Terrible Swift Sword (43 page)

McClellan had collided with this fact
before—after all, that was how he had lost McDowell's corps—and he collided
with it again, painfully, as he moved in pursuit of Joe Johnston.

The roads on the peninsula were bad, the
maps were worse and the weather itself was not favorable, and army headquarters
still believed that the Confederates had a great advantage in numbers; but in
the fortnight following the battle of Williamsburg, McClellan's advance went
smoothly and with reasonable diligence, and there seemed to be good understanding
between the general and the administration. When McClellan, who had little use
for his corps commanders, asked permission to make new arrangements, Stanton
told him that the President did not want the existing organization broken up
but that since big battles were impending McClellan could do as he chose, at
least on a temporary basis. McClellan reshuffled his troops and created two
new army corps, giving one to his friend Fitz John Porter and the other to the
General Franklin who had brought that division down from McDowell.
¹³
McClellan also asked that the Navy open the river route to Richmond, after the
Farragut manner, and the Navy at least tried; sent
Monitor,
a new ironclad named
Galena
and three gunboats steaming up the river to
Drewry's Bluff, a bit of high ground on a sharp bend in the James just seven
miles below Richmond. Here the Confederates had hastily built a fort, with
Virginia's
gunners to handle the heavy ordnance, and
they had driven piles and sunk hulks in the river to block the channel, and if
they lost this fort they lost everything because the Federal flotilla then
could go straight to the Richmond wharves.

The fort held, and on May 15 the Navy got
a bloody nose. The Confederate batteries were one hundred feet above
water-level,
Monitor
could
not elevate her guns enough to hit anything, the wooden ships dared not come to
close quarters, and
Galena
turned
out to be unexpectedly fragile. Her armor was not strong enough to stop heavy
shot at close range, and what happened to her demonstrated an unhappy truth
about naval warfare in the age of iron: inadequate armor was worse than no
armor at all, because broken bits of iron flew about the decks like shell
fragments. She was hit forty-three times, took heavy casualties, and was
reduced almost to a wreck, and after a few hours the Federal flotilla drifted
off downstream out of range. (When
Galena
reached
dry dock her armor was stripped off and she eventually went back into service
as an ordinary wooden gunboat.) It was clear that the Navy could not do below
Richmond what Farragut had done below New Orleans.
¹⁴

Still,
this was no more than a check. The James at least was an open highway to within
ten miles of the Confederate capital, and if General McClellan wanted to move
his base over to that river he was able to do so. He considered the idea, but
concluded that at least for the present he would move from the York, and by May
16 he had established a supply depot at a place called White House, on the
Pamunkey, twenty-two miles due east of Richmond, on the Richmond & York
River Railroad. And now, with Johnston pulling his men into the Richmond defenses
behind the Chickahominy River, which meandered sluggishly from northwest to
southwest a little more than half of the way from White House to Richmond, McClellan
made an urgent call for reinforcements.

On May 8 he had written to Stanton
pointing out that the Confederates would unquestionably mass their forces to
defend Richmond and that the Federals ought to concentrate also; "all the
troops on the Rappahannock and if possible those on the Shenandoah should take
part in the approaching battle . . . All minor considerations should be thrown
to one side and all our energies and means directed toward the defeat of
Johnston's army in front of Richmond." On May 14 he reiterated this in a
direct appeal to Mr. Lincoln. He would not be able to put more than 80,000 men
into battle, he would | have to fight perhaps double his own numbers, and he
needed every man he could get. He went on, eloquently, the only general in
American history who felt moved to assure his President that the country's
principal army, on the eve of battle, was actually loyal to the government:

"Any commander of the
re-enforcements whom Your Excellency may designate will be acceptable to me,
whatever expression I may have heretofore addressed to you on that subject. I
will fight the enemy, whatever their force may be, with whatever force I may
have, and I firmly believe that we shall beat them, but our triumph should be
made decisive and complete. The soldiers of this army love their Government
and will fight well in its support. You may rely upon them. They have
confidence in me as their general and in you as their President."
¹⁵

The reinforcements
McClellan wanted were McDowell's men, recently strengthened to something like
40,000 by the addition of Shields's division, which had just been moved over
to the Rappahannock from Banks's domain in the Shenandoah Valley; and the
commander who would be acceptable in spite of past remarks was of course
McDowell himself, whose headquarters at this time were at Falmouth, across the
river from Fredericksburg, fifty miles north of Richmond. There was just one
difficulty. McClellan hoped that "all minor considerations" would be
ignored in the use of this force, and the chief of these considerations was Mr.
Lincoln's rigid insistence that McDowell, whatever else he did, remain at all
times between the Confederate Army and Washington. As early as April 11, McDowell
had been told that he was to consider the protection of Washington his
essential responsibility and was to "make no movement throwing your forces
out of position for the discharge of this primary duty."
¹⁸
In
his appeal for McDowell's corps McClellan was specifying that it ought to be
sent to him by water, which would effectively take it off the board for a
fortnight. Mr. Lincoln had McDowell come to Washington for a quick conference,
and on the next day, May 17, Stanton sent a reply to McClellan.

The
President, said Stanton, would not uncover Washington entirely, and thought
that McDowell could reach the peninsula more quickly if he went by land. But
McDowell definitely would be sent; he had been ordered to march down from
Fredericksburg by the shortest route, keeping himself always in position to
protect the capital but joining McClellan's right wing as rapidly as possible.
He would retain full command of his own troops, and although when he made
contact he would come under McClellan's control, McClellan was instructed to
"give no orders, either before or after your junction, which can put him
out of position to cover this city."
¹⁷

Rather
more than half a loaf, presumably much better than no bread at all; McClellan
was to get what he had asked for, although it would be given in a way he did
not want, with attached conditions which he considered objectionable. And the
fact that these conditions were attached, and that the reinforcements would
move by road instead of by water, suddenly became new evidence of villainous
bad faith on the part of the administration. To his wife, on the day after he
received Stanton's dispatch, McClellan burst out:

"Those hounds in Washington are
after me again. Stanton is without exception the vilest man I ever knew or
heard of."
¹⁸

2.
Do
It
Quickly

The situation between Jefferson Davis
and Joseph E. Johnston was strangely like that between Abraham Lincoln and General
McClellan. Mr. Davis felt that his Army commander was unpredictable, hard to
guide and much too secretive; General Johnston felt that the President gave him
no support, nagged him with petty directives and opposed a politician's
deviousness to a soldier's honest competence. The two men did not exactly
distrust each other, but each man certainly looked at the other with a wary
eye. If there had been a time for such a thing, the two Presidents doubtless
could have sympathized with one another. The two generals could have done the
same thing.

In all of this Mr. Davis had one
advantage which Mr. Lincoln lacked.

Mr. Lincoln spoke to General McClellan
(when he did not address him directly) through Secretary Stanton: an arrangement
which originally was excellent and was at any rate unavoidable, but which by
the middle of the spring of 1862 was unfortunately quite certain to increase
the difficulty of communication. Mr. Davis, on the other hand, spoke to
Genera! Johnston for the most part through General Lee, and this made all the
difference in the world. General Lee had the complete confidence of both the
President and the Army comj mander, he took elaborate pains to retain it, and
he had a professional capacity of his own which neither man ever called in question.
Although the Federal government all but lost touch with its principal army, a
similar thing did not happen on the Confederate side.

As
a matter of fact there never existed between President Davis and General
Johnston the profound difference in fundamental attitudes which did so much to
cut President Lincoln off from General McClellan. General Johnston wak
extremely cautious, defensive-minded, reluctant to put everything to the
touch—as a soldier, indeed, he was in many ways somewhat like General McClellan—but
up to a certain point any Confederate general defending Richmond had to have
those qualities, and they were never the basis for his disagreements with Mr.
Davis. These two men were estranged more by little things than by big ones.
Each man was proud, touchy, quick to take offense and slow to forget about it
afterward, and their bitterest exchanges came over comparative trivialities.
They quarreled acridly, not over the sort of commitment the nation had made
when it went to war, or over the way in which the war might best be won, but
over such matters as why General Johnston ranked fourth instead of first among
Confederate generals, and whether regiments from the same state should or
should not be brigaded together. They might agree that the old lines at
Centreville and Manassas could not be held, but they would wrangle at great
length about who actually ordered the lines abandoned and who ought to be
blamed for the loss of all that bacon. When Johnston at last evacuated the
Yorktown lines (which he had never wanted to enter in the first place) Mr.
Davis was disturbed not by the retreat but by the general's tight-lipped
refusal to say where the retreat was going to end. Both men believed that the
ideal way to defend Richmond, once the peninsula was given up, was to assemble
all the troops that could be found and boldly go north of the Potomac (a thing,
incidentally, which formed the basis for Mr. Lincoln's worst nightmares); when
it proved impossible to do this, Johnston darkly suspected that the President
refused to do for him what he might have done for another man.
¹

Standing between these two men, Lee
could prevent a complete estrangement. He could assuage Johnston's feelings
when they were hurt, could call the man to time when necessary without making
him feel that bumbling civilians were outraging blameless soldiers, and on
occasion could deflect to himself complaints which otherwise would have gone
direct to the President. Snubbed by McClellan, Mr. Lincoln once remarked that
he would hold the general's horse if that would help win the war; Jefferson
Davis would never conceivably have said anything of the kind, but General Lee
might have held the horse in his stead—or, more probably, might have seen the
snub coming and found a way to smother it.

Lee's position in all
of this was difficult. He held a position which Mr. Davis had invented at a
time when it seemed necessary to veto an act of Congress creating the position
of general-in-chief: a necessity arising from Mr. Davis's conviction that the
President's constitutional function as commander-in-chief must not be infringed
upon by any such act of Congress. Lee had much authority and no authority, all
at the same time. He was charged, "under the direction of the
President," with conducting the military operations of the armies of the
Confederacy; his orders, in other words, were binding on one and all, but on
matters of any consequence he could speak only at the President's direction.
²
Perhaps the most revealing measure of his capacity as a man is the fact that
this spring, even thus limited, he found and used a device that confounded Mr.
Lincoln, Secretary Stanton, General McClellan, and all of the Federal armies in
the state of Virginia.

By the first of May, when McClellan was
almost ready to open his bombardment at Yorktown and Johnston was almost ready
to foil him by departing, the general Confederate situation in Virginia was
desperate. On the peninsula, Johns ton with 55,000 men faced an army
approximately twice that large. At Norfolk, which was about to be abandoned,
the Confederate Major General Benjamin Huger had 10,000 soldiers, who
presumably would join Johnston; they were balanced by 12,400 Federals under old
General Wool at Fort Monroe, who would eventually be put under McClellan's
command. In northern Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley to the tidewater city
of Fredericksburg, there were some 75,000 Federal troops in the separated
commands of McDowell and Banks and in the Washington lines. In addition,
Pathfinder Fremont had upwards of 17,000 scattered up and down the mountain
valleys of western Virginia; he was beginning to pull them together and was
contemplating
e
move south to break
the railroad line that connected Virginia and Tennessee. To meet this immense
array—which, for all anyone in Richmond knew, might at any moment be welded
into one army—the Confederacy had 13,000 men under Brigadier General Joseph R.
Anderson, below the Rappahannock watching McDowell; 6000 or more under
Stonewall Jackson in the upper Shenandoah; 2800 under Brigadier General Edward
Johnson west of Staunton, to keep an eye on Fremont; and 8500 under Major
General Richard Ewell, poised at one of the gaps in the Blue Ridge, ready at
need to join Jackson against Banks or to move east and join Anderson against
McDowell. Since the Confederate authorities had a fairly accurate count on
Federal strength, a simple exercise in addition was all anyone needed in order
to understand the inadequacy of Confederate manpower in Virginia.