Terrible Swift Sword (51 page)

There
were occasional alarms. On July
6,
McClellan told his
wife that the enemy was massed in his front and that he was about to give
battle. It was a solemn occasion, and he wrote: "I go into this battle
with the full conviction that our losses make it necessary for me to chance the
fate of my army. My men are confident & I have no doubt as to our success
unless the Creator orders otherwise. I believe we will give them a tremendous
thrashing. . . . Tomorrow will probably determine the fate of the
country." Tomorrow, as it happened, brought no battle at all. Lee was not
massing troops anywhere: he had just notified Mr. Davis that the Yankee gunboats
made it impossible for him to attack the Union position with any hope of
success, and that he would therefore leave a small force of infantry and cavalry
to keep an eye on things, and take the rest of the army back to Richmond and
let it get some rest.
¹¹
Not being obliged to fight, McClellan spent
at least part of July 7 composing a document which he gave to Mr. Lincoln
shortly after the President reached camp.

Some time earlier the general had asked
leave to submit a paper on the general state of military affairs, but this document—if
indeed it had any connection with that request— was pure politics: advice from
a general to a President on the kind of war the President ought to be
conducting. It was in substance a flat restatement of the conservative Northern
Democratic position on the war, submitted with the warning that if it were not
made official government policy "our cause will be lost." Military
power must not be used to upset "the relations of servitude," and
"neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons,
territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be
contemplated for a moment." Without a conservative policy it probably
would not be possible to get new recruits for the Army, and "a declaration
of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our
present armies." Of course, Mr Lincoln would need a general-in-chief who
was in thorough sympathy with such a policy; General McClellan did not ask for
the appointment, but would happily serve "in such position as you may
assign me." (There was a faint, quaint echo here of the position Mr.
Seward had taken in the spring of 1861 when he gave Mr. Lincoln a note modestly
offering to run the government for him.) The general reported that Mr. Lincoln
read the paper, thanked him for it, and put it in his pocket.
¹²

There were, of course, many things for
the President to do. He reviewed the troops, looking at the soldiers, letting
them look at him.
¹³
He talked with McClellan and with the corps
commanders about the condition of the army and the intentions of the Rebels,
trying to find out whether the army was safe where it was and whether if need
be it could safely be withdrawn. He was especially struck by the great number
of absentees from the army, and after he returned to Washington he wrote
anxiously to McClellan on the subject. As far as he could learn, he said, at
least 45,000 soldiers who belonged to the army were not with it, and there
seemed to be no way to get them back; which was a pity, because if McClellan
had them he could in the President's opinion, "go into Richmond in the
next three days."

The absentees represented a problem the
War Department never was able to solve. Comparatively few of the missing
45,000 were actually deserters; mostly, they were men who had fallen ill and
had been transferred to hospitals in their home states, the theory being that
they would recover more rapidly in familiar surroundings. The theory was sound
enough, but the home-state hospitals were entirely under the control of
home-state politicians and the army had no way to reclaim a man who got into
one of them. McClellan once estimated that not more than a tenth of the men who
were sent to these hospitals ever returned to duty, and neither he nor any
other army commander was able to do anything about it.
¹⁴
To the end,
the army carried on its rolls the names of thousands of men who never fought.

But the paper on war
aims was what really mattered now.

In place of the larger effort which Mr.
Lincoln was demanding it called for a more moderate effort. In effect it proposed
that the administration act as if somebody else had won the presidential election
of 1860. (Define war, with Clausewitz, as a simple extension of politics: here
was a bland proposal to make this war an extension of the politics of the
losers rather than of the victors.) It rested on the assumption that the war
had not, in 15 desperate months, changed the base for any man's thinking, and
it was aimed at victory-by-consent and restoration of the status quo.

The paper meant more than it openly
said, but its interpretation was no problem for anyone who knew how the
conservative officers in the Army of the Potomac were talking. Quite openly,
these men were saying that the administration wanted McClellan to fail so that
it could impose anti-slavery doctrines on the South. This, they said, meant
final disruption of the Union, because no matter how badly the Southern states
were beaten they would never come back into the Union unless the government
promised not to touch slavery. The Union could not possibly be restored by
sheer force. Secession needed a beating, but it also needed reassurance, kind
words and a lot of coaxing.

The point of view is explicitly stated
in a letter written just then by Colonel Gouverneur K. Warren, a Regular who
commanded a brigade in Porter's corps and who would eventually be a hero of
Gettysburg and a corps commander. Warren wrote that President Lincoln ought to
"discard the New England and Greeley abolitionists entirely; this would
remove the cause for resistance from the masses South, and we could crush out
the Secession leaders." He went on to assert that the restored Union
"is unattainable without allowing the Southern people their
constitutional rights, for it is otherwise degrading them."
¹⁵

McClellan shared this
notion, and he had actually come to feel that his recent defeat might really
have been a blessing. Writing to Mrs. McClellan on July 10, in a mood of rare
humility, the general put it thus:

"I have not done
splendidly at all—I have only tried to do my duty & God has helped me—or
rather He has helped my army & our country—& we are safe. I think I begin
to see His wise purpose in all this & that the events of the next few days
will prove it. If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now the fanatics of the
North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible. However that may
be, I am sure that it is all for the best."
¹⁸

What the general was
telling his wife was of course a deep secret, although he believed that
Secretary Stanton—"the most deformed hypocrite & villian that I have
ever had the bad fortune to meet with"—was reading all of his private telegrams,
and he remarked that the Secretary's ears would probably tingle if he could
also read the letters to Mrs. McClellan.
¹⁷
But the existence in the
officer corps of this kind of feeling was common knowledge. Not long before the
beginning of the Seven Days, Porter wrote to Manton Marble, of the strongly
Democratic New York
World,
with
a pointed suggestion: "I wish you would put the question. Does the
President (controlled by an incompetent Secy) design to cause defeat here for
the purpose of prolonging the war?" And the effect of this train of
thought on officers' attitude toward their own government comes out in an
indignant letter written a few weeks after this by Alexander S. Webb, a rising
young staff officer who was inspector general for the army's chief of
artillery. Webb assured his father that "the fools in Washington"
were determined that "General G.B. McC must be 'subalternized,' " and
he burst out angrily: "Was there ever
such
a government, such fools, such idiots. I tell
you father I feel as if every drop of blood I have should be poured out in
punishing these men. I hate or despise them more intensively than I do the
Rebels."
¹⁸

This was a strange state of mind to be
pervading general headquarters of the nation's most important army, and it led
the commanding general into strange mental and emotional byways. The day after
McClellan saw a disguised blessing in his defeat, he confided to his wife:
"I have commenced receiving letters from the North urging me to march on
Washington & assume the Govt!" He would of course do nothing of the
kind, but the idea remained in his mind, and a little time after this he told
her: "I have nothing as yet from Wash, and begin to believe that they
intend & hope that I & my army may melt away under the hot sun—if they
leave me here neglected much longer I shall feel like taking my rather large
military family to Wash, to seek an explanation of their course. I pray that
under such circumstances I should be treated with rather more politeness than I
have of late."
¹⁹

More often, his mood was one of
resignation. He believed that he would be superseded and he did not care very
much: "I have lost confidence in the Govt. & would be glad to be out
of the scrape—keep this to yourself." The feeling deepened, and shortly afterward
he wrote: "If things come to pass as I anticipate I shall leave the
service with a sad heart for my country but a light one for myself. I am tired
of being dependent on men I despise from the bottom of my heart. I cannot
express to you the infinite contempt I feel for these people;— but one thing
keeps me at my work—love for my country and my army." His feeling toward
President Lincoln had curdled: "I cannot regard him in any respect my
friend. I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow if he dared to do so.
His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings
than those of thorough contempt."
²⁰

To
his old friend Barlow he wrote in similar vein. He was sorry so many good
soldiers had "fallen victims to the stupidity and wickedness at
Washington which have done their best to sacrifice as noble an Army as ever
marched to battle," but he was resigned: "I do not care if they
do
take me from this Army—except on account of
the Army itself. I have lost all regard & respect for the majority of the
Administration, & doubt the propriety of my brave men's blood being spilled
to further the designs of such a set of heathen villains."
²¹
But the mood of resignation did not keep him from feeling angry, and he gave
Mrs. McClellan his unvarnished opinion of Secretary Stanton:

"So
you want to know how I feel about Stanton, and what I think of him now. I will
tell you with the utmost frankness.

I think that he is the most unmitigated
scoundrel I ever knew, heard or read of; I think that (and I do not wish to be
irreverent) had he lived in the times of the Savior, Judas Iscariot would have
remained a respected member of the fraternity of the apostles, & that the
magnificent treachery & rascality of E. M. Stanton would have caused Judas
to have raised his arms in holy horror, & he would certainly have claimed
& exercised the right to have been the betrayer of his lord & master,
by virtue of the same merit that raised Satan to his 'eminence.' I
may
do the man injustice."
²²

Mr. Lincoln of course never saw this
letter, but he did know that there was a bottomless chasm between his Secretary
of War and his principal field commander, and he also knew that the general's
letter of advice on war policy did not fit at all with his own determination to
drive on for victory at any cost; and on July 11 he signed an order naming
Major General Henry W. Halleck General-in-Chief of the armies of the United
States and ordering him to report at once to Washington.

CHAPTER
SIX

Unlimited War

1.
Trading with the
Enemy

In the old
days,
Nassau in the Bahamas was a sleepy colonial port where time stood still and
nobody cared. Hardly anything ever happened. Once in a great while a tropical
storm would drive some merchant ship on an offshore reef, and the more
energetic inhabitants could go out, after the storm was over, to pick the
bones. Once in a great while, too, one of the cruisers of Her Majesty's West
Indian squadron would drop in for a visit, lying in port with deck awnings
white under the sun while the commanding officer went ashore to confer with the
governor on some item of empire business. Most of the time the place simply
drowsed, and a visitor remarked that its whole air was "one of indolent
acquiescence in its own obscurity."

Then came the
American Civil War, and Nassau suddenly became the most important single way
station on the sea road to the Southern Confederacy, which meant that for a
brief, frenzied time it was the town where fortunes could be made more quickly
than anywhere else on earth. The harbor was full of ships, the wharves were
piled with freight, and the streets, inns, and drinking places were crowded
with men who had much money to spend, not much time to spend it, and the
reckless high spirits born of the knowledge that no matter how much they spent
they would get it all back in a very few days. Nassau, in short, was the center
of a hell-roaring boom, and one sailor wrote that what was going on here must
have been like the scenes in the pirate havens in the days when the Spanish
Main was beyond the law.

Nassau was like this because it was a
neutral port within easy reach of the Confederate coast. (There were others—
Bermuda, Havana, Matamoros in Mexico, even blue-nose