignore. He had taken his political
life in his hands by reinstating McClellan in command of the Army of the
Potomac, and the party leaders were sounding off about it. Senator Zachariah
Chandler of Michigan, almost incoherent with fury, underlining words with
sputtering pen point, was writing that recent disasters to the army had been
caused by "treason, rank treason, call it by what name you will," and
could see no hope save in "a demand of the loyal governors backed by a threat"
to bring about an immediate change in policy; the President was "unstable
as water" and was letting himself be "bullied by those traitor
Generals" who would yet create a military dictatorship.
²

To the Republican leaders, everything was
simple. The Army of the Potomac was not aggressively used and was shamefully
pushed around by muscular Rebels. The reason, as they saw it, could only be
that it was led by men whose hearts were not in the cause; by case-hardened
Democrats; by men who sympathized with slavery and who therefore did not really
want the rebellion suppressed; by men disloyal, in plain English. The remedy
was, of course, obvious: entrust the army only to generals whose abolitionist
convictions were strong beyond all question and there would be no more of this
pampering and cosseting of treason.

This led them into manifest absurdities. They
considered John Charles Fremont ideal material for high command: he was sound
on the slavery question, and that was enough. The mere fact that he was totally
devoid of military ability was beside the point. They also felt that the
ineffable Ben Butler would make a good army commander; he was fully as
incompetent as Fremont in the military field, but he was "loyal" on
the only issue which mattered—even now he was rubbing slaveholders' noses in
it, in New Orleans. Franz Sigel, the transplanted German revolutionary, and
David Hunter, who had rashly proclaimed emancipation along the Georgia coast,
would be equally acceptable. No one ever accused those men of being especially
qualified soldiers, but no one ever accused them of sympathy with slavery,
either, and that was all that counted. Lincoln flared up once when burly Ben
Wade was insisting on the removal of McClellan; if he removed him, asked the
President irritably, with whom should he replace him? "Anybody!"
cried Wade. Lincoln shook his head; "anybody" might do for Wade, he
said, but he must have
somebody.

Yet these men had a point. One could almost
say that they were right for the wrong reasons—or partly right, at any rate,
for reasons that were mostly wrong. There
was
a crippling deficiency in the army command, from the
brigades and divisions on up, and it was the kind of deficiency from which the
Confederate Army of Northern Virginia did not suffer: a lack of the hard, grim,
remorseless, driving spirit that must be on tap if wars are to be won.

Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley
offers an example: driving his men in pursuit of Banks with remorseless fury,
sending them on far past the point of physical exhaustion, continuing to pursue
even though most of his army had fallen out from sheer inability to take
another step, keeping it up long after a more sober general would have realized
that pursuit was impossible—but winning, in the end, because he forced Banks to
fight at Winchester before Banks could rally his men and get set for the blow,
which meant that Banks got licked disastrously.

Jackson
was an undefiled genius, to be sure, and it is hardly fair to expect all corps
and division commanders to measure up to his standard. But there was a touch of
the same sort of thing in the other Confederate commanders. General A. P. Hill
was too heedless and impetuous by far, rushing into the attack without proper
caution—but, in the end, providing the killing punch, against the odds, that
helped to knock McClellan's right wing back behind the Chickahominy. Longstreet
was sullen and balky, ignoring Lee's expressed wish, waiting for his foe to
make one more ill-advised maneuver. Yet finally, when the opening appeared, he
came down on the enemy's exposed flank like an avalanche, every man in action,
no reserves held back for use in case something went wrong; and he turned the
second battle of Bull Run into a rout. The Confederacy's other General Hill,
D. H. Hill, was a carping dyspeptic who observed that Lee's tactics at Malvern
Hill were all wrong and that it was hopeless to assault the massed Yankee guns;
but when finally ordered he went in with such a cold fury that he almost turned
certain defeat into dazzling victory. The least common denominator of those men
was that they fought all-out. If they hit at all they hit with everything there
was. They had an exultant acceptance for the chances of war. They fought as if
they enjoyed it, and they probably did. The Army of the Potomac just was not
getting that kind of leadership. Kearny had had it, but he was dead. Most of
the other generals seemed uninspired.

What the radicals really meant when they
complained that the Federal generals were too easy with their opponents was
that the generals kept missing their chances for lack of that extra ounce of
deep combativeness. They were quite wrong in believing that this would be
remedied by promoting stanch abolitionists, but they were quite right in
insisting that more forceful leaders were needed; and they anticipated
Clemenceau in believing that war was far too important to be left to the
generals, anyway. The North had not yet found the men who had the flaming
spirit of war. McClellan's army was not handled the way Lee's army was: neither
as a whole nor in its divisions and brigades. The key perhaps lies in the fact
that any attempt to show how a Northern general at this period failed to
measure up usually makes its point by showing, for contrast, what his opposite
number on the Confederate side was doing.

Canny
old Secretary Welles in the Navy Department really had the answer. He was
ceaselessly shuffling naval officers, looking for that hard-fighting, driving
quality without which all other assets are vain. Over and over in his diary one
finds him speaking of some distinguished officer who didn't quite measure up:
"He has wordy pretensions, some capacity, but no hard courage . . .
scholarly pretensions, some literary acquirements, but not of much vigor of
mind. . . . Is an intelligent but not an energetic, driving, fighting officer,
such as is wanted for rough work." He summed up the army's problem neatly
enough: "Some of our best-educated officers have no faculty to govern,
control and direct an army in offensive warfare. We have many talented and
capable engineers, good officers in some respects, but without audacity, desire
for fierce encounter, and in that respect almost utterly deficient as
commanders."

A considerable part of the radicals'
suspicion was directed at West Point. Had not that school been under Southern
control for a generation or more? Had not some of its most distinguished
graduates gone South when the war began? Did it not seem to produce, for the
North, bookish and doctrinaire generals who made war by rote and neglected to
hit the enemy when he should be hit? And was not war itself, for that matter,
really quite a simple matter if a man had his heart in the right place? To the
radicals, lack of professional training for army command was a positive asset,
not a deficiency. A man whose heart was in the war was infinitely better than a
professional who did not care.

Since most of the really successful generals
in that war, Northern and Southern alike, finally turned out to be West
Pointers, this attitude seems almost willfully obtuse today; yet here again
the politicians had a point. The government's experience with the older
regular-army officers in the early part of the war had not been too happy. Very
few of the regulars had shown enthusiasm for the Northern cause. Many limited
themselves to a strict performance of the letter of their duty, were utterly
lacking in zeal, openly predicted defeat, and admittedly served the North only
because the honor of a soldier required it. The stuffiness that had grown up in
a small officer corps limited to routine duties in the long years of peace had
not gone unnoticed. Jacob Cox of Ohio, a civilian who rose to become a better
than average major general, has recorded that one general to whom he reported
early in the war admonished him severely on the importance of obeying orders
literally but not going one step beyond: "If you had been in the army as
long as I have, you would be content to do the things that are ordered without
hunting up others." Cox was quite as caustic as anyone in criticizing the
incompetent officers who came in from civilian life, for political reasons,
under the volunteer system, but he remarked: "It seems to me an entirely
fair conclusion that with us in 1861, as with the first French republic, the
infusion of the patriotic enthusiasm of a volunteer organization was a
necessity, and that this fully made up for the lack of instruction at the
start."
⁸

And if the volunteer system elevated many a
nincompoop to high command, it also brought up some good men with solid talents
for war: more of them than one is likely to realize, reading the blanket
denunciations of political generals. The North got men like John Logan and
Frank Blair, for instance—untutored civilians who became such good soldiers
that each was able to command an army corps under as grim a fighting man as
William T. Sherman. Blair and Logan were political generals pure and simple,
one the brother of a cabinet minister, the other a prominent Democrat whom it
was important to placate, but they were first-rate soldiers as well. It may be
that Sherman, with his rough informality and his utterly unregimented mind, had
more of a knack for developing fighting men than anyone in the East had; it may
be noted that in the Army of the Potomac O. O. Howard never showed a sign of
anything but diligent mediocrity, but that when he was transferred west and
went under Sherman he presently became an army commander. On his march to the
sea Sherman had more ex-civilians than West Pointers among his generals, and
they were men of his own choosing. Sherman's favorite corps commander was
believed to be Joseph A. Mowrer, who never saw West Point.

In the East, too, some of the volunteer
officers were measuring up. One of the best men in the Army of the Potomac was
the amazingly warlike Manhattan lawyer, Colonel Francis Barlow, now commanding
the 61st New York but ultimately to be an inspired, savagely fighting division
commander. Barlow had the quality the Republicans were looking for, if they
only knew it—the indefinable something which can best be summed up as a
positive taste for fighting. Instead of wearing a regulation officer's sword
he carried the heaviest cavalry saber he could find; said that when he whacked
a laggard or a straggler with the flat of it he wanted to hit with something
that would hurt. He had an obsession about preventing straggling, and he let it
gnaw at him until he found the answer, which wasn't until after he came to
division command. Then, when on the march, he used to detail a company to form
a skirmish line, with fixed bayonets, at the rear of the division column, with
orders to sweep up and drive forward all stragglers. It wasn't a pleasant
assignment. Most of the men in the skirmish line had to scramble over ditches
and fences and fallen logs and work their way through brambles and underbrush
while the rest of the army was tramping the smooth highway, and they got all
the dust the division kicked up. The natural result was that after an hour of
it they were mad enough to bayonet their own parents, and a straggler who fell
into their hands was due to get very rough treatment. As a consequence: no
stragglers from Barlow's division.

Barlow was no stickler for the niceties of
military dress. He wore his single-breasted uniform coat unbuttoned, and under
it he wore a checked flannel shirt, lumberjack-style. He looked, one of Meade's
staff officers wrote, "like a highly independent mounted newsboy,"
and a Brady photograph shows him as a slouchy, rangy, limber young man, black
felt hat crumpled in one hand, heavy boots on his feet, clean-shaven, rather
handsome, with quiet, deadly-cold eyes. After he got his division he took it where
the fighting was. Somebody totted up figures after the war and found that in
all the Federal armies there were nineteen regiments which had done so much
hard fighting that each had lost at least sixteen officers killed in action;
five of the nineteen belonged to Barlow's division. He had entered the army as
a private in the spring of 1861; became a colonel a year later, and when the
Maryland campaign began was commanding what might be called half a brigade—his
own regiment, plus the 64th New York, which was attached to it.

There weren't many Barlows. But the army did
contain the kind of generals the radicals were really looking for, and they
were beginning to make their presence felt. One of them was General Israel B.
Richardson, who—for all that he was a West Pointer—carried informality of
dress and behavior to a point that made Barlow look like a fency-thet Briton in
the Horse Guards. Richardson might have been modeling himself subconsciously
after old Zachary Taylor, or maybe he just didn't care; at any rate, he went
around camp with a battered straw hat on his head and his hands in his pockets,
looking like a seedy old farmer—uniform coat discarded half the time, so that
no insignia of rank were visible. A dapper young shavetail galloped up to his
division headquarters one time with a dispatch; saw Richardson, took him for an
orderly, and tossed him his bridle reins as he dismounted with a curt
"Here—hold my horse." A few moments later the shavetail was admitted
to the headquarters tent, to find the supposed orderly sitting behind a camp
desk, eying him with grim amusement and asking, "And what do you want,
sir?" Another time some privates of the 57th New York were washing in a
little brook. A man whom they took to be a wagon driver came up and asked if he
could borrow some soap. One soldier told him to go to hell and find his own
soap, but some of the others were more generous; and the shabby wagon driver,
after a wash, sat on the bank and told them stories about the Mexican
War—pleasant enough old coot, the boys thought, in whose remarks there was a
little old-timer lecture about how soldiers should always share things with
their comrades. A day or so later it happened that three of these privates
were detailed to take some contrabands to division headquarters. In front of
the tent they found this same old-timer, and they asked him if he could tell
them where to find General Richardson. "Well," he said, "I guess
I can tell you. Sometimes they call
me
General
Richardson—and other times they call me Greasy Dick."
⁴