Mr Lincoln's Army (59 page)

Specific references are:

1.
 
The Bivouac and the Battlefield.

2.
 
Under the Old Flag,
by Major General James Harrison Wilson.

3.
 
A good study of that extremely fascinating character,
Kearny, is contained in
General
Philip Kearny: Battle Soldier of Five Wars,
by Thomas Kearny, from which the quotations in this
paragraph are taken.

4.
 
Four Years Campaigning in the Army of the Potomac,
by Daniel G. Crotty.

5.
 
Service with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteers.

6.
 
Ibid.

7.
 
A Duryee Zouave,
by
Thomas P. Southwick.

8.
History
of the 12th Massachusetts Volunteers,
by
Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin F. Cook.

9.
Personal Recollections of the Civil War,
by General Gibbon.

10.
General
Philip Kearny.

4. Man on a Black Horse

There are innumerable
accounts of the disorder and despair attending the retreat from the field of
Second Bull Run. One of the most detailed is in General Regis de Trobriand's
fascinating
Four Years with the
Army of the Potomac.
See
also Charles A. Page's
Letters
of a War Correspondent,
General
Oliver Otis Howard's autobiography, the second volume of
Battles and Leaders,
and
any number of regimental histories. The soldiers' odd distrust of General
McDowell also crops out in many of the regimental histories.

Specific references are:

1.
"Personal Experience under Gen. McClellan," by
Brigadier General Henry Seymour Hall, from
Papers of the Kansas Commandery, Military Order of the
Loyal Legion of the United States.

2.
For the preceding quotations, see
Three Years in the Army of the Potomac,
by Henry N. Blake;
History
of the 3rd Regiment of Wisconsin Veteran Volunteer Infantry,
by Edwin E. Bryant;
History
of the 12th Massachusetts Volunteers,
and
Service with the 6th Wisconsin
Volunteers.
There is a good
discussion of the soldiers' antagonism toward McDowell and Pope in General
Cox's
Military Reminiscences.

3.
This quotation, and the ones in the immediately preceding
paragraphs, are from General de Trobriand's book mentioned above.

4.
Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard.

5.
Military Reminiscences
of General Cox.

6.
Personal Recollections
of General Gibbon.

7.
Articles
by Captain William H. Powell and George Kimball in
Battles and
Leaders,
Vol. H, Part 2.

8.
        
Following the Greek Cross.

CHAPTER TWO
1.
A Great Work in My Hands

No bit of Civil War literature is much more interesting
than
McClellan's Own Story—
that oddly organized autobiography which tells so much more
about its author than the author can possibly have dreamed. The quotations from
McClellan in this chapter are taken from that work, and it has hardly seemed
necessary to clutter up the text with footnotes identifying each quotation.

Specific references are:

1.
For
a good account of McClellan's Ohio experience, see General Cox in
Vol. I, Part 1, of
Battles
and Leaders.

2.
Ibid.

3.
Under the Old Flag.

4.
     
Selections
from the Letters and Diaries of Brevet Brigadier General Willoughby Babcock.

5.
Three Years in the Army of the Potomac.

6.
     
Reminiscences
of the 19th Massachusetts Regiment,
by
Captain John G. B.
Adams.

7.
Military Reminiscences
of General Cox.
2. Aye, Deem Us Proud

Since it was an unimportant engagement in a military sense,
Ball's Bluff gets little space in most histories of the war. There is a good
account in Volume II,

Part 2, of
Battles
and Leaders,
and the histories of
the 15th and 20th Massachusetts regiments give interesting details. Colonel
Baker is described in Volume I of Carl Sandburg's
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Specific references are:

1.
 
The Story of the 15th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer
Infantry in the
Civil War,
by Andrew E. Ford.

2.
Personal Recollections of the Civil War,
by James Madison Stone.

3.
Four Years with the Army of the Potomac.

4.
History of the First Regiment Minnesota Volunteer Infantry,
by R. I. Holcombe.

5.
The 20th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,
by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Bruce.

6.
        
The Story of the 15th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer
Infantry.

7.
For a summary of this strange case, see "Ball's Bluff
and the Arrest of
General Stone," by Richard B. Irwin, in
Battles and Leaders,
Volume
II, Part 1.

3.
I Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed

It is one of the oddities
of Civil War history that General McClellan's handling of his purely military
problems cannot be understood unless the purely political problems of
President, Cabinet, and Congress are understood also. Along with the military
histories, it is necessary to consult such books as Sandburg's
Abraham Lincoln,
whose
rambling, discursive, all-inclusive account of the currents that swirled about
Lincoln makes clear so much that McClellan never understood at all.
Lincoln's War Cabinet,
by Burton J. Hendrick, sheds a good oblique light on the
situation, while books by such contemporaries as Gideon Welles and Alexander K.
McClure are invaluable. Again, the McClellan quotations in this chapter are
from
McClellan's Own Story.

Specific references are:

1.
 
The Diary of a Public Man,
with Prefatory Notes by F. Lauriston Bullard.

2.
 
Scott's letters are found in
Battles and Leaders,
Volume
II, Part 1.

3.
 
See Volume II of
A
History of the United States Navy,
by
Edgar Stanton Maclay, and
The
Second Admiral: A Life of David Dixon Porter,
by Richard S. West.

4.
 
Nothing in Douglas Southall Freeman's monumental biography
of Lee is much more significant than its picture of Lee's great tact and depth
of understanding in his handling of a political problem which was,
potentially, quite as explosive as the one which confronted McClellan. It was a
problem which was altogether too much for as able a soldier as General Joseph
E. Johnston.

5.
Following the Creek Cross.

CHAPTER THREE

1.
But You Must Act

The argument over the rights and wrongs of the
administration's interference with McClellan's peninsular campaign will not
end, probably, until the Civil War itself drops out of discussion. Where
certainty is impossible, about the most that can be done is to try to see
why
the
administration did the things McClellan complained of so bitterly. A very good
detailed analysis of the way in which McClellan laid himself open to the charge
of failing to protect Washington adequately is found in
Campaigns in Virginia,
Volume I,
Papers
of the

Military Historical Society of Massachusetts.
The growth of the misunderstanding is traced in two nearly
contemporaneous works—William Swinton's
Campaigns
of the Army of the Potomac,
and
Benton J. Lossing's
Pictorial
History of the Civil War.
See
also
The Peninsula: McClellan's
Campaigns of 1862,
by
Major General Alexander S. Webb. Specific references are:

1.
The Rebellion Record,
edited by Frank Moore.

2.
For an interesting examination of this point, see Alexander
K. McClure,
Abraham Lincoln and
Men of War Times,
pp. 221-22.

3.
Two good discussions of this savage little fight and its
far-reaching effects are in Freeman's
Lee's
Lieutenants,
Vol. I, and
Henderson's
Stonewall Jackson.

4.
        
Following the Greek Cross.

2.
The Voice of Caution

The reader who cares to see a complete account of
McClellan's espionage and intelligence system in operation can do no better
than read
The Spy of the Rebellion:
Being a True History of the Spy System of the United States Army during the
Late Rebellion,
by Allan Pinkerton. A
good analysis of the troubles his faulty reports got McClellan into is to be
found in General Cox's
Military
Reminiscences.
Pinkerton's reports
appear in the
Official Records,
Series I, Vol. XI, Part 1, pp. 268-70.

Specific references are:

1.
 
General Philip Kearny.

2.
 
A Duryie Zouave.

3.
 
History of the First Brigade New Jersey Volunteers,
by Camille Baquet.

4.
 
Following the Greek Cross.

5.
 
The Diary of a Young Officer.

6.
 
Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard.