George Brinton McClellan, when at the age of thirty-four he was raised suddenly to a dizzying height of fame and power, was generally looked upon as a prodigy. Though he was not that, he had a real claim to distinction. Had destiny been considerate, permitting him to rise gradually and to mature as he rose, he might have earned a stable reputation high among those who are not quite great. He had done well at West Point, and as a very young officer in the Mexican War; he had represented his country as a military observer with the allies in the Crimea; he was a good engineer, and a capable man of business. His winning personality, until he went wrong in the terrible days of 1862, inspired "a remarkable affection and regard in every one from the President to the humblest orderly that waited at his door."[1] He was at home among books; he could write to his wife that Prince Napoleon "speaks English very much as the Frenchmen do in the old English comedies";[2] he was able to converse in "French, Spanish, Italian, German, in two Indian dialects and he knew a little Russian and Turkish." Men like Wade and Chandler probably thought of him as a "highbrow," and doubtless he irritated them by invariably addressing the President as "Your Excellency." He had the impulses as well as the traditions of an elder day. But he had three insidious defects. At the back of his mind there was a vein of theatricality, hitherto unrevealed, that might, under sufficient stimulus, transform him into a poseur. Though physically brave, he had in his heart, unsuspected by himself or others, the dread of responsibility. He was void of humor. These damaging qualities, brought out and exaggerated by too swift a rise to apparent greatness, eventually worked his ruin. As an organizer he was unquestionably efficient. His great achievement which secures him a creditable place in American history was the conversion in the autumn of 1861 of a defeated rabble and a multitude of raw militia into a splendid fighting machine. The very excellence of this achievement was part of his undoing. It was so near to magical that it imposed on himself, gave him a false estimate of himself, hid from him his own limitation. It imposed also on his enemies. Crude, fierce men like the Vindictive leaders of Congress, seeing this miracle take place so astoundingly soon, leaped at once to the conclusion that he could, if he would, follow it by another miracle. Having forged the thunderbolt, why could he not, if he chose, instantly smite and destroy? All these hasty inexperienced zealots labored that winter under the delusion that one great battle might end the war. When McClellan, instead of rushing to the front, entered his second phase--the one which he did not understand himself, which his enemies never understood--when he entered upon his long course of procrastination, the Jacobins, startled, dumfounded, casting about for reasons, could find in their unanalytical vision, but one. When Jove did not strike, it must be because Jove did not wish to strike. McClellan was delaying for a purpose. Almost instantaneous was the whisper, followed quickly by the outcry among the Jacobins, "Treachery! We are betrayed. He is in league with the enemy."
Their distrust was not allayed by the manner in which he conducted himself. His views of life and of the office of commanding general were not those of frontier America. He believed in pomp, in display, in an ordered routine. The fine weather of the autumn of 1861 was utilized at Washington for frequent reviews. The flutter of flags, the glint of marching bayonets, the perfectly ordered rhythm of marching feet, the blare of trumpets, the silvery notes of the bugles, the stormily rolling drums, all these filled with martial splendor the golden autumn air when the woods were falling brown. And everywhere, it seemed, look where one might, a sumptuously uniformed Commanding General, and a numerous and sumptuous staff, were galloping past, mounted on beautiful horses. Plain, blunt men like the Jacobins, caring nothing for this ritual of command, sneered. They exchanged stories of the elaborate dinners he was said to give daily, the several courses, the abundance of wine, the numerous guests; and after these dinners, he and his gorgeous staff, "clattering up and down the public streets" merely to show themselves off. All this sneering was wildly exaggerated. The mania of exaggeration, the mania of suspicion, saturated the mental air breathed by every politician at Washington, that desperate winter, except the great and lonely President and the cynical Secretary of State.
McClellan made no concessions to the temper of the hour. With Lincoln, his relations at first were cordial. Always he was punctiliously respectful to "His Excellency." It is plain that at first Lincoln liked him and that his liking was worn away slowly. It is equally plain that Lincoln did not know how to deal with him. The tendency to pose was so far from anything in Lincoln's make-up that it remained for him, whether in McClellan or another, unintelligible. That humility which was so conspicuous in this first period of his rule, led him to assume with his General a modest, even an appealing tone. The younger man began to ring false by failing to appreciate it. He even complained of it in a letter to his wife. The military ritualist would have liked a more Olympian superior. And there is no denying that his head was getting turned. Perhaps he had excuse. The newspapers printed nonsensical editorials praising "the young Napoleon." His mail was filled with letters urging him to carry things with a high hand; disregard, if necessary, the pusillanimous civil government, and boldly "save the country." He had so little humor that he could take this stuff seriously. Among all the foolish letters which the executors of famous men have permitted to see the light of publicity, few outdo a letter of McClellan's in which he confided to his wife that he was willing to become dictator, should that be the only way out, and then, after saving his country, to perish.[3]
In this lordly mood of the melodramatic, he gradually--probably without knowing it-became inattentive to the President. Lincoln used to go to his house to consult him, generally on foot, clad in very ordinary clothes. He was known to sit in McClellan's library "rather unnoticed" awaiting the General's pleasure.[4]
At last the growing coolness of McClellan went so far that an event occurred which Hay indignantly set down in his diary: "I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come. The President, Governor Seward and I went over to McClellan's house tonight. The servant at the door said the General was at the wedding of Colonel Wheaton at General Buell's and would soon return. We went in and after we had waited about an hour, McClellan came in, and without paying particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up-stairs, passing the door of the room where the President and the Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half an hour, and sent once more a servant to tell the General they were there; and the answer came that the General had gone to bed.
"I merely record this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes without comment It is the first indication I have yet seen of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities. Coming home, I spoke to the President about the matter, but he seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it were better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity."[5]
Did ever a subordinate, even a general, administer to a superior a more astounding snub? To Lincoln in his selfless temper, it was Only a detail in his problem of getting the army into action. What room for personal affronts however gross in a mood like his? To be sure he ceased going to McClellan's house, and thereafter summoned McClellan to come to him, but no change appeared in the tone of his intercourse with the General. "I will hold McClellan's horse," said he, "if he will win me victories."[6]
All this while, the two were debating plans of campaign and McClellan was revealing-as we now see, though no one saw it at the time-the deep dread of responsibility that was destined to paralyze him as an active general. He was never ready. Always, there must be more preparation, more men, more this, more that.
In January, 1862, Lincoln, grown desperate because of hope deferred, made the first move of a sort that was to be lamentably frequent the next six months. He went over the head of the Commanding General, and, in order to force a result, evoked a power not recognized in the military scheme of things. By this time the popular adulation of McClellan was giving place to a general imitation of the growling of the Jacobins, now well organized in the terrible Committee and growing each day more and more hostile to the Administration. Lincoln had besought McClellan to take into account the seriousness of this rising tide of opposition.[7] His arguments made no impression. McClellan would not recognize the political side of war. At last, partly to allay the popular clamor, partly to force McClellan into a corner, Lincoln published to the country a military program. He publicly instructed the Commanding General to put all his forces in movement on all fronts, on Washington's birthday.[8]
From this moment the debate between the President and the General with regard to plans of campaign approached the nature of a dispute. McClellan repeated his demand for more time in which to prepare. He objected to the course of advance which the President wished him to pursue. Lincoln, seeing the situation first of all as a political problem, grounded his thought upon two ideas neither of which was shared by McClellan: the idea that the supreme consideration was the safety of Washington; the resultant idea that McClellan should move directly south, keeping his whole army constantly between Washington and the enemy. McClellan wished to treat Washington as but one important detail in his strategy; he had a grandiose scheme for a wide flanking movement, for taking the bulk of his army by sea to the coast of Virginia, and thus to draw the Confederate army homeward for a duel to the death under the walls of Richmond. Lincoln, neither then nor afterward more than an amateur in strategy, was deeply alarmed by this bold mode of procedure. His political instinct told him that if there was any slip and Washington was taken, even briefly, by the Confederates, the game was up. He was still further alarmed when he found that some of the eider generals held views resembling his own.[9] To his modest, still groping mind, this was a trying situation. In the President lay the ultimate responsibility for every move the army should make. And whose advice should he accept as authoritative? The first time he asked himself that question, such peace of mind as had survived the harassing year 1861 left him, not to return for many a day.
At this moment of crises, occurred one of his keenest personal afflictions. His little son Willie sickened and died. Lincoln's relation to his children was very close, very tender. Many anecdotes show this boy frolicking about the White House, a licensed intruder everywhere. Another flood of anecdotes preserve the stupefying grief of his father after the child's death. Of these latter, the most extreme which portray Lincoln toward the close of February so unnerved as to be incapable of public duty, may be dismissed as apocryphal. But there can be no doubt that his unhappiness was too great for the vain measurement of descriptive words; that it intensified the nervous mood which had already possessed him; that anxiety, deepening at times into terrible alarm, became his constant companion.
In his dread and sorrow, his dilemma grew daily more intolerable. McClellan had opposed so stoutly the Washington birthday order that Lincoln had permitted him to ignore it. He was still wavering which advice to take, McClellan's or the elder generals'. To remove McClellan, to try at this critical moment some other general, did not occur to him as a rational possibility. But somehow he felt he must justify himself to himself for yielding to McClellan' s views. In his zeal to secure some judgment more authoritative than his own, he took a further step along the dangerous road of going over the Commander's head, of bringing to bear upon him influences not strictly included in the military system. He required McClellan to submit his plan to a council of his general officers. Lincoln attended this council and told the generals "he was not a military man and therefore would be governed by the opinion of a majority."[10] The council decided in McClellan's favor by a vote of eight to four. This was a disappointment to Lincoln. So firm was his addiction to the overland route that he could not rest content with the council's decision. Stanton urged him to disregard it, sneering that the eight who voted against him were McClellan's creatures, his "pets." But Lincoln would not risk going against the majority of the council. "We are civilians," said he, "we should justly be held responsible for any disaster if we set up our opinions against those of experienced military men in the practical management of a campaign."[11]
Nevertheless, from this quandary, in which his reason forced him to do one thing while all his sensibilities protested, he extricated himself in a curious way. Throughout the late winter he had been the object of a concerted attack from Stanton and the Committee. The Committee had tacitly annexed Stanton. He conferred with them confidentially. At each important turn of events, he and they always got together in a secret powwow. As early as February twentieth, when Lincoln seemed to be breaking down with grief and anxiety, one of those secret conferences of the high conspirators ended in a determination to employ all their forces, direct and indirect, to bring about McClellan's retirement. They were all victims of that mania of suspicion which was the order of the day. "A majority of the Committee," wrote its best member, long afterward when he had come to see things in a different light, "strongly suspected that General McClellan was a traitor." Wade vented his spleen in furious words about "King McClellan." Unrestrained by Lincoln's anguish, the Committee demanded a conference a few days after his son's death and threatened an appeal from President to Congress if he did not quickly force McClellan to advance.[12]
All this while the Committee was airing another grievance. They clamored to have the twelve divisions of the army of the Potomac grouped into corps. They gave as their motive, military efficiency. And perhaps they thought they meant it. But there was a cat in the bag which they carefully tried to conceal. The generals of divisions formed two distinct groups, the elder ones who did not owe their elevation to McClellan and the younger ones who did. The elder generals, it happened, sympathized generally with the Committee in politics, or at least did not sympathize with McClellan. The younger generals reflected the politics of their patron. And McClellan was a Democrat, a hater of the Vindictives, unsympathetic with Abolition. Therefore, the mania of suspicion being in full flood, the Committee would believe no good of McClellan when he opposed advancing the elder generals to the rank of corps commanders. His explanation that he "wished to test them in the field," was poohpoohed. Could not any good Jacobin see through that! Of course, it was but an excuse to hold back the plums until he could drop them into the itching palms of those wicked Democrats, his "pets." Why should not the good men and true, elder and therefore better soldiers, whose righteousness was so well attested by their political leanings, why should not they have the places of power to which their rank entitled them?
Hitherto, however, Lincoln had held out against the Committee's demand and bad refused to compel McClellan to reorganize his army against his will. He now observed that in the council which cast the die against the overland route, the division between the two groups of generals, what we may call the Lincoln generals and the McClellan generals, was sharply evident. The next day he issued a general order which organized the army of the Potomac into corps, and promoted to the rank of corps commanders, those elder generals whose point of view was similar to his own.[13] Thereafter, any reference of crucial matters to a council of general officers, would mean submitting it, not to a dozen commanders of divisions with McClellan men in the majority, but to four or five commanders of corps none of whom was definitely of the McClellan faction. Thus McClellan was virtually put under surveillance of an informal war council scrutinizing his course from the President's point of view. It was this reduced council of the subordinates, as will presently appear, that made the crucial decision of the campaign.
On the same day Lincoln issued another general order accepting McClellan's plan for a flanking movement to the Virginia coast.[14] The Confederate lines at this time ran through Manassas--the point Lincoln wished McClellan to strike. It was to be known later that the Confederate General gave to Lincoln's views the high endorsement of assuming that they were the inevitable views that the Northern Commander, if he knew his business, would act upon. Therefore, he had been quietly preparing to withdraw his army to more defensible positions farther South. By a curious coincidence, his "strategic retreat" occurred immediately after McClellan had been given authority to do what he liked. On the ninth of March it was known at Washington that Manassas had been evacuated. Whereupon, McClellan's fatal lack of humor permitted him to make a great blunder. The man who had refused to go to Manassas while the Confederates were there, marched an army to Manassas the moment he heard that they were gone--and then marched back again. This performance was instantly fixed upon for ridicule as McClellan's "promenade to Manassas."
To Lincoln the news of the promenade seemed both a vindication of his own plan and crushing evidence that if he had insisted on his plan, the Confederate army would have been annihilated, the war in one cataclysm brought to an end. He was ridden, as most men were, by the delusion of one terrific battle that was to end all. In a bitterness of disappointment, his slowly tortured spirit burst into rage. The Committee was delighted. For once, they approved of him. The next act of this man, ordinarily so gentle, seems hardly credible. By a stroke of his pen, he stripped McClellan of the office of Commanding General, reduced him to the rank of mere head of a local army, the army of the Potomac; furthermore, he permitted him to hear of his degradation through the heartless medium of the daily papers.[15] The functions of Commanding General were added to the duties of the Secretary of War. Stanton, now utterly merciless toward McClellan, instantly took possession of his office and seized his papers, for all the world as if he were pouncing upon the effects of a malefactor. That McClellan was not yet wholly spoiled was shown by the way he received this blow. It was the McClellan of the old days, the gallant gentleman of the year 1860, not the poseur of 1861, who wrote at once to Lincoln making no complaint, saying that his services belonged to his country in whatever capacity they might be required.
Again a council of subordinates was invoked to determine the next move. McClellan called together the newly made corps commanders and obtained their approval of a variation of his former plan. He now proposed to use Fortress Monroe as a base, and thence conduct an attack upon Richmond. Again, though with a touch of sullenness very rare in Lincoln, the President acquiesced. But he added a condition to McClellan's plan by issuing positive orders, March thirteenth, that it should not be carried out unless sufficient force was left at Washington to render the city impregnable.
During the next few days the Committee must have been quite satisfied with the President. For him, he was savage. The normal Lincoln, the man of immeasurable mercy, had temporarily vanished. McClellan's blunder had touched the one spring that roused the tiger in Lincoln. By letting slip a chance to terminate the war--as it seemed to that deluded Washington of March, 1862--McClellan had converted Lincoln from a brooding gentleness to an incarnation of the last judgment. He told Hay he thought that in permitting McClellan to retain any command, he had shown him "very great kindness."[16] Apparently, he had no consciousness that he had been harsh in the mode of McClellan's abatement, no thought of the fine manliness of McClellan's reply.
During this period of Lincoln's brief vengefulness, Stanton thought that his time for clearing scores with McClellan had come. He even picked out the man who was to be rushed over other men's heads to the command of the army of the Potomac. General Hitchcock, an accomplished soldier of the regular army, a grandson of Ethan Allen, who had grown old in honorable service, was summoned to Washington, and was "amazed" by having plumped at him the question, would he consent to succeed McClellan? Though General Hitchcock was not without faults--and there is an episode in his later relations with McClellan which his biographer discreetly omits--he was a modest man. He refused to consider Stanton's offer. But he consented to become the confidential adviser of the War Office. This was done after an interview with Lincoln who impressed on Hitchcock his sense of a great responsibility and of the fact that he "had no military knowledge" and that he must have advice.[17] Out of this congested sense of helplessness in Lincoln, joined with the new labors of the Secretary of War as executive head of all the armies, grew quickly another of those ill-omened, extra-constitutional war councils, one more wheel within the wheels, that were all doing their part to make the whole machine unworkable; distributing instead of concentrating power. This new council which came to be known as the Army Board, was made up of the heads of the Bureaus of the War Department with the addition of Hitchcock as "Advising General." Of the temper of the Army Board, composed as it was entirely of the satellites of Stanton, a confession in Hitchcock's diary speaks volumes. On the evening of the first day of their new relation, Stanton poured out to him such a quantity of oral evidence of McClellan's "incompetency" as to make this new recruit for anti-McClellanism "feel positively sick."[18]
By permitting this added source of confusion among his advisers, Lincoln treated himself much as he had already treated McClellan. By going over McClellan's head to take advice from his subordinates he had put the General on a leash; now, by setting Hitchcock and the experts in the seat of judgment, he virtually, for a short while, put himself on a leash. Thus had come into tacit but real power three military councils none of which was recognized as such by law--the Council of the Subordinates behind McClellan; the Council of the Experts behind Lincoln; the Council of the Jacobins, called The Committee, behind them all.
The political pressure on Lincoln now changed its tack. Its unfailing zeal to discredit McClellan assumed the form of insisting that he had a secret purpose in waiting to get his army away from Washington, that he was scheming to leave the city open to the Confederates, to "uncover" it, as the soldiers said. By way of focussing the matter on a definite issue, his enemies demanded that he detach from his army and assign to the defense of Washington, a division which was supposed to be peculiarly efficient General Blenker had recruited a sort of "foreign legion," in which were many daring adventurers who had seen service in European armies. Blenker's was the division demanded. So determined was the pressure that Lincoln yielded. However, his brief anger had blown itself out. To continue vengeful any length of time was for Lincoln impossible. He was again the normal Lincoln, passionless, tender, fearful of doing an injustice, weighed down by the sense of responsibility. He broke the news about Blenker in a personal note to McClellan that was almost apologetic. "I write this to assure you that I did so with great pain, understanding that you would wish it otherwise. If you could know the full pressure of the case, I am confident you would justify it."[19] In conversation, he assured McClellan that no other portion of his army should be taken from him.[20]
The change in Lincoln's mood exasperated Stanton. He called on his pals in the Committee for another of those secret confabulations in which both he and they delighted. Speaking with scorn of Lincoln's return to magnanimity, he told them that the President had "gone back to his first love," the traitor McClellan. Probably all those men who wagged their chins in that conference really believed that McClellan was aiming to betray them. One indeed, Julian, long afterward had the largeness of mind to confess his fault and recant. The rest died in their absurd delusion, maniacs of suspicion to the very end. At the time all of them laid their heads together--for what purpose? Was it to catch McClellan in a trap?
Meanwhile, in obedience to Lincoln's orders of March thirteenth, McClellan drew up a plan for the defense of Washington. As Hitchcock was now in such high feather, McClellan sent his plan to the new favorite of the War Office, for criticism. Hitchcock refused to criticize, and when McClellan's chief of staff pressed for "his opinion, as an old and experienced officer," Hitchcock replied that McClellan had had ample opportunity to know what was needed, and persisted in his refusal.[21] McClellan asked no further advice and made his arrangements to suit himself. On April first he took boat at Alexandria for the front. Part of his army had preceded him. The remainder-except the force he had assigned to the defense of Washington-was speedily to follow.
With McClellan's departure still another devotee of suspicion moves to the front of the stage. This was General Wadsworth. Early in March, Stanton had told McClellan that he wanted Wadsworth as commander of the defenses of Washington. McClellan had protested. Wadsworth was not a military man. He was a politician turned soldier who had tried to be senator from New York and failed; tried to be governor and failed; and was destined to try again to be governor, and again to fail. Why should such a person be singled out to become responsible for the safety of the capital? Stanton's only argument was that the appointment of Wadsworth was desirable for political reasons. He added that it would be made whether McClellan liked it or not. And made it was.[22] Furthermore, Wadsworth, who had previously professed friendship for McClellan, promptly joined the ranks of his enemies. Can any one doubt, Stanton being Stanton, mad with distrust of McClellan, that Wadsworth was fully informed of McClellan's opposition to his advancement?
On the second of April Wadsworth threw a bomb after the vanishing McClellan, then aboard his steamer somewhere between Washington and Fortress Monroe. Wadsworth informed Stanton that McClellan had not carried out the orders of March thirteenth, that the force he had left at Washington was inadequate to its safety, that the capital was "uncovered." Here was a chance for Stanton to bring to bear on Lincoln both those unofficial councils that were meddling so deeply in the control of the army. He threw this firebrand of a report among his satellites of the Army Board and into the midst of the Committee.2[3]
It is needless here to go into the furious disputes that ensued-the accusations, the recriminations, the innuendoes! McClellan stoutly insisted that he had obeyed both the spirit and the letter of March thirteenth; that Washington was amply protected. His enemies shrieked that his statements were based on juggled figures; that even if the number of soldiers was adequate, the quality and equipment were wretched; in a word that he lied. It is a shame-less controversy inconceivable were there not many men in whom politics and prejudice far outweighed patriotism. In all this, Hitchcock was Stanton's trump card. He who had refused to advise McClellan, did not hesitate to denounce him. In response to a request from Stanton, he made a report sustaining Wadsworth. The Committee summoned Wadsworth before it; he read them his report to Stanton; reiterated its charges, and treated them to some innuendoes after their own hearts, plainly hinting that McClellan could have crushed the Confederates at Manassas if he had wished to.[24]
A wave of hysteria swept the Committee and the War Office and beat fiercely upon Lincoln. The Board charged him to save the day by mulcting the army of the Potomac of an entire corps, retaining it at Washington. Lincoln met the Board in a long and troubled conference. His anxious desire to do all he could for McClellan was palpable.[25] But what, under the circumstances, could he do? Here was this new device for the steadying of his judgment, this Council of Experts, singing the same old tune, assuring him that McClellan was not to be trusted. Although in the reaction from his momentary vengefulness he had undoubtedly swung far back toward recovering confidence in McClellan, did he dare--painfully conscious as he was that he "had no military knowledge"--did he dare go against the Board, disregard its warning that McClellan's arrangements made of Washington a dangling plum for Confederate raiders to snatch whenever they pleased. His bewilderment as to what McClellan was really driving at came back upon him in full force. He reached at last the dreary conclusion that there was nothing for it but to let the new wheel within the wheels take its turn at running the machine. Accepting the view that McClellan had not kept faith on the basis of the orders of March thirteenth, Lincoln "after much consideration" set aside his own promise to McClellan and authorized the Secretary of War to detain a full corps.[26]
McClellan never forgave this mutilation of his army and in time fixed upon it as the prime cause of his eventual failure on the Peninsula. It is doubtful whether relations between him and Lincoln were ever again really cordial.
In their rather full correspondence during the tense days of April, May and June, the steady deterioration of McClellan's judgment bore him down into amazing depths of fatuousness. In his own way he was as much appalled by the growth of his responsibility as ever Lincoln had been. He moved with incredible caution.*
*Commenting on one of his moments of hesitation, J.S. Johnston wrote to Lee: "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." 14 O. R., 416.
His despatches were a continual wailing for more men. Whatever went wrong was at once blamed on Washington. His ill-usage had made him bitter. And he could not escape the fact that his actual performance did not come up to expectation; that he was constantly out-generaled. His prevailing temper during these days is shown in a letter to his wife. "I have raised an awful row about McDowell's corps. The President very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I ought to break the enemy's lines at once. I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself." A despatch to Stanton, in a moment of disaster, has become notorious: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army."[27]
Throughout this preposterous correspondence, Lincoln maintained the even tenor of his usual patient s