Part 14 (2/2)
And still a few days afterward:
”I shall carry this thing _en grande_, and crush the rebels in one campaign.”
From the giddy elevation to which such an imaginary achievement raised his dreams, there was but one higher step, and his colossal egotism immediately mounted to occupy it. On August 9, just two weeks after his arrival in Was.h.i.+ngton, he wrote:
”I would cheerfully take the dictators.h.i.+p and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved;” while in the same letter he adds, with the most nave unconsciousness of his hallucination: ”I am not spoiled by my unexpected new position.”
Coming to the national capital in the hour of deepest public depression over the Bull Run defeat, McClellan was welcomed by the President, the cabinet, and General Scott with sincere friends.h.i.+p, by Congress with a hopeful eagerness, by the people with enthusiasm, and by Was.h.i.+ngton society with adulation. Externally he seemed to justify such a greeting.
He was young, handsome, accomplished, genial and winning in conversation and manner. He at once manifested great industry and quick decision, and speedily exhibited a degree of ability in army organization which was not equaled by any officer during the Civil War. Under his eye the stream of the new three years' regiments pouring into the city went to their camps, fell into brigades and divisions, were supplied with equipments, horses, and batteries, and underwent the routine of drill, tactics, and reviews, which, without the least apparent noise or friction, in three months made the Army of the Potomac a perfect fighting machine of over one hundred and fifty thousand men and more than two hundred guns.
Recognizing his ability in this work, the government had indeed given him its full confidence, and permitted him to exercise almost unbounded authority; which he fully utilized in favoring his personal friends, and drawing to himself the best resources of the whole country in arms, supplies, and officers of education and experience. For a while his outward demeanor indicated respect and grat.i.tude for the promotion and liberal favors bestowed upon him. But his phenomenal rise was fatal to his usefulness. The dream that he was to be the sole savior of his country, announced confidentially to his wife just two weeks after his arrival in Was.h.i.+ngton, never again left him so long as he continued in command. Coupled with this dazzling vision, however, was soon developed the tormenting twofold hallucination: first, that everybody was conspiring to thwart him; and, second, that the enemy had from double to quadruple numbers to defeat him.
For the first month he could not sleep for the nightmare that Beauregard's demoralized army had by a sudden bound from Mana.s.sas seized the city of Was.h.i.+ngton. He immediately began a quarrel with General Scott, which, by the first of November, drove the old hero into retirement and out of his pathway. The cabinet members who, wittingly or unwittingly, had encouraged him in this he some weeks later stigmatized as a set of geese. Seeing that President Lincoln was kind and una.s.suming in discussing military questions, McClellan quickly contracted the habit of expressing contempt for him in his confidential letters; and the feeling rapidly grew until it reached a mark of open disrespect. The same trait manifested itself in his making exclusive confidants of only two or three of his subordinate generals, and ignoring the counsel of all the others; and when, later on, Congress appointed a standing committee of leading senators and representatives to examine into the conduct of the war, he placed himself in a similar att.i.tude respecting their inquiry and advice.
McClellan's activity and judgment as an army organizer naturally created great hopes that he would be equally efficient as a commander in the field. But these hopes were grievously disappointed. To his first great defect of estimating himself as the sole savior of the country, must at once be added the second, of his utter inability to form any reasonable judgment of the strength of the enemy in his front. On September 8, when the Confederate army at Mana.s.sas numbered forty-one thousand, he rated it at one hundred and thirty thousand. By the end of October that estimate had risen to one hundred and fifty thousand, to meet which he asked that his own force should be raised to an aggregate of two hundred and forty thousand, with a total of effectives of two hundred and eight thousand, and four hundred and eighty-eight guns. He suggested that to gather this force all other points should be left on the defensive; that the Army of the Potomac held the fate of the country in its hands; that the advance should not be postponed beyond November 25; and that a single will should direct the plan of accomplis.h.i.+ng a crus.h.i.+ng defeat of the rebel army at Mana.s.sas.
On the first of November the President, yielding at last to General Scott's urgent solicitation, issued the orders placing him on the retired list, and in his stead appointing General McClellan to the command of all the armies. The administration indulged the expectation that at last ”The Young Napoleon,” as the newspapers often called him, would take advantage of the fine autumn weather, and, by a bold move with his single will and his immense force, outnumbering the enemy nearly four to one, would redeem his promise to crush the army at Mana.s.sas and ”save the country.” But the November days came and went, as the October days had come and gone. McClellan and his brilliant staff galloped unceasingly from camp to camp, and review followed review, while autumn imperceptibly gave place to the cold and storms of winter; and still there was no sign of forward movement.
Under his own growing impatience, as well as that of the public, the President, about the first of December, inquired pointedly, in a memorandum suggesting a plan of campaign, how long it would require to actually get in motion. McClellan answered: ”By December 15,--probably 25”; and put aside the President's suggestion by explaining: ”I have now my mind actively turned toward another plan of campaign that I do not think at all antic.i.p.ated by the enemy, nor by many of our own people.”
December 25 came, as November 25 had come, and still there was no plan, no preparation, no movement. Then McClellan fell seriously ill. By a spontaneous and most natural impulse, the soldiers of the various camps began the erection of huts to shelter them from snow and storm. In a few weeks the Army of the Potomac was practically, if not by order, in winter quarters; and day after day the monotonous telegraphic phrase ”All quiet on the Potomac” was read from Northern newspapers in Northern homes, until by mere iteration it degenerated from an expression of deep disappointment to a note of sarcastic criticism.
While so unsatisfactory a condition of affairs existed in the first great military field east of the Alleghanies, the outlook was quite as unpromising both in the second--between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi--and in the third--west of the Mississippi. When the Confederates, about September 1, 1861, invaded Kentucky, they stationed General Pillow at the strongly fortified town of Columbus on the Mississippi River, with about six thousand men; General Buckner at Bowling Green, on the railroad north of Nashville, with five thousand; and General Zollicoffer, with six regiments, in eastern Kentucky, fronting c.u.mberland Gap. Up to that time there were no Union troops in Kentucky, except a few regiments of Home Guards. Now, however, the State legislature called for active help; and General Anderson, exercising nominal command from Cincinnati, sent Brigadier-General Sherman to Nashville to confront Buckner, and Brigadier-General Thomas to Camp d.i.c.k Robinson, to confront Zollicoffer.
Neither side was as yet in a condition of force and preparation to take the aggressive. When, a month later, Anderson, on account of ill health turned over the command to Sherman, the latter had gathered only about eighteen thousand men, and was greatly discouraged by the task of defending three hundred miles of frontier with that small force. In an interview with Secretary of War Cameron, who called upon him on his return from Fremont's camp, about the middle of October, he strongly urged that he needed for immediate defense sixty thousand, and for ultimate offense ”two hundred thousand before we were done.” ”Great G.o.d!” exclaimed Cameron, ”where are they to come from?” Both Sherman's demand and Cameron's answer were a pertinent comment on McClellan's policy of collecting the whole military strength of the country at Was.h.i.+ngton to fight the one great battle for which he could never get ready.
Sherman was so distressed by the seeming magnitude of his burden that he soon asked to be relieved; and when Brigadier-General Buell was sent to succeed him in command of that part of Kentucky lying east of the c.u.mberland River, it was the expectation of the President that he would devote his main attention and energy to the accomplishment of a specific object which Mr. Lincoln had very much at heart.
Ever since the days in June, when President Lincoln had presided over the council of war which discussed and decided upon the Bull Run campaign, he had devoted every spare moment of his time to the study of such military books and leading principles of the art of war as would aid him in solving questions that must necessarily come to himself for final decision. His acute perceptions, retentive memory, and unusual power of logic enabled him to make rapid progress in the acquisition of the fixed and accepted rules on which military writers agree. In this, as in other sciences, the main difficulty, of course, lies in applying fixed theories to variable conditions. When, however, we remember that at the outbreak of hostilities all the great commanders of the Civil War had experience only as captains and lieutenants, it is not strange that in speculative military problems the President's mature reasoning powers should have gained almost as rapidly by observation and criticism as theirs by practice and experiment. The mastery he attained of the difficult art, and how intuitively correct was his grasp of military situations, has been attested since in the enthusiastic admiration of brilliant technical students, amply fitted by training and intellect to express an opinion, whose comment does not fall short of declaring Mr.
Lincoln ”the ablest strategist of the war.”
The President had early discerned what must become the dominating and decisive lines of advance in gaining and holding military control of the Southern States. Only two days after the battle of Bull Run, he had written a memorandum suggesting three princ.i.p.al objects for the army when reorganized: First, to gather a force to menace Richmond; second, a movement from Cincinnati upon c.u.mberland Gap and East Tennessee; third, an expedition from Cairo against Memphis. In his eyes, the second of these objectives never lost its importance; and it was in fact substantially adopted by indirection and by necessity in the closing periods of the war. The eastern third of the State of Tennessee remained from the first stubbornly and devotedly loyal to the Union. At an election on June 8, 1861, the people of twenty-nine counties, by more than two to one, voted against joining the Confederacy; and the most rigorous military repression by the orders of Jefferson Davis and Governor Harris was necessary to prevent a general uprising against the rebellion.
The sympathy of the President, even more than that of the whole North, went out warmly to these unfortunate Tennesseeans, and he desired to convert their mountain fastnesses into an impregnable patriotic stronghold. Had his advice been followed, it would have completely severed railroad communication, by way of the Shenandoah valley, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, between Virginia and the Gulf States, accomplis.h.i.+ng in the winter of 1861 what was not attained until two years later. Mr. Lincoln urged this in a second memorandum, made late in September; and seeing that the princ.i.p.al objection to it lay in the long and difficult line of land transportation, his message to Congress of December 3, 1861, recommended, as a military measure, the construction of a railroad to connect Cincinnati, by way of Lexington, Kentucky, with that mountain region.
A few days after the message, he personally went to the President's room in the Capitol building, and calling around him a number of leading senators and representatives, and pointing out on a map before them the East Tennessee region, said to them in substance:
I am thoroughly convinced that the closing struggle of the war will occur somewhere in this mountain country. By our superior numbers and strength we will everywhere drive the rebel armies back from the level districts lying along the coast, from those lying south of the Ohio River, and from those lying east of the Mississippi River. Yielding to our superior force, they will gradually retreat to the more defensible mountain districts, and make their final stand in that part of the South where the seven States of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia come together. The population there is overwhelmingly and devotedly loyal to the Union. The despatches from Brigadier-General Thomas of October 28 and November 5 show that, with four additional good regiments, he is willing to undertake the campaign and is confident he can take immediate possession. Once established, the people will rally to his support, and by building a railroad, over which to forward him regular supplies and needed reinforcements from time to time, we can hold it against all attempts to dislodge us, and at the same time menace the enemy in any one of the States I have named.
While his hearers listened with interest, it was evident that their minds were still full of the prospect of a great battle in Virginia, the capture of Richmond, and an early suppression of the rebellion. Railroad building appeared to them altogether too slow an operation of war. To show how sagacious was the President's advice, we may antic.i.p.ate by recalling that in the following summer General Buell spent as much time, money, and military strength in his attempted march from Corinth to East Tennessee as would have amply sufficed to build the line from Lexington to Knoxville recommended by Mr. Lincoln--the general's effort resulting only in his being driven back to Louisville; that in 1863, Burnside, under greater difficulties, made the march and successfully held Knoxville, even without a railroad, which Thomas with a few regiments could have accomplished in 1861; and that in the final collapse of the rebellion, in the spring of 1865, the beaten armies of both Johnston and Lee attempted to retreat for a last stand to this same mountain region which Mr. Lincoln pointed out in December, 1861.
Though the President received no encouragement from senators and representatives in his plan to take possession of East Tennessee, that object was specially enjoined in the instructions to General Buell when he was sent to command in Kentucky.
”It so happens that a large majority of the inhabitants of eastern Tennessee are in favor of the Union; it therefore seems proper that you should remain on the defensive on the line from Louisville to Nashville, while you throw the ma.s.s of your forces by rapid marches by c.u.mberland Gap or Walker's Gap on Knoxville, in order to occupy the railroad at that point, and thus enable the loyal citizens of eastern Tennessee to rise, while you at the same time cut off the railway communication between eastern Virginia and the Mississippi.”
Three times within the same month McClellan repeated this injunction to Buell with additional emphasis. Senator Andrew Johnson and Representative Horace Maynard telegraphed him from Was.h.i.+ngton:
<script>