Mr Lincoln's Army (56 page)

For a time the wheel remained at dead center,
and if Lincoln came to any final conclusion during his visit he kept it to
himself. He went back to Washington, and McClellan busied himself with the job
of reorganization. He needed much new equipment and he was not getting it fast
enough; he argued endlessly with Halleck and the supply people in Washington,
refusing to move until he felt the army was fully ready, insisting again that
he must be heavily reinforced because Lee still outnumbered him. Lincoln
prodded him ineffectually to get him to advance; lost his patience once, and
when McClellan reported his cavalry horses worn out asked sarcastically just
what his cavalry had been doing lately that would tire anybody's horses. Once
Halleck sent peremptory orders, in Lincoln's name, to cross the river. McClellan
ignored them; and while he was continuing to re-equip and reorganize, Jeb
Stuart got north of the river with his cavalry and rode gaily clear around the
army, getting back unhurt, while Federal detachments ran all over western
Maryland looking for him. The bickering became sharper, much of it due to the
old two-way misunderstanding—Washington's inability to see the need for proper
organization and supply, and McClellan's own inability to realize that the
enemy was in worse shape than himself and needed to be crowded a bit. But at
last, seven weeks after the battle, the great army slipped down the river,
crossed to the Virginia side, and started south.

McClellan seems to have planned this
campaign intelligently. He took his army down the eastern side of the Blue
Ridge, evidently aiming to box Lee up in such a way that Lee would have to come
out and fight at a disadvantage, and there is some reason to believe that he
might have had the Rebel army in a bad spot had he been allowed to continue.
But his number was up. It was a different war now, and he was due to go out of
it, and it was really only a question of time. Lincoln appears to have made up
his mind that he would remove him if he let Lee get east of the Blue Ridge and
stand in his path to Richmond; and when Lee got his army—or part of it, at any
rate—to Culpeper Courthouse ahead of McClellan, that pulled the trigger. But
that was only the immediate excuse. If it had not been that it would have been
something else. Whenever the actual decision was made, it had been in the cards
for weeks. So . . .

November 7, near midnight; a snowy night,
with a cold wind out of the mountains, and everybody huddled under shelter;
McClellan in his headquarters tent, writing a letter to his wife. A special
train had come down from Washington that afternoon, and a War Department
functionary had left it and had ridden several miles in a snowstorm, not to see
the commanding general, but to call on General Burnside. This much McClellan
knew, and he had a fair idea what it meant, but he said nothing and stayed in
his tent, his staff all asleep. Finally there came a knock on his tent pole, and
on his invitation two men came in—Burnside, looking very troubled and
embarrassed, and the War Department's General Buckingham, powdered snow lying
in the folds of his neat, unweathered uniform. McClellan was cordial and
seemed unworried; sat them down and chatted pleasantly about this and that,
quite as if a midnight call like this were an everyday occurrence. Buckingham
at last remarked that maybe the general had better know what they were there
for, and handed over the papers. Letter to McClellan from Halleck—"you
will immediately turn over your command to Maj.-Gen. Burnside and repair to
Trenton, NJ. [McClellan's home], for further orders"; and an order from
the adjutant general setting forth that "by direction of the President of
the United States" the command of the army was passing from McClellan to
Burnside.

McClellan read them, seeming quite
unruffled—apparently the man could take it when he had to—and looked up at
Burnside with a little smile. "Well, Burnside, I turn the command over to
you." Almost tearfully, painfully conscious that he was not qualified to
command the army, Burnside begged him to delay the transfer for at least a day
or two so that Burnside might be brought up to date on troop movements,
intelligence reports, campaign plans, and the like. McClellan agreed and the
visitors left, and McClellan went back to the letter he was writing. He gave
his wife the news and added: "Alas for my poor country! I know in my
inmost heart she never had a truer servant."

True
servant or false, it was all one now, and his part was finished. There were a
couple of days of earnest activity at headquarters while Burnside was fitting
his own staff into place—something of a scramble for assignments going on,
with many jobs open for new men and with the men who were being displaced
trying to find suitable billets, every officer who had a wire to pull yanking
on it for all he was worth. Burnside conscientiously went to work to study the
intricate web of facts, pending orders, and strategic plans which he was inheriting.
Evidently they were just too much for him; he hesitated for a time, and all
army movements were halted, while off to the south Lee's officers wondered
briefly why the Yankees had stopped moving just when they seemed to be
maneuvering effectively. Then Burnside canceled everything and decreed that the
army should move east. It is hard to tell just what he had in mind, the sure
professional touch at GHQ having departed with his arrival, but he seems to
have had some notion of slipping unobserved around the Confederates' right
flank—the one maneuver which no Federal general ever succeeded in accomplishing
against Robert E. Lee. So the army pulled itself together and made ready to
move.

Meanwhile, one little ceremony remained: to
say good-by to General McClellan. On November 10, the order of removal having
been published, McClellan rode through the camps around Warrenton, and for the
last time the fighting men raised their shouts to the wintry sky as the jaunty
little man on the great black horse came riding down the lines.

There
they were, brigade after brigade, desperately yelling their farewell: the men
who had been a loose militia muster until he made them an army, the men who had
found pride and strength in being soldiers because it was he who taught them
soldiering, the men who, for all their hard knowledge of battle, could still
see a shine and a color in war as long as he led them. They had struggled in
the Chickahominy swamps and sweltered in the noisome camp at Harrison's
Landing, they had gone laughing under the flags at Frederick and had stormed
through the smoke to the Dunker church, and he was part of it all; he had lived
through those things with them and somehow had given them meaning, so that
endurance and hope had been easier because of him. And now he was going away
and they would never see him again, and if they were to have endurance and hope
they would have to find them for themselves because no one at the top was going
to provide them any more.

McClellan passed by the long ranks, and the
cheers went up as long as his figure was in sight; and in his wake there rang
out yells of "Send him back! Send him back!" Here and there a
regiment threw down its arms, swearing angrily, saying it would fight no more.
One general was heard (or was reported to have been heard) to call out:
"Lead us to Washington, General—we'll follow you!" He came down the
Centreville pike at last—that already historic road of battle, the road that
had led Pope and McDowell to Bull Run, the road along which the Iron Brigade
had found its first experience of combat— and Sumner's corps was lined up on
one side of the road, Porter's corps on the other. (Porter himself was doomed
now, a sure sacrifice to the vindictive charges filed by Pope; only with
McClellan in command could he be protected, and the same officer who brought
down the orders relieving McClellan had brought other orders relieving Porter.
He was to be court-martialed and cashiered before the winter ended.) These two
corps, where affection for McClellan ran higher than anywhere else in the army,
stood in long ranks facing the roadway, batteries of field artillery drawn up
here and there in the intervals between brigades. They snapped to present arms
as the general came up, and then the rigid rows of muskets jerked all askew as
the men began to yell, and there was a great cry all along the road.

He
passed by and went out of sight, and came finally to the railroad station,
where a guard of two thousand men had been drawn up for a final salute.
McClellan got on the special train, the guns boomed out—and then the men broke
ranks, swarmed about the car, uncoupled it, swore that he should not leave
them. McClellan came out on the rear platform and raised his hand, and they all
fell silent.

"Stand
by General Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well" he
said. The demonstration stopped. Silently the men re-coupled the car, the
conductor waved a signal to the engineer, and the train clanked out of the
station. A veteran recorded: "When the chief passed out of sight, the
romance of war was over for the Army of the Potomac."
⁷

Washington
seems to have breathed a collective sigh of relief when he went. There had been
fears that the army would mutiny—fears that seemed well grounded, if the loose
talk that had been flying around army headquarters was listened to. Young
Lieutenant Wilson noted that staff officers had been drinking heavily and had
been "talking both loudly and disloyally," and there was a good deal
of campfire chatter to the effect that the army ought to "change front on
Washington," oust the government, and put McClellan in control of civil
and military affairs alike. But this was just staff talk, after all, and it
reflected the hysteria of individuals rather than the temper of the soldiers.
The men who yelled and wept and threw down muskets were expressing grief and
anger, but it does not appear to have entered their heads that the order from
Washington might actually be disobeyed by one hundred thousand trained men who
had weapons in their hands. Washington need not have worried; they just were
not that kind of army.

Indeed, there were mixed feelings among the men
here and there. In Burnside's IX Corps the change was actually welcomed; those
men had not served under McClellan very long, they did not yet realize how
Burnside had misused and wasted them on the hills southeast of Sharpsburg, and
they felt that their likable corps commander should do very well indeed at the
head of the army. In the New England regiments, where abolitionists were
numerous, there was very little grumbling. Some soldiers comforted themselves
with a tale that McClellan was really being called back to Washington to
replace Halleck. And there were a few men who had seen enough of the final
thinness of the Rebel lines at the Antietam to feel that McClellan had failed
them there: men who recorded that after that battle the army's cheers for the
general had not quite had the warmth they had had before.
⁸

It was left for a campfire group in the 17th
Michigan to provide the characteristic soldier's comment. These men discussed
pros and cons that evening. They were profoundly depressed—the regiment had
fewer than three hundred men now, and it had left Detroit in August a thousand
strong; the boys had learned a lot these last three months. They suspected that
the worst would come of this change in generals, and now that they thought
about it they concluded that none of their generals really amounted to very
much. So, said their historian, they finally agreed that Lincoln ought to
retire all of the generals "and select men from the ranks who will serve
without pay, lead the army against Lee, strike him hard, and follow him until
he fails to come to time." Having expressed this crude front-line wisdom,
they grinned ruefully, wagged their heads, and went off through the sleety rain
to their pup tents.
⁹

And presently the army began to move again;
not down the line of the railroad, where McClellan's plan would have taken it,
but southeast along the Rappahannock toward Fredericksburg, where Burnside
wanted to go. The bugle calls spattered through the camps, wagons were loaded,
and regiment after regiment swung into column and marched out into the muddy
road. The veteran who put it down on paper was right: the romance was gone from
the war now. They had left it behind them, with the lemonade and fried chicken
of the ladies' committees at the railway stations, with the brightness of the
uniforms that had never known mud or smoke, with the lighthearted inconsequence
of those early days when it seemed as if the war might be more than half a
lark, when the sky was bright with wonder and the chance of death was only a
challenge to set vibrant nerves tingling.

The romance had gone—inevitably, because the
war itself was not romantic. The young soldiers were veterans at last. They
were not McClellan's army any longer, and they never could be again; they were
Lincoln's army now, or the country's, or the army of some inscrutable tide that
was flowing down the century to change everything they were used to and break
the way for something unimaginable. They had been that army all along, as a
matter of fact, and now the war was something that could not be fought on tag
ends of youthful hero worship. Now it was going to be ugliness and dirt and
pain and death, with the good men getting all the worst of it while the
shirkers went straggling off to safety; and the men knew it, and put their feet
on the Virginia road to go where it might lead them.

The road ahead was long, and it was to lead
them to worse than they had had: to Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, to
Gettysburg and the Wilderness, to the sickening meadows at Cold Harbor and the
squalid trenches around Petersburg; to the ultimate misery and bleak wisdom
that lie at the end of all the roads of war. They were on their own now,
fighting for something they had not been asked about; they had made the victory
through which the war had been given its lasting meaning, and now they would
have to go on to the end of it, marching doggedly to the dark fields where they
would be called on to give the last full measure of a devotion which they
themselves could never understand or define.