Mr Lincoln's Army (21 page)

But somehow all of this made no difference
whatever. Up around Fredericksburg, at that time, General McDowell was winning
the lasting enmity of his own soldiers by his care to protect civilian
property; here was McClellan, right in the presence of the enemy, doing the
same thing and rising even higher in popularity. How account for it? How,
except by saying that one man had the magic touch and the other lacked it. But
the magic touch is not entirely a mystery, even so. McClellan took
extraordinary pains to make his men feel that they were good soldiers and that
the commanding general knew they were good and was grateful to them for it.
After the fight at Williamsburg he was prompt to visit the regiments which had
been engaged and thank them for their fine work. In one newspaper dispatch we
see him visiting, in succession, the 5th Wisconsin, the 7th Maine, and the 33rd
New York, making a brief, graceful little speech to each: "I have come to
thank you for your bravery and good conduct in the action of yesterday. . . .
You acted like veterans! Veterans of many battles could not have done
better!"

Then
there was the time, a few days later, when the 4th Michigan, plus a squadron of
cavalry and a few engineer troops, made a reconnoissance across the
Chickahominy and collided with Rebel troops, driving them off and losing some
eight men in killed and wounded while doing it. McClellan visited the regiment
as soon as it got back to camp; in front of the men he shook hands with the
colonel and congratulated him, shook hands also with a captain who had been
mentioned for gallant conduct. Then he turned to the men themselves, not with a
little speech this time but with an easy, friendly comradeship. "How do
you feel, boys?" There was a quick chorus of "We feel bully,
General!" Still casual, McClellan asked them: "Do you think anything
can stop you from going to Richmond?" And the regiment yelled
"No!" in a shout that Jefferson Davis might almost have heard, off
beyond the swamps in the Confederate capital; and McClellan gave the men his
gay little salute and galloped away, leaving the Michigan boys feeling almost
as if they had married him.
¹⁰

And if there is a mystery in the way McClellan's
men could ignore his care to protect Rebel property while McDowell's men found
the same care unforgivable when McDowell displayed it, there is equal mystery
in the way those actions were regarded back in Washington. The anti-slavery
Republicans, already suspecting that McClellan proposed to sell out the Union,
found in his protection of Confederate civilian property strong corroboration
of their suspicion. Yet McDowell, who was doing exactly the same thing, was
the chosen hero of these men. They rejoiced when he was taken out from under
McClellan's command and would have liked to see him in McClellan's place; to
their minds he was the shining example of what a general ought to be. Again,
the answer, to an extent, may be much the same in reverse: one general had the
touch for dealing with political persons at the capital, and the other general
did not.

Indeed,
that queer riddle of what a general could and could not do goes even farther.
At the time when McClellan was slowly pursuing Johnston up to the edge of
Richmond, General Halleck, out in the Mississippi Valley, was pursuing General
Beauregard, who was retreating down into northern Mississippi after the
dreadful, mangling fight at Shiloh. McClellan was pursuing very cautiously. His
reasons might have been good or they might have been bad; in any case, his
pursuit was slow, which was a damning mark against him with Secretary Stanton
and the radical group in Congress. Halleck, who had more of a numerical
superiority over Beauregard than McClellan had over Johnston, was edging
forward with a sluggish deliberation that made McClellan's advance look
precipitate, averaging hardly a mile a day and entrenching up to the ears every
evening. Yet Halleck, like McDowell, was a hero to Stanton and his crowd,
rising in favor daily, destined before long to be brought to the capital as
supreme commander. McClellan's hesitation was proof of his disloyalty;
Halleck's hesitation, twice as pronounced and far less justified, was simply ignored—by
everyone except Lincoln, who felt that both men ought to hurry a little more.

All of this proves nothing much except that
the nation was running a high fever and had a touch of delirium now and then.
But the effects were tragic, for in the end it was those amateur soldiers down
among the Chickahominy swamps who were going to have to pay for it. The
relations between a general and his superiors can't be poisoned in just one
direction; the poison works both ways, and if the radicals believed McClellan
to be a villain, McClellan returned the sentiment with interest. His letters to
his wife no longer showed merely the irritation and nervous strain of a young
general who was being crowded a little too hard; they reflected downright fury,
coupled with a conviction that the civilians who were working against him were
scoundrels. The detachment of McDowell's corps was "the most infamous
thing that history has recorded." When the President urged McClellan to
break the Confederate lines, "I was much tempted to reply that he had
better come and do it himself." Long before the siege of Yorktown ended he
was writing: "Don't worry about the wretches; they have done nearly their
worst, and can't do much more. I am sure that I will win in the end, in spite
of all their rascality. History will present a sad record of these traitors who
are willing to sacrifice the country and its army for personal spite and
personal aims." He spoke of his predicament—a man with "the Rebels on
one side, and the abolitionists and other scoundrels on the other"—and a
few days later wrote that "those hounds in Washington are after me
again."

The main collision with the Confederate Army
had not yet taken place. Yet already there had developed this amazing
situation: the Secretary of War, plus leading administration senators, believed
the general commanding the army to be a traitor who would rather lose than win,
and the general, in his turn, believed that
they
were traitors who would rather see the country lose than
permit him to win. That word "treason," so rare in American history,
was dancing back and forth like a tennis ball. Misunderstanding between the
home office and the man in the field had become complete; had developed a
breach not to be healed, with hatred and anger and terrible suspicions that
would be incredible were they not all part of the record. Like a steaming,
choking fog, this atmosphere hung over the army, poisoning its chances,
staining its banners. Whoever was most at fault, this heavy intangible lay
across the army's path, ready to take the lives of boys who had had no part in
it and who would die not knowing that it existed.

Now there could be only one road to
salvation for McClellan, for his soldiers, and for the country itself.
McClellan had to win. Victory in front of Richmond would swallow up everything,
leaving the hot accusations and recriminations as dry bones which the
historians might pick over at their convenience. The weight that rested on the
broad shoulders of the young general was heavier than he knew. For if the war
itself was the supreme test of democratic institutions— "testing whether .
. . any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure"—the fighting
of it was testing the qualities of democracy's leaders. The unfathomable
strength of the country had been placed at these leaders' disposal. If that
strength could be used properly, the war could be won quickly and the country
would be spared much suffering. If it could not, if leadership failed to
measure up, then the people themselves would have to carry the whole load, and
everything they had hoped for in this bright land of promise would depend on
their finding within themselves enough endurance and heroism and patience to
meet the unimaginable agony which their leaders had been unable to spare them.

To which it may be said that McClellan did
the best he could and that he worked under terrible handicaps, some of which he
created himself. One of them—in some ways, considering his own inner nature,
the most damaging of all—was a matter of detail: selection of the wrong man to
run G-2, Army Intelligence—Army Secret Service, as they called it in those
days.

G-2 was handled by a short, stocky, bearded
man who was known around headquarters as Major E. J. Allen, and who in reality
was Allan Pinkerton, famous head of a famous detective agency in Chicago.
First of the country's great private detectives, Pinkerton had genuine talent,
coupled with a certain flair for publicity; he had handled many jobs for
railroads, as a railroad man McClellan had known him before the war, and when
McClellan became a major general he called in Pinkerton and put him in charge
of military intelligence, espionage and counterespionage alike. Pinkerton built
up quite an organization, and in the long run what McClellan knew about the
Confederate Army that was facing him was mostly what Pinkerton told him.

As it turned out, Pinkerton was a fine man
for running down train robbers and absconding bank cashiers but was completely
miscast as chief of military intelligence. He had energy, courage,
administrative ability, and imagination—too much imagination, perhaps, for he
was operating in an era when a fine hairline separated the ridiculously false
from the frighteningly true. Early in 1861, while he was still in civil life,
he had gone into Maryland at the bidding of the president of the Philadelphia,
Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, who had heard of secessionist plots to
sabotage the railroad leading to Washington and wanted to find out about them.
Pinkerton planted operatives in Baltimore, Havre de Grace, Perryville, and
other places, and presently reported that he had discovered not merely a plan
to sabotage the railroad but a widespread plot to kill Abraham Lincoln before
his inauguration.

Pinkerton's men lived with this plot; after
the war, in his memoirs, Pinkerton told how they got into secret societies,
mingled freely with secession-minded Baltimore blue-bloods, cultivated
beautiful friendships with Baltimore belles "under the witching spell of
music and moonlit nature," and uncovered a far-reaching, elaborately
detailed conspiracy for assassination. It is something of a comedown to find
that the leader of this conspiracy was a barber in a Baltimore hotel —the
build-up about Southern aristocrats leads one to expect a Virginia Carter, at
the very least—but so it was. One of Pinkerton's men sat in on a secret meeting
where men drew lots to see who would actually do the killing, another one came
up with information about plans for cutting telegraph wires and destroying
railroad bridges (presumably so that the North could neither learn of the
assassination nor do anything about it after it had happened), and Pinkerton
submitted a full report while Lincoln was on his way east.

The report caused much excitement, quite
naturally: it was either a perfect script for a theatrical thriller or an
astounding revelation of deadly plotting which simply had to be frustrated. As
a final result Lincoln changed his plans: slipped quietly out of Harrisburg and
came into Washington by sleeping car a day ahead of time, thereby arousing much
derision and criticism.

Lincoln seems never to have been quite
certain whether Pinkerton had saved his life or induced him to make a fool of
himself, and nobody since then has been able to be quite certain about it
either. The plot itself, as Pinkerton described it in his book, has a wildly improbable
sound, with the conspirators behaving in an impossibly stagy manner; but just
as one concludes that the thing simply could not have been true, there comes
the recollection that when the 6th Massachusetts Infantry passed through
Baltimore just after Fort Sumter there was precisely the kind of riot that
Pinkerton's men had mentioned as a projected stage setting for the murder of
Lincoln: a riot in which angry men fired real guns and in which both soldiers
and citizens of Baltimore were killed. Also, in 1865, a plot quite as harebrained
as anything Pinkerton's men reported did result in Lincoln's death. Men were
living in the center of a lurid and improbable melodrama in those days, and if
it was fantastic, it was very real; just as the tale strains credulity to the
breaking point somebody is killed—by pistol or by knife or by hangman's noose.
They might have exaggerated their stage effects in a most inartistic manner,
but their guns were not loaded with blank cartridges.

At any rate, Pinkerton took over McClellan's
military intelligence problem and applied real ingenuity to the job. His men
went fanning out behind the Confederate lines to some purpose; one of them actually
got in with Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, in the days before
McClellan took his army down to the peninsula, and carried a pass signed by
that official and became a member of a Rebel counterespionage outfit that was
trying to catch Yankee spies. Each of Pinkerton's men carried a pass through
the Union lines written in invisible ink which became visible only on exposure
to sunlight. They got in touch with a secret organization of colored men in
Richmond, the Loyal League, who met in cellars and attics and whose password
was "Friends of Uncle Abe," and who helped the Union operatives in
and out of the Rebel capital. One agent even joined a Confederate spy team and
became a courier, carrying messages back and forth between Richmond and
Baltimore—the messages, of course, all being copied for McClellan before
delivery. Timothy Webster, the greatest of Pinkerton's spies, was finally
caught and hanged. Other spies disappeared, as spies do in wartime; but all in
all they had perfected a genuinely remarkable system for getting forbidden
information out of Richmond.