Terrible Swift Sword (41 page)

It was precisely at
this point that McClellan was told by Washington that McDowell's corps was no
longer his to command. Its 33,000 men could not be included in any strategic
design pursued by the Army of the Potomac. Bitterly, McClellan wrote later
that this "left me incapable of continuing operations which had begun. It
compelled the adoption of another, a different and less effective plan of
campaign. It made rapid and brilliant operations impossible. It was a fatal
error."
¹⁶

McClellan
would have been more than human if he had not complained. Yet his assertion
that the withdrawal of McDowell compelled him to adopt "a different and
less effective plan of campaign" and "made brilliant and rapid
operations impossible" is obviously a rationalization devised after the
event. It finally took him a month to take Yorktown, instead of the hours
specified in his March 19 letter to the Secretary of War, but this delay cannot
be ascribed to the fact that he learned, after his army had made contact with
the Confederates around Yorktown, that he could not use McDowell's corps.

For the clear fact is
that when this news reached him McClellan had already consented to delay. He
had sent back for his siege train and was preparing to shatter the Confederate
works by bombardment, and the one thing certain about this operation was that
it would take a great deal of time.

McClellan's siege train then included
seventy-one pieces of ordnance, ranging from a few imported Whitworth rifles
and some ordinary 20-pounders and four and one half inch rifles all the way up
to immense cannon which could fire 200-pound projectiles, and a large number of
10-inch and 13-inch siege mortars. The lighter pieces would go by road,
horse-drawn, much as field artillery moved, but the heavy ones—the really
important pieces—were altogether too ponderous to be handled that way. They
had to be brought up by water, in barges, with derricks, sling carts, rollers,
jacks and specially built wagons to move them into position at the end of the
trip; and then they had to be placed on wooden firing platforms, in massive
earthen emplacements, with ramps of log-and-earth construction leading up to
the platforms, before they could be put into action. Simply to get these pieces
into position was a long and laborious process, never resorted to unless the
army was prepared to sit down in front of a fortified position and be spendthrift
of time.

It took the army, thus, five days simply
to make the necessary reconnaissances and pick the sites for the batteries;
after which it took more than three weeks to prepare the emplacements and get
the guns and mortars into position. (Along with everything else, it was
necessary to haul more than seven hundred wagonloads of powder, shells,
equipment, and small stores from the tip of the peninsula to McClellan's
lines.) Inevitably, the program was a certified time-killer.
¹⁷
The
notion that the delay in front of Yorktown was due to McClellan's last-minute
discovery that he could not use McDowell loses most of its gloss when it is
matched against two things—what was originally planned with respect to
McDowell, and what was actually done about him.

McClellan's
schedule called for McDowell's corps to be brought down to the peninsula last
of all. This corps was to tarry in the Washington area (as McDowell explained
the scheme to President Lincoln) "until it was ascertained that the whole
of the enemy's force was down below; and then, when he" (McClellan)
"had their whole force in hand down below, this remaining corps was to go
down also."
¹⁸
It undoubtedly made conservative good sense to
hold back this fourth of the army until the enemy had been made to display his
hand, but it undeniably had a wait-and-see quality; there was nothing in it to
make anyone suppose that the army could not act until this last segment of it
reached the scene.

Furthermore, McDowell's corps was
between one and two weeks away from McClellan in any case. If the President and
the Secretary of War had kept their hands off altogether, McClellan would not
have had these troops before the middle of April at the very earliest. What he
would then have done with them is a matter for speculation, no doubt, but the
record is eloquent.

As
soon as he learned that this corps was being withheld, McClellan wrote asking
Mr. Lincoln to reconsider. The Gloucester move, he said, was crucial; if he
could not have all of McDowell's corps, could not he have two divisions from
it—or, if no more could be done, just one division? If he had to, he said, he
could make do with one.

One division he got, at last—12,000 men,
under Brigadier General William B. Franklin; and, as Mr. Lincoln pointed out afterward,
it took ten days for this division to make the trip. In addition, when the
division reached the lower bay, on April 20, McClellan was not ready to use it.
After its arrival the division stayed on transports for two weeks while
McClellan, his staff, and the Navy people steamed about making arrangements to
get it ashore in rear of Gloucester.

In the end, just as things were about to
begin to happen, the unfeeling Confederates evacuated the entire Yorktown line
and marched off up the peninsula, leaving McClellan free title to Yorktown, to
Gloucester, and to everything else. The Prince de Joinville, that stoutly loyal
French ornament on McClellan's staff, wrote mournfully: "The Confederates
had vanished, and with them all chance of a brilliant victory."
¹⁹
Once
again, Joseph E. Johnston had confounded McClellan by beating a retreat. But
the chance for a brilliant victory had vanished long before.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Turning Point

1.
The Signs
of
the Times

There
had been
a good deal of
artillery fire along the York-town lines during the night, and there had also
been a good deal of rain, but both died out before dawn; and although the
morning of May 4 was undeniably damp it was strangely and disturbingly silent.
Joe Johnston had gone, leaving empty trenches, a number of abandoned cannon,
and a set of live shells with trip-wires attached buried in the works to discourage
Yankee patrols. Although his retreating army moved slowly in the heavy mud it
had plenty of time. The Army o the Potomac had at last made itself ready to
bombard—ii had, this morning, forty-eight heavy guns and mortars in six
prepared batteries, and a few of these had already opened fire—but it was not
ready to pursue. The situation was both pleasing and embarrassing.

General McClellan sent a wire to the War
Department announcing that he now possessed Yorktown, and when
Secre
tary
Stanton sent congratulations, spiced with the remark that he hoped soon to hear
that General McClellan had taken
Richmond
as well, the general replied that "our success is brilliant," said
that its effects would be of great importance, and declared that he would
pursue with fervor and would in fact "push the enemy to the wall."
¹

The
rain began afresh, the bad roads grew worse, and the army's advance guard went
with difficulty toward Williamsburg, where the Confederate rear guard might
possibly be overtaken. The rear guard, it developed, was waiting, protected by
a series of modest field fortifications, and on May 5 there was a savage,
costly, and rather pointless battle which went on until twilight, at which time
the Confederates resumed their retreat. The Union Army lost some 2200 men,

the Confederates lost perhaps 1700, and
the battle might as well not have been fought except that it gave part of each
army some combat experience, which may conceivably have been worth the price
paid. McClellan was in Yorktown during the fight, embarking troops to go to
the head of the York River, and before the day ended Johnston went riding up
the peninsula to prepare to meet such a move, and to
a
large
extent the battle fought itself.
²

President Lincoln,
meanwhile, was getting busy.

It
struck him now that when the Confederates lost York-town and the peninsula they
also lost all chance to hold Norfolk, and if they lost Norfolk they would
automatically lose that fearsome iron-clad,
Virginia,
whose existence had made it impossible for
McClellan to use the James River; and so on May
6
the President came
down the Chesapeake accompanied by Secretary Stanton and Secretary Chase and
went into conference with Flag Officer Goldsborough and with Major General
John E. Wool, Army commander at Fort Monroe. In his original campaign plan
McClellan had remarked that Norfolk would fall when Richmond fell, which was
true enough, but Mr. Lincoln did not want to wait that long and so he was on
the scene to try his own hand at running a campaign.

The
task presented only moderate problems, because once Yorktown was gone the
Confederates were quite ready to leave Norfolk as soon as somebody hustled
them. The President got the Navy to bombard the Confederate batteries at
Sewell's Point, with the two cabinet members he went here and there on
a
tugboat
looking for a good place for troops to disembark and march toward Norfolk, and
a fascinated Army officer wrote about seeing the President giving orders to
somebody from the deck of Goldsborough's flagship: "dressed in
a
black suit with a
very seedy crape on his hat, and hanging over the railing he looked like some
hoosier just starting for home from California with store clothes and a biled
shirt on." Norfolk was abandoned, Union troops marched in on May 10 to
find the business district stagnant and the old navy yard destroyed; and the
Confederate Navy realized that there was nothing on earth it could do with
Virginia.
The famous ironclad was too unseaworthy to
go out into the open ocean and drew too much water to go up the James to Richmond.
In the end her own crew blew her up, on May 11, and McClellan —who told Stanton
that if this happened he could base himself on
the
James—telegraphed his
congratulations and remarked that this would enable him to make his own movements
"much more decisive."
³

Decisive
movements were just what Mr. Lincoln wanted, and McClellan would have been well
advised to pay a little more attention to these energetic civilians who bustled
about on gunboats and tugs, giving orders to Army and Navy officers and looking
at times like remnants from the gold rush. To be specific, he would have been
wise to go down to Fort Monroe to confer with them as soon as they got there.
Hej was told of their arrival by Secretary Stanton and was invited to come down
for a talk, and on May 7 he replied that this unfortunately was impossible. He
was then at Williamsburg, making arrangements for a continued advance toward
the head of the York, and he notified the Secretary that "in the present
state of affairs
...
it is really
impossible for me to go to the rear to meet the President and yourself."
He repeated the substance of this later in the same day: "I regret that
my presence with the army at this particular time is of such vast importance
that I cannot leave to confer with the President and yourself."
⁴
The distance from Williamsburg to Fort Monroe is approximately thirty miles.

If there was in this
refusal a faint echo of the evening in November when McClellan had returned to
his Washington headquarters and had gone straight to bed, leaving the President
(who had come to headquarters to see him) to cool heels in the waiting room on
the ground floor, nobody commented on it; and the most that can be said is that
McClellan now lost an excellent chance—possibly his last chance to improve his
relations with his superior officers. This relationship had been deteriorating
for months; here and now, with the army ready to resume its march on Richmond,
the general might have welcomed an opportunity to sit down with the President
and the Secretary of War, explain his plans and problems, listen while they
explained theirs, and restore mutual understanding and faith.

It seems a pity that
McClellan could not find time for it. An Army commander who is about to
undertake a climactic campaign needs above everything else the confidence of
his government. If he lacks this he is tragically isolated and his army is
dangerously handicapped. The Lincoln government's confidence in McClellan, to
say nothing of his own confidence in the government, had been fading for
months, and the long delay in front of Yorktown had made matters worse. Early
in April Mr. Lincoln had written to McClellan, trying to explain that forces
which neither President nor general could long resist made determined action
necessary. "Once more let me tell you," the President had written,
"it is indispensable to
you
that
you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.
...
I
beg to assure you
that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling
than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most
anxious judgment I consistently can.
But you
must act."
⁵
That letter had been written on April 9. Now, a month later, the general and
the President could sit down together and talk things out; could do this in the
light of the occupation of Yorktown, the seizure of Norfolk, the death of the
Virginia,
the rising surge of Federal victories on
other fronts—could do it, in short, under circumstances which might have made
it possible for civilians and soldiers to understand one another and to work
together in harmony. But it did not happen.

The tragedy of the
long delay at Yorktown was that attitudes and habits of mind developed earlier
had begun to harden; in the mind of the commanding general, and in the
collective mind of the army itself. The unique separateness of this Army of the
Potomac, like that of no other American army either then or later, was becoming
fixed; a separateness reflected partly in a nervous irritability that would
respond instantly to any real or imagined slight. Four days after his army took
possession of Yorktown, McClellan found it necessary to chide his wife for her
failure to appreciate what a great thing he and his army had done.

"Your two letters of Sunday and
Monday reached me last night," he wrote. "I do not think you over
much rejoiced at the results I gained. I really thought that you would
appreciate a great result gained by fine skill & at little cost more than
you seem to. It would have been easy for me to have sacrificed 10,000 lives in
taking Yorktown, & I presume the world would have thought it was brilliant.
...
I am very sorry that you do not
exactly sympathize with me in the matter."
⁶

It
is necessary to emphasize that this was not just the outburst of a spoiled
egotist. McClellan had begun to reach a point at which his own government
looked like an enemy. It wanted him to fail; it was playing politics with the
war, trying to turn a war for reunion into an abolitionist crusade. When he won
something, he won because pure military skill had triumphed over sordid
political scheming; to doubt the genuineness of his achievement was to line
up, however unintentionally, with the enemy. This attitude was being instilled
in him by the men in whom he had most confidence. S. L. M. Barlow, the New York
lawyer and financier who was immensely influential in Democratic politics,
sounded the keynote in a letter he sent McClellan during the first fortnight at
York-town: "The dastardly conduct of those in Washington, who seek to
drive you from the Army, or into a defeat, to serve their own selfish ends, is
beginning to be understood and when the people know the facts, as they will,
when it becomes necessary, the ambitious scoundrels in Washington will wist
they had never been born."

Writing thus, Barlow simply reflected a
thesis which Democratic party leaders were more and more beginning to embrace
While the Yorktown siege was still going on, Barlow got letter from Samuel
Ward, Washington lobbyist and financier^ suggesting that Secretary Stanton
ought to be impeached f treason "in having interfered with the progress of
the war. its organization by competent authority, to the detriment probably the
destruction of the north." Ward advised hi "Circulate the story or
rumor of bets that Stanton will be i) Fort Lafayette in less than 60
days." (Fort Lafayette was the prison for men suspected of disloyalty. It
was where General Stone was lodged.) When Yorktown at last fell, Barlow wrote
McClellan jubilantly: "I cannot express to you the intense satisfaction
caused by your triumphant success at Yorktown & on the peninsula. I feel
like laughing & crying alternately. The hounds who had pursued you so
bitterly are now in despair and they know it. The most noisy abolitionists now
fear to say anything openly & the politicians among them are trying to get
on your side without delay."
⁷

This would not have
been so bad if it had concerned McClellan alone. But the officer corps of the
Army of the Potomac was tied closely to him, and the point of view of the
commanding general went down through brigadiers, colonels, and field officers,
like a subtle infection running into the bloodstream, to all ranks. Above all,
it affected the Regular officers; the professionals, who wanted to have as
little as possible to do with Washington politics and now found that General
Mc
Clellan
stood for everything they stood for and that his political enemies stood for
everything he and they were against. A glimpse of the way this went is afforded
by a letter which Barlow got in April from Brigadier General Thomas F. Meagher,
commander of the Irish brigade in Sumner's II Corps. Meagher was an Irish
patriot—a man just under forty who had been born in Waterford, had been
condemned to death in 1848 for sedition, had seen his sentence commuted to
transportation to Tasmania, had escaped from that lonely place and had come at
last to New York, where he became an American citizen and the recognized leader
of the New York Irish. Ten days before Yorktown was taken he wrote to Barlow
telling how things looked to the Army of the Potomac.

"With regard to
the rumors you mentioned to me as intimating a serious difference between our
general in chief and the Government," he wrote, "I heard of such (or
something like such) a day or two after we disembarked. Since then have heard
nothing—I understood that McDowell had played what the officers of the Regular
Army and General McClellan's friends regarded as a 'scurvy trick' in his taking
advantage of the latter's absence in this quarter to get a Corps d'Armee, and
so withdraw some 50,000 men from this critical field of operation. . . . The
officers of the Regular Army who spoke to me on this subject seemed greatly
excited and indignant at what they considered to be 'foul play' on the part of
General McDowell and the Administration, and one of them informed me that
although General McClellan said nothing
...
yet that it was his determination after the siege and battle of Yorktown to
resign his command."
⁸

This
attitude had a profound political coloration. New York banker August Belmont, a
power in the Democratic party, wrote to Barlow late in April: "The conduct
of the Administration against McClellan is really disgraceful & wicked, it
shows once more that instead of patriots & statesmen we have only partizans
at the head of government." Belmont foresaw "the most calamitous
results" from the fact that "the chief command of the army was taken
from the hands of the most unquestionable capacity to be put upon the weak
shoulders of civilians." McClellan's most trusted subordinate in the army
was Brigadier General Fitz John Porter, handsome, affable, well-born, a West
Pointer with a good Mexican War record, now a division commander in
Heintzelman's III Corps. Porter was vigorous on the Democratic side. Some time
in April he wrote to Manton Marble, editor of the strongly Democratic New York
World,
Putting himself and the McClellan officers
generally right in the middle of the political fight. "This army will
cause a revulsion of opinion on its return home," Porter wrote. "I
hear that the most conservative opinions" (anti-abolitionist opinions; in
short, conservative Democratic opinions) "are expressed everywhere and the
few abolitionists in the armies of the U.S. are not looked upon as friends to
the Union. The conservative element throughout the army will make itself felt
at the next election." A few weeks later he assured Marble: "Our men
wish to go home—and wish the war to cease—but they say they will whip the
abolitionists when they get home especially for trying to prolong this
unnatural war Our men will speak, and good-bye to the abolition traitors who
try now to defend themselves by publishing falsehoods A fortnight after
Yorktown was occupied, a young New York officer asserted stoutly: "If McClellan
is defeated it will be the fault of the administration, not his own."
⁹