Mr Lincoln's Army (26 page)

The heat was oppressive. Mosquitoes seemed
even worse here than they had been around Richmond. The camp stank horribly:
too many men were crowded into too small an area, the pits that were dug for
refuse never seemed quite adequate, the latrines were an abomination. There was
a plague of flies, and the drinking water (obtained, for the most part, by
digging shallow wells) was unpleasantly warm and muddy, and was beyond all
question tainted. A new surgeon arrived to join the 5th New Hampshire just at
this time, and he wrote feelingly of the impression made by what he saw:
"the barefooted boys, the sallow men, the threadbare officers and seedy
generals, the diarrhea and dysentery, the yellow eyes and malarious faces, the
beds upon the bare earth in the mud, the mist and the rain." All of this,
he confessed, instantly destroyed his "pre-conceived ideas of
knight-errantry."
⁴

Fresh provisions came down from the
North, which was a help; cabbages, tomatoes, and potatoes were welcome,
although the men were not entirely sure that fresh beef was much better than
salt pork —the butchers were inexpert and hasty, carcasses were usually cut up
while lying on the ground, and the meat had a way of being sandy by the time it
got to the company cooks. In any case, the cooks rarely knew of any way to cook
beef except by boding it. The one good feature about the place, the men agreed,
was that they could bathe in James River.

But even though Harrison's Landing was a
miserable camp, where the regimental sick lists kept lengthening and tired boys
had enough unwanted leisure to remember that they were homesick, the army was
not altogether discouraged. It had learned things about war that it had never
dreamed of, to be sure, but as the men compared notes on what they had been
through it seemed to them that they had done very well indeed. They could not
understand just why they had had to retreat, and it was a disappointment not to
be in Richmond; but every battle, when they looked back on it, seemed to have
been no worse than a draw, and Malvern Hill they rightly considered a distinct
victory. If some of them felt that so fine a victory ought to have been
followed up by an advance on Richmond, they concluded after talking it over
that Little Mac knew what he was doing and that they could safely leave all
such problems to him.

Had
they known it, as stout a friend of McClellan as Fitz-John Porter himself
believed that the retreat after Malvern Hill was a mistake; a determined
advance next day, he thought, would have pushed Lee aside and opened the way to
Richmond. Phil Kearny, who had long since come to dislike McClellan
intensely—he still thought McClellan had slighted him in his dispatches
describing the battle of Williamsburg, and anyway, McClellan just wasn't the
type that hot-blooded Kearny could admire—was violent in his criticism. When
the order to retreat reached him at the end of the battle, he cried out:
"I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, enter my solemn protest against this
order for retreat. We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and
take Richmond. And in full view of all the responsibility of such a
declaration, I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice
or treason."
⁵

Kearny's remarks were to get back to
Washington in time, but they did not circulate among the enlisted men. With
them McClellan's name still had the old magic. The 3rd Michigan, which was one
of Kearny's regiments, was making a despairing effort to boil coffee on one of
the first mornings in camp. Fires wouldn't burn in the rain, and men were
gathered around trying to hold blankets, overcoats, and what not over the
smoldering embers, when McClellan came riding by. The men dropped everything
and ran over to cluster around him and shout, and when he could make himself
heard he quiedy told them that he knew things had been tough but that everything
was going to be all right from now on: they were fine soldiers, they had given
the Rebels more than they had received, and they'd take Richmond yet. The boys
cheered and went back to their fires, got them going somehow, drank their
coffee, and felt better. Talking things over after they had finished their
coffee and had their pipes lighted, they agreed that they were quite a regiment
and the army was quite an army; they had marched all night and fought all day for
a week, most of the time they had whipped the enemy—who could have done better
than that? And as for McClellan: he was still the man.
⁰

New uniforms were issued, and there were
reviews: a grand series of reviews, presently, with President Lincoln himself on
hand to sit on his horse, lanky and ungainly, beside McClellan to watch the men
march past. A boyish lieutenant on the staff of General Taylor, of the New
Jersey brigade, hadn't managed to get in on the issue of new uniforms. His
pants were unspeakably ragged and dirty—he confessed that he had not had them
off for upward of a week—and he was excused from the review. That evening he
went to General Taylor's tent on business, entered, and found Lincoln himself
there, chatting with Taylor. Abashed, he tried to withdraw; no man in pants
like his had any business lingering in the presence of the President of the
United States. But Lincoln told him not to leave and asked

Taylor
to introduce him. Taylor did so, explaining about the regrettable pants worn
out in the country's hard service. Lincoln shook hands, rested his left hand on
the boy's shoulder, and said: "My son, I think your country can afford to
get you a new pair of breeches."
⁷

Lincoln hadn't come all the way down from
Washington just to review troops, of course, nor did he spend much time
chatting with brigade commanders. He was there primarily to see McClellan and
to find out for himself, if possible, just what could be done next with the
Army of the Potomac. The war was approaching an unexpected crisis, and much
more had been lost than a few square miles of swampland along the Chickahominy.
What was fast disappearing was the last chance for a relatively short war;
going with it, or soon to go, was the high hope and confidence with which the
country had faced the summer's fighting. Unless the war could be won quickly it
would become a new kind of war, creating its own objectives, exacting a
fearful price; no longer an affair of esprit de corps and hero worship and the
elan of highhearted volunteer fighters, but a long, brutal, grinding, and
totally unpredictable struggle to which all the agony and heartbreak of the
Seven Days' fighting would be only a prelude.

The sky had been so bright that spring, and
final victory had not appeared to be far away. In the West, Kentucky and most
of Tennessee were safe and New Orleans was taken, and it looked as if the
whole length of the Mississippi would soon be open. In the East, amphibious
expeditions had seized much of the Confederacy's coast line, and McClellan's
army had seemed ready to drive straight through to Richmond. Secretary Stanton
had been so encouraged in April that he had blithely closed all of the
recruiting offices, which was a black item against him in McClellan's book. Now
the brightness was gone and dark clouds were climbing up the sky. The armies
in the West were stalled—no actual repulse anywhere, but no victories, either.
Every detail of the Virginia campaign had gone awry, and men were thankful
because the Army of the Potomac had not actually been destroyed. John Pope had
been brought on from the West to make an army out of the scattered commands
north of the Rappahannock—McDowell's, Sigel's, and Banks's—but McClellan's army
still represented most of the muscle, and it was the big question mark. What
could it do now? Or, considering that it was McClellan's army, what
would
it do? Lincoln had to find out.

When the bad news first came in from in front
of Richmond, Lincoln had been consoling. In his first message to McClellan he
told him: "Maintain your ground if you can, but save the army at all
events, even if you fall back to Fort Monroe. We still have strength enough in
the country, and will bring it out." Next day he wired McClellan: "If
you think you are not strong enough to take Richmond just now, I do not ask
you to just now," and promised reinforcements; a new levy of three
hundred thousand volunteers was to be raised at once. On the following day he
wired that he was satisfied that "yourself, officers and men have done the
best you could" and conveyed "ten thousand thanks for it." A day
later he repeated his acknowledgment of "the heroism and skill of
yourself, officers and men" and assured McClellan: "If you can hold
your present position we shall hive the enemy yet." In a letter Lincoln
went into detail about reinforcements, again urged the general to hold on and
make his army safe, and added in a postscript: "If at any time you feel
able to take the offensive, you are not restrained from doing so."
Confidently McClellan replied: "Alarm yourself as little as possible about
me, and don't lose confidence in this army."

So far, so good; President and general seemed
to understand one another. Now the President was on the ground to talk things
over.

Yet
how could they talk, those two men, even with incalculable matters depending on
their coming to agreement? We know both of them by now; we have had two
generations to study them and find out what they really meant. But they could
never see each other clearly. Too many shadows lay between them. On each man
was a pressure; in each man was an ignorance which kept him from understanding
just what the other man's pressure was like—ignorance of politics, for the one,
and of military affairs, for the other. Behind each man, subtly influencing
him, were the suspicions his colleagues held, including on each side the dim
half belief that perhaps the other man did not really wish a speedy end to the
war. (Among the "war Democrats," who had no use for anti-slavery
agitation, was the feeling that the Republicans did not want the war to end
until it could be made into an instrument to crush slavery. Among the Republicans
was the conviction that men like McClellan wanted the war to drag out into an
indecisive peace-without-victory which would leave slavery intact. These two
feelings were in the backgrounds of the President and the general who were to
confer with each other.)

McClellan had bluntly accused the
administration of infamous conduct. He had not been rebuked for it. He had had
nothing from Washington since then but kind words. How could he interpret that,
except as clear proof that there
was
infamous
conduct in Washington and that the authors of it—the men who gave him his
orders—felt so guilty that they dared not resent his angry words? He had invited
them to cashier him and they had not done it; instead, Stanton had sent a note
assuring him that "you have never had from me anything but the most
confiding integrity," followed by another asserting: "No man had ever
a truer friend than I have been to you and shall continue to be. You are
seldom absent from my thoughts, and I am ready to make any sacrifice to aid
you."

And Lincoln? Among his trusted cabinet
members was Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, who has been described as
an irascible Santa Claus with his stern face and his bushy white whiskers, and
who was eminently level-headed, taking no part in the frantic factional efforts
to tell Lincoln how to run the war. Welles had visited McClellan on the
peninsula shortly after Yorktown fell and had had a long and oddly revealing
talk with him. McClellan had confided his great desire to capture Charleston,
South Carolina, a city which he would like "to demolish and
annihilate." (The general must have been really worked up that day. It is
impossible to imagine him demolishing and annihilating any city: for better or
for worse, he completely lacked the Sherman touch.) In his diary—that marvelous
depository for acid comments—Welles went on with the tale:

"He detested, he said, both South
Carolina and Massachusetts, and should rejoice to see both states extinguished.
Both were and always had been ultra and mischievous, and he could not tell
which he hated most These were the remarks of the general-in-chief at the head
of our armies then in the field, and when as large a proportion of his troops
were from Massachusetts as from any state in the Union, while as large a
proportion of those who were opposed, who were fighting the Union, were from
South Carolina as from any state. He was leading the men of Massachusetts
against the men of South Carolina, yet he, the general, detests them
alike."
⁸

It is easy enough at this day to see
McClellan's outburst as a variant of "a plague on both your houses,"
directed at the fire-eaters of North and South alike, and it is hard to get
very disturbed about it. But there was a war on then, and a detached attitude
was hard to come by, and, as Welles said, that
was
an odd way for a Northern general to talk. A Northern
newspaper correspondent, summing up the Seven Days' Battles, had written that
"Massachusetts mourns more dead soldiers, comparatively, than any state's
quota in the Army of the Potomac." It is fair to assume that Welles had
told Lincoln about McClellan's words. Would not those words inevitably get in
between the two men as they talked about the future course of the war?

If those words wouldn't, there were others
that would. Phil Kearny had been free in his comments. His insistence that he
could march his own division into Richmond, after Lee struck his first blow
north of the Chickahominy, and his angry denunciation of McClellan for ordering
a retreat were by no means army secrets. Brigadier General Hiram G. Berry, who
commanded one of Kearny's brigades, had been present when Kearny sounded off,
and Berry, who came from Maine, was in steady confidential correspondence with
Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin. Even earlier, Kearny had been writing to a
friend in the North that "McClellan is a dirty, sneaking traitor,"
and was suggesting that back of McClellan's strategy "there is either
positive treason or at least McClellan or the few with him are devising a game
of politics rather than war." At this distance it is fairly easy to
recognize Kearny as a tolerably familiar type in the long history of the American
Army—the ardent, hard-fighting, distinguished soldier who just has to blow off
at the mouth every now and then. But Lincoln was conferring with McClellan in
1862, and all he could be expected to see was that the most slashing fighter in
the army was doubting the loyalty of his commanding general.