Terrible Swift Sword (13 page)

For
a general to argue for higher rank is nothing new, but rarely has anyone
submitted a longer or a more impassioned argument than the one composed now by
General Johnston; nor, in the opinion of Mr. Davis and his Secretary of War,
the astute lawyer Mr. Benjamin, did any sort of argument often rest on a weaker
base. Mr. Davis coldly gave Johnston a two-sentence reply: "I have just
received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say,
unusual; its arguments and its statements utterly one-sided, and its
insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming."
¹¹
With
this, General Johnston had to be content. His rank remained number four.

All of this actually had done no
immediate harm. Davis's and Johnston's angry exchange took place a fortnight
ahead of the Fairfax Courthouse conference, without affecting their ability to
have a reasoned exchange of views. What was significant about both the
Beauregard and Johnston cases was the indication that the Confederate President
was not going to try very hard to accommodate himself to a proud and touchy general;
and Southern characteristics being as they were, he was likely to have to deal
with a large number of proud and touchy generals before the war ended.
Furthermore, even though the Confederate nation was set up under a one-party
regime, there would inevitably develop, sooner or later, some sort of
anti-administration party. Here was clear warning that when that happened, at
least two of the five ranking generals in the Confederate Army might become
allies of such a party.

As
Vice-President, Alec Stephens had no more day-by-day responsibilities than any
other American who occupies that office. Yet he represented something—if
nothing more, that part of the South which had believed most fervently in
states' rights and a simple pastoral society—and he was becoming more and more
the confidant for people who were vigorously in opposition to everything the
administration was doing. Robert Toombs, surly as a bereaved bear, was writing
to him from Camp Pine Creek, near Fairfax Courthouse, complaining that Joe Johnston
was "a poor devil, small, arbitrary and inefficient" and by
implication denouncing Mr. Davis for keeping such a man in power. The trouble,
Toombs believed, was West Point, where both Mr. Davis and General Johnston had
been educated, an institution whose graduates seemed unable to appreciate
military capacity in those who had merely been to the United States Senate.

"The army is dying," wrote
Toombs. "I don't mean the poor fellows who go under the soil on the
roadside, but the army as an army is dying and it will not survive the winter.
Set this down in your book, and set down opposite to it its epitaph,
'died
of West Point.'
We have patched a new
government with old cloth, we have tied the living to the dead
...
we are lying down here rotting."

From
another correspondent in the same army camp, Thomas W. Thomas, Stephens got
even bitterer words. Less than a month before the election in which Davis and
Stephens were running together as a ticket, Thomas was telling Stephens:
"All governments are humbugs and the Confederate government is not an
exception. Its President this day is the prince of humbugs and yet his
nomination for the first permanent presidency meets with universal acceptance,
and yet I do know that he possesses not a single qualification for the place
save integrity. . . . Imbecility, ignorance and awkwardness mark every feature
of his management of this army. He torments us, makes us sick and kills us by
appointing worthless place-hunters to transact business for us on which depends
our health, efficiency and even our lives.
...
He is king, and here where we are fighting to maintain the last vestige of
republicanism on earth we bow down to him with more than eastern
devotion."
¹²

What Thomas Thomas
might think of the administration in the fall of 1861 would not be worth
recording, except for its revelation of the kind of talk which Mr. Davis's
Vice-President and running mate was willing to listen to at the very moment
when the administration was asking election for a six-year term. Mary Boykin
Chesnut, mistress of a great South Carolina estate and wife of one of President
Davis's intimate associates, wrote that "there is a perfect magazine of
discord and discontent in that Cabinet; only wants a hand to apply the torch
and up they go."
¹³
September had hardly begun before Secretary
of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory was noting that "there was an opposition in
Congress to the Administration"; Davis agreed with him, although Benjamin
thought the case was not that bad. Thomas Bragg, the administration's new attorney
general, felt that the governors from the deep South were "giving trouble
about troops and not acting in harmony with the Administration," and he
believed that the situation was going to get worse.
¹⁴

Part of this, to be
sure, represented little more than the growing pains of a new government whose
leaders were unhappily discovering that it was possible to be sorely vexed by
their own friends as well as by Yankees. But more of it came out of a dawning realization
that the first summer of the war, even though it had been marked by glorious
victories, had not in fact been going very well. The blockade was beginning to
hurt, and the ardent recruits who could not be armed were impatient witnesses
to the pain; and the Southern coast lay all but naked to the gathering Federal
fleets. The North was settling down for a long pull, and although it had not
yet mustered its power it had already won the border, from Virginia all the way
to Kansas. The offensives that lay just ahead would be conducted by Federals,
not by Confederates, and the more a man knew about Confederate strength the
less confident he was that these offensives could be beaten back. To the
average Southerner the war had hardly begun, but the leaders could see ominous
signs in the sky. Time was passing, and it was working for the wrong side.

The editor of the
Richmond
Whig
darkly
noted that "our past inaction, whether constrained or voluntary, by
enabling the enemy to organize his whole strength, will render necessary a vast
deal of terrible fighting on our side, to battle his assaults and make good our
independence." The
Daily Examiner
called
attention to the fact that "the peace party of the North, like the Union
party of the South, has entirely disappeared," and predicted that unless
the Southern government could place the army on a completely new footing,
"its chance next year will be bad."
¹⁵
President Davis
closed a gloomy letter to General G. W. Smith with the cry: "Oh, that we
had plenty of arms and a short time to raise the men to use them."
¹⁶

Underlying everything, perhaps, there
was an uneasy feeling that the war was threatening to take the South where the
South did not want to go. The unhappiness of the men who were writing such
angry letters to Alexander Stephens was symptomatic. Secession had been a
valiant attempt to preserve not merely a fragment of the past but a concept of
a society wherein the individual was everything and the government was next to
nothing. This concept had a fatal limitation: it based a noble ideal of freedom
upon a belief in slavery. In a short war, in which hot courage swept everything
before it, this crippling contradiction might be evaded. It would have to be
faced squarely in a long war.

2.
Struggle for Power

When George B.
McClellan reached Washington on the afternoon of July 26 to take command of the
capital and its army, he was the living symbol of the Northern demand for
speedy action. He may not consciously have meant to be anything of the kind,
and in the end the role was a little too heavy for him, but that was how it was
in the beginning. He was the North's first great hero, and for a little while
he made the sky look brighter.

McClellan
was a perfectionist, driven by an authentic vision and also by an ambition that
soared on an updraft of public acclaim. He was a man who had great talents; he
knew that he had them and he proposed to use them to the fullest, and at first
he was in an immense hurry. During the year that lay just ahead he would
finally come to seem the most maddeningly

deliberate of men, but in the beginning
he was impatient—impatient with incompetence, with pomposity and its fumbling
ineptitudes, with the techniques of delay. He knew what was wrong with the
Federal war effort and he knew how to set it right, and neither the President,
the general-in-chief nor anyone else could stand in his way. To the restless
men who wanted the rebellion put down at the earliest possible moment McClellan
briefly appeared to be the very embodiment of the spirit that would win the
war.

It fitted neatly with
his position as national hero. He reached the capital when the military relics
of the Bull Run disaster were still being collected and sorted out, and he
brought with him the record of victory in the western Virginia mountains— the
proof that Northern soldiers could beat Southern soldiers if they were just led
by the right man. He had a cool self-assurance, a winning manner, and a jaunty
readiness to accept unlimited responsibility, and to a capital and a nation
grown disillusioned with militiamen he seemed to be all soldier. His first
steps were to sweep the stragglers off the streets, to police the barrooms, to
get the innumerable stray officers back on duty, and to create an organization
which looked like business. He not only made the capital safe; he made it look
and feel safe, and when he rode about the camps on his business he was greeted
by cheers.

On
July 27 McClellan was formally welcomed by the President and was invited to
come back to the White House in the afternoon and meet the cabinet. This was
somewhat displeasing to General Scott, who felt that this new commander ought
to stay within prescribed channels and approach the Chief Executive only
through the commanding general, but after touring the city, making note of its
defenseless condition and remarking that drunken soldiers and officers made
the downtown section "a perfect pandemonium," McClellan shook hands
with the top brass, and in the evening wrote to his wife to tell her all about
it. Apparently the experience had been somewhat dazzling.

"I find myself in a new and strange
position here: President, cabinet, General Scott and all deferring to me,"
he wrote. "By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the
power of the land. I almost think that was I to win one whole success now I
could become dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that
kind would please me—
therefore
I
won't
be
Dictator. Admirable self denial! I see already the main causes of our recent
failure."
¹

For
a man who had been in town hardly more than twenty-four hours these were strong
words; yet it is easy to see how McClellan came to write them. He
had
become the power of the land, and everybody
was
deferring to him. He had come on the scene at
that magical moment (which, for an ambitious man, may lead either to apotheosis
or to downfall) when people long so desperately for a miracle worker that they
take their appointed hero on faith, so that for a time he can do nothing wrong
and can have, quite literally, anything he wants. All of the deep determination
to wipe out the shame of Bull Run and go on to victory was expressing itself
just now in the feeling toward McClellan. As far as Washington could speak for
the country, the nation was putting itself unreservedly in his hands, and
McClellan could not help knowing it . . . nor could he help being affected by
the knowledge.

On August 2 he wrote to his wife full of
confidence. He had just given the President "a carefully considered plan
for conducting the war on a grand scale," and he went on: "I shall
carry this thing on
en grand
and
crush the Rebels in one campaign. I flatter myself that Beauregard has gained
his last victory. We need success and must have it. I will leave nothing undone
to gain it." But he must have a free hand: "Gen. Scott has been
trying to work a traverse to have Emory made Inspector General of
my
army and of
the
army. I respectfully declined the favor and
perhaps disgusted the old man. . . . He cannot long retain command I think—when
he is retired I am sure to succeed him, unless in the meantime I lose a battle
—which I do not expect to do."
²

He
had been in Washington no more than one week, and not for two more days would
he even be ready to organize the regiments of his army into brigades; yet
already he was fiercely possessive regarding that army, and he was looking
ahead to the day when Scott would be removed from his path and he himself would
be general-in-chief. If this was largely due to the simple fact that he had a
good professional's pride in his job and resented anything that might delay him
in its performance, it might have been heightened just a little by the kind of
talk that was being poured into his ears. The attention he was getting was
enough to test any man's poise.

On the night of August 4 there was a state
dinner at the White House, given in honor of Prince Napoleon of France, who had
come over to have a look at America and at the war. McClellan and Scott entered
together, Scott leaning on McClellan's arm—swollen, gouty age stumping along
with vigorous, handsome young manhood—and McClellan felt correctly that
"many marked the contrast." At the dinner table a lieutenant colonel
on Prince Napoleon's staff, Camille Ferri Pisani, found himself seated between
McClellan and the British minister, Lord Lyons. The officer talked with
McClellan at some length; then, during a lull in the conversation, Lord Lyons asked
him: "You are aware that you are talking with the next President of the
United States?" Ferri Pisani repeated the remark to McClellan, who
"answered with a fine, modest and pleasant smile."
³

When a newcomer in Washington finds,
after no more than ten days on the job, that he is being spoken of casually as
the next President, his self-esteem is apt to grow beyond manageable
proportions. Yet it seems clear that at this time what was driving McClellan
was chiefly an intense desire to get on with the job. In his memorandum to the
President, written on the day of that White House dinner, McClellan had
recognized that this war was not going to be like other wars, in which the
object usually was "to conquer a peace and make a treaty on advantageous terms."
There could be no treaty here: what was necessary was not merely to beat the
enemy in the field but "to display such an overwhelming strength as will
convince all our antagonists, especially those of the governing aristocratic
classes, of the utter impossibility of resistance." The contest
"began with a class; now it is with a people," and only decisive
military success could settle things. McClellan urged a comprehensive war
plan: tighten the blockade, open the Mississippi, invade eastern Tennessee,
establish a force of 38,000 men to protect the upper Potomac, the line of the
Baltimore & Ohio and the capital itself, and then form a field army of
225,000 men to smash Confederate strength in Virginia and roll on "into
the heart of the enemy's country, and crush out the rebellion at its very
heart." Possibly a smaller force could do the job, but speed was
essential: "the question to be decided is simply this: shall we crush the
rebellion at one blow, terminate the war in one campaign, or shall we leave it
for a legacy to our descendants?"
⁴

In a Washington which had come increasingly
to feel that

General Scott's famous Anaconda Plan
represented an inert defensive policy and foreshadowed an unendurably long war
fought at a leisurely pace, this sort of talk was like a breath of fresh air.
Crusty Gideon Welles summed up Scott's policy by saying that the old lieutenant
general wanted only to enforce "non-intercourse with the insurgents, shut
them out from the world by blockade and military frontier lines, but not to invade
their territory," and he felt that this was unwise for the country.
⁵
He noticed, as did others, that Secretary Seward, still active as a
policy-maker, quickly transferred his support from Scott to McClellan. The two
men conferred almost daily, and it presently developed that Seward knew more
about McClellan's plans and his disposition of troops than Scott himself knew.
If, in his memorandum to Lincoln, McClellan had stepped far out of his sphere
as army commander to outline grand strategy for the entire nation, he was
unquestionably getting Seward's energetic support.

On August 8, McClellan wrote a letter to
his wife that showed how things were going: "Rose early today (having
retired at three a.m.) and was pestered to death with senators, etc, and a row
with General Scott until about four o'clock; then crossed the river and rode
beyond and along the line of pickets for some distance. Came back and had a
long interview with Seward about my 'pronunciamento' against General Scott's
policy. . . . How does he (Seward) think that I can save this country when
stopped by General Scott—I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor! He
cannot or will not comprehend the condition in which we are placed and is unequal
to the emergency. If he
cannot
be
taken out of my path I
will
not
retain my position but will resign and let the admin, take care of
itself."
⁶

The
row with Scott grew out of a letter which McClellan had that same day sent to
the general-in-chief, saying that military intelligence indicated a threatened
offensive by Beauregard, that Washington was woefully insecure, and that it was
necessary to reinforce Washington at once to a strength of at least 100,000
men "before attending to any other point." Scott became indignant,
telling Secretary of War Cameron that he had been unable to get McClellan to
discuss the matter in person, that he himself did not think Washington was in
any danger at all, and that he was tired of being bypassed and overridden by
his junior—as a result of which, Scott urged that the President "allow me
to be placed on the officers' retired list, and then quietly to lay myself
up—probably forever—somewhere in or about New York."
⁷
President
Lincoln intervened, and at his request McClellan withdrew the letter,
"with the most profound assurance for General Scott and yourself,"
but the old general was not appeased. He refused to withdraw his own letter,
asserting that McClellan persisted in discussing with various members of the
cabinet matters that he should properly be discussing with the
general-in-chief, and adding: "With such supports on his part, it would be
as idle for me as it would be against the dignity of my years, to be filing
daily complaints against an ambitious junior who, independent of the extrinsic
advantages alluded to, has unquestionably very high qualifications for military
command."
⁸

The
pace was getting faster. On the same day that he withdrew the offending
letter, McClellan wrote to his wife: "Gen. Scott is the great obstacle. He
will not comprehend the danger. I have to fight my way against him. Tomorrow
the question will probably be decided by giving me absolute control independently
of him. I suppose it will result in enmity on his part against me; but I have
no choice. The people call upon me to save the country. I must save it, and
cannot respect anything that is in the way. I receive letter after letter, have
conversation after conversation, calling on me to save the nation, alluding
to the presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be united with you
forever in heaven, I have no such aspiration. I would cheerfully take the
dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved. I am not
spoiled by my unexpected new position. I feel sure that God will give me the
strength and wisdom to preserve this great nation; but I tell you, who share
all my thoughts, that I have no selfish feeling in this matter. I feel that God
has placed a great work in my hands. I have not sought it. I know how weak I
am, but I know that I mean to do right, and I believe that God will help me and
give me the wisdom I do not possess. Pray for me, that I may be able to
accomplish my task, the greatest, perhaps, that any poor, weak mortal ever had
to do."
⁸

Three days after this letter, McClellan
wrote that "Gen. Scott is the most dangerous antagonist I have,"
adding that "our ideas are so widely different that it is impossible for
us to work together much longer," and on August 16 he summed it up:
"I am here in a terrible place—the enemy have from 3 to

4 times my force—the Presid't is an
idiot, the old General is in his dotage—they cannot or will not see the true
state of affairs." He enlarged on this slightly: "I have no ambition
in the present affairs; only wish to save my country, and find the incapables
around me will not permit it. They sit on the verge of the precipice and cannot
realize what they see. Their reply to everything is, 'Impossible! Impossible!'
They think nothing possible which is against their wishes."
¹⁰

Three weeks in Washington: the
general-in-chief was either a dotard or a traitor and in any case was the
"most dangerous antagonist," and the President was an idiot; and talk
about the presidency and a dictatorship was fluttering through the heated air.
Yet the real problem was not so much General McClellan's troubles with his
superiors and with himself as it was the fact that the Washington atmosphere
was clouding his vision.