PART THREE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There had been army reviews before, but nothing like this one. The sheer scale of the Grand Review, as it was styled, dwarfed anything that had come before it in North America, and even rivaled the European pageants of Frederick the Great, Wellington, and Napoléon.1 On the chilly, windswept morning of November 20, 1861, four months after the Battle of Manassas, on a treeless plain eight miles west of Washington, DC, George Brinton McClellan, the thirty-four-year-old general in chief of all Union armies, staged an exhibition that featured a veritable sea of blue-uniformed men: seventy thousand of them, ranged in glittering lines that stretched in a semicircle two and a half miles wide.2 Thirty thousand spectators watched in wonder from fields, trees, housetops, and barns as the massive body wheeled before them, bayonets flashing and regimental flags flying, and led by saber-wielding officers.3 In attendance were most of the people who mattered in Washington, including President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Secretary of State William Seward, scores of senators and congressmen, and foreign diplomats. They had all come out from the city in carriages to this place, known as Bailey’s Crossroads, in the cold weather to watch.
In spite of the presence of so many notables, this was McClellan’s show. He was, by his own careful design, its featured attraction, and his stage management was, as usual, flawless. He arrived on a large, muscular black horse, a compact man who yet managed to inspire such descriptions as “broad-shouldered, strong-chested, strong-necked and strong-jawed.” His hand was cocked jauntily on his hip. He was flanked by his immaculate, gold-lace-trimmed staff, a cohort of 1,800 prancing cavalry, and even a mounted cavalry band.4 As smoke from a ninety-gun salute drifted across the assembly, “Little Mac” joined the president, Cameron, and Seward and together they rode down the long line of troops as a band played “Hail to the Chief” and the cheers of the soldiers rolled across the snow-streaked plain.5 It was all, as the Philadelphia Press put it, “indescribably grand,”6 so much so that it helped inspire a Washington woman named Julia Ward Howe to begin writing, the next day, new lyrics for the popular tune “John Brown’s Body.” The song would become famous as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
It was possible, in fact, to watch this military pageant and forget, momentarily, that it was this same army—or rather an earlier version of it—that had fled in full panic from a smaller rebel force at Manassas, climbing up one another’s backs and over flabbergasted civilians to reach the safety of the capital. It was even possible to ignore for the moment the rather stark fact—it was becoming starker with each passing week—that only a few miles away from this throat-tightening spectacle, camped that very same Confederate army with precisely the same commanding generals—Johnston and Beauregard—and it was almost exactly where the fleeing Federals had left it in July. Since then no Union forces had advanced against it, no artillery had been fired in its direction other than a few rounds lobbed by a Federal reconnaissance party.7 Indeed, the Confederate forces had been allowed to conduct their own reviews, unmolested, a mere dozen miles away—to Confederate general Joe Johnston’s amazement.
What made such proximity so remarkable was that, whereas in July the Union had outnumbered its rivals 35,000 to 32,000, there were now 150,000 Federal troops in the field against 40,000 rebels, a mismatch so absurd that many politicians and pundits in the North were beginning to wonder why they were watching reviews at all instead of reading about military victories.8 This was the grand irony of McClellan’s Grand Review. The troops who were turned out for this parade alone—seventy-six regiments, seventeen batteries, and seven regiments of cavalry, roughly half of the Army of the Potomac—were greater in number than all of the Confederate forces in Virginia, and far better equipped. Though not everyone would have agreed with those troop appraisals—as we will see, that was part of the problem—there was plenty of reliable intelligence in the hands of Union generals and Northern politicians to suggest that it was true, or at least approximately true, and with numbers like that, rough estimates were all that was needed.9
The reason for such bristling passivity was not hard to find, even in a war that was unfolding in a rat’s nest of political and military intrigue. It was the immaculately dressed man on the big black horse: George B. McClellan, the general who, possessed of an enormous, gleaming weapon, mysteriously refused to use it. He was one of the most remarkable public figures the United States of America has ever produced. The list of his personal attributes was as striking then as it is now. He was an extremely efficient and even gifted administrator. He was good at the business side of running an army. He was also egocentric to a nearly unimaginable degree, harshly judgmental of others, vainglorious, mean-spirited, dissembling, almost pathologically risk-averse, haughty, insincere, back-stabbing, callously dismissive of his peers, and, though he was not a coward in any conventional sense, he was certainly very troubled by the idea of sending large numbers of men into battle. To give edge to all of this, he believed himself to be God’s chosen instrument on earth for the salvation of the Union. He was so convinced of this that, later in the war, he was able to justify jeopardizing an entire Union army to advance his own interests.10 Part of McClellan’s brilliance was that, to his bosses in Washington and to the nation at large, he did not seem to be any of those things—at least not at first. His true personality was as thoroughly cloaked, in its own way, as his classmate Tom Jackson’s. He appeared, in the spring and summer of 1861, as the savior of the Union, a bright, briskly efficient, refreshingly straightforward, confident, and confidence-inspiring man who could right the terrible wrongs of Manassas and make “On to Richmond!” something other than the empty battle cry it had become.
McClellan had always seemed destined for greatness. Precociously smart, he had gone off to the University of Pennsylvania at fourteen, then matriculated at West Point at sixteen, two years under the minimum age, where he graduated second in the same class—1846—in which Jackson ranked seventeenth. Unlike the socially awkward Jackson, McClellan was immensely popular with his classmates. He served with distinction as an engineer in the Mexican-American War and was subsequently assigned by the US Army as an observer in the Crimean War. He resigned from the army at age thirty to become vice president and chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad. Two years later he became president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. He did well at both jobs. “There is an indefinable air of success about him and something of the ‘man of destiny,’ ” wrote a contemporary.11 In late July 1861, following the Union disaster at Manassas, he had been given command of the Army of the Potomac, reporting to Winfield Scott. Brimming with confidence and buoyed up by a fawning press, McClellan gave a speech soon after he arrived in which he promised that the war he was going to wage would be short, sharp, and final. Indeed, he seemed to harken strangely back to the very early, romantic days of the war, when people believed that one big, glorious fight would settle the issue. “I expect to fight a terrible battle,” he wrote to a friend. “When I am ready I shall move without regard to season or weather. . . . But of one thing you may rest assured—when the blow is struck it will be heavy, rapid, and decisive.”12
He became instantly famous, and it went instantly to his head. “I find myself in a strange position here—President, Cabinet, Genl. Scott all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” he wrote to his young wife, Nelly. “I almost think that were I to win some small 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!”13 In another letter to her he wrote, “Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called on to save my country?”14 As though he needed more of this sort of encouragement, the press insisted on comparing him to a young Napoléon.
But it turned out that Little Mac was very good at one thing, and it was not a small thing: training an army. Starting in August, he transformed the Army of the Potomac from the ragged corps that had lost its first battle and almost all its confidence into something that looked as if it could win a war. Working long hours, he tightened discipline, pulled in shirkers and wanderers, made everything from transport to the commissary work more efficiently, and drilled the men endlessly. He built fifty forts and redoubts around Washington, DC, with parapets twelve feet thick, armed with three hundred guns, and fronted by abatis (barricades of fallen trees). In a very real sense, McClellan rescued the Union in those early days from despondency and fear: someone had to rebuild the army and show the country that there was great hope for the future. He did it with chin up and cap bill down, and none of the men who cheered as he rode by them had any notion that he was anything less than the great commanding officer he seemed to be.
He was also showing just how deeply ambitious he was. He moved almost immediately against his boss, the debilitated Winfield Scott, who suffered from dropsy, vertigo, and paralysis and had trouble staying awake. McClellan largely ignored him, violating military protocol by dealing directly with the president and cabinet, and complaining loudly to all of them that Scott was holding things up, interfering with McClellan’s grand plan for a fast and decisive end to the war. Scott complained bitterly about McClellan’s maneuvering, but to no avail. On November 1, Scott retired, leaving McClellan as general in chief as well as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Little Mac had wanted it all, and, with astonishing speed, he had gotten it.
Meanwhile, he was behaving more and more as though he were, in fact, the power of the land. He rented a splendid house very near the White House, where he and Nelly threw lavish dinner parties. He went everywhere with a large entourage of aides and staff officers. His vainglory had an edge to it, too. The more entrenched he became, the more contempt he felt for his peers and rivals. He wrote to his wife, “I can’t tell you how disgusted I am with these wretched politicians—they are a most despicable set of men. . . . I am becoming daily more disgusted with this imbecile administration.” He thought Lincoln’s cabinet contained “some of the greatest geese I have ever seen. . . . Seward is the meanest of them all—a meddlesome, officious, incompetent little puppy. . . . [Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Welles is a garrulous old woman. . . . [Attorney General Edward] Bates is an old fool. . . . The presdt. is nothing more than a well meaning baboon . . . ‘the original gorilla.’ . . . It is sickening in the extreme [to] see the weakness and unfitness of the poor beings who control the destinies of this great country.”15 McClellan’s self-infatuation reached its apogee one evening in November, when Lincoln and Seward came to call on him at his home. They were told he was at a dinner party. They waited. An hour later McClellan arrived and was told about his visitors. He ignored them, walked upstairs, and retired for the evening. An hour and a half after they arrived, a servant informed Lincoln and Seward that McClellan had gone to bed. (It would not be the last time that he stood Lincoln up or publicly ignored him.)
The problem with McClellan—and by late autumn it was a large and growing problem—was that, for all his talk of ending the war quickly with a single decisive blow, and in spite of the army of half a million men he now commanded, he refused to advance against the enemy, or even to come up with a coherent plan of attack. This was in spite of continuous prodding from Lincoln, the cabinet, Republicans in Congress, and newspaper editors such as the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley. It was, indeed, their criticism of him—“meddling” with army affairs, as he saw it—that made him so contemptuous of them. He had blamed the delays on Scott. But after November 1 Scott was no longer in command, and still no plans for an advance materialized, in spite of a warm, dry autumn that was favorable to the movement of large armies.
McClellan’s reasons for refusing to march were constantly shifting. His position was first that the men were not ready, which was in many ways accurate. Then, as months rolled by and soldiers were trained and dazzling public reviews were staged, he retooled his arguments, now insisting that he was woefully undermanned and outgunned by Confederate forces. This was to be his plaint for the rest of his war career: he was being forced to send vastly outnumbered troops to their deaths because shortsighted politicians would not give him enough men or guns. This position also had the effect of shifting blame for inaction from him to Lincoln and the War Department. In November, McClellan complained bitterly that “I cannot move without more means . . . I have been thwarted and deceived by these incapables at every turn. . . . It now begins to look like a winter of inactivity. If it is so, the fault will not be mine.”16
It should be noted that whether McClellan is considered by history to be a morally admirable character or not—most historians have seen him as pompous, egotistical, and self-defeating, largely the result of his own self-indicting letters to his wife and others—in his caution, conservatism, and desire for perfect preparedness before making a move, he was absolutely in step with many other commanding generals early in the war, on both sides. The sort of headlong, man-wasting aggressiveness that generals such as Grant, Sherman, Lee, and Jackson later brought to the war was not yet seen as sound strategy. Who, after all, had won at Manassas, the defense-minded Johnston and Beauregard, or McDowell, with his elaborate and daring end run around the Confederate flank? McClellan, in fact, argues his biographer Ethan Rafuse, was squarely in a larger, post-Enlightenment military tradition that placed “an emphasis on logistics, sieges, and carefully executed maneuvers whose costs and risks could be rationally calculated.”17 That tradition saw its fullest flowering in the Army of the Potomac, just as it was being rendered almost completely obsolete.
Whatever the reason, in a country clamoring for war, the blame for inaction rested largely with McClellan. In November 1861 he had three times the troops and three times the artillery of the Confederates in his front. That he did not credit this was partly because he was receiving grossly inaccurate intelligence from Allan Pinkerton, a McClellan hire from Chicago whose private detective agency seemed to specialize in exaggerating its clients’ peril. In October, Pinkerton’s operatives estimated that there were 150,000 well-supplied Confederates near Manassas. The reality was that McClellan had 120,000 against 45,000, a numerical superiority so crushing that, had he advanced, rebel forces would have been forced to retire behind the Rappahannock, if not to Richmond itself. In November Pinkerton made the ridiculous assertion that Joe Johnston had been reinforced with 75,000 fresh troops and was preparing to attack Washington.18 But these absurd bits of intelligence were only half the problem; they required some extremely credulous person to believe them. That was McClellan, who was turning out to be one of the most timid military commanders in American history. He wanted to believe Pinkerton because Pinkerton reinforced his own instinctive caution. Manassas had shown McClellan and everyone else just how much was at risk in a single battle, and how serious, well-intentioned, sober men with military experience could be made to look like fools in a matter of hours.
A grisly reminder of this new phenomenon had taken place that fall near Leesburg, Virginia, about forty miles northwest of Washington on the Potomac River. In response to unusual Confederate troop movements, McClellan had ordered his local division commander, Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, to make a “slight demonstration” to feel the enemy out. Stone passed the order on to Colonel Edward “Ned” Baker, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln’s and a US senator from Illinois. On October 21, 1861, Baker crossed the Potomac with most of a brigade to reinforce a small raiding party, collided with Confederate forces under Nathan “Shanks” Evans, of Manassas fame, and was badly beaten at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Baker was killed, and his men were sent reeling back down the muddy, hundred-foot bluff and into the river, where they were shot in the back as they tried to swim away. For the size of the expedition, Union losses were staggering: 223 killed, 226 wounded, and 553 prisoners taken. Evans’s forces suffered less than 200 casualties.19 The disaster at Ball’s Bluff resulted in the formation in the Federal Congress of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate it, and in the rapid destruction of the reputation and career of Brigadier Charles P. Stone, the committee’s first victim. In addition to bearing responsibility for the defeat, Stone, as it turned out, had been a little too cooperative in returning escaped slaves to their owners, and this was thought to reflect on his patriotism; he was thrown in jail as a traitor. It was believed by many in the Union, and later by Stone himself, that to protect himself, General McClellan had thrown him to the wolves.
The risks of command were equally apparent that autumn in the Union West, where another romantic egotist, General John Frémont, in a job fully as large-scale and important as McClellan’s, was presiding over a different sort of disaster. On August 10, in the first big fight in the western theater, a Union army in southwestern Missouri had been soundly defeated by Confederates at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, losing 2,500 killed and wounded. A month later, 3,500 Union soldiers surrendered at the town of Lexington, Missouri, after a brief siege. Frémont himself, famous as the “Pathfinder of the West” and the Republican candidate for president in 1856, turned out to be a miserable failure, from the ridiculous imperial pomp of his St. Louis headquarters, awash in corrupt army contracts, to his issuance, on August 30, of an unauthorized proclamation in which he declared martial law and assumed all powers of the state, announced the death penalty for all Confederate guerrillas caught behind Union lines, and freed the slaves and seized the property of all Confederate activists in Missouri. It was a breathtakingly stupid move. As Lincoln pointed out to him, shooting guerrillas would immediately prompt Confederates to retaliate by shooting Union prisoners, man for man. Lincoln also told him that freeing the slaves—which Union elected leaders had taken pains in the Crittenden-Johnson resolution of July 1861 to assure the country was not the goal of the war—could, among other things, cost the Union the support of Kentucky, one of the Union-friendly slaveholding “border states.” The price of rebellion could not be the emancipation of slaves. Not yet. Frémont compounded his error by sending his wife, Jessie, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, to inform Lincoln that her husband refused to withdraw his proclamation unless the president ordered him to, and to point out that, were the Northern electorate to choose between Frémont and Lincoln, it would certainly choose Frémont. Lincoln ordered Frémont to withdraw his proclamation. In October he relieved Frémont of command.
Between the legendary Pathfinder in St. Louis and the dashing Young Napoléon in Washington, by December 1861 Union morale had been brought to its lowest point since the days immediately after the defeat at Bull Run. The international community, meanwhile, so crucial to the fate of the Confederacy, was beginning to sound more and more convinced of the South’s viability as an independent nation. In the late fall, the correspondent for the Times of London in Washington made an astonishing diary entry that read, “All the diplomatists [foreign diplomats], with one exception, are of the opinion that the Union is broken forever, and the independence of the South virtually established.”20