The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (155 page)

Whatever his past successes, Vicksburg was too important a prize for its capture to hinge entirely on the problematic advance of a man who was the subject of so many ugly rumors and whose character, even aside from the truth or falseness of such talk, seemed to have undergone a discouraging reversal. At any rate, Lincoln in this case had provided not one but two extra strings for the bow that was to be bent in that direction. While Banks was moving upriver against the place, supported by warships from Farragut’s fleet, and Grant was marching overland down the Mississippi Central from Grand Junction, a third force was to descend the river from southern Illinois, its mission being to coöperate with Porter’s ironclad flotilla for an attack on the stronghold which Jefferson Davis had called “the Gibraltar of the West.” This third force was irregular and highly secret in nature, its purpose known only to three men: Lincoln, Stanton, and its commander, John McClernand. They had created it—out of the whole cloth, so to speak. McClernand had come north on leave in late September, saying privately that he was “tired of furnishing brains” for Grant’s army, and had appealed to his friend the President to “let one volunteer officer try his abilities.” In accordance with the plan he submitted, Stanton gave him on October 21 a confidential order authorizing him “to proceed to the States of Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and to organize the troops remaining in those States and to be raised by volunteering or draft … to the end that, when a sufficient force not required by the operations of General Grant’s command shall be raised, an expedition may be organized under General McClernand’s command against Vicksburg … to clear the Mississippi River and open navigation to New Orleans.” A presidential indorsement further authorized him to show this confidential document “to Governors, and even others, when in his discretion he believes so doing to be indispensable to the progress of the expedition.”

Armed with this order, which he saw as placing his star in the ascendant—his ambition had not been lessened by the singeing he took at Donelson while seeking the bubble reputation at the cannon’s mouth—McClernand left for his home state in late October, there to begin assembling the force which he believed would put him not only in
Vicksburg but also in the White House. Even the first of these steps would take time, however; and time, he knew, was the foe of secrecy. Sure enough, by early November Grant began hearing what he called “mysterious rumors of McClernand’s command.” Glad as he had been to get rid of his fellow Illinoisan, he did not want him back in his department at the head of a rival army. When Halleck—whom the three lawyers had also not let in on their secret—informed him that Memphis would “be made the depot of a joint military and naval expedition on Vicksburg,” Grant took alarm and wired back: “Am I to understand that I lie still here while an expedition is fitted out from Memphis, or do you want me to push as far south as possible? Am I to have Sherman move subject to my orders, or is he and his forces reserved for some special service?” Halleck replied blandly: “You have command of all troops sent to your department, and have permission to fight the enemy where you please.”

That was enough for Grant. Receiving Halleck’s go-ahead message near Grand Junction on November n, he had cavalry in Holly Springs two days later. He followed at once with the infantry, established a supply base there, and continued his advance down the Mississippi Central. By December 1 his cavalry was across the Hatchie, the rebels fading back. Still Grant followed. Within another week he had occupied Oxford, fifty miles beyond his starting point, setting up a command post in the courthouse and repairing the railroad in his rear.… Whatever else McClernand’s behind-the-scenes maneuver might accomplish in the end, it had effected at least one thing before it even got beyond the plans-and-training stage: Grant’s mind had emerged from the tunnel it had entered after Shiloh. He was himself again, or anyhow he appeared to be, and this in itself was encouraging to Lincoln. However, he could also see that in North Mississippi, as elsewhere along the thousand-mile front, the fine autumn weather had mostly gone to waste, so far as offensive operations were concerned. Grant was still 150 airline miles from Vicksburg, and neither Banks nor McClernand had even begun to move.

Here in the East, delay was especially discouraging for being close at hand; Lincoln’s torture, as a result, was not unlike that of Tantalus, who saw the surface of the pool recede each time he bent to drink. In this case, too, he was soon obliged to suspect that he had made an error in personal judgment, no matter how well founded that judgment had seemed at the time he acted on it. In addition to native combativeness, demonstrated on independent service, Burnside had other qualities which had caused Lincoln to overrule his twice-repeated protest that he was not competent to command the Army of the Potomac, despite the fact that his rank entitled him to the post. Less than three years older than McClellan, he had been his friend before and during the war and had taken no part in the bickering that surrounded him.
It was Lincoln’s hope that this would ease the blow and soften the reaction when “McClellan’s bodyguard” got the news that its hero had been replaced. Also, Burnside had no political opinions: a lack that might have been expected to spare him the mistrust and enmity of the Jacobins who had hounded his predecessor. Both calculations, one regarding the army, the other Congress, appeared to have been valid at the outset. For a time, they even worked; or else they seemed to. But the President was not long in finding out that both had been something less than inclusive. According to one general in a group who came to congratulate Burnside on his promotion, he thanked them “and then, with that transparent sincerity which made everyone believe what he said, he added that he knew he was not fit for so big a command, but he would do his best.” The witness remarked: “One could not help feeling a certain tenderness for the man. But when a moment later the generals talked among themselves, it was no wonder that several shook their heads and asked how we could have confidence in the fitness of our leader if he had no such confidence in himself?” Such in part was the reaction in the army he was about to lead into battle. As for the radicals in Congress, it soon became apparent that an absence of politics was by no means a recommendation in their eyes. They had no objection to politics, per se; they merely insisted that the politics be Republican. All they really knew of Burnside was that he was the acknowledged friend of the man whose ruin they were proud to have helped accomplish, and they were prepared to do as much for him in turn, if on closer acquaintance it appeared that he deserved it.

Such objections were mainly personal, however, and Lincoln did not share them, or if he did he thought them incidental. His main concern was with Burnside as a strategist, a seeker after battle: which was where his doubts came in. Aware that the President wanted immediate action, and had in fact removed his predecessor for not giving it to him, the new commander immediately prepared a plan which he submitted for approval. Not liking the army’s present location—which seemed to him uncomfortably similar to the one John Pope had occupied before he came to grief—Burnside had the notion of converting the advance just east of the Blue Ridge into a feint, under cover of which he would “accumulate a four or five days’ supply for the men and animals; then make a rapid move of the whole force to Fredericksburg, with a view to a movement upon Richmond from that point.” This was the so-called “covering approach” which Lincoln had always favored, since it protected Washington. But in this case he thought the plan defective, in that it made the southern capital the primary Federal objective, not Lee’s army, which in fact it seemed that Burnside was attempting to avoid. Halleck felt that way about it, too, and on November 12 went down to Warrenton for a talk with the lush-whiskered general, who argued forcefully in favor of the change of base.
Still doubtful, Halleck returned to Washington and reported the discussion to the President. Lincoln too was unconvinced, but he was so pleased at the prospect of early action—here in the East, if nowhere else—that he agreed to let Burnside go ahead—or, more strictly speaking, sideways, then ahead—provided he moved fast. Halleck passed the word to Warrenton on the 14th: “The President has just assented to your plan. He thinks that it will succeed, if you move very rapidly; otherwise not.”

Burnside did move rapidly, “very rapidly.” Despite the tremendous supply problems which went with having an “aggregate present” of approximately 250,000 officers and men for whose welfare he was responsible—150,441 in the field force proper, 98,738 in the capital defenses—the fact was, he had turned out to be an excellent administrator. On the day he received Lincoln’s qualified assent to an eastward shift, he regrouped his seven corps into Right, Left, and Center “Grand Divisions” of two corps each, respectively under Sumner, Franklin, and Hooker, leaving the seventh in “independent reserve” under Sigel. With his army thus reorganized for deft handling, he took up the march for Falmouth the following day, November 15. Sumner went first, followed on subsequent days by Franklin, Hooker, and the cavalry. Moving down the north bank of the Rappahannock, which thus covered the exposed flank of the column, the Right Grand Division arrived on the 17th and the others came along behind on schedule. Burnside himself reached Falmouth on the 19th, just in advance of the rear-guard elements. Proudly he wired Washington: “Sumner’s two corps now occupy all the commanding positions opposite Fredericksburg.… The enemy do not seem to be in force.” So far, indeed, except for an occasional gray cavalry vedette across the way, the only sign of resistance had come from a single rebel battery on the heights beyond the historic south-bank town, and it had been smothered promptly by counterbattery fire. Lincoln had asked for speed, and Burnside had given it to him. He seemed about to give him all else he had asked for, too—hard fighting—for he added: “As soon as the pontoon trains arrive, the bridge will be built and the command moved over.”

But there was the rub. Burnside had left the sending of the pontoons to Halleck, who in turn had left it to a subordinate, and somewhere along the chain of command the word “rush” had been dropped from the requisition. The army waited a week, during which a three-day rain swelled the fords and turned the roads into troughs of mud. Still the pontoons did not come. On the eighth day they got there; but so by then had something else; something not nearly so welcome. “Had the pontoon bridge arrived even on the 19th or 20th, the army could have crossed with trifling opposition,” Burnside notified Halleck on the 22d. “But now the opposite side of the river is occupied by a large rebel force under General Longstreet, with batteries ready to be placed
in position to operate against the working parties building the bridge and the troops in crossing.” Vexed that his forty-mile change of base, executed with such efficiency and speed that it had given him the jump on his wily opponent, had gained him nothing by way of surprise in the end, he said flatly: “I deem it my duty to lay these facts before you, and to say that I cannot make the promise of probable success with the faith that I did when I supposed that all the parts of the plan would be carried out.… The President said that the movement, in order to be successful, must be made quickly, and I thought the same.”

Lincoln was distressed: not only because of the delay, which he had predicted would be fatal to the success of the campaign, but also because the new commander, in the face of all those guns across the river, seemed to believe it was part of his duty to expose his army to annihilation by way of payment for other men’s mistakes. November 25, the day the first relay of pontoons reached Falmouth, the President wired: “If I should be in a boat off Aquia Creek at dark tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, could you, without inconvenience, meet me and pass an hour or two with me?” He made the trip, saw Burnside and the situation—which he characterized by understatement as “somewhat risky”—then returned to Washington, worked out a supplementary plan of his own, and sent for the general to come up and discuss it with him and Halleck. As he saw it, the enemy should be confused by diversionary attacks, one upstream from Fredericksburg, the other on the lower Pamunkey, each to be delivered by a force of about 25,000 men and the latter to be supported by the fleet. Both generals rejected the plan, however, on grounds that it would require too much time for preparation. So Lincoln, with his argument stressing haste thus turned against him, had to content himself with telling Burnside to go back to his army and use his own judgment as to when and where he would launch an assault across the Rappahannock.

Burnside returned to Falmouth on the next to last day of November. His notion was to strike where Lee would least expect it, and the more he thought about the problem, the more it seemed to him that this would be at Fredericksburg itself, where Lee was strongest. Accordingly, he began to mass his 113,000 effectives—Sigel having been posted near Manassas—along and behind the north-bank heights, overlooking the streets of the Rappahannock town whose citizens had already been given notice to evacuate their homes. November was gone by then, however. In the East as in the West, to Lincoln’s sorrow, there had been no fall offensive, only a seemingly endless preparation for one which had not come off.

Between these two East-West extremes, the trouble in Middle Tennessee, while similar to the trouble in Virginia and North Mississippi, was in its way even more exasperating. Burnside and Grant at least regretted the delay and expressed a willingness to end it, but
Rosecrans not only would not say that he regretted it, he declared flatly that he would not obey a direct order to end it until he personally was convinced that his hard-marched army was ready for action, down to the final shoenail in the final pair of shoes. This came as a shock to Lincoln, who had expected Old Rosy’s positivism to take a different form. He would have been less surprised, no doubt, if he had known Grant’s reaction when that general learned in late October that his then subordinate was leaving. “I was delighted,” he later wrote, adding: “I found that I could not make him do as I wished, and had determined to relieve him from duty that very day.”