CHAPTER 6

MCCLELLAN’S VICTORY

AUGUST 30–SEPTEMBER 3, 1862

AUGUST 30 WAS A DAY OF DISCOURAGEMENT AND HUMILIATION FOR General McClellan. Halleck had taken from him the last elements of the Army of the Potomac, the corps of Franklin and Sumner, sent forward to reinforce Pope. He was a general without an army, denied even the privilege of merely accompanying his men “to share their fate on the field of battle.” The latest dispatches from Pope claimed success in the fighting on August 29 and anticipated a major victory on the thirtieth. It appeared that McClellan’s aid would not be required to save the capital, and that Halleck and Stanton were prepared to relieve him.¹

Behind the scenes, Stanton was at work on a coup that, if successful, would finish McClellan’s career. Stanton had already told the president that “after all these battles, there should be one Court Martial, if never any more. He said that nothing but foul play could lose us this battle & that it rested with McClellan and his friends.” His correspondence with Halleck had put the General-in-chief on record, declaring that McClellan had failed to obey his orders. Stanton then drafted a formal petition for the cabinet to sign, which called for “the immediate removal of George B. McClellan from the command of any army in the United States.” Coming from men who were both his official councilors and leaders of the constituent factions of Lincoln’s own party, such a declaration would have weight. Chase circulated it among the cabinet, urging all members to add their signatures. Chase had been suspected of flirting with a McClellan alliance in the past, but the general’s recent behavior had turned him into a determined enemy.

The petition charged McClellan with incompetence, as evidenced by the failure of his campaigns and their heavy losses, “And also because by recent disobedience to superior orders and inactivity he has twice imperiled the army commanded by General Pope, and while he continues to command will daily hazard the fate of our armies and our national existence.” The petition concluded with an implicit challenge to the president’s judgment: “We are unwilling to be accessory to the waste of national resources, the protraction of the war, the destruction of our armies, and the imperiling of the Union which we believe must result from the continuance of George B McClellan in command.” Stanton and Chase planned to surprise Lincoln by presenting their protest at the next cabinet meeting, on September 2.²

There was wide though not unanimous agreement in the cabinet that McClellan was excessively cautious in the field and had deliberately thwarted the reinforcement of Pope. Stanton and Chase, with Seward the most powerful men in the cabinet, believed he was guilty of actions and sentiments akin to treason. Attorney General Bates condemned “a criminal tardiness, a fatuous apathy, a captious, bickering rivalry, among our commanders who seem so taken up with their quick-made dignity, that they overlook the lives of their people & the necessities of their country.” Seward would not join in promoting the petition out of loyalty to Lincoln, but he planned to absent himself from the September 1 cabinet meeting—which suggested his acceptance, if not approval, of the movement. Navy secretary Welles agreed with the criticism of McClellan but refused to sign because he thought the petition violated the cabinet’s proper role, by seeking to “control” rather than to advise the president. Only Postmaster General Blair, the most conservative member of the cabinet, disagreed with the petitioners’ judgment of McClellan. He was never approached for a signature and knew nothing of the plot.³

Stanton had launched his conspiracy on August 30, while Pope was still issuing confident bulletins promising victory. Twenty-four hours later the situation was transformed. The first definitive reports of Pope’s disaster reached the capital on the night of the thirtieth, and once again the Union high command was thrown into confusion. It was uncertain whether Pope’s army was still capable of self-defense, or if Washington itself was in danger. Halleck broke under the pressure, writing to McClellan: “I beg of you to assist me in this crisis with your ability and experience. I am utterly tired out.”⁴

For McClellan the reversal of fortune was so stunning and swift as to seem providential. At 9:30 that morning he had written to his wife lamenting the humiliating and powerless position in which he found himself. He was planning to write to William Aspinwall, his New York political supporter, “so that my friends in New York may know” that he bore no responsibility for the catastrophe. A little more than twelve hours later he had Halleck’s telegram begging for assistance. McClellan had said he would not deign to rescue the administration again unless they conceded “control.” True to his word, he refused to help unless Halleck restored him to command: “I am ready to afford you every assistance in my power, but you will readily perceive how difficult an undefined position such as I now hold must be.” He proposed a meeting for the morning of August 31, “alone, either at your house or the office.” But Halleck would not take responsibility for reappointing the object of Stanton’s hatred. He postponed the meeting till the next day (September 1), and asked Lincoln to attend and make the final decision.⁵

For Lincoln the question of McClellan’s command was fraught with political as well as military problems. For months he had been at pains to deny, evade, or minimize the conflict between McClellan and Stanton, which threatened to split the bipartisan coalition that had so far sustained the war for the Union. Now he would have to side with either the secretary or the general, and make the choice in the midst of a crisis of apparent military collapse and divisive political recrimination. Rumors of the power struggle between McClellan and Stanton, and deliberate leaks by the participants and their partisans, created a poisonous atmosphere in a city made anxious by the approach of the Rebel army and the lack of news from Pope. Captain Charles Francis Adams, Jr., whose First Massachusetts cavalry regiment had been hastily shipped north from the Sea Islands, was appalled at the state of mind prevailing in the capital. Adams belonged to one of the first families of American politics, and at twenty-seven he already knew Washington’s culture from the inside. His great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams had been presidents of the United States; his father was a leading Republican currently serving as Lincoln’s ambassador to Great Britain. “Our rulers seem to me to be crazy,” young Adams wrote his father. “The air of this city seems thick with treachery; our army seems in danger of utter demoralization. . . . Everything is ripe for a terrible panic, the end of which I cannot even imagine.”⁶

The cabinet and especially Stanton had invested its hopes in John Pope, and preferred to blame McClellan for Pope’s defeat. But Pope had utterly discredited himself with all but his most partisan supporters. He had not only lost his battle, the dispatches he had sent during the action were so far out of touch with reality as to suggest abysmal incompetence or deliberate falsification. (“As big a liar as John Pope” was already a cant phrase in the capital.) Pope had also exacerbated the political divisions within the officer corps by charging McClellan, and the Potomac generals assigned to Pope’s army, with deliberate sabotage of his operations: “Everybody in this army considers [McClellan] responsible for the failure to send forward Sumner and Franklin and Cox or anybody else.”⁷ To give color to these charges he had arrested Generals Fitz-John Porter, William Franklin, and Charles Griffin. The New York Tribune, responding to leaks from Stanton’s aides, blamed McClellan for the defeat at Manassas and accused the general and his acolytes of actions akin to treason.⁸ A reporter for the popular Spirit of the Times decried the public’s “infatuation” with McClellan, a “false prophet” whose support came from advocates of “Southern rights” and pro-slavery filibusters, “a military adept, and he cannot plan . . . a soldier and he cannot fight.”⁹ On the other side, McClellan’s officers were filling Washington with dark rumors of Stanton’s jealousy and malfeasance, and the opposition press was defending McClellan and urging his reappointment to command.¹⁰

The drift of public opinion favored McClellan. Even the staunchly Republican Adams was persuaded that McClellan, not the administration, was in the right. Adams was getting inside information from officers on McClellan’s staff, who saw Lincoln’s cabinet as the seat of “treason.” Adams was too shrewd to take these claims at face value, but he was convinced that the war effort required a single controlling hand to reconcile the army and the War Department, and for that role he declared, “I still believe in McClellan.”¹¹

FROM LINCOLN’S PERSPECTIVE, the worst part of all this was that (“treason” aside) there was some truth in what each side was saying about the other. Lincoln knew that Pope was a failure, and that the army would not willingly fight another battle under his command. McClellan was the obvious choice to replace him: he was the senior officer by rank and experience, had the confidence of the Army of the Potomac, and was justly renowned for his skill in organizing and raising the morale of an army. But Lincoln shared the cabinet’s belief that McClellan had “wanted [Pope] to fail,” an “unpardonable” breach of faith, even if its motive was personal jealousy rather than political disloyalty. Halleck informed him that McClellan’s officers serving under Pope had indeed been bad-mouthing their commander, thus undermining morale.¹²

Still, the prime necessity was to maintain the army’s will and capacity for fighting the enemy, and at the moment that required the dismissal of Pope and McClellan’s reappointment to command of the troops. The first necessity was to reorganize the army and prepare it for battle. McClellan had the skills to do that, and more importantly the officers and men who comprised the army were eager for him to be restored to command. As Lincoln told John Hay, “There is no man in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops into shape half as well as he. . . . If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.”¹³

Lincoln was willing to give McClellan command of the forces now gathering in the Washington defenses and charge him with the task of reorganizing and preparing them to renew the fight. However, he was not yet ready to give McClellan command of the army in the field. Lincoln was not yet aware of Stanton’s petition, but he expected that his cabinet, which would meet on September 2, would oppose even this limited empowerment of McClellan. To offset the suspicions of those who accused McClellan of sabotaging Pope, and perhaps to reassure himself of McClellan’s loyalty, Lincoln asked the general to write directly to Fitz-John Porter and other former colleagues, asking them to be more supportive of Pope while the latter remained in command. McClellan did just that on the evening of September 1, asking “for my sake and that of the country & of the old Army of the Potomac that you and all my friends will lend the fullest & most cordial support to Genl Pope. . . . The destinies of our country and the honor of our arms are at stake, & all depends now upon the cheerful cooperation of all in the field.” While the letter may have satisfied Lincoln’s demand, it put Porter and his colleagues in an uncomfortable position by implying that hitherto their support had been less than complete. Since Porter was facing court-martial for having disobeyed Pope’s orders, that implication was damaging. His response was to tell McClellan, “You may rest assured that all your friends, as well as every other lover of his country, will ever give, as they have given, to General Pope their cordial cooperation. . . . Our killed, wounded, and enfeebled troops attest our devoted duty.”¹⁴

The cabinet meeting was even more difficult than Lincoln expected. Navy Secretary Welles believed that the majority of his colleagues came to the meeting with “a fixed determination to remove, and if possible to disgrace, McClellan. Chase frankly stated he desired it, that he deliberately believed McClellan ought to be shot.” Lincoln’s announcement that McClellan had been put in command of the Washington defenses was countered by Stanton’s petition, whose recommendations were supported by all those present except Blair. Lincoln said he was ­“distressed . . . exceedingly to find himself differing on such a point from the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Treasury.” Still, he defended his decision: McClellan might be “deficient” in the qualities that make a good field general, but “there is no better organizer” of troops, and “he had beyond any officer the confidence of the army.” Moreover, his new command was limited to the defense of Washington. The choice of a new field commander had not yet been made, and Lincoln was willing to consider other candidates for that position.¹⁵

The cabinet was unable to recommend a viable alternative. Chase suggested Generals Hooker, Sumner, and Burnside. Hooker had not commanded anything larger than a division, and Sumner had already been promoted beyond his level of competence. Burnside had been offered the command and had turned it down out of loyalty to McClellan. No one there thought Halleck could do the job, but Lincoln was willing to give him a try. On September 3, the day after McClellan assumed command of all forces in and around Washington, the president asked Stanton to prepare an order for Halleck to organize a field army “for active operations.” Halleck simply passed the buck to McClellan.

On September 5 came word that Lee’s army had crossed the Potomac and was invading Maryland. The choice of a field commander could no longer be delayed. Lincoln made one last attempt to get Burnside to accept the active command, while McClellan remained in Washington. When Burnside again refused, there was no option but to hand the field command to McClellan.¹⁶

A QUESTION OF CHARACTER

Lincoln appreciated the fact that McClellan had been “working like a beaver” to reorganize the army, but he still had doubts about McClellan’s generalship. His extreme reluctance to engage and his exaggerated response to enemy threats that had often proved illusory suggested that he lacked the nerve to fight a battle when it was necessary to do so. Lincoln also had doubts about McClellan’s character. His behavior during the Second Battle of Bull Run led Lincoln to question whether McClellan’s first loyalty was to the Union cause or to his own and/or his party’s interest.

The controversy over McClellan’s motives and actions was intense among his contemporaries, and historians have continued the debate. In a strictly military view, McClellan’s objections to Franklin’s move were unreasonable and inadequate, and his refusal to obey orders inexcusable. Even if McClellan’s presumptions had been true—that Jackson was blocking the road with a numerically superior force—an advance toward Manassas by VI Corps was a sound and even necessary tactical move, which might have relieved Pope by threatening to take Jackson in the rear. McClellan’s fear of a Confederate attack on Washington via the Chain Bridge was preposterous.

However, responsibility for the disaster at Manassas was not McClellan’s alone. Halleck failed to exercise his authority as army commander. If his orders to McClellan had been as firm on August 27–28 as they were on the evening of the twenty-ninth, Franklin’s Corps might have intervened sooner. Pope’s handling of the battle was utterly incompetent. Even without VI Corps, Pope had more men on the field than Lee. His army was certainly large enough to hold its ground, and if he had stood on the defensive Lee might well have hesitated to attack. If Pope’s own assaults had not been so utterly misconceived and mismanaged, his army would not have been driven from the field after their repulse.

There is no question that McClellan’s response to Pope’s crisis and Halleck’s orders was obstructive rather than cooperative. The real questions concern his motives. His critics believe he deliberately delayed the sending of reinforcements to Pope’s army, hoping his rival’s defeat would lead to his own restoration to command. His worst critics at the time saw him as a crypto-Confederate and accused him of treason. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles had a more balanced view of McClellan than Chase or Stanton, but even he was troubled. Welles did not for a moment “entertain the thought that he is unfaithful,” let alone Chase’s view that he was “imbecile, a coward, a traitor.” He thought McClellan’s reluctance to fight was partly a matter of personality, but also worried it might reflect a deeper problem: “I sometimes fear his heart is not earnest in the cause.” He believed McClellan had allowed his antipathy for Pope to override his duty to support him. His insistence on seeing a moral equivalence between secessionism and abolitionism had blinded him to the true political character of the war. Welles had been appalled by McClellan’s assertion that “[h]e detested . . . both South Carolina and Massachusetts, and should rejoice to see both States extinguished”—this at a time when Massachusetts men were fighting and dying in McClellan’s own army.¹⁷

Welles was right in seeing McClellan’s motives as a combination of personality and politics. The general was incapable of seeing the war, or any of its events, from any perspective but his own. The Union could only be properly saved if McClellan saved it. For that reason he had abandoned his own army on the battlefield of Glendale, leaving his men to get out of their scrape as best they could. His care during the crisis of Second Bull Run was for himself, and for the force immediately under his command, and what happened to Pope and his army was of secondary importance.¹⁸

MCCLELLAN’S EGOCENTRICITY WAS not merely a personal pathology but the functional equivalent of a strategic theory. His approach to every strategic or tactical problem began with the assumption that the fate of the republic depended on his achieving and maintaining personal supremacy in the making of policy. His willingness to run the risks inherent in battle was constrained by his need to defend his political position against attack by Stanton and the Radicals in his rear. So long as Stanton remained in power he had little to gain by risking a decisive engagement with Lee’s army: a defeat would ruin him, a victory would only strengthen the Stanton-Lincoln regime.

On the other hand, Lee’s victory at Second Bull Run was effectively a victory for McClellan in his struggle against Stanton, and his first impulse was to exploit that victory. He consulted with his staff and other supporters about the feasibility of issuing an ultimatum to Lincoln: McClellan would refuse to save Maryland from invasion unless Lincoln agreed to purge Stanton from the cabinet. Burnside, fresh from having refused Lincoln’s proffer of the command, spent till three in the morning talking him out of it, explaining how wrong it would be to create a political crisis while Lee was in Maryland. McClellan finally agreed to withhold his ultimatum, but as the campaign went forward his officers and political supporters would intensify their campaign to give McClellan greater control over civil and military policy.¹⁹

THROUGH THE CONFUSION and alarm of the previous week, Lincoln had maintained his focus on the strategic essentials. His secretary John Hay declared, “It is due in great measure to his indomitable will, that army movements have been characterized by such energy and celerity for the last few days.” The Confederate army must be fought if it was to be damaged or destroyed, and if Lee was on the offensive, so much the better—battle was inevitable. All that was wanted was a general who would commit to the attempt all the forces Lincoln could give him. Since McClellan was all Lincoln had, he would bow to necessity and get what use he could out of the man. As he told John Hay, “we must use what tools we have.” Perhaps McClellan might be “aroused to doing something, by the sort of snubbing he got last week.”²⁰

During the time when he was considering whether or not to restore McClellan to command, Lincoln penned a meditation on the divine will. He shared with nearly all his countrymen, including General McClellan, a conviction that the course of human events was shaped by divine intelligence and intention. But as Lincoln understood things, the God of history was no respecter of either persons or nations, and His methods were dark and seldom pleasant.

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. . . . I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

The appropriate response to such a God was a kind of heroic humility, which acknowledged the limits of human power and the necessity of using whatever power one had to define a just objective and work to achieve it. God’s purpose might well be “something different from the purpose of either party—and yet human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purposes.” It was in that spirit that he resigned himself to using McClellan as the instrument of his policy, despite the latter’s weaknesses as a field general, despite his “unpardonable” sabotaging of Pope, despite the danger that his army might be more loyal to their general than to the republic.²¹

McClellan’s view of divine providence was simpler and more self-serving. Though he used the formulas of Christian humility, he read the disaster to his nation’s government and its army as divine vindication of his own actions and his beliefs, confirmation of his standing as the agent of divine providence for the salvation of the republic. The defeat of the army led by Pope and McDowell was “a signal act of retributive ­justice”—God’s work, not the result of his own action or inaction: “I have done nothing towards this.” God has been “trying me in the fire,” but now that he was in command, “I believe that God will give us the victory.” “Again I have been called upon to save the country—the case is desperate, but with God’s help I will try unselfishly to do my best & if he wills it accomplish the salvation of the nation. . . . I know that the interests at stake are so great as to justify his interference—not for me, but for the innocent thousands, millions rather, who have been plunged in misery by no fault of theirs.”²²

Within the week McClellan would enjoy a piece of luck so outrageous and unearned that he might be pardoned for thinking himself favored by providence.