Terrible Swift Sword (20 page)

"I insisted," wrote Mr. Bates,
"that being 'Commander in Chief by law, he
must
command—especially in such a war as this.
...
If I were President, I
would
command
in
chief—
not in detail, certainly—and I would
know what army I had, and what the high generals (my Lieutenants) were doing
with that army."

At about the same time Judge David Davis, out
in Illinois,

got a letter from a friend in Washington
who had been digesting the President's message and who felt that it was not
nearly belligerent enough. Things around the capital, said this man, looked and
felt much as they had just before Bull Run, with the same desperate eagerness
for action raising war's demands to an unendurable pitch: "There is springing
up again both in Congress & the country a good deal of restlessness &
impatience, at the apparent inactivity of the immense army we have in the
field. And you need not be at all surprised if there should be in a very short
time another tremendous 'On to Richmond' cry."
¹¹

Always
there was the Army, growing larger, covering the fields and roads all about
Washington, moving toward no one knew quite what, looking for a definition of
what it would soon be doing. People who saw its moving columns on the march
were stirred by feelings that clamored to be put into words, and a woman who
had seen these parading battalions sat by her hotel window early one morning
and got some of the words down on paper. She wrote about a fiery gospel writ in
burnished rows of steel, of the trampling out of the winepress of the Almighty,
of the terrible swift sword which was flashing a fateful lightning, and it
seemed to her that God was on the march . . . marching on through the cloud
that hung over Presidents, soldiers, and all the people everywhere.

6The
Want of Success

As the old year ended
Mr. Greeley's
Tribune
remarked
that Washington was dirty, sickly, and possibly done for. Streets and alleys
were "reeking," deep with mud and other matters. The army was very
slow about removing the dead horses and mules which littered the encircling
camps, typhoid fever was common not merely with the military but in the homes
of the wealthy—even General McClellan had come down with the disease, bringing
strategy to a standstill—and it struck the editor that if Congress did not
quickly get things cleaned up "then typhus, and not Beauregard, will ere
long force the Government and the inhabitants generally to abandon the doomed
city."
¹

Mr. Greeley, to be sure, was the most
mercurial editor in the history of American journalism, alternating between
soaring enthusiasm and the most abysmal panic, and the year seemed to be
opening brightly enough. New Year's Day, in 1862 as always, saw a big reception
at the White House. Cabinet members and Justices of the Supreme Court attended,
and Secretary Seward's daughter Fanny saw Mrs. Lincoln as "a compact
little woman with a full round face," noted that she wore "a black
silk, or brocade, with purple clusters on it," and discovered happily that
the first lady was most cordial. The foreign diplomats were present, all
a-glitter in bright uniforms, and they were followed by a great many Army and
Navy officers, also in full regalia. When these eminent folk left the police
opened the gates to the general public and an immense throng came in. Senator
Orville Browning discovered when the crush subsided that his pocket had been
picked and that he was out between $50 and $100 in gold, and Attorney General
Bates wrote that the people were "overwhelming the poor fatigued
President."
²

The attorney general was not alone in
feeling that Mr. Lincoln was carrying a heavy load. Some weeks earlier Mr.
Russell of the London
Times
had
gained the same impression. Mr. Russell went around one evening to see General
McClellan and was told that the general, being tired, had gone to bed and
would see no one; he learned that a night or two before this the same message
had been given to the President, who had dropped in to discuss the war with his
general-in-chief, and when he reflected on the load the President was carrying
the newspaperman saw something both ludicrous and pathetic in the man's plight.
"This poor President!" he mused. "He is to be pitied; surrounded
by such scenes, and trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval
warfare, big guns, the movements of troops, military maps, reconnaissances,
occupations, interior and exterior lines, and, all the technical details of the
art of slaying." Mr. Lincoln, he reflected, was compelled to run
"from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports,
recommendations, sometimes good-humored, never angry, occasionally dejected,
and always a little fussy." It involved a great deal of lost motion and
at times the President seemed a figure of fun, but it occurred to Mr. Russell
that there had been Presidents who looked more dignified but somehow accomplished
a good deal less.
³

The war was moving, and Mr. Lincoln felt
that the men whom he had appointed to direct it ought to be moving with it.
This they were not doing. General McClellan could hardly be blamed for
contracting typhoid fever, but the fact remained that he had been
general-in-chief for two months and the Federal war effort was still going by
piecemeal. In Missouri, General Halleck was methodically restoring order to
the administrative chaos left by General Fremont, but if he had any plans for waging
vigorous war no one knew what they were, least of all General Buell, who
commanded in Kentucky and who would inevitably be concerned in any offensive
General Halleck might undertake. General Buell, in his turn, was as busy as a
man could be making preparations, but he did not seem ready to do anything and
neither Mr. Lincoln nor McClellan himself had been able to persuade him that
there was any merit in the plan to invade eastern Tennessee. Almost
desperately, Mr. Lincoln had written to Halleck and Buell, asking them if they
were "in concert"; each man had replied, in effect, that he had no
idea what the other man was doing. General Buell added that he supposed General
McClellan would look after all of this, and General Halleck warned the President
that "too much haste will ruin everything"; and Mr. Lincoln found as
the New Year began that he was running three separate wars—in Missouri, in Kentucky,
and in Virginia—and that there was no apparent connection between any two of
the three.*

Missouri and Kentucky were a long way
off, to be sure, but Virginia was right under the President's eyes. It was the
showcase, watched by Congress and the press and the country, and although the
Army of the Potomac had grown large and had begun to look and feel like a real
army, displaying excellent drill and high morale in an endless series of
colorful reviews, the fact remained that it was not actually doing anything.
The worst part of this was that although the army was inactive a good charter
for action seemed to exist, and action by this charter had been promised. The
promise, unhappily, had never been fulfilled.

Early
in November, General McClellan had assured Secretary Chase that he planned a
bold swift movement. He would (he said) move 50,000 men to Urbanna, a little
town near the mouth of the Rappahannock River some fifty miles east of
Richmond. Once this advance was made, the general went on, he would send 50,000
more men to the same place, and with the two forces combined he would march
west and capture Richmond before the Confederate Army around Manassas could get
back to defend the place. Inasmuch as Mr. Chase was Secretary of the Treasury
and the financial problem was massive, General McClellan asked how soon this
advance ought to be made. Chase told him that "I could get along under
existing arrangements until about the middle of February," and McClellan
assured him that there was no problem; the whole thing would be done by
February 1.

This was not just a scheme airily
expounded to soothe a cabinet minister. Early in December, McClellan discussed
the project soberly with Brigadier General J. G. Barnard, chief of engineers,
and Barnard offered a couple of ideas for his consideration. It would take a
good deal of time, said Barnard, to move the big army down the Chesapeake Bay
by water, and Joe Johnston might very well slip in and capture Washington
while the move was being made. Since Washington must be protected no matter
what happened, it would thus be necessary to leave at least 100,000 men in the
lines around the capital. Furthermore, this water-borne campaign against Richmond
necessarily involved as a first step the capture of Norfolk. If McClellan was
going to move via Urbanna the operation against Norfolk should be begun at
once.

. . . thus General Barnard. The whole
business was most interesting, but the fact remained that nothing whatever had
come of any of it. What McClellan had said would be done by February 1 was not
being done and nobody was preparing to do it, and it was beginning to be clear
that it was not just the attack of typhoid fever—which, fortunately, was rather
a mild case—that was causing the delay.
⁵

There were men in
Congress who were starting to complain bitterly, and they were men to whom a
Republican President was obliged to listen. The Army was immobilized, these
men were saying, because the men who could order it to move did not have their
hearts in their work. The professional leadership of the Army must be at fault.
In the Senate, Lyman Trumbull opposed a bill to increase the number of cadets
at West Point, asserting bluntly: "I believe that it is owing to the West
Point Academy that this war has languished as it has," and in the House,
Owen Lovejoy cried that "we are afraid that we shall hurt somebody if we
fight; that we shall get these rebels and traitors so exasperated that they
will not return to their loyalty."
⁶
It was of course true that
Mr. Lovejoy was a whole-souled abolitionist, and hence in a minority, but it
was also true that more and more men were beginning to value zeal for the cause
above professional competence. (The Senate by a vote of 25 to 12 killed the
bill to enlarge the cadet corps.) Furthermore, the demand for hard blows struck
quickly and vigorously was increasingly being coupled with a demand that the
war be directed against slavery as well as against disunion. Grim Thaddeus
Stevens, Republican leader in the House, called on the administration to recognize
the magnitude of the crisis and to realize that "this is an internecine
war in which one party or the other must be reduced to hopeless
feebleness." The Federal power could never win such a war, he declared,
until it got a revolutionary determination inspired by "the grand idea of
liberty, equality and the rights of man." As things stood, "we feel
that while we are fighting for a compact we are fighting to rivet still
stronger the chains of slavery." Give to each general, he urged, a sword
for one hand and "the book of freedom" for the other, and the army
would soon "sweep despotism and rebellion from every corner of this
continent."
⁷

The
President still saw the war as a fight to restore the Union, and he wanted to
keep it that way. The most important fact about such a war, however, was that
it had to be won, and the President was being forced to see that it had better
be won quickly. If the professionals could do this for him, well and good. If
they could not, men like Stevens were giving clear warning that the remorseless
revolutionary struggle (against which Lincoln had warned, in his message to Congress)
would soon become a reality. The professional might indeed find the book of
freedom a troublesome bit of baggage, but it would be thrust into his hand if
he did not win without it. Abraham Lincoln knew no more of military matters
than any other small-town lawyer, and his efforts to educate himself were (as
Mr. Russell had observed) both frantic and ungainly; but he could see that he
would win no war unless the massive power of the Federal government could be
brought to the points of contact and unflinchingly applied, and early in
January he tried to get some action.

McClellan was sick and could not be
consulted. The President had written to Halleck and Buell, urging that they
join hands and break Sidney Johnston's line, getting in return from each man
the bland confession that there were not even the haziest of plans for
co-operation. Halleck went so far as to read the President a little lecture on
the military art, pointing out that if he and Buell tried to mount
simultaneous offensives they would simply be operating on exterior lines
against a centrally placed enemy, a thing which "is condemned by every
military authority I have ever read." On this letter the President wrote:
"It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be
done."
⁸

What
followed was both pointless and odd, testifying to nothing except the
President's desperation.

On the night of January 10, Mr. Lincoln held
a White House meeting, talking to General Irvin McDowell, who in a way was
McClellan's second-in-command in the Army of the Potomac, and to General
William B. Franklin, a sober regular who commanded one of the divisions in that
army; inviting also Secretary Seward, Secretary Chase, and the Assistant
Secretary of War, Mr. Thomas Scott. Mr. Lincoln bluntly admitted that he had to
do something—he at least had to talk to somebody—and he remarked quaintly that
if General McClellan, sick or well, did not plan to use the army right away he
would like to borrow it, provided he could find out what ought to be done with
it. The two generals, subordinates of the absent McClellan but answerable also
to the President, seem to have been more or less embarrassed: understandably
enough, since in the history of the Republic no White House conference quite
like this one was ever held, before or since.