Mr Lincoln's Army (19 page)

Everybody was beginning to move. Banks was
bringing the larger part of his force east over the Blue Ridge, to take station
at Manassas; McDowell was grouping his own divisions and preparing for the
advance; the leading elements of the Army of the Potomac were going ashore at
Fortress Monroe—going down from the ships on long, floating bridges and jumping
into waist-deep water to wade the last few yards—and if the administration was
making things difficult for McClellan, it was at least satisfied with the
layout. And just then Stonewall Jackson upset the entire schedule.

What Jackson actually did, measured by any
quantitative standard, was not really very important. He commanded fewer than
four thousand men at that time, and he had them camped in the Shenandoah
Valley to keep an eye on the Yankee invader. He got wind of

Banks's
move eastward, underestimated the numbers Banks was leaving behind, and moved
boldly forward to the attack, hitting Shields's division at Kernstown, a few
miles south of Winchester, one afternoon late in March. Since Shields had
twice as many men as had been supposed, Jackson was roundly whipped and he had
to retreat up the valley after a savage Hide battle which Shields's boys
recalled later with vast pride—theirs was the only outfit in the Union Army
which could say it had licked Stonewall Jackson in open fight. As a military
spectacle this battle of Kernstown was notable chiefly because it showed what
an iron-hard man Jackson was: he cashiered his best general afterward for
withdrawing his men without orders. To be sure, the men were totally out of
ammunition and were badly outnumbered, and the withdrawal was just plain common
sense, but that made no difference: the retreat hadn't been ordered at headquarters,
and anyhow, as Jackson sternly remarked, the men could have stayed and used
their bayonets. This was rough on the general who got cashiered, but it had a
notably stimulating effect on all other generals who served under Jackson
thereafter.
³

Seemingly,
all that had happened was that Jackson had made an ill-advised attack and had
been beaten. But the effects, by a roundabout route, were felt afar off. Both
McClellan and Banks agreed that if Jackson was strong enough to attack Shields
he had better be watched pretty carefully, since the Rebels obviously had more
men in the valley than had been supposed—neither general dreaming that Jackson
had made his attack with so small a force. So it was decided that Banks must
keep his entire command in the Shenandoah Valley, a strategic area of
considerable sensitivity; and troops were drawn from the fortifications around
Washington to occupy the Manassas-Centreville fine which had originally been
designated for Banks. That done, McClellan took a last look around, concluded
that everything was under control, wrote a final note to the War Department
showing how the troops which he was not taking with him were disposed, and set
off for Fortress Monroe.

Now the dispositions he had made, as revised
because of the battle of Kernstown, were certainly adequate to give Washington
the protection Lincoln had insisted on. As a military man McClellan could
honestly feel that he had done all that was required. But he wasn't called on
to satisfy military men on this point; he had to satisfy politicians who were
more than ready to see spooks under the bed, and from their point of view he
had left himself wide open to the charge of ignoring his instructions-this
general whom the Secretary of War and the administration leaders on Capitol
Hill had already accused of treasonous intent. The actual figures are a bit
dull, but they need to be looked at for a moment:

McClellan had left some seventy-three
thousand men behind, as his note showed. Banks in the Shenandoah had slightly
more than thirty-five thousand, some eighteen thousand were at Manassas and
Warrenton, thirteen hundred or so were along the Potomac downstream from
Washington, and there were approximately eighteen thousand in the Washington
garrison. Total, seventy-three thousand and odd—enough, surely, to carry out
the letter of his instructions?

Not to Lincoln's eyes, which were the eyes
that had to be satisfied. To begin with, some ten thousand of these men were
Blenker's Germans, bound west to serve with Fremont and hence out of
calculation as far as the defense of Washington was concerned. In addition,
when he figured the strength of Manassas and Washington, McClellan had included
certain troops which were due to come in soon from the state capitals but which
had not yet arrived; what Lincoln soon discovered was that there were actually
less than thirteen thousand in the Washington garrison, almost all of them
untrained men. As far as he could see, instead of the forty thousand men who
were to be left "in and about Washington" there were only these
almost useless thirteen thousand, plus the handful downstream, plus the troops
at Manassas and Warrenton. All in all, after carefully counting heads, Lincoln
could find fewer than twenty-eight thousand soldiers in and near the capital.

To
this, of course, McClellan would have replied that the thirty-five thousand
under Banks in the Shenandoah should properly be added, since they were near
enough and strong enough to make their presence felt. But it was asking a
little too much to expect Lincoln and the Cabinet to see it that way under the
conditions then prevailing. To civilian eyes the force in the Shenandoah was a
long way off. No one in Washington could forget that the Union had had a fairly
strong army in the Shenandoah when McDowell was beaten at Bull Run: its
presence in the valley had not served to protect Washington in July 1861, and
an unmilitary President and Cabinet could hardly be blamed for feeling that
things might be no different in April of 1862. Add it up any way he tried, the
President could only conclude that McClellan had not done what he had been told
to do. The capital was not properly defended.

The reaction to this was immediate. McClellan
had barely started up the peninsula when he was officially notified that McDowell's
corps at Fredericksburg had been withdrawn from his command and would get its
orders hereafter direct from Washington.

Which meant that his campaign started under a
great handicap. McClellan himself got off the boat at Fortress Monroe on April
2 and found that he had on hand—disembarked, equipped, and ready to go—some
fifty-eight thousand men: five infantry divisions, a scattering of cavalry,
and a hundred guns. He at once started them up the roads toward Yorktown, with
instructions that the rest of the army was to follow as soon as it arrived. The
first thing he discovered was that someone had steered him wrong about those
sandy roads on the peninsula. Instead of being sandy they were uniformly of
pure gumbo mud, with hollow crowns so that they collected whatever water might
be coming down; and the weather turned rainy, so that the roads quickly became
bottomless beyond anything in anybody's imagination. Guns and wagons sank to
the axles and beyond. One officer wrote later that he saw a mule sink completely
out of sight, all but its ears, in the middle of what was supposed to be a main
road. He added that it was a rather small mule.
⁴

McClellan's next discovery was that the
Rebels had dug a line of entrenchments running completely across the peninsula
from York-town, on the York River, to the mouth of Warwick Creek, on the James.
Emplaced in these lines they had several dozen heavy naval guns (acquired a
year earlier through capture of the United States navy yard at Norfolk) plus a
number of fieldpieces, and they appeared to have all the infantry they needed.
The approaches to this line led through swamps and tangled woodlands, and every
foot of road would have to be corduroyed before guns could be brought up.
Bewiskered old General Heintzelman, leading the advance, reported—somewhat
hastily, it would seem—that a direct assault was out of the question. McClellan
decided there would have to be a siege. Under his original plans he would
simply have brought McDowell down from the north to take the Rebel works in the
rear, thereby forcing their immediate evacuation, but McDowell was no longer
his to command. To get past these lines McClellan would have to go straight
over them, and that appeared to be a matter for the slow, methodical,
step-by-step process of digging parallels, moving up heavy guns, and getting
everything ready to blast the Rebel works off the face of the earth by sheer
weight of gunfire.

Concerning which there was to be great
argument, then and thereafter. When McClellan got his first look at the
Yorktown fines, the Confederate force there was under command of General John
B. Magruder, who had no more than twelve thousand men and who felt the lines to
be faulty both in design and in construction. Magruder was never especially
distinguished as a combat general, but in his idle moments he had considerable
talent as an amateur actor, and he now called on this theatrical ability to
help him. He marched a couple of regiments through a clearing, in sight of the
Federal advance guard, double-quicked them around a little forest out of sight,
and then marched them through the clearing again-over and over, like a stage
manager using a dozen adenoidal spear carriers to represent Caesar's legions.
The device worked, and Heintzelman reported the Rebels present in great
strength with many more coming up.

Joe Johnston, hastening down in advance of
his own troops to have a look at the situation, appreciated the dodge but felt
it could hardly be relied on forever. He galloped back to Richmond in dismay
to report that the lines were quite untenable: McClellan could get through or
around them any time he wanted to make a real push, to put the whole
Confederate Army there would simply be to put it in a trap, best to evacuate at
once and prepare to fight near Richmond. Davis and Lee overruled him, on the
ground that McClellan's advance must be delayed as long as possible. Evacuation
would mean the fall of Norfolk, and that would mean the loss of the famous
ironclad
Virginia
(ex-Merrimac),
which
drew too much water to come up James River to Richmond and was too unseaworthy
to go out beyond the Virginia capes into the open ocean. Also—and far more
important—the entire Confederate Army was about to undergo complete
reorganization. The men had originally enlisted for twelve months, and their
terms were just now expiring. Conscription was going into effect and none of
the manpower would actually be lost, but for some weeks there would be complete
turmoil, not to say chaos, with officers being shifted or replaced all over the
lot and with every regiment having a grand reshuffle. It would be almost
impossible to maneuver or to fight in the open until that was over. So
Johnston, much against his will, took his army down to Yorktown to stave off
the advance as long as he could. When he got it there his pessimism deepened;
to Lee, in Richmond, he wrote that "no one but McClellan could have
hesitated to attack." But the attack was not made. Instead there was a
gradual, painstaking building up of Federal strength in preparation for a
final, overwhelming artillery bombardment. Johnston knew that when this assault
came he would have to leave, but mercifully (to his eyes) the assault was long
in coming.

Lincoln and his Cabinet knew nothing of
Johnston's trepidation or of the disorganized condition of the Confederate
Army. What they did know was that McClellan's army was simply sitting down
before the enemy's works, waiting. They had already begun to suspect that
McClellan was a general who moved very slowly; now, knowing little or nothing
of the obstacle in front of him, knowing only that weeks were passing without
an advance, they found suspicion hardening to certainty. This was hard to
bear; for men who already doubted McClellan's good faith and loyalty it was
quite impossible to bear in silence. The clamor against McClellan deepened,
became a clamor against Lincoln for keeping him in command. Lincoln tried to
give McClellan an understanding of this increasing pressure as a factor which
McClellan would have to keep constantly in mind when he made his plans; tried
to show him that it was a pressure which, political conditions being what they
so regrettably were, even the President of the United States might finally be
unable to resist. On April 9 Lincoln wrote him: "And once more let me tell
you, it is indispensable to
you
that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help
this." He concluded the letter by assuring McClellan that he would sustain
him as far as he could: "but," he added, "you must act."

This was easy enough to order from
Washington. McClellan might be pardoned for feeling that he was being
second-guessed in an unconscionable manner by men who knew nothing about what
he was really up against. To say "Strike a blow!" was simple enough;
actually striking it meant sending young men through swamps and almost
impassable second-growth timber against enemies amply protected by heavy
earthworks, and even at this date it is not easy to say that such an attack
would have won. The men of the Army of the Potomac were to learn that when the
Army of Northern Virginia was once properly dug in, on ground where it proposed
to linger, it could be uncommonly hard to move. Joe Johnston might have been
wrong and McClellan might have been right. The trouble was that being right
wasn't quite enough. Nothing was going to satisfy Washington except results,
and Washington was not going to wait too long for them, either. Nobody was
going to be reasonable about anything.