Rise to Greatness (33 page)

Their conference began with a review of the disjointed commands in Virginia. Lincoln described the strength and positions of the forces under McDowell, Banks, and Frémont, as well as McClellan’s situation on the peninsula and the force under Sturgis in Washington. Scott absorbed the information, pronounced the capital defenses adequate, and then pointed to the scattered divisions under McDowell as the source of Lincoln’s problems. The troops at Fredericksburg were of no use. As Scott put it, they could not “be called up, directly [and] in time, by McClellan, from the want of railroad transportation, or an adequate supply train.” The old general proposed the same solution McClellan had been advocating: put McDowell’s men on ships and send them by water to the peninsula. The reinforcements would help Little Mac take Richmond, and this, “combined with our previous victories, would be a virtual end of the rebellion, [and] soon restore entire Virginia to the Union.”

The meeting continued through the morning and covered the entire conflict. With New Orleans in Union hands, the next objectives were, in Scott’s opinion, the ports of Mobile and Charleston and the rail hub at Chattanooga. The president expressed his desire to have a properly trained general in chief in Washington: as he later explained, he “had never professed to be a military man.” But he had felt forced to take the reins, owing to “procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people … and Congress.” Who could fill the role now? “All he wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act.”

Scott had in mind just the man: Henry Halleck. The previous autumn, Scott had done all he could to hold on to the top position until Halleck could arrive from California to replace him, but McClellan had shouldered Scott aside. Nothing since then had altered Scott’s opinion that Halleck was the best strategist of his generation. With his Corinth campaign completed, Old Brains was ripe for a new assignment.

The discussion broke up at noon; Lincoln spent the next three hours touring the academy and inspecting the cadets. After a small dinner party back at the hotel, he paid a visit to the nearby foundry where the gunsmith Robert Parker Parrott was casting fearsome rifled cannon for the Union army and navy. By now, news had traveled throughout Dutchess County that the president was in the neighborhood; from nine to eleven
P.M.
, Lincoln received visitors in the parlor of his hotel. At midnight, the West Point band showed up to serenade the exhausted traveler.

By the morning of June 25, a number of newspaper reporters had reached West Point, drawn by the tantalizing intelligence that Lincoln had made an eleven-hour journey just to confer with Scott. “The President’s sudden visit set a thousand rumors buzzing,” Nicolay noted back in Washington, “as if a beehive had been overturned. There was all sorts of guessing as to what would result—the Cabinet was to break up and be reformed—Generals were to be removed and new war movements were to be organized.”

Lincoln invited the newsmen to ride along on his return trip to Washington, so they were on hand for a stop in Jersey City, where he addressed a crowd gathered to meet his no-longer-secret train. “When birds and animals are looked at through a fog they are seen to disadvantage,” Lincoln began—precisely the sort of folksy irrelevancy with which he usually signaled his intention to avoid saying anything substantial. “So it might be with you if I were to attempt to tell you why I went to see General Scott. I can only say that my visit to West Point did not have the importance which has been attached to it.… It had nothing whatever to do with making or unmaking any General in the country.” At this, the audience laughed and applauded, allowing Lincoln to close with a joke. “The Secretary of War, you know, holds a pretty tight rein on the Press,” he said, referring to Stanton’s control of the telegraph to censor war news. “I’m afraid that if I blab too much he might draw a tight rein on me.”

With that, the president was back inside his coach, and in the company of John Pope, who knew that Lincoln had not been entirely truthful: an important new general was in fact being made. When the train reached Washington, Pope would be given command over the combined armies of McDowell, Frémont, and Banks, thus setting up an overnight rival to McClellan’s force and authority in Virginia.

*   *   *

How many troops were gathered on the peninsula for the dramatic final week of June? Historians have found it difficult to settle on a number. One prominent authority claimed that the “Army of Northern Virginia counted some 85,000 troops, including Jackson’s command,” while “McClellan’s force on the Chickahominy came to 104,300.” Another arrived at quite a different count: “Lee [enjoyed] numerical superiority with 112,220 men present for duty to McClellan’s 101,434.” Some of these estimates may have been influenced by the writer’s feelings, pro or con, about McClellan. In any event, the question can never be resolved, given the imperfections of nineteenth-century record keeping and slippery definitions of what it meant, in armies of independent-minded volunteers and reluctant Rebel conscripts, to be “present for duty.”

If we look past the elusive specifics, however, we can see a sharp picture of the general situation: a huge and well-supplied Union army stood at the doorstep of the Confederate capital, opposed by an army of roughly comparable size but more limited resources. The Union held the strategic advantage, according to no less an expert than Robert E. Lee, because little by little McClellan was laying the groundwork for a siege of Richmond, which meant that the Confederates would have to choose between giving up the city to save their army, or risking everything on a bold attack.

A decision to pull back from the Rebel capital might have changed the whole course of the war by committing Lee to a guerrilla operation. From the mountains of Virginia, Lee could, as he put it, “fight those people for years to come,” but only “if my soldiers will stand by me.” But the man known as “Evacuating Lee” could not be certain that his countrymen would support a decision to leave Richmond. After taking a hard look at that vulnerable right wing of McClellan’s mighty host, the Rebel commander resolved to gamble on a desperate attack.

An entirely different picture, painted in lurid lines and vibrant colors, existed inside the mind of George B. McClellan. The general believed that he was outnumbered by at least two to one; that virtually all the Rebels who had been in Corinth had magically relocated to his front and flank; that the administration, up to and including the president, was deliberately undermining him in order to turn the war into a long, remorseless revolution against slavery. On June 20, McClellan’s confidant Fitz John Porter put this delusion baldly in a message to a friendly newspaper editor in New York: Stanton and Lincoln, Porter claimed, were ignoring “all calls for aid.” Porter asked, “Does the President (controlled by an incompetent [Stanton]) design to cause defeat here for the purpose of prolonging the war?”

McClellan’s flatterers assured him that the Republicans were overplaying their treacherous hand and that he would emerge from his troubles as the nation’s next president. But McClellan saw only doom. A dysfunction that had begun as an excess of secrecy half a year earlier, when Little Mac was making his plans, then soured into mistrust in March after he set out from the capital with his army, had now become a fever of paranoia. Where it counted—in his own mind—McClellan wasn’t the commander of the strongest force the Americas had ever seen. He was a vulnerable underdog menaced on all sides. Suspecting that Lee was about to attack, he narrated his defeat in advance, warning Stanton: “I regret my great inferiority in numbers but feel that I am in no way responsible for it.” Having begged for reinforcements and been refused, he wrote: “I will do all that a General can do … and if [the army] is destroyed by overwhelming numbers [I] can at least die with it & share its fate. But if the result … is a disaster the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest where it belongs.”

A week of brutal fighting across the peninsula followed that strange telegram. The Army of the Potomac proved itself an extremely tough and well-disciplined force. In the first major clash of the Seven Days battles, McClellan’s right wing under Fitz John Porter, amounting to about a fourth of the total Union strength, fought stoutly against roughly two thirds of Lee’s army. The tremendous Confederate blow was designed to crumple the Union flank and expose the Federal supply line, but a combination of Porter’s grit and Stonewall Jackson’s inexplicable lassitude allowed McClellan to execute a daring shift in his base of supplies. Day after day, the Rebels pounded Little Mac’s rearguard as he moved his army—with thousands of wagons, tons of supplies, and twenty-five hundred beef cattle—to a new base on the south side of the peninsula, anchored on the James River.

In the final battle, on July 1 at Malvern Hill, Lee threw his nearly spent force in wave after hopeless wave against massed Union artillery. “It was not war,” said the Confederate general Daniel Hill of the battle, “it was murder.” Another Confederate general, James Longstreet, mournfully summed up the clash as a matter of “losing six thousand men and accomplishing nothing.” A mapmaker for the Union army, Robert Sneden, watched the final charge of the day:

About 6 p.m. [after] pushing out about twenty pieces of artillery from their front, followed by four lines of solid infantry colors flying, as if on parade, [the Confederates] advanced at a run with terrifying yells, heard all above the crash of musketry and roar of artillery. We now opened on them with terrible effects.… Several times our infantry withheld their fire until the Rebel column, which rushed through the storm of canister and grape, [came] close up to the artillery. Our men then poured a single crashing volley of musketry and charged the enemy with the bayonet with cheers. [We] thus captured many prisoners and colors and drove the remainder in confusion from the field. These would rally under cover of the woods and charge again, but only to be met with the same murderous volleys of shot, shell, and bullets, leaving piles of dead and dying on the plateau along our front. Hundreds of poor maimed wretches were continually crawling on hands and knees across the open, many of whom were killed before they regained shelter in the woods. The Rebel cavalry were seen driving the remnants of regiments out of the woods into the open ground, and were shooting all those who did not keep in line and “face the music.” As the charging columns came up to within 150 yards of our artillery, whole ranks went down at once, battle flags rose and disappeared. Officers on horseback threw their sword arm in the air and [tumbled] to the ground. Riderless horses were running in every direction, while officers on foot were far in advance of their commands, shouting and yelling like madmen.

The week’s carnage was hideous: some 20,000 Confederates dead, wounded, or missing, plus 16,000 more from the Union. As at Shiloh, the Rebels gave everything they had, yet failed to break a Union army. But where Grant had beheld disaster and seen through it to victory, McClellan looked on a golden opportunity and saw only defeat. Despite the chaos of battle, he should have been able to discern that Lee had hit the Union right with the majority of his force and thus left only a thin line between the bulk of the Federal army and the streets of Richmond. Now, the Rebels were divided by the river and vulnerable on one wing. With the chance to deliver a devastating blow to the Confederacy directly before him, though, the Young Napoleon lacked the nerve to attack.

The critical moment occurred on June 27, the second day of fighting for Porter’s V Corps. A terrible bloodletting at Gaines’ Mill left Lee’s shock force decimated. Near the end of the day, the Rebels finally broke Porter’s line, but the Federals fell back safely south of the Chickahominy and destroyed the bridge. Now the time was ripe for a counterattack: the Union troops all together faced Lee’s thin line, while the bulk of the Rebel force was stranded on the opposite bank. McClellan, however, could think only of defensive maneuvers and the nearness of disaster. He would not go forward; he would fall back to a new base of operations.

Even as he made the decision, McClellan knew his critics would call it a retreat. And although he was not a general who led from the front—indeed, he spent most of the Seven Days far from any battlefield—he latched onto the idea that he might die in the next day, leaving his side of this history unrecorded. Shortly after midnight, he took up his pen to defend himself and indict his superiors.

“Had I (20,000) twenty thousand or even (10,000) ten thousand fresh troops to use tomorrow I could take Richmond,” he informed Washington. “But I have not a man in reserve.” This wasn’t true: most of his force was fairly fresh, having seen only jabs and feints by the 25,000 Rebels on the Union left. But McClellan and the rest of the Federal high command were convinced that those 25,000 were actually 100,000, poised to crush the Union army come morning. “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this.”

The general might have stopped there, but as he wrote he grew angrier and more self-righteous. Letting slip the hatred he had accumulated over six long months, he accused Stanton and Lincoln of “needlessly sacrific[ing]” the brave men of his army. He knew this was grossly insubordinate and tried halfheartedly to excuse himself: “I feel too earnestly tonight—I have seen too many dead & wounded comrades to feel otherwise.” But if he was to die with his men in the morning, he would not go out on an apologetic note. “The Government has not sustained this army,” he wrote. Then he closed with a paragraph so outrageous that the officer in charge of the telegraph took it on himself to delete it before carrying the message to Stanton. “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.”

“They will never forgive me for that,” McClellan later told his wife. “I knew it when I wrote it; but as I thought it possible that it might be the last I ever wrote, it seemed better to have it exactly true.”