Mr Lincoln's Army (22 page)

But the incomprehensible part about it all is
that with this elaborate espionage network, operated by experts and staffed by
brave and intelligent men, the information that was brought to McClellan was
so disastrously wrong. Disastrously, because it made the Rebel armies appear
more than twice as large as they really were and because McClellan believed it
and acted on it. Pinkerton's spy system was well organized, bold,
successful—and McClellan would have been infinitely better off if he had had
no spy system whatever.

While McClellan was waiting in front of
Yorktown, Pinkerton proudly gave him a report showing that Joe Johnston had
from 100,-000 to 120,000 men in line against him. This information, he said,
came from "officers of their army and from persons connected with their
commissary department," where they were issuing 119,000 daily rations—the
only instance in history, probably, where the Confederates were accused of
overfeeding their men. Pinkerton added that it was safe to assume that his
estimate was under rather than over the real figure. Now the only trouble with
that was that Johnston at the time had barely 50,000 men on the peninsula. He
was shockingly outnumbered and he knew it, and the only hope that he could see
was for Davis to strip the Southern coast line bare of troops, no matter what
the cost locally, and reinforce him with every available man so that he might
be brought near enough to McClellan's numbers to have some chance of fighting a
successful battle.

Some six weeks later, on the eve of the
fateful Seven Days' Battles in front of Richmond, Pinkerton assured McClellan
that Lee had more than 180,000 men facing him; probably many more, since the
agents had actually identified 200 regiments of infantry and cavalry, eight
battalions of independent troops, five battalions of artillery, twelve
companies of independent infantry and cavalry, and forty-six additional
companies of artillery, and the Rebels undoubtedly had many other outfits present
whose designations could not be learned. After the fighting was over, Pinkerton
reported that he was satisfied the Rebels had at least 200,000 men in the
battles, of whom 40,000 were casualties. Long after the war Pinkerton continued
to insist on the accuracy of his figures; he had obtained them, he said,
"from prisoners of war, contrabands, loyal southerners, deserters,
blockade-runners and from actual observations by trustworthy scouts."

So to all the other handicaps that beset
him—distrust at the War Department, troops withheld, strategic plans
countermanded—McClellan had this final, ruinous handicap to contend with:
heavily outnumbering his opponent, he was led to believe that his opponent
heavily outnumbered him. He and his staff took Pinkerton's word as gospel. This
was hard to do sometimes; McClellan's headquarters had a fairly accurate count
on the number of divisions in the Confederate Army, and that number could not
conceivably account for the vast hordes of men supposed to be present. But instead
of questioning Pinkerton's figures, headquarters simply assumed that those
divisions were "grand divisions"—oversized groupings of two or more
army corps, such as Burnside set up later at Fredericksburg—and continued to
believe that from 180,000 to 200,000 armed Rebels were in front of them.

It was just tragic that this had to
happen to McClellan, of all generals; for this man must always listen, at the
last, to the voice of caution, the subconscious warning that action may bring
unlooked-for perils, the lurking fear that maybe some contingency has not been
calculated. Before he can act, everything must be ready, every preparation
must be made, every possible mischance must be provided for. Now, with his own
career and the nation's fate balanced on a knife's edge, with Lincoln quietly
warning him that he must at all costs
do
something,
there is this final deterrent: conducting an offensive campaign deep in enemy
territory, he finds himself to be dreadfully outnumbered—so much so that only
a very great daring would make an offensive possible at all. Almost everything
he did and failed to do in this campaign can be explained by that one fact.

3,
Tomorrow Never Comes

With
all of these difficulties of espionage, counting numbers, and weighing risks,
the men in the ranks had nothing to do. They never even saw their own army all
in a mass, to say nothing of the enemy's. In this broken, wooded country the
Rebels were usually visible, even in battle, only as small detachments. The men
could see that they were edging up toward Richmond. Heintzelman's corps was
close enough so that the men could hear the church bells ringing in the
capital, and if progress looked slow to people back in Washington, it seemed
fast enough to the men who had to tramp along the bottomless roads.

There
had been too much rain, and in the lowlands the humid heat was an oppressive
weight to boys from the North, and a general air of weather-beaten tarnish
began to appear on brigades that had been natty and polished when they came off
the transports. Officers who had been bright with gold-embroidered shoulder
straps, red sashes, and plumed felt hats became more somber-looking; many of
them bought privates' uniforms and sewed the insignia of rank on the shoulders,
having learned that in a fight or on the picket lines the enemy believed in
picking off the officers first. Regiments that had worn fancy leggings or
gaiters began to discard them, the men finding that it was more comfortable to
roll the trouser leg snug at the ankle and haul the gray regulation sock up
over it. Paper collars had disappeared, and the men in the Zouave regiments,
which wore gay red pants and yellow sashes, topped by Turkish-style fezzes,
began to wonder if these uniforms were not both unduly conspicuous on the firing
line and excessively hard to keep neat.

When the actual fighting came it was
desperately confused, and even the generals seem to have had trouble
understanding what was happening. Finding McClellan with part of his army south
of the Chickahominy and part of it north, Joe Johnston waited for a heavy rain
to swell the river and make passage between the two wings more difficult, and
then fell hard on the part that was south of the river. The battle of Seven
Pines, or Fair Oaks, which resulted was bloody enough, with five or six
thousand casualties on each side, but it was indecisive. The diaries and
memoirs of the men who fought in it cannot be put together to make a picture
of anything but a series of savage combats in wood and swamp, where wounded
Confederates drowned in stagnant pools and wounded Federals were burned when
powder flashes set fire to dead leaves and underbrush insufficiently dampened
by rain; and there seemed to be no tactical plans other than a simple urge to
get the men up into places where they could shoot at each other.

Things went badly, and Bull Sumner was
ordered to bring his corps over from the north side and get into the fight. He
marched his men up to the flooded river to find that the makeshift bridge the
engineers had built was ready to float off downstream—center part loose from
its underpinning, foaming water all about, engineer officer coming up to tell
him that the bridge was unsafe and it was impossible to use it. Sumner roared:
"Impossible? Sir, I tell you I
can
cross!
I am ordered!" And cross he did, too, although his men waded knee-deep in
water that swirled over the planking. The muddy roads on the south side were so
soupy that his artillery almost sank out of sight, and the gunners worked up to
their waists in mud and water to inch the guns along. When they finally got
them into action, each recoil drove the wheels down into the soft ground nearly
to the hub caps.
¹
Sumner sent the 5th New Hampshire in on a
counterattack after a Confederate charge had been repulsed. The regiment's
colonel, a former newspaper editor named E. E. Cross, who had lived in the Far
West and had fought both Mexicans and Indians, exhorted the men: "Charge
'em like hell, boys—show 'em you
are
damned
Yankees!" As the regiment advanced, Cross fell wounded. He propped
himself up on an elbow, and when some of the men came over to help him he told
them: "Never mind me—whip the enemy first and take care of me
afterward."
²

General
William H. French, stout and apoplectic, with a face so red that he always
looked as if his collar were choking him, set out to gallop boldly along the
line of his brigade as it prepared to go into action, and dropped completely
out of sight in muddy water when his horse bounced into what had been thought
to be a mere surface puddle. The general came up blowing and swearing mightily,
while the brigade shouted with laughter. A lieutenant in the 57th New York was
told by his colonel to lead his company off through the wood to get an enfilade
fire on a Confederate detachment in front. He did so, and the Rebels withdrew,
new troops being, as Longstreet indelicately remarked, "as sensitive about
the flanks as a virgin." When the metropolitan papers came to camp a few
days later the lieutenant discovered that this modest little exploit had
become a grand charge, led by a general, which had driven the enemy with great
slaughter. Reflecting on the way a small story can become great, the
lieutenant wrote: "If the history of past ages is as much tainted as the
history we are now making—then alas poor Yorick!"
³
Toward the
end of the battle, some anonymous Federal put a bullet through Joe Johnston's
shoulder, and a moment later a shell fragment hit the general in the chest and
unhorsed him: and thus the one significant result of the battle—its
significance not guessed at the time—was that Robert E. Lee became commander of
the Army of Northern Virginia.

After the battle things were about as they
had been, except that a horrible stench hung over the whole broad valley.
McClellan felt that the attack had been intelligently conceived—"It is the
only smart thing Joe Johnston has yet attempted. It was
very
smart," he was quoted as saying—and he busied
himself getting the roads improved so that heavy guns could be moved up, while
he saw to it that his lines were protected by proper entrenchments, and he
moved more and more of the army over to the south side of the river. He had
each division lined up for dress parade a few days after the battle, and a
stirring order from himself was read to the men:

"Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac! I
have fulfilled at least a part of my promise to you. You are now face to face
with the Rebels, who are held at bay in front of their capital. The final and
decisive battle is at hand. Unless you belie your past history, the result
cannot be for a moment doubtful." The proclamation went on and on, assuring
the soldiers that they were better fighters than their enemies, and concluding:
"Soldiers! I will be with you in this battle and share its dangers with
you. Our confidence in each other is now founded upon the past. Let us strike
the blow which is to restore peace and union to this distracted land. Upon your
valor, discipline and mutual confidence the result depends."
⁴

It is written that the soldiers cheered when
they heard these fine words, and they probably did—although during the next
fortnight or so there seemed to be very little in their general situation to
cause much cheering. The weather was muggy and enervating, the mosquitoes were
a trial, sick lists grew dolefully long as malaria and other complaints
appeared, and there was no escape whatever from the frightful smell. Many dead
had gone unburied in the swamps and thickets, others had been given a mere
covering of earth which the rains quickly washed away, and anyway, nobody had
warned these boys that one of the worst things about war is the way it stinks.
All any individual soldier could see was the uninspiring acre or so in his
immediate vicinity, and the adventure and excitement of war seemed to have shrunk
to sullen endurance of boredom and acute physical discomfort.

But morale did not sag as much as might be
supposed. McClellan's prose might be purple, but it did create self-esteem. The
men felt that they had done well at Williamsburg, and Seven Pines had been
twice as big a fight and they had got through it ah right; they had passed the
test of battle and nobody had ever licked them, and they began to feel that
they were seasoned old soldiers. They had learned about artillery fire, which
was so terrifying to new troops and, for that matter, not exactly pleasant
even to old ones. Shell and solid shot fired by smoothbore cannon were
perfectly visible in flight and always seemed to be coming right at the
observer: a completely unnerving thing until one got used to it. Spent shot,
rolling along the ground, was deceptively dangerous; it looked harmless but
wasn't, and some of Hooker's men told how an officer had put his foot out to
stop such a ball and had lost his leg thereby. Shells were unpredictable. One man
had picked up a dud and it had exploded in his hands—yet by some freak he was
not badly hurt; at other times one shellburst might kill half a dozen men. A
boy in a New Jersey regiment wrote that going under fire for the first time was
pretty terrible: some of the men in his company, he said, were so scared they
simply fell to the ground as if shot, picking themselves up sheepishly a bit
later as nerve returned. He recalled one boy who went up to the firing line
like a man in a trance, moaning over and over: "O Lord, dear good
Lord!"