Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (31 page)

There was also a problem with McClellan’s fussiness. One railroad executive remembered that in civilian life McClellan had been “constantly soliciting advice, but he knows not more about a situation and has no more confidence in his own judgment after he has received it, than before.” This characteristic was not going to disappear from McClellan “as a soldier.”
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The debacle at Bull Run had demonstrated the foolishness of rushing untrained soldiers into combat, and so Congress had been willing to give McClellan what it had not given McDowell, the time to train and equip an army. As the summer of 1861 faded into autumn, and autumn into winter, McClellan showed no desire to do more than train and equip, plus organize elaborate reviews.

Part of the politicians’ impatience with McClellan was generated by a persistent unwillingness on the part of the politicians to recognize the immense difficulties in arming, feeding, clothing, and then moving an army that was larger than the entire Mexican War enlistments. A good deal of it was also the result of a West Point engineer’s love for perfecting technical details. McClellan’s first plan for Virginia, which he formulated in late 1861, dismissed the notion of assaulting the Confederates at Manassas Junction directly and called for an ambitious joint army-navy landing operation that would unload Federal forces at Urbanna, on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, and march from there overland to Richmond, only fifty miles away. By January 1862 McClellan had changed his mind: he would need to wait on Buell’s advance into Kentucky before doing anything in Virginia, and he even considered moving his army to Kentucky and abandoning all notion of a Virginia invasion.

Neither of these plans produced any movement on McClellan’s part, and by the end of January Lincoln was so exasperated with his general in chief that on January 27
he issued a presidential order mandating a “general movement of the land and naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces” on February 22, followed by a second order on January 31 that assigned McClellan particular responsibility for “an expedition for the immediate object of seizing and occupying a point upon the railroad southwestward of what is known as Manassas Junction.”
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McClellan, incensed at what he saw as unprofessional meddling on Lincoln’s part, replied by resurrecting the Urbanna plan and proposing to move down to the Rappahannock instead of Manassas. “The Lower Chesapeake Bay… affords the shortest possible land route to Richmond, and strikes directly at the heart of the enemy’s power in the east,” McClellan argued. “A movement in force on that line obliges the enemy to abandon his intrenched position at Manassas, in order to hasten to cover Richmond and Norfolk. … During the whole movement our left flank is covered by the water. Our right is secure, for the reason that the enemy is too distant to reach us in time. He can only oppose us in front. We bring our fleet into full play.” By March 8 McClellan was no closer to moving on Urbanna than he was to the moon, and Lincoln called him onto the White House carpet for an explanation. The prodding finally worked, and on March 10 McClellan and his grand army marched out of Washington to attack what McClellan was sure would be a Confederate Sevastopol, filled with abundant Confederate soldiers who would inflict thousands of casualties that his Urbanna plan would have avoided.
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To McClellan’s unspeakable surprise, the Confederate entrenchments at Manassas turned out to be empty. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, who now had sole command of the Confederacy’s northern Virginia army, had far fewer men than McClellan thought, and he prudently eased himself out of the Manassas lines before McClellan’s hammer fell, withdrawing to the Rappahannock. The next day McClellan read in the newspapers that Lincoln had relieved him of his post of general in chief, ostensibly to allow McClellan to concentrate his energies on the Virginia theater.
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For McClellan, this was a humiliation of the first order. But Lincoln had by now learned that humiliation was a remarkably effective medicine for McClellan’s case of “the slows”: the next day McClellan laid out yet another plan for invading Virginia. He had no interest in an overland campaign from Manassas, and the original Urbanna campaign was now impossible with Joe Johnston sitting behind the Rappahannock. McClellan insisted that the basic idea of a combined army-navy operation was still feasible, provided one changed the target area to the James River,
where the federal government still retained possession of Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the James River peninsula. He would load the 120,000 men of the Army of the Potomac onto navy transports and, relying on the superiority of the Federal navy in the waters of Chesapeake Bay and the strategic cover provided by Fortress Monroe, land his soldiers on the James River peninsula just below Richmond, then draw up to the Confederate capital and besiege it before Johnston’s Confederate army on the Rappahannock knew what was happening.
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In McClellan’s mind, this plan had all the proper advantages to it. By using Federal seapower, he would overcome the Confederate advantage of interior lines in Virginia, constitute a gigantic turning movement that would force the Confederates to abandon everything north of Richmond without a shot, and take the rebel capital rather than the rebel army as the real object of the campaign, thus avoiding unnecessary battles and unnecessary loss of life. To Lincoln, who had borrowed books on military science from the Library of Congress in an effort to give himself a crash course on strategy and tactics, this looked instead like an unwillingness on McClellan’s part to advance to a decisive Napoleonic battle, and it was only a matter of time before Lincoln’s administration began to impute political as well as strategic motives to McClellan’s indirect methods. Secretary of War Stanton at once objected that the James River plan merely demonstrated how unaggressive McClellan was. And since piloting the Army of the Potomac down to the James River would leave Washington almost undefended, it also left a question in Stanton’s suspicious mind as to whether McClellan was deliberately opening the national capital to a Confederate strike from northern Virginia.

Still, McClellan was the expert, and the army was solidly behind him, so Lincoln (despite Stanton’s reservations) decided to authorize the venture—provided that McClellan left approximately 30,000 men under the rehabilitated Irvin McDowell in front of Washington to protect the capital. When McClellan discovered this caveat, he protested that he needed every last man of the Army of the Potomac for his offensive. Lincoln was adamant, however: he would release McDowell’s troops only if Washington was safe beyond doubt, and even then McDowell would need to march overland, down to the James, to link up with McClellan.
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On March 17, 1862, McClellan began the laborious process of transporting nearly 90,000 men of the Army of the Potomac to the tip of the James River peninsula at Fortress Monroe, leaving the remainder behind in scattered commands and forts around Washington, and McDowell at Alexandria.

The resulting Peninsula Campaign confirmed everyone’s worst fears about McClellan’s vanity and slowness, and for a few others raised fears about his loyalty
to a Republican administration. True to McClellan’s prediction, the Army of the Potomac’s landing on the James peninsula caught the Confederate army in Virginia totally by surprise. Only a thin force of 15,000 rebel infantry, under the command of former West Pointer and amateur actor John Magruder, held a defensive line across the James peninsula at the old Revolutionary War battlefield of Yorktown, and if McClellan had but known the pitiful numbers opposing him, he could have walked over Magruder and into Richmond without blinking. What Magruder lacked in terms of numbers, however, he more than made up for with theatrical displays of parading troops and menacing-looking artillery emplacements, and he successfully bluffed McClellan into thinking that a major Confederate army stood in his path. By the time McClellan was finally ready to open up a major assault on the Yorktown lines on May 5, 1862, Joe Johnston’s Confederate army in Virginia had been regrouped around Richmond and was prepared to give McClellan precisely the kind of defensive battle he had hoped to avoid. To make matters worse, Johnston enjoyed the reputation of being one of the finest defensive strategists in the old army.

For the next three weeks, McClellan slowly felt his way up the peninsula, growing more and more convinced that Johnston had as many as 200,000 rebels defending Richmond (Johnston actually had only 60,000) and demanding that Lincoln send him more reinforcements, starting with McDowell’s troops, whom he wanted to move overland across the Rappahannock to join him around Richmond. By the last half of May, McClellan and the Army of the Potomac were beside the Chickahominy River, six miles from Richmond, with his right flank sitting to the northwest and expecting to be joined by McDowell. As he finally worked himself up to planning an assault on Richmond, he began feeding his army, corps by corps, across to the south side of the Chickahominy, closer to Richmond.

Unfortunately for McClellan, torrential spring rains swept away the Chickahominy bridges after only two of his five army corps had crossed the Chickahominy. On May 31, hoping to crush these two isolated corps before the river subsided, Johnston wheeled out his entire army and struck the exposed Federals at the battle of Seven Pines.
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For two days Johnston and the Confederates hammered at the two vulnerable Federal corps. The Federal generals handled their untested men well, and the Confederates drew off with the loss of more than 6,000 men, including Joe Johnston, who was severely wounded. Far from this putting spirit back into McClellan, however, the outcome of Seven Pines only operated against him. Frightened by Johnston’s unaccountable aggressiveness, McClellan cautiously slowed his advance across the Chickahominy. Far more ominous was the replacement of the wounded Johnston by an infinitely more skillful and aggressive Confederate general, Robert Edward Lee.

In Lee, the Confederacy possessed one of the purest examples of American military culture. The consummate Virginia gentleman, the son of a Revolutionary War general and grandson-in-law of George Washington, Lee had enjoyed a spotless career in the old army in Mexico and on the western plains, and had even served briefly as superintendent of West Point. Despite his faultless aristocratic bloodlines, Lee had actually spent a lifetime living down the dissipated reputation established by his dashing but improvident father, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who had been the commandant of George Washington’s cavalry. Chronically in debt and chronically in flight from his creditors, Light-Horse Harry abandoned his family for refuge in the West Indies and died in 1818, leaving his wife, Anne Carter Lee, and family to the tender mercies of his wife’s relatives and the open-armed community of Alexandria, Virginia.

Struggling to efface these stains on the family name, Robert Lee committed himself to the life of the army and to education at West Point. All of the Lees had a certain debonair wildness in their makeup, but Robert fought it back with a consciously cultivated aloofness and reserve that might almost have seemed arrogant had it not been wedded to a softness and gentility of manner. His four years at West Point were close to flawless—he had no behavioral demerits and was ranked second (by a fraction) in his class academically—and so he was commissioned in the army’s premier service, the Corps of Engineers.
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Behind the shield of Virginia gentlemanliness, Lee could be as aggressive as the most Napoleonic of generals. He had become one of Winfield Scott’s most trusted subordinates in Mexico. By the beginning of 1861 Lee had risen to the post of lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, and he was promoted to full colonel by Abraham Lincoln on March 30, 1861. Old General Scott had wanted to give Lee even more: the full command of the Federal armies, which eventually went to George McClellan.

But Lee, unlike Scott, who was also a Virginian, could not tear himself away from his old family and state loyalties, especially when he owed so much of his boyhood redemption to them. He could not agree with Lincoln’s decision to “pin the States in the Union with the bayonet,” and on April 20, 1861, he resigned his commission. Lee had told Frank Blair, Lincoln’s personal emissary, that if it were up to him, he would free all the slaves in the South in order to avert civil war, but he could not “draw my sword… save in defense of my native State.” No Southerner went into rebellion with more professed reluctance. As he explained to his sister the same day, “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” He offered his services instead to Virginia, where he
was made a major general of state volunteers; when Virginia was accepted into the Confederacy on May 7, Lee was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate forces, and for a year he served in a variety of capacities, especially as Jefferson Davis’s de facto chief of staff.
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With Johnston wounded, Davis would entrust the defense of Richmond to no one but Lee.

Lee had already made more than enough trouble for McClellan even before taking the field. In March Lee prevailed upon Davis to allow Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a former Virginia Military Institute professor and minor hero of the Bull Run battle, to take command of the small Confederate force in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and make a threatening feint down the Valley toward Harpers Ferry and the poorly defended Federal capital. Jackson, who had acquired the nickname “Stonewall” for his courage at Bull Run, moved menacingly toward the Potomac River, confirming all of Lincoln’s and Stanton’s fears that McClellan’s Peninsula operation was going to lay Washington open to capture. Lincoln threw three separate Federal forces of about 40,000 men after Jackson’s 16,000 “foot cavalry,” but Jackson easily eluded or trounced all three, and left all the Federal soldiers in northern Virginia tied securely in knots and unavailable to the increasingly nervous McClellan—including McDowell’s troops, whom McClellan was still awaiting on the Chickahominy.
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