Mr Lincoln's Army (12 page)

After a week he was able to report proudly:
"I have Washington perfectly quiet now; you would not know that there was
a regiment here." No soldier was allowed to leave his camp without a pass,
and passes were made hard to get. Similarly, civilians were prevented from visiting
the camps without passes and were kept from crossing the bridges to the
Virginia side unless they had legitimate business there. The bewildered men in
uniform who had been disconsolately idling on the streets and in their tents
suddenly discovered that they were going to be soldiers after all; they were
kept busy, things moved with snap and order, there seemed to be a reason for
the routine that had descended upon their lives.

The most incompetent and unfit of the
regimental officers were weeded out by hastily organized selection boards.
These selection boards were badly needed. The great weakness of this army lay
in its officer corps, and the big problem of the high command always was to
find officers who were worthy of the men they were leading. Later, as the test
of battle helped to weed out the obvious misfits, and as hard experience
developed qualities of natural leadership in others, this problem became
simpler, but in the beginning it occasionally seemed beyond solution. The
officers were in most cases as ignorant as the men they led, and they were
usually ten times harder to handle. A few of them saw their own inadequacy and
eliminated themselves, like the sixty-year-old Maine colonel who, learning that
a selection board had been set up, came before it voluntarily and asked to be
relieved. He had enjoyed militia work for forty years, he said artlessly, but
he was finding actual warfare a different proposition and he felt that he was
too old to learn; he would send in his resignation at once if they would
suspend proceedings and spare him the humiliation of being officially weeded
out.
³

An idea of the size of the officer problem
can be had from a glimpse at the diary of a member of the 75th New York, which
regiment stopped over in Baltimore while on the way to Washington that summer.
This man wrote despondently: "Tonight not 200 men are in camp. Capt.
Catlin, Capt. Hulburt, Lt. Cooper and one or two other officers are under
arrest. A hundred men are drunk, a hundred more are at houses of ill fame, and
the balance are everywhere. . . . Col. Alford is very drunk all the time
now."
⁴

A diarist in the 11th Massachusetts told of
one colonel who put the regimental chaplain in charge of his cooking
arrangements and held him so strictly accountable for the quality of the meals
that the poor man had no time for his priestly duties. After one particularly
bad meal the colonel called the chaplain before him and barked: "If you
don't cook a better dinner than this tomorrow, I'll have you tied to the
flagstaff next Sunday and make you preach to the regiment for two hours!"
As a result, the chaplain spent so much time in the kitchen next day that he
was unable to officiate at a funeral, and the services had to be read by the
regimental surgeon. The diarist added sadly that colonels who didn't insist on
having regular devotional services usually failed to hold the respect of their
men.
⁵

There was a happy-go-lucky informality about
the men in charge of some of these new regiments. The 19th Maine, being
Yankees, sought to turn an honest penny by laying in a stock of fruit and flour
and baking pies, which the regiment sold in surrounding camps. A sergeant in a
Massachusetts regiment, being offered a pie by one such, asked the price.
Twenty-five cents, he was told. "I won't pay it," he said promptly,
being a Yankee himself. "Your colonel was just through here selling them
for twenty cents."
⁶

Somehow these officers were either taught
their business or eliminated. The selection boards weeded out more than three
hundred, but they couldn't begin to reach them all, deep questions of local
politics being bound up in most of the original appointments; state governors
were touchy, and the administration hated to offend them. But what a selection
board couldn't do a good brigadier general could. Phil Kearny, for instance,
got his regiments up to snuff in short order. The day he was assigned to his
brigade he found most of the men lawlessly stripping an adjacent apple orchard.
He immediately called in the field officers of his regiments and gave them a
terrific blowing up in his crispest regular-army style. The officers, as
freeborn Americans who weren't used to being talked to that way, answered back
with heat; so Kearny switched his tactics, turned on the charm instead, took
all the officers to an elaborate dinner party, transformed them into a little
band of brothers before they knew quite what was happening, and by midnight had
them all agreeing that for the honor of the brigade and their own heroic souls
they would thereafter enforce discipline in the strictest military style. They
did, too.

All up and down the line the volunteers began
to find that this was an army, not just a disorganized aggregration of
soldiers. Someone took the trouble to inspect the camps and teach the colonels
how to lay them out so they were neat, tidy, and sanitary. The supply system
was reorganized and the men ate regularly; regimental sick lists declined as
sanitation and meals improved and soldiers were taught how to pitch their tents
so that the first shower would not flood everything they contained, and the
dreary discouragement that divitalized homesick boys began to lift. Regimental
commanders found themselves answerable to brigadiers who inspected camp and
drill ground and insisted on good performance—and who, when performance was
not good, knew enough about their jobs to show how it could be improved.
Brigades, in turn, were formed into divisions, with regular-army officers
riding herd on them. The War Department was still buying quantities of amazingly
shoddy goods—the tents were skimpy and leaky, many of the fine new uniforms
lost their shape and color almost overnight, the New England boys noted that
the shoes were poorly made and would never last, and the arms that were issued
were sadly imperfect—but at least the stuff was coming in and being
distributed. The air of the holiday militia outing was gone.

Then there were the reviews—reviews of
regiments, of brigades, of divisions—with regimental officers nervously
inspecting arms and equipments beforehand, with the bands zealously blaring out
marching tunes, and with the new soldiers proudly performing their recently
learned maneuvers on the smooth turf, while the flags streamed in the breeze
and admiring civilians stood about the reviewing stand, the ladies bright with
their hooped skirts and sunshades . . . and always, as the crowning feature,
the young general himself, galloping down the lines on his great black charger
at a pace his staff could never quite maintain, seeing everything, demanding good
performance, and then glowing with happy pride when it was given. They cheered
as he went by—how could they help it, when he was the living symbol of their
regained self-respect?—and they cheered afresh when he acknowledged their
cheers. Wrote one of his officers:

"He
had a taking way of returning such salutations. He went beyond the formal
military salute, and gave his cap a little twirl, which with his bow and smile
seemed to carry a little of personal good fellowship even to the humblest
private soldier. If the cheer was repeated he would turn in his saddle and
repeat the salute. It was very plain that these little attentions to the troops
took well, and had no doubt some influence in establishing a sort of
comradeship between him and them."
⁷

Not that there was any familiarity or easy-going
softness in the relations between general and soldiers. There was a vast gulf
fixed, then as now, between the major general commanding and the humble
private, and McClellan did not narrow it. He did not live in camp, but stayed
in the heart of Washington, in a fine big house where he gave elaborate dinner
parties to glittering people, and wherever he went he was trailed by his staff,
including two genuine French princes, and a trim cavalry escort. The troops did
not see him during their workaday routine; when he came on the scene it was
always a special event, surrounded by all of the formalities. He could apply a
severe discipline when it seemed necessary. The 2nd Maine Regiment refused to
turn out for duty one day in August. Camped near it were some ninety-day
regiments whose time had expired, and they were going home, and the boys in the
2nd Maine, although they had enlisted for three years, felt that they ought to
go home too—the war was going to last much longer than they had expected; if
it was fair for one regiment to leave, why wasn't it fair for all? McClellan
came down on them quietly but hard, and sixty-three men were presently shipped
off to the dreaded fortress of Dry Tortugas—a frowning pile of masonry on a
desolate sand key in the Gulf of Mexico, originally built as "the
Gibraltar of the new world" but now used as a disciplinary barracks for
hard cases—to break rocks for the rest of the war.

With another somewhat similar case McClellan
tried a different tack. The 79th New York was a former militia regiment; called
itself the "Highlanders," came to Washington in the bare-kneed glory
of kilts, and had a crusty Scottish colonel named Cameron. It had been at Bull
Run, where its colonel had been killed; it had long since abandoned kilts for
the regulation sky-blue pants, and it was fed up with military life. Also, it
was brigaded under William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a hard man and who at that
time seems to have had something to learn about the way to handle volunteer
troops. So one morning the 79th refused to do duty and demanded an adjustment
of its grievances. McClellan rounded up a battalion of regular infantry, plus a
squadron of regular cavalry and a battery of regular artillery—hard-boiled
Indian fighters from the plains, filled with strong disdain for volunteer
soldiers—and lined them up facing the 79th, firearms loaded and ready for use;
whereupon the 79th was invited to stop being mutinous and return to duty. The
New Yorkers blinked at the ominous array in front of them. These regulars,
clearly, were perfectly willing to shoot volunteers if ordered, and the officer
in charge had a frosty glint in his eye. The 79th had had no notion that it was
committing mutiny; it was just exercising its democratic right of protest, as
American citizens always did; but if the major general commanding saw it
differently, what with all those regulars, why
...
So the 79th returned to duty, and nobody was shot, and
McClellan took the regimental colors away and kept them in his own office,
restoring them a month later with a neat little flourish and the comment that
the Highlanders had redeemed themselves by good conduct.

So McClellan was able to write to his wife
truthfully: "I have restored order very completely already." Things
were looking up, and the young general wrote, "I shall carry this thing
en
grand
and crush the Rebels
in one campaign. I flatter myself that Beauregard has gained his last
victory." And how could he help feeling that way, when he drank daily of
the adulation of his men? "You have no idea how the men brighten up now
when I go among them. I can see every eye glisten. Yesterday they nearly pulled
me to pieces in one regiment. You never heard such yelling."

Yet
the Rebels were menacing, and there was cause for deep worry. Behind their
fortified lines at Centreville and Manassas, who knew what dark plans were
afoot? Washington was ill defended: "If Beauregard does not attack
tonight I shall regard it as a dispensation of Providence." And in mid-August:
"I cannot get one minute's rest during the day, and sleep with one eye
open at night, looking out sharply for Beauregard, who, I think, has some
notion of making a dash in this direction." Next day the danger seemed
even worse: "I am here in a terrible place; the enemy have from three to
four times my force; the President, the old general, cannot or will not see the
true state of affairs."

It was very disturbing; especially so since
the danger actually existed almost exclusively in the mind of the commanding
general. The Confederates were well dug in near the site of their old Bull Run
victory, but Joseph E. Johnston, their commander, and his flamboyant
second-in-command, the famous Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—something of a
young Napoleon himself, in ardent Southern esteem—were asking nothing more than
that the Yankees would leave them alone for a few months. They had perhaps
thirty thousand men with them—about a quarter of the number McClellan believed
them to have—and their troubles in respect to organization, discipline, and
leadership were quite as pressing as those of the Federals, if not a little
more so, the Southern private being a rugged individualist not readily amenable
to military rule. The lone Southerner who was talking in terms of an offensive
in those days was the dour and warlike Stonewall Jackson, who figured that the
North was still badly off balance and could be had even by untrained troops;
but Jackson had not yet become famous, and his voice went unheard, and neither
Johnston nor Beauregard was even dreaming of offensive action. Not until
October would Johnston suggest an advance, and then he conditioned the
suggestion with the stipulation that he be heavily reinforced. Reinforcements
being denied, he dropped the idea. He was heavily outnumbered and he was
perfectly well aware of it, even though McClellan saw him as having "three
or four times my force." While Johnston was trying to get his own
disorganized battalions into something resembling military shape, McClellan was
anxiously writing: "I have scarcely slept one moment for the last three
nights, knowing well that the enemy intend some movement and fully recognizing
our own weakness."