THE   MISSISSIPPI  AND   SIULOII. 
We  have  seen  how  when  he  heard  of  Grant's 
victory  he  generously  asked  that  Buell,  Grant, 
and  Pope  be  made  major-generals  of  volun- 
teers, and  with  equal  generosity  to  himself 
broadly  added,  "  and  give  me  command  in 
the  West."  He  could  not  agree  with  Buell 
that  Nashville  was  the  most  vital  point  of  the 
rebellion  in  the  West,  and  that  heavy  rebel 
reinforcements  would  be  thrown  into  it  from 
all  quarters  east  and  south.  Halleck  develops 
his  idea  with  great  earnestness  in  replying  to 
that  suggestion  from  Buell.    He  says : 
To  remove  all  questions  as  to  rank,  I  have  asked 
the  President  to  make  you  a  major-general.  Come 
down  to  the  Cumberland  and  take  command.  The 
battle  of  the  West  is  to  be  fought  in  that  vicinity. 
You  should  be  in  it  as  the  ranking  general  in  immedi- 
ate command.  Don't  hesitate.  Come  to  Clarksville 
as  rapidly  as  possible.  Say  that  you  will  come,  and  I 
will  have  everything  there  for  you.  Beauregard  threat- 
ens to  attack  either  Cairo  or  Paducah ;  I  must  be 
ready  for  him.  Don't  stop  any  troops  ordered  down 
the  Ohio.  We  wrant  them  all.  You  shall  have  them 
back  in  a  few  days.  Assistant-Secretary  of  War  Scott 
left  here  this  afternoon  to  confer  with  you.  He  knows 
my  plans  and  necessities.  I  am  terribly  hard  pushed. 
Help  me,  and  I  will  help  you.  Hunter  has  acted  nobly, 
generously,  bravely.  Without  his  aid  I  should  have 
failed  before  Fort  Donelson.  Honor  to  him.  We  came 
within  an  ace  of  being  defeated.  If  the  fragments 
which  I  sent  down  had  not  reached  there  on  Sat- 
urday we  should  have  gone  in.  A  retreat  at  one 
time  seemed  almost  inevitable.  All  right  now.  Help 
me  to  carry  it  out.  Talk  freely  with  Scott.  It  is  evi- 
dent to  me  that  you  and  McClellan  did  not  at  last 
accounts  appreciate  the  strait  I  have  been  in.  I  am 
certain  you  will  when  you  understand  it  all.  Help 
me,  I  beg  of  you.  Throw  all  your  troops  in  the  di- 
rection of  the  Cumberland.  Don't  stop  any  one  or- 
dered here.  You  will  not  regret  it.  There  will  be 
no  battle  at  Nashville. 
In  answer  to  an  inquiry  from  Assistant- 
Secretary  Scott,  he  explains  further  : 
I  mean  that  Buell  should  move  on  Clarksville  with 
his  present  column :  there  unite  his  Kentucky  army 
and  move  up  the  Cumberland,  while  I  act  on  the  Ten- 
nessee.    We  should  then  be  able  to  cooperate. 
This  proposal  was  entirely  judicious;  but 
in  Halleck's  mind  it  was  subordinated  to  an- 
other consideration,  namely  :  that  he  should 
exercise  superior  command  in  the  West.  Again 
he  telegraphed  to  McClellan  (February  19), 
"  Give  it  [the  Western  division]  to  me,  and 
I  will  split  secession  in  twain  in  one  month." 
The  same  confidence  is  also  expressed  to  Buell, 
in  a  simultaneous  dispatch  to  Assistant-Secre- 
tary Scott,  who  was  with  Buell.  "  If  General 
Buell  will  come  down  and  help  me  with  all 
possible  haste  we  can  end  the  war  in  the  West 
in  less  than  a  month."  A  day  later  Halleck 
becomes  almost  peremptory  in  a  dispatch  to 
McClellan  :  "  I  must  have  command  of  the 
armies  in  the  West.  Hesitation  and  delay  are 
losing  us  the  golden  opportunity.  Lay  this  be- 
fore the  President  and  Secretary  of  War.  May 
I  assume  the  command  ?  Answer  quickly." 
To  tins  direct  interrogatory  McClellan  re- 
plied in  the  negative.  The  request,  to  say  the 
least  of  it,  was  somewhat  presumptuous,  and 
hardly  of  proper  tone  to  find  ready  acquies- 
cence from  a  military  superior.  In  this  case, 
however,  it  was  also  calculated  to  rouse  a 
twofold  instinct  of  jealousy.  Buell  was  a 
warm  personal  friend  of  McClellan,  and  the 
latter  could  not  be  expected  to  diminish  the 
opportunities  or  endanger  the  chances  of  his 
favorite.  But  more  important  yet  was  the 
question  how  this  sudden  success  in  Hal- 
leck's department,  and  the  extension  of  com- 
mand and  power  so  boldly  demanded,  might 
affect  McClellan's  own  standing  and  author- 
ity. He  was  yet  General-in-Chief,  but  the 
Administration  was  dissatisfied  at  his  inaction, 
and  the  President  had  already  indicated,  in 
the  general  war  order  requiring  all  the  armies 
of  the  United  States  to  move  on  the  2 2d  of 
February,  that  his  patience  had  a  limit.  Mc- 
Clellan did  not  believe  that  the  army  under 
his  own  immediate  care  and  command  would 
be  ready  to  fulfill  the  President's  order. 
Should  he  permit  a  rival  to  arise  in  the  West 
and  grasp  a  great  victory  before  he  could 
move  ? 
An  hour  after  midnight  McClellan  answered 
Halleck  as  follows  : 
Buell  at  Bowling  Green  knows  more  of  the  state 
of  affairs  than  you  at  St.  Louis.  Until  I  hear  from 
him  I  cannot  see  necessity  of  giving  you  entire  com- 
mand. I  expect  to  hear  from  Buell  in  a  few  minutes. 
I  do  not  yet  see  that  Buell  cannot  control  his  own 
line.  I  shall  not  lay  your  request  before  the  Secretary 
until  I  hear  definitely  from  Buell. 
Halleck  did  not  feel  wholly  baffled  by  the 
unfavorable  response.  That  day  he  received 
a  dispatch  from  Stanton,  who  said: 
Your  plan  of  organization  has  been  transmitted  to 
me  by  Mr.  Scott  and  strikes  me  very  favorablv,  but 
on  account  of  the  domestic  affliction  of  the  President 
I  have  not  yet  been  able  to  submit  it  to  him.  The 
brilliant  result  of  the  energetic  action  in  the  West  fills 
the  nation  with  joy. 
Encouraged  by  this  friendly  tone  from  the 
Secretary  of  War,  Halleck  ventured  a  final 
appeal : 
One  whole  week  has  been  lost  already  by  hesitation 
and  delay.  There  was,  and  I  think  there  still  is.  a  golden 
opportunity  to  strike  a  fatal  blow,  but  I  can't  do  it 
unless  I  can  control  Buell's  army.  I  am  perfectly  will- 
ing to  act  as  General  McClellan  dictates  or  to  take 
any  amount  of  responsibility.  To  succeed  we  must  be 
prompt.  I  have  explained  everything  to  General  Mc- 
Clellan and  Assistant-Secretary  Scott.  There  is  not  a 
moment  to  be  lost.  Give  me  authority  and  I  will  be 
responsible  for  results. 
Doubtless  Halleck  felt  that  the  fates  were 
against  him,  for  the  reply  chilled  his  lingering 
hopes: 
Your  telegram  of  yesterday,  together  with  Mr.  Scott's 
reports,  have  this  morning  been  submitted  to  the  Pres-
564 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
.  who,  after  full  consideration  of  the  subject,  does 
not  think  any  change  in  the  organization  of  the  army 
or  the  military  departments  at  present  advisable.    He 
expects  you  and  General  Buell  to  cooper- 
ate rally  and  zealously  with  each  other,  and  would  be 
>  know   whether  there  has  been  any  failure  of 
.ration  in  any  particular. 
Mr.  I  .incoln  had  been  watching  by  the  bed- 
side  of  his  dying  son,  and  in  his  overwhelming 
probably  felt  disinclined  to  touch  this 
new  vexation  of  military  selfishness  —  a  class 
of  questions  from  which  he  always  shrank  with 
the  utmost  distaste ;  besides,  we  shall  see  in 
due  time  how  the  President's  momentary  de- 
cision  turned  upon  much  more  comprehensive 
changes  already  in  contemplation. 
Before  McClellan's  refusal  to  enlarge  Hal- 
leek's  command,  he  had  indicated  that  his 
judgment  and  feelings  were  both  with  Buell. 
Tints  he  telegraphed  the  latter  on  February 
Halleck  says  Columbus  reenforced  from  New  Or- 
leans, and  steam  up  on  their  boats  ready  for  move  — 
bly  on  Cairo.  Wishes  to  withdraw  some  troops 
from  Donelson.  I  tell  him  improbable  that  rebels  are 
reenforced  from  New  Orleans  or  attack  Cairo.  Think 
[they]  will  abandon  Columbus.  .  .  .  How  soon  can 
rou  be  in  front  of  Nashville,  and  in  what  force  ? 
What  news  of  the  rebels  ?  If  the  force  in  West  can 
take  Nashville,  or  even  hold  its  own  for  the  present,  I 
hope  to  have  Richmond  and  Norfolk  in  from  three  to 
four  weeks. 
He  sent  a  similar  dispatch  to  Halleck,  in 
which  he  pointed  out  Nashville  as  the  press- 
ing objective  : 
buell  has  gone  to  Bowling  Green.  I  will  be  in  com- 
munication with  him  in  a  few  minutes,  and  we  will 
then  arrange.  The  fall  of  Clarksville  confirms  my 
.  I  think  Cairo  is  not  in  danger,  and  we  must 
now  direct  our  efforts  on  Nashville.  The  rebels  hold 
firm  at  Manassas.  In  less  than  two  weeks  I  shall  move 
the  army  of  the  Potomac,  and  hope  to  be  in  Richmond 
soon  after  you  are  in  Nashville.  I  think  Columbus 
will  be  abandoned  within  a  week.  We  will  have  a 
desperate  battle  on  this  line. 
While  the  three  generals    were  discussing 
high  strategy  and  grand  campaigns  by  tele- 
..  and  probably  deliberating  with  more 
anxiety  the  possibilities  of  personal  fame,  the 
simple   soldiering  of   Grant   and   Foote  was 
ing  some  of  the  problems  that  confused 
cientinc  hypothesis.    They  quietly  occupied 
'  llarksville,  which  the  enemy  abandoned ;  and 
even  while  preparing  to  do  so,  Grant  suggested 
in  his  dispatch  of  February  19,    "If  it  is  the 
•  of  the  general  commanding  department, 
I   can    have    Nashville   on    Saturday  week." 
1  the  suggestion  in  a  dispatch 
I  ebruary  21,  but  the  coveted  permission 
did  not  come  in  time. 
Meanwhile  Buell,  having  gone  to  Bowling 
Green  to  push  forward  his  railroad  bridge,  and 
hearing  of  the  fall  of  Clarksville  and  the  prob- 
able abandonment  of  Nashville,  moved  on  by 
forced  marches  with  a  single  division,  reaching 
the  Cumberland  opposite  the  city  on  the  25th. 
The  enemy  had  burned  the  bridge  and  he 
could  not  cross;  but  almost  simultaneously 
he  witnessed  the  arrival  of  steamboats  bring- 
ing General  Nelson's  division,  which  imme- 
diately landed  and  occupied  the  place.  This 
officer  and  his  troops,  after  several  varying  or- 
ders, were  finally  sent  up  the  Cumberland  to 
Grant,  and  ordered  forward  by  him  to  occupy 
Nashville  and  join  Buell.  It  was  a  curious 
illustration  of  dramatic  justice  that  the  strug- 
gle of  the  generals  over  the  capture  of  the 
place  should  end  in  the  possession  of  Nash- 
ville by  the  troops  of  Buell  under  the  orders 
of  Grant,  whose  name  had  not  once  been 
mentioned  by  the  contending  commanders. 
For  a  few  days  succeeding  the  occupation 
of  Nashville  news  and  rumors  of  what  the 
rebels  were  doing  were  very  conflicting,  and 
none  of  the  Union  commanders  suggested  any 
definite  campaign.  On  February  26  Halleck 
ordered  preparations  for  a  movement  up  either 
the  Tennessee  or  the  Cumberland,  as  events 
might  require;  but  for  two  days  he  could  not 
determine  which.  Finally,  on  the  1st  of  March, 
he  sent  distinct  orders  to  Grant  to  command 
an  expedition  up  the  Tennessee  River,  to  de- 
stroy the  railroad  and  cut  the  telegraph  at 
Eastport,  Corinth,  Jackson,  and  Humboldt. 
This  was  to  be,  not  a  permanent  army  ad- 
vance, but  a  temporary  raid  by  gun-boats 
and  troops  on  transports ;  all  of  which,  after 
effecting  what  local  destruction  they  could, 
were  to  return  —  the  whole  movement  being 
merely  auxiliary  to  the  operations  then  in 
progress  against  New  Madrid  and  Island  No. 
10,  designed  to  hasten  the  fall  of  Columbus. 
It  turned  out  that  the  preparations  could  not 
be  made  as  quickly  as  Halleck  had  hoped; 
the  delay  arising,  not  from  the  fault  or  neg- 
lect of  any  officer,  but  mainly  from  the  pre- 
vailing and  constantly  increasing  floods  in 
the  Western  waters,  and  especially  from  dam- 
age to  telegraph  lines  that  seriously  hindered 
the  prompt  transmission  of  communications 
and  orders.  Out  of  this  latter  condition  there 
also  grew  the  episode  of  a  serious  misunder- 
standing between  Halleck  and  Grant,  which 
threatened  to  obscure  the  new  and  brilliant 
fame  which  the  latter  was  earning. 
Only  a  moment  of  vexation  and  ill  temper 
can  account  for  the  harsh  accusation  Halleck 
sent  to  Washington,  that  Grant  had  left  his 
post  without  leave,  that  he  had  failed  to  make 
reports,  that  ne  and  his  army  were  demoral- 
ized by  the  Donelson  victory.  Reply  came 
back  that  generals  must  observe  discipline  as 
well  as  privates.  "  Do  not  hesitate  to  arrest 
him  [Grant]  at  once,"  added  McClellan,  "if
THE   MISSISSIPPI  AND   SI  I  I LO II 
the  good  of  the  service  requires  it,  and  place 
C.  F.  Smith  in  command."  Halleck  imme- 
diately acted  on  the  suggestion,  ordered  Grant 
to  remain  at  Fort  Henry,  and  gave  the  pro- 
posed Tennessee  expedition  to  Smith.  Grant 
obeyed,  and  at  first  explained,  with  an  admi- 
rable control  of  temper,  that  he  had  not  been 
in  fault.  Later  on,  however,  feeling  himself 
wronged,  he  several  times  asked  to  be  relieved 
from  duty.  By  this  time  Halleck  was  con- 
vinced that  he  had  unjustly  accused  Grant 
and  as  peremptorily  declined  to  relieve  him, 
and  ordered  him  to  resume  his  former  general 
command.  "  Instead  of  relieving  you,"  he 
added,  "  I  wish  you,  as  soon  as  your  new  army 
is  in  the  field,  to  assume  the  immediate  com- 
mand and  lead  it  on  to  new  victories."  In 
truth,  while  neither  general  had  been  unjust 
by  intention,  both  had  been  blamable  in  con- 
duct. Grant  violated  technical  discipline  in 
leaving  his  command  without  permission; 
Halleck,  with  undue  haste,  preferred  an  accu- 
sation which  further  information  proved  to 
be  groundless.  It  is  to  the  credit  of  both  that 
they  dismissed  the  incipient  quarrel  and  with 
new  zeal  and  generous  confidence  immediately 
joined  in  hearty  public  service. 
While  the  Grant- Halleck  controversy  and 
preparations  for  the  Tennessee  River  expedi- 
tion were  both  still  in  progress,  the  military 
situation  was  day  by  day  slowly  defining  it- 
self, though  as  yet  without  very  specific  ac- 
tion or  conclusion.  Buell,  becoming  satisfied 
that  the  enemy  had  no  immediate  intention 
to  return  and  attack  him  at  Nashville,  inquired 
on  March  3  of  Halleck :  "  What  can  I  do  to 
aid  your  operations  against  Columbus  ?  "  To 
this  Halleck  replied  on  the  4th  with  the  infor- 
mation that  Columbus  had  been  evacuated, 
and  asked,  "  Why  not  come  to  the  Tennessee 
and  operate  with  me  to  cut  Johnston's  line 
with  Memphis,  Randolph,  and  New  Madrid  ?  " 
Without  committing  himself  definitely,  Buell 
answered  on  the  6th,  merely  proposing  that 
they  should  meet  at  Louisville  to  discuss  de- 
tails. Halleck,  however,  unable  to  spare  the 
time,  held  tenaciously  to  his  proposition,  in- 
forming Assistant-Secretary  Scott,  at  Cairo,  of 
the  situation  in  these  words  : 
I  telegraphed  to  General  Buell  to  reenforce  me  as 
strongly  as  possible  at  or  near  Savannah  [Tennessee]. 
Their  line  of  defense  is  now  an  oblique  one,  extending 
from  Island  No.  10  to  Decatur  or  Chattanooga.  Hav- 
ing destroyed  the  railroad  and  bridges  in  his  rear, 
Johnston  cannot  return  to  Nashville.  We  must  again 
pierce  his  center  at  Savannah  or  Florence.  Buell  should 
move  immediately,  and  not  come  in  too  late,  as  he  did 
at  Donelson. 
Feeling  instinctively  that  he  could  get  no 
effective  voluntary  help  from  Buell,  Halleck 
turned  again  to  McClellan,  informing  him  of 
Vol.  XXXVI.— 92. 
his  intended  expedition  up  the  Tennessee 
River,  that  he  had  directed  a  landing  to  be 
made  at  Savannah,  that  he  had  sent  intrench- 
ing tools,  and  would  push  forward  reinforce- 
ments as  rapidly  as  possible.  On  the  follow- 
ing day,  however,  reporting  the  strength  ol 
Grant's  forces,  he  said:  "You  will  perceive 
from  this  that  without  Buell's  aid  I  am  too 
weak  for  operations  on  the  Tennessee."  '1  lie 
information  received  by  him  during  the  next 
twenty-four  hours  that  Curtis  had  won  a  splen- 
did victory  at  the  battle  of  Pea  Ridge  in  Arkan- 
sas made  a  favorable  change  in  his  resources, 
and  he  explains  his  views  and  intentions  to 
McClellan  with  more  confidence  : 
Reserves  intended  to  support  General  Curtis  will 
now  be  drawn  in  as  rapidly  as  possible  and  sent  to  the 
Tennessee.  I  propose  going  there  in  a  few  days.  That 
is  now  the  great  strategic  line  of  the  Western  campaign, 
and  I  am  surprised  that  General  Buell  should  hesitate 
to  reenforce  me.  He  was  too  late  at  Fort  Donelson,  as 
Hunter  has  been  in  Arkansas.  I  am  obliged  to  make 
my  calculations  independent  of  both.  Believe  me,  gen- 
eral, you  make  a  serious  mistake  in  having  three  inde- 
pendent commands  in  the  West.  There  never  will  and 
never  can  be  any  cooperation  at  the  critical  moment; 
all  military  history  proves  it.  You  will  regret  your 
decision  against  me  on  this  point.  Your  friendship 
for  individuals  has  influenced  your  judgment.  Be  it 
so.  I  shall  soon  fight  a  great  battle  on  the  Tennessee 
unsupported,  as  it  seems ;  but  if  successful,  it  will  settle 
the  campaign  in  the  West. 
• 
We  may  also  conclude  that  another  element 
of  the  confidence  that  prompted  his  language 
was  the  intimation  lately  received  from  the 
Secretary  of  War,  who  three  days  before  had 
asked  him  to  state  "  the  limits  of  a  military 
department  that  would  place  all  the  Western 
operations  you  deem  expedient  under  your 
command."  In  fact,  events  in  the  East  as  well 
as  in  the  West  were  culminating  that  rather 
suddenly  ended  existing  military  conditions. 
The  naval  battle  between  the  Merri?;iac3.x\di  the 
Mo?iitor,  and  the  almost  simultaneous  evacua- 
tion of  Manassas  Junction  by  the  rebel  forces 
in  Virginia,  broke  the  long  inactivity  of  the 
Army  of  the  Potomac. 
We  cannot  better  illustrate  how  intently 
Mr.  Lincoln  was  watching  army  operations, 
both  in  the  East  and  the  West,  than  by  quot- 
ing his  dispatch  of  March  10  to  Buell : 
The  evidence  is  very  strong  that  the  enemy  in  front 
of  us  here  is  breaking  up  and  moving  off.  General 
McClellan  is  after  him.  Some  part  of  the  force  may 
be  destined  to  meet  you.  Look  out,  and  be  prepared. 
I  telegraphed  Halleck,  asking  him  to  assist  you  if 
needed. 
McClellan's  aimless  march  to  capture  a  few 
scarecrow  sentinels  and  quaker  guns  in  the 
deserted  rebel  field-works,  which  had  been  his 
nightmare  for  half  a  year,  afforded  the  oppor- 
tunity for  a  redistribution  of  military  leader-
666 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
ships,  which  the  winter's  experience  plainly 
dictated.  Slow  and  cautious  in  maturing  his 
decisions,  President  Lincoln  was  prompt  to 
announce  them  when  they  were  once  reached. 
On  the  nth  of  March  he  issued  his  War  Or- 
der No.  3,  one  of  his  most  far-reaching  acts 
oi  military  authority.  It  relieved  McClellan 
from  the  duties  ot  General-in-Chief  of  all  the 
armies,  and,  sent  him  to  the  held  charged  with 
the  single  object  of  conducting  the  campaign 
nst  Richmond.  This  made  possible  a  new 
combination  for  the  West,  and  the  same  order 
united  the  three  Western  departments  (as  far 
as  Ivnowille,  Tennessee)  under  the  com- 
mand of  Halleck.  Under  this  arrangement 
was  fought  the  great  battle  on  the  Tennessee 
that  Halleck  predicted,  giving  the  Union  arms 
a  victory  the  decisive  influence  of  which  was 
felt  throughout  the  remainder  of  the  war;  a 
success,  however,  due  mainly  to  the  gallantry 
of  the  troops,  and  not  to  any.  genius  or  brill- 
iant generalship  of  Halleck  or  his  subordinate 
commanders. 
The  Tennessee  River  expedition  under 
Smith,  which  started  on  March  10,  made  good 
its  landing  at  Savannah,  and  on  the  14th  Smith 
sent  Sherman  with  a  division  on  nineteen 
steamboats,  preceded  by  gun-boats,  to  ascend 
the  river  towards  Eastport  and  begin  the  work 
of  destroying  railroad  communications,  which 
had  been  the  original  object  of  the  whole 
movement.  Sherman  made  a  landing  to  carry 
out  his  orders;  but  this  was  the  season  of 
spring  freshets.  A  storm  of  rain  and  snow 
changed  every  ravine  and  rivulet  to  a  torrent ; 
the  Tennessee  River  rose  fifteen  feet  in  twenty- 
four  hours,  covering  most  steamboat  landings 
with  deep  water;  and  the  intended  raid  by 
land  and  water  was  reduced  to  a  mere  river 
reconnaissance,  which  proved  the  enemy  to 
be  in  considerable  force  about  Iuka  and  Cor- 
inth, covering  and  guarding  the  important  rail- 
road crossings  and  communications.  Sherman 
felt  himself  compelled  to  return  to  Pittsburg 
Landing,  on  the  west  bank  of  the  Tennessee, 
nine  miles  above  Savannah,  which  was  on  the 
east  bank.  The  place  was  already  well  known 
to  both  armies,  for  a  skirmish  had  occurred 
there  on  the  1st  of  March  between  Union  gun- 
boats and  a  rebel  regiment. 
It  would  seem  that  General  Smith  had  fixed 
upon  Pittsburg  Landing  as  an  available  point 
from  which  to  operate  more  at  leisure  upon 
the  enemy's  railroad  communications,  and 
hence  had  already  sent  Hurlbut's  division 
thither,  which  Sherman  found  there  on  his 
return.  The  place  was  not  selected  as  a  bat- 
tle-field, nor  as  a  base  of  operations  for  a  cam- 
paign, but  merely  to  afford  a  temporary  lodg- 
ment for  raids  upon  the  railroads.  By  a  silent 
and  gradual  change  of  conditions,  however, 
the  intention  and  essential  features  of  the 
whole  Tennessee  River  movement  underwent 
a  complete  transformation.  What  was  begun 
as  a  provisional  expedition  became  a  strategic 
central  campaign ;  and  what  was  chosen  for 
an  outpost  of  detachments  was  almost  imper- 
ceptibly turned  into  a  principal  point  of  con- 
centration, and  became,  by  the  unexpected 
assault  of  the  enemy,  one  of  the  hardest- 
fought  battle-fields  of  the  whole  war. 
Halleck  assumed  command  of  his  combined 
departments  by  general  orders  dated  March 
13,  and  after  explaining  once  more  to  Buellthat 
all  his  available  force  not  required  to  defend 
Nashville  should  be  sent  up  the  Tennessee, 
he  telegraphed  him  on  the  16th  of  March: 
Move  your  forces  by  land  to  the  Tennessee  as  rap- 
idly as  possible.  .  .  .  Grant's  army  is  concentrating 
at  Savannah.  You  must  direct  your  march  on  that 
point  so  that  the  enemy  cannot  get  between  us. 
The  combined  campaign  thus  set  in  motion 
was  wise  in  conception,  but  its  preliminary 
execution  proved  lamentably  weak ;  and  the 
blame  is  justly  attributable,  in  about  equal 
measure,  to  Halleck,  Buell,  and  Grant.  For 
a  few  days  Halleck's  orders  were  decided  and 
firm ;  then  there  followed  a  slackening  of  opin- 
ion and  a  variance  of  direction  that  came 
near  making  a  disastrous  wreck  of  the  whole 
enterprise.  His  positive  orders  to  Buell  to 
move  as  rapidly  as  possible  and  to  concen- 
trate at  Savannah  were  twice  repeated  on  the 
1 7th  ;  but  on  the  26th  he  directed  him  to  con- 
centrate at  Savannah  or  Eastport,  and  on  the 
29th  to  concentrate  at  Savannah  or  Pitts- 
burg, while  on  April  5  he  pointedly  con- 
sented to  a  concentration  at  Waynesborough. 
This  was  inexcusable  uncertainty  in  the  com- 
binations of  a  great  strategist,  who  complained 
that  "  hesitation  and  delay  are  losing  us  the 
golden  opportunity."  These  were  the  timid 
steps  of  a  blind  man  feeling  his  way,  and  not 
the  firm  strides  of  a  leader  who  promised  to 
"split  secession  in  twain  in  one  month." 
It  can  hardly  be  claimed  that  BuelPs  march 
fulfilled  the  injunction  to  move  "  as  rapidly  as 
possible."  When  his  advanced  division  reached 
Duck  River  at  Columbia  on  the  18th  it  found 
that  stream  swollen  and  the  bridge  destroyed, 
and  set  itself  to  the  task  of  building  a  new 
frame  bridge  with  a  deliberateness  better  be- 
fitting the  leisure  of  peace  than  the  pressing 
hurry  of  war.  Buell  arrived  in  person  at 
Columbia  on  the  26th.*  He  manifested 
his  own  dissatisfaction  with  the  delay  by  or- 
dering the  construction  of  another  bridge, 
this  time  of  pontoons,  which  was  completed 
simultaneously  with  the  first   on  March  30. 
*  Buell  in  "  Battles  and  Leaders  of  the  Civil  War," 
Vol.  I.,  p.  491.
THE  MISSISSIPPI  AND   SHI  10 1  I 
Still  further  delay  was  projected  by  a  propo- 
sition to  halt  for  concentration  at  Waynes- 
borough.  It  must  be  said  in  justice  to  Buell, 
that  Halleck  did  not  complain  of  the  slow 
bridge-building  at  Columbia,  and  that  he 
consented  to  the  concentration  at  Waynes- 
borough.  Had  it  taken  place,  Buell's  army 
would  again  have  been  "  too  late  "  for  a  great 
battle.  The  excuse  offered,  that  Buell  sup- 
posed the  Union  army  to  be  safe  on  the  east 
bank  of  the  Tennessee  at  Savannah,  can 
scarcely  be  admitted;  for  on  the  23d  Buell 
received  a  letter  from  Grant  which  said : 
I  am  massing  troops  at  Pittsburg,  Tennessee.  There 
is  every  reason  to  suppose  that  the  rebels  have  a  large 
force  at  Corinth,  Mississippi,  and  many  at  other  points 
on  the  road  towards  Decatur. 
This  information,  which  Buell  considered 
of  no  importance,  appears  to  have  excited 
the  serious  attention  of  General  William  Nel- 
son, one  of  Buell's  division  commanders,  who, 
already  impatient  at  the  tardy  bridge-build- 
ing, read  the  signs  of  danger  in  the  condi- 
tions about  him  with  a  truer  military  instinct. 
Nelson  finally  obtained  permission  to  ford  the 
now  falling  waters  of  Duck  River,  crossed  his 
division  on  the  29th  and  30th,  and  began  the 
march  over  the  ninety  miles  remaining  to  be 
traversed  with  an  enthusiasm  and  impetuosity 
that  swept  the  whole  army  past  the  proposed 
halting-place  at  Waynesborough,  bringing  his 
own  division  to  Savannah  on  the  5th,  and 
others  on  the  6th,  of  April. 
It  reflects  no  credit  on  General  Halleck  or 
General  Grant  that  during  the  interim  of  Bu- 
ell's march  the  advanced  post  of  Pittsburg 
Landing  had  been  left  in  serious  peril.  Hal- 
leck was  busy  at  St.  Louis  collecting  rein- 
forcements to  send  to  Grant,  with  the  an- 
nounced intention  to  proceed  to  the  field  and 
take  personal  command  on  the  Tennessee 
River.  This  implied  a  delay  demanding  either 
the  concentration  of  the  whole  army  at  Sa- 
vannah, as  originally  ordered  by  him,  behind 
the  safe  barrier  of  the  Tennessee,  or  strong  for- 
tifications for  the  exposed  position  of  Pittsburg 
Landing,  on  the  west  bank.  On  the  other  hand, 
Grant,  resuming  his  general  command  in  per- 
son on  March  17,  and  finding  his  five  divisions 
separated,  three  at  Savannah  and  two  at  Pitts- 
burg Landing, —  nine  miles  apart,  with  a  river 
between  them, —  properly  took  alarm  and  im- 
mediately united  them ;  but  in  doing  this  he 
committed  the  evident  fault  of  defying  danger 
by  choosing  the  advanced  position  and  of 
neglecting  to  raise  the  slightest  intrenchments 
to  protect  his  troops  —  which  were  without 
means  of  rapid  retreat  —  against  a  possible  as- 
sault from  an  enemy  only  twenty  miles  distant, 
and  according  to  his  own  reports  at  all  times 
his  equal  if  not  his  superior  in  numbers.    But 
one  cause  can  be  assigned  for  this  palpable 
imprudence.  Well  instructed  in  the  duti< 
an  officer  under  orders,  he  was  just  beginning 
his  higher  education  as  a  leader  of  armies,  and 
he  was  about  to  receive  the  most  impressive 
lesson  of  his  very  strange  career. 
It  has  been  already  stated  that  after  the  fall 
of  Fort  Donelson  the  rebel  commanders  fled 
southward  in  confusion  and  dismay.  We  have 
the  high  authority  and  calm  judgment  of  Gen- 
eral Grant,  in  the  mature  experience  and  reflec- 
tion of  after  years,  that  "  if  one  general  who 
would  have  taken  the  responsibility  had  been 
in  command  of  all  the  troops  west  of  the  Al- 
leghanies,  he  could  have  marched  to  Chatta- 
nooga,  Corinth,  Memphis,  and  Vicksburg 
with  the  troops  we  then  had";  *  but  the  Seces- 
sionists of  the  South-west  were  still  in  the  fer- 
vor of  their  early  enthusiasm,  and  recovered 
rapidly  from  the  stupefaction  of  unexpected 
disaster.  In  the  delay  of  four  or  five  weeks 
that  the  divided  ambition  and  over-cautious 
hesitation  of  the  Union  generals  afforded  them, 
they  had  renewed  their  courage,  and  united 
and  reenforced  their  scattered  armies.  The 
separation  of  the  armies  of  Johnston  from 
those  of  Beauregard,  which  seemed  irreparable 
when  the  Tennessee  River  was  opened,  had 
not  been  maintained  by  the  prompt  advance 
that  everybody  pointed  out  but  which  no- 
body executed.  By  the  23d  of  March  the 
two  Confederate  generals  had  once  more, 
without  opposition,  effected  a  junction  of  their 
forces  at  and  about  Corinth,  and  thus  reversed 
the  pending  military  problem.  In  the  last 
weeks  of  February  it  could  have  been  the 
united  Unionists  pursuing  the  divided  Con- 
federates. In  the  last  weeks  of  March  it  was 
the  united  Confederates  preparing  to  attack 
the  divided  armies  of  Halleck  and  Buell.  The 
whole  situation  and  plan  is  summed  up  in  the 
dispatch  of  General  Albert  Sidney  Johnston 
to  Jefferson  Davis,  dated  April  3,  1862  : 
General  Buell  is  in  motion,  30,000  strong,  rapidly 
from  Columbia  by  Clifton  to  Savannah ;  Mitchell  be- 
hind him  with  10,000.  Confederate  forces.  40,000,  or- 
dered forward  to  offer  battle  near  Pittsburg.  Division 
from  Bethel,  main  body  from  Corinth,  reserve  from 
Burnsville  converge  to-morrow  near  Monterey  on 
Pittsburg.  Beauregard  second  in  command ;  Polk, 
left;  Hardee,  center;  Bragg,  right  wing;  Breckinridge, 
reserve.  Hope  engagement  before  Buell  can  form  junc- 
tion. 
The  Confederate  march  took  place  as  pro- 
jected, and  on  the  evening  of  April  5  their 
joint  forces  went  into  bivouac  two  miles  from 
the  Union  camps.  That  evening  also  the  Con- 
federate commanders  held  an  informal  con- 
ference. Beauregard  became  impressed  with 
impending  defeat ;  their  march  had  been  slow, 
the  rations  they  carried  were  exhausted,  and 
*  Grant,  "  Personal  Memoirs,"  Vol.  I.,  p.  317.
668 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
their  extra  rations  and  ammunition  were  not 
\ !  at  hand.  They  could  no  longer  hope  to 
effect  the  complete  surprise  that  was  an  es- 
al  feature  of  their  plan.  Beauregard  ad- 
ange  of  programme  —  to  abandon  the 
.  ted  attack  and  convert  the  movement 
a  ••  reconnaissance  in  force."  General 
iston  listened,  but  refused  his  assent,  and 
orders  were  given  to  begin  the  battle  next 
morning.  No  suspicion  of  such  a  march  or  at- 
tack entered  the  mind  of  any  Union  officer; 
and  that  same  day  Grant  reported  to  Halleck, 
••  The  main  force  of  the  enemy  is  at  Corinth." 
The  natural  position  occupied  by  the  Union 
forces  is  admitted  to  have  been  unusually 
strong.  The  Tennessee  River  here  runs  nearly 
north.  North  of  the  camps,  Snake  Creek  with 
an  affluent,  Owl  Creek,  formed  a  barrier 
stretching  from  the  river  bank  in  general  di- 
rection towards  the  south-west.  South  of  the 
camps,  Lick  Creek  and  river  sloughs  also 
formed  an  impassable  obstruction  for  a  con- 
siderable distance  next  to  the  Tennessee.  The 
river  on  the  east,  and  Snake  and  Owl  creeks 
on  the  west,  thus  inclosed  a  high  triangular 
plateau  with  sides  three  or  four  miles  in  length, 
crossed  and  intersected  to  some  extent  by 
smaller  streams  and  ravines,  though  generally 
open  towards  the  south.  The  roads  from  Pitts- 
burg Landing  towards  Corinth  followed  the 
main  ridge,  also  towards  the  south-west.  A  net- 
work of  other  roads,  very  irregular  in  direc- 
tion, ran  from  the  Corinth  roads  to  various 
points  in  the  neighborhood.  Alternate  patches 
of  timber,  thick  undergrowth,  and  open  fields 
covered  the  locality.  Two  miles  from  Pitts- 
burg Landing,  on  one  of  the  Corinth  roads, 
stood  a  log  meeting-house,  called  Shiloh 
Church,  which  was  destined  to  become  the 
center  of  the  battle-field  and  to  give  its  name 
to  the  conflict. 
Three  of  Grant's  divisions  were  camped  in 
an  irregular  line  from  Lick  Creek  to  Owl 
Creek,  closing  the  open  side  of  the  triangular 
plateau — Sherman's  division  in  the  center,  near 
Shiloh  Church;  Prentiss  to  his  left,  towards  the 
Tennessee  River  and  somewhat  in  advance; 
McClernand  to  the  right,  towards  Owl  Creek 
and  somewhat  in  rear.  Half-way  back  from 
Shiloh  Church  to  Pittsburg  Landing  were 
camped  the  divisions  of  Hurlbut  and  of 
Smith,  the  latter  now  commanded  —  owing 
nith's  illness  — by  W.  H.  L.  Wallace.  An- 
other division,  under  General  Lew.  Wallace, 
had  been  left  at  Crump's  Landing,  six  miles 
to  the  north,  as  a  guard  against  rebel  raids, 
which  threatened  to  gain  possession  of  the 
banks  of  the  Tennessee  at  that  point  to  de- 
stroy the  river  communications.  Grant  had 
apprehensions  of  a  raid  of  this  character  and 
cautioned  his  officers  against  it,  an   admoni- 
tion that  was  the  basis  of  such  alertness  and 
vigilance  as  had  existed  for  several  days. 
Most  of  the  particulars  of  the  battle  that 
followed  will  probably  always  form  a  subject 
of  dispute.  There  were  no  combined  or  dra- 
matic movements  of  masses  that  can  be  an- 
alyzed and  located.  The  Union  army  had  no 
prepared  line  of  defense  ;  three  lines  in  which 
the  rebel  army  had  been  arranged  for  the  at- 
tack became  quickly  broken  and  mingled  with 
one  another.  On  the  Union  side  the  irregular 
alignment  of  the  camps  and  the  precipitancy 
of  the  attack  compelled  the  formation  of 
whatever  line  of  battle  could  be  most  hurriedly 
improvised.    General  Force  says  : 
A  combat  made  up  of  numberless  separate  encount- 
ers of  detached  portions  of  broken  lines,  continually 
shifting  position  and  changing  direction  in  the  forest 
and  across  ravines,  filling  an  entire  day,  is  almost  in- 
capable of  a  connected  narrative. 
At  5  o'clock  on  the  morning  of  Sunday, 
April  6,  1862,  the  rebel  lines  moved  forward 
to  the  attack.  The  time  required  to  pass  the 
intervening  two  miles,  and  the  preliminary 
skirmishes  with  Union  pickets  and  a  recon- 
noitering  Union  regiment  that  began  the 
fight,  gradually  put  the  whole  Union  front 
on  the  alert;  and  when  the  mainlines  closed 
with  each  other,  the  divisions  of  Prentiss, 
Sherman,  and  McClernand  were  sufficiently  in 
position  to  offera  stubborn  resistance.  The  Con- 
federates found  themselves  foiled  in  the  easy 
surprise  and  confusion  that  they  had  counted 
upon.  It  would  be  a  tedious  waste  of  time  to 
attempt  to  follow  the  details  of  the  fight,  which, 
thus  begun  before  sunrise,  continued  till  near 
sunset. 
Along  the  labyrinth  of  the  local  roads,  over 
the  mixed  patchwork  of  woods,  open  fields, 
and  almost  impenetrable  thickets,  across 
stretches  of  level,  broken  by  miry  hollows  and 
abrupt  ravines,  the  swinging  lines  of  conflict 
moved  intermittently  throughout  the  entire 
day.  There  was  onset  and  repulse,  yell  of  as- 
sault and  cheer  of  defiance,  screeching  of 
shells  and  sputtering  of  volleys,  advance  and 
retreat.  But  steadily  through  the  fluctuating 
changes  the  general  progress  was  northward, 
the  rebels  gaining  and  pushing  their  advance, 
the  Unionists  stubbornly  resisting,  but  little  by 
little  losing  their  ground.  It  was  like  the  flux 
and  reflux  of  ocean  breakers,  dashing  them- 
selves with  tireless  repetition  against  a  yield- 
ing, crumbling  shore.  Beauregard,  to  whom  the 
Confederate  commander  had  committed  the 
general  direction  of  the  battle,  several  times 
during  the  day  advanced  his  headquarters 
from  point  to  point,  following  the  steady  prog- 
ress of  his  lines.  The  time  consumed  and 
the  lists  of  dead  and  wounded  are  sufficient 
evidence  of  the  brave  conduct  of  officers  and
THE  MISSISSIPPI  AND   SIIILOH. 
the  gallant  courage  of  men  on  both  sides.  On 
the  Union  side  the  divisions  of  Hurlbut  and 
W.  H.  L.  Wallace  had  early  been  brought 
forward  to  sustain  those  of  Prentiss,  Sherman, 
and  McClernand.  It  was,  to  a  degree  seldom 
witnessed  in  a  battle,  the  slow  and  sustained 
struggle,  through  an  entire  day,  of  one  whole 
army  against  another  whole  army.  The  five 
Union  divisions  engaged  in  the  battle  of  Sun- 
day numbered  33,000.*  The  total  force  of  the 
Confederates  attacking  them  was  40,000. 
It  was  in  the  latter  half  of  the  afternoon 
that  the  more  noteworthy  incidents  of  the  con- 
test took  place.  The  first  of  these  was  the 
death  of  the  Confederate  commander,  General 
Albert  Sidney  Johnston,  who  fell  personally 
leading  the  charge  of  a  brigade,  t  The  knowl- 
edge of  the  loss  was  carefully  kept  from  the 
Confederate  army,  and  the  management  on 
their  side  of  the  conflict  was  not  thereby  im- 
paired, because  Beauregard  had  been  mainly 
intrusted  with  it  from  the  beginning.  About 
5  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  a  serious  loss  fell 
upon  the  Unionists.  General  Prentiss,  com- 
manding the  Sixth  Division,  and  General  W. 
H.  L.  Wallace,  commanding  the  Third  Divis- 
ion, whose  united  lines  had  held  one  of  the 
key-points  of  the  Federal  left  since  9  o'clock 
in  the  forenoon  against  numerous  and  well- 
concentrated  assaults  of  the  enemy,  found  that 
the  withdrawal  of  troops  both  on  the  right  and 
the  left  produced  gaps  that  offered  an  open- 
ing to  the  enemy.  Prentiss  had  been  instructed 
by  General  Grant  to  hold  his  position  at  all 
hazards,  and  consulting  with  Wallace  they 
determined  to  obey  the  order  notwithstanding 
the  now  dangerous  exposure.  But  the  enemy 
seized  the  advantage;  they  quickly  found 
themselves  enveloped  and  surrounded;  only 
portions  of  their  command  succeeded  in  cut- 
ting their  way  out;  Wallace  was  mortally 
wounded,  and  Prentiss  and  fragments  of  the 
two  divisions,  numbering  2200  men,  were 
taken  prisoners. 
This  wholesale  capture  left  a  wide  opening 
in  the  left  of  the  Federal  lines,  and  probably 
would  have  given  the  victory  to  the  rebels 
but  for  another  circumstance  which  somewhat 
compensated  for  so  abrupt  a  diminution  of  the 
Union  forces.  The  Union  lines  had  now  been 
swept  back  more  than  a  mile  and  a  half,  and 
the  rebel  attack  was  approaching  the  main 
Corinth  road,  running  from  Pittsburg  Landing 
along  the  principal  ridge,  which  here  lay 
nearly  at  a  right  angle  to  the  river.  Colonel 
Webster  of  General  Grant's  staff,  noting  the 
steady  retreat  of  the  Union  lines  and  foresee- 
ing that  the  advancing  attack  of  the  enemy 
would  eventually  reach  this  ridge,  busied  him- 
self to  post  a  line  of  artillery  —  from  thirty- 
five  to  fifty  guns — along  the  crest,  gathering 
whatever  was  available,  among  which  were 
several  heavy  pieces.  To  man  and  support  this 
extemporized  battery  he  organized  and  posted, 
in  conjunction  with  Hurlbut's  division,  such 
fragments  of  troops  as  had  become  useless  at 
the  front.  To  reach  the  crest  of  this  ridge  and 
this  line  of  hastily  planted  cannon  the  enemy 
was  obliged  to  cross  a  deep,  broad  hollow,  ex- 
tending to  the  river  and  partly  filled  with  back- 
water. The  topography  of  the  place  was  such 
that  the  gun-boats  Tyler  and  Lexiugto?i  were 
also  stationed  in  the  Tennessee,  abreast  the 
valley  and  sheet  of  back-water,  and  their  guns 
were  thus  enabled  to  assist  the  line  of  cannon 
on  the  ridge  by  a  cross-fire  of  shells. 
General  Grant  had  passed  the  previous  night 
at  Savannah,  where  he  had  become  aware  of 
the  arrival  of  the  advance  brigades  of  Nelson's 
division  of  Buell's  army  on  the  same  day  (April 
5).  He  started  by  boat  to  Pittsburg  Land- 
ing early  Sunday  morning,  having  heard  the 
firing  but  not  regarding  it  as  an  attack  in  force. 
Arrived  there  he  became  a  witness  of  the  seri- 
ous nature  of  the  attack,  and  remained  on  the 
battle-field,  visiting  the  various  division  com- 
manders and  giving  such  orders  as  the  broken 
and  fluctuating  course  of  the  conflict  suggested. 
But  the  defense,  begun  in  uncertainty  and  haste 
before  his  arrival,  could  not  thereafter  be  re- 
duced to  any  order  or  system;  it  necessarily, 
all  day  long,  merely  followed  the  changes  and 
the  violence  of  the  rebel  attack.  The  blind  and 
intricate  battle-field  offered  little  chance  for 
careful  planning ;  the  haste  and  tumult  of  com- 
bat left  no  time  for  tactics.  On  neither  side  was 
the  guidance  of  general  command  of  much 
service;  it  was  the  division, brigade,  and  regi- 
mental commanders  who  fought  the  battle. 
About  noon  of  Sunday  General  Grant  began 
to  have  misgivings  of  the  result,  and  dispatched 
a  letter  for  help  to  Buell's  forces  at  Savannah, 
saying,  "  If  you  will  get  upon  the  field,  leav- 
ing all  your  baggage  on  the  east  bank  of  the 
*  Throughout  the  history  of  the  War  of  the  Rebellion 
there  is  a  marked  disagreement  in  the  estimate  of 
numbers  engaged  in  battles,  as  stated  by  the  Unionists 
on  one  side  and  the  Confederates  on  the  other.  This  vari- 
ance comes  from  a  different  manner  of  reporting  those 
"present  for  duty"  in  the  two  armies,  out  of  which 
arises  a  systematic  diminution  of  Confederates  and  in- 
crease of  Federals  in  the  statements  of  Confederate 
writers.  General  Force,  in  his  admirable  little  book 
"  From    Fort    Henry   to    Corinth,"   analyzes    these 
methods  of  computation  as  applied  to  the  battle  of 
Shiloh,  and  arrives  at  the  conclusion  that  the  actual 
number  of  "combatants  engaged  in  the  battle "  of 
Sunday  was  fully  40,000  Confederates  and  between 
32,000  and  33,000  Unionists. 
The  reenforcements  of  Monday  numbered,  of  Buell's 
army,  about  20,000;  Lew.  Wallace's.  6500;  and  other 
regiments,  about  1400. 
t  W.  P.  Johnston  in  "  Battles  and  Leaders  of  the 
Civil  War,"  Vol.  I.,  p.  504.
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
river,  it   will  be  more  to  our  advantage,  and 
possibly  save  the  day  to  us."    He  also  sent 
rder  to  General  Lew.  Wallace,  at  Crump's 
,.  to   hasten  his  division  to  the  right 
e  army. 
So  tar  as  the  Confederates  had  any  distinct 
plan  of  battle,  it  was  merely  the  simple  one 
of  forcing  the   Federals  away  from  the  river 
to  gain  possession  of  Pittsburg  Landing,  cut 
leir  means  of  retreat  by  seizing  or  destroy- 
ing the  transports,  and  compel  Grant  to  ca- 
pitulate.  But  the  execution  of  this  leading 
design  was  completely  frustrated  by  the  difti- 
nature  of  the  ground  and  by  the  gallant 
stance  made  by  Prentiss  and  Wallace,  who 
held  their  line  on  the  Union  left,  unshaken 
and  unmoved,  from  9  o'clock  in  the  forenoon 
until  5  o'clock  in  the  evening.  The  principal 
advance  made  by  the  rebels  was  not  next  to 
the  river,  where  they  desired  it,  but  on  the 
Union  right  next  to  Owl  Creek,  where  it  was 
of  least  value.  Even  after  they  had  captured 
the  whole  residue  of  Prentiss's  and  Wallace's 
divisions,  and  had  cleared  out  that  terrible 
center  of  the  Union  fire  which  they  had  inef- 
fectually assaulted  a  dozen  times,  and  which  by 
bitter  experience  they  themselves  learned  to 
know  and  designate  as  the  "Hornets' Nest," 
and  near  which  their  Commander-in-Chief  had 
fallen  in  death,  they  were  not  yet  within  reach 
of  the  coveted  banks  of  Pittsburg  Landing. 
Before  them  still  yawned  the  broad  valley, 
the  back-water,  the  mire,  the  steep  hills  across 
which  screeched  the  shells  from  the  gun- 
boats and  from  the  long  death-threatening 
line  of  Webster's  reserve  artillery,  and  behind 
which  the  bayonets  of  Hurlbut's  division,  yet 
solid  in  organization  and  strong  in  numbers, 
glinted  in  the  evening  sun.  From  Hurlbut's 
right  the  shattered  but  courageous  remnants 
o\  the  divisions  of  McClernand  and  Sherman 
stretched  away  in  an  unbroken  line  towards 
( 'reek.  Ground  had  been  lost  and  ground 
had  been  won:  the  line  of  fire  had  moved  a 
mile  and  a  half  to  the  north  ;  the  lines  of  com- 
batants had  been  shortened  from  three  miles 
in  the  morning  to  one  mile  in  the  evening; 
but  now,  after  the  day's  conflict,  when  the 
sun  approached  his  setting,  the  relations  and 
the  prospects  of  the  bloody  fight  were  but 
little  changed.  The  Confederates  held  the 
field  of  battle,  but  the  Unionists  held  their 
central  position,  their  supplies,  and  their  com- 
munications. The  front  of  attack  had  become 
as  weak  as  the  front  of  defense.  On  each  side 
from  eight  to  ten  thousand  men  had  been  lost, 
by  death,  wounds,  and  capture.  From  ten  to 
fifteen  thousand  panic-stricken  Union  strag- 
glers cowered  under  the  shelter  of  the  high 
river  bank  at  Pittsburg  Landing.  From  ten  to 
fifteen  thousand  Confederate  stragglers,  some 
equally  panic-stricken,  others  demoralized  by 
the  irresistible  temptations  of  camp-pillage,  en- 
cumbered the  rear  of  Beauregard's  army.  The 
day  was  nearly  gone  and  the  battle  was  un- 
decided. 
A  controversy  has  recently  arisen  as  to  the 
personal  impressions  and  intentions  of  Gen- 
eral Grant  at  this  crisis.  His  "  Memoirs"  de- 
clare in  substance  that  he  was  still  so  confident 
of  victory  that  he  gave  orders  that  evening 
for  a  renewal  of  the  fight  on  the  following 
morning  by  a  general  attack.  General  Buell, 
on  the  other  hand,  makes  a  strong  argument 
that  the  evidence  is  against  this  assumption.* 
It  is  possible,  as  in  so  many  other  cases,  that 
the  truth  lies  midway  between  the  two  state- 
ments. A  famous  newspaper  correspondent 
who  was  on  the  battle-field  made  the  following 
record  of  the  affair  long  before  this  contro- 
versy arose : 
The  tremendous  roar  to  the  left,  momentarily  nearer 
and  nearer,  told  of  an  effort  to  cut  him  off  from  the 
river  and  from  retreat.  Grant  sat  his  horse,  quiet, 
thoughtful,  almost  stolid.  Said  one  to  him,  "  Does  not 
the  prospect  begin  to  look  gloomy?"  "Not  at  all," 
was  the  quiet  reply.  "  They  can't  force  our  lines 
around  these  batteries  to-night  —  it  is  too  late.  Delay 
counts  everything  with  us.  To-morrow  we  shall  attack 
them  with  fresh  troops  and  drive  them,  of  course." 
The  correspondent  adds,  in  a  note  :  "  I  was 
myself  a  listener  to  this  conversation,  and  from 
it  I  date,  in  my  own  case  at  least,  the  begin- 
ning of  any  belief  in  Grant's  greatness."! 
As  this  writer  was  one  of  Grant's  most 
candid  critics,  his  testimony  on  this  point  is 
all  the  more  valuable. 
The  turning-point  was  at  length  reached. 
Whatever  may  have  been  the  much-disputed 
intentions  and  hopes  of  commanders  at  that 
critical  juncture  that  were  not  expressed 
and  recorded,  or  what  might  have  been  the 
possibilities  and  consequence  of  acts  that 
were  not  attempted,  it  is  worse  than  useless 
to  discuss  upon  hypothesis.  Each  reader  for 
himself  must  interpret  the  significance  of  the 
three  closing  incidents  of  that  momentous 
Sunday,  which  occurred  almost  simultane- 
ously. 
Some  of  the  rebel  division  commanders, 
believing  that  victory  would  be  insured  by 
one  more  desperate  assault  against  the  Union 
left  to  gain  possession  of  Pittsburg  Landing, 
made  arrangements  and  gave  orders  for  that 
object.  It  seems  uncertain,  however,  whether 
the  force  could  have  been  gathered  and  the 
movement  made  in  any  event.  Only  a  single 
brigade  made  the  attempt,  and  it  was  driven 
back   in  confusion.     The  officer  of  another 
*  Buell  in  "  Battles  and  Leaders  of  the  Civil  War," 
Vol.  I.,  p.  523,  et  seq. 
t  Whitelaw  Reid,  "  Ohio  in  the  Civil  War."
THE   MISSISSIPPI  AND   SHI  10//. 
671 
detachment  refused  the  desperate  service. 
Still  others  were  overtaken  in  their  prepara- 
tion by  orders  from  General  Beauregard  to 
withdraw  the  whole  Confederate  army  from 
the  fight,  and  to  go  into  bivouac  until  the  fol- 
lowing day.  Eager  as  was  that  commander  for 
victory,  the  conclusion  had  been  forced  on 
his  mind,  that,  for  that  clay  at  least,  it  was  not 
within  the  power  of  his  army  to  complete 
their  undertaking;  and  accordingly  he  di- 
rected that  the  fight  should  cease.  He  reached 
this  determination  not  knowing  that  Buell  had 
arrived,  and  still  hoping  that  he  would  not 
arrive,  even  on  the  morrow. 
In  this  hope  Beauregard  was  disappointed. 
While  yet  his  orders  to  retire  from  the  com- 
bat were  being  executed,  and  before  the  last 
desperate  charge  of  the  rebels  towards  Web- 
ster's reserve  artillery  was  beaten  back,  the  van- 
guard of  Nelson's  division,  which  had  marched 
from  Savannah  and  had  been  ferried  across 
the  river  by  transports,  was  mounting  the  bank 
at  Pittsburg  Landing  and  deploying  in  line  of 
battle  under  the  enemy's  fire,  Ammen's  fresh 
brigade  first  coming  to  the  support  of  the 
line  of  Union  guns.  A  few  men  out  of  the 
brigade  fell  by  the  rebel  bullets,  and  then  came 
twilight,  and  soon  after  the  darkness  of  night. 
The  tide  of  victory  was  effectually  turned. 
Whatever  the  single  army  of  Grant  might 
or  might  not  have  accomplished  on  the  follow- 
ing day  against  the  army  of  Beauregard  is 
only  speculation.  Beauregard's  attack  had 
been  ordered  discontinued  before  the  actual 
presence  of  BuelPs  troops  on  the  battle-field, 
Had  the  attack  been  continued,  however,  that 
opportune  arrival  would  have  rendered  its 
success  impossible. 
After  sunset  of  Sunday  all  chances  of  a  rebel 
victory  vanished.  The  remainder  of  Nelson's 
division  immediately  crossed  the  river  and  fol- 
lowed Ammen's  brigade  to  the  field.  Critten- 
den's division  was  next  placed  in  position 
during  the  night.  Finally  McCook's  division 
reached  Pittsburg  Landing  early  Monday 
morning  and  promptly  advanced  to  the  front. 
General  Buell,  who  had  come  before  the  van- 
guard on  Sunday  evening,  in  person  directed 
the  placing  and  preparation  of  these  three 
superb  divisions  of  his  army  —  a  total  of  about 
twenty  thousand  fresh,  wTell- equipped,  and 
well-drilled  troops  —  to  renew  an  offensive 
conflict  along  the  left  of  the  Federal  line.  On 
the  Federal  right  was  stationed  the  fresh  di- 
vision of  General  Lew.  Wallace,  numbering 
6500,  which  had  arrived  from  Crump's  Land- 
ing a  little  after  nightfall,  and  which  took  posi- 
tion soon  after  midnight  of  Sunday.  Along  the 
Federal  right  center,  Grant's  reduced  divisions 
which  had  fought  the  battle  of  Sunday  were 
gathered  and  reorganized,  McClernand  and 
Sherman  in  front,  Hurlbut  and  the  escaped 
remnants  of  W.  H.  L.  Wallace's  division,  with 
some  new  detachments,  in  reserve.  Grant 
and  Buell  met  on  Sunday  evening  and  agreed 
to  take  the  offensive  jointly  on  Monday 
morning;  Buell  to  command  his  three  divis- 
ions on  the  left,  Grant  to  direct  his  own  foi 
on  the  right.  No  special  plan  was  adopted 
other  than  simultaneously  to  drive  the  enemy 
from  the  field.  The  plan  was  carried  out  in 
harmony  and  with  entire  success.  With  only 
temporary  checks,  brought  about  by  the  too 
great  impetuosity  of  the  newly  arrived  reen- 
forcements,  the  two  wings  of  the  Union  army 
advanced  steadily,  and  by  3  o'clock  in  the 
afternoon  were  in  possession  of  all  the  ground 
from  which  they  had  been  driven  on  the  pre- 
vious day ;  while  the  rebel  army  was  in  full 
retreat  upon  Corinth  —  foiled  of  its  victory, 
dejected  in  spirit,  and  in  a  broken  and  almost 
hopeless  state  of  disorganization.  A  little 
more  genius  and  daring  on  the  part  of  the 
Union  commanders  would  have  enabled  them 
by  vigorous  pursuit  to  demolish  or  capture 
it;  but  they  chose  the  more  prudent  alterna- 
tive, and  remained  satisfied  with  only  suffi- 
cient advance  to  assure  themselves  that  the 
enemy  had  disappeared. 
HALLECK'S    CORINTH    CAMPAIGN. 
On  Wednesday,  April  9,  two  days  after  the 
battle  of  Shiloh,  General  Grant  gave  evidence 
that  he  had  fully  learned  the  severe  lesson  of 
that  terrible  encounter.  Reporting  to  Halleck 
his  information  that  the  enemy  was  again 
concentrating  all  his  forces  at  Corinth,  he 
added : 
I  do  not  like  to  suggest,  but  it  appears  to  me  that  it 
would  be  demoralizing  upon  our  troops  here  to  be 
forced  to  retire  upon  the  opposite  bank  of  the  river, 
and  unsafe  to  remain  on  this  many  weeks  without 
large  reinforcements. 
If  his  mind  had  reached  a  conviction  of 
this  character  two  or  three  weeks  earlier,  the 
results  of  the  battle  of  Shiloh  would  have 
given  better  testimony  to  his  military  efficiency. 
Halleck's  opinion  probably  coincided  with 
that  of  Grant,  and  the  fortunes  of  war  enabled 
him  immediately  to  fulfill  his  promise  to  come 
to  his  relief.  The  day  which  saw  the  con- 
clusion of  the  fight  at  Shiloh  (April  7,  1S62) 
witnessed  the  surrender  of  the  rebel  works  at 
Island  No.  10,  on  the  Mississippi  River,  and 
the  quick  capture  of  nearly  their  entire  garri- 
son of  six  or  seven  thousand  men.  This  finished 
the  task  which  General  Pope  had  been  sent  to 
do  and  enabled  Halleck  to  transfer  him  and 
his  army,  by  water,  from  the  Mississippi  River 
to  the  Tennessee.  Halleck's  order  was  made 
on  April  15,  and  on  the  2 2d  Pope  landed  at
67- 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
Hamburg,  four  miles  above  the  battle-field  of 
Shiloh,  with  his  compact  force  of  twenty  thou- 
sand men  fully  organized  and  equipped,  and 
flushed  with  a  signal  victory. 
Halleck  had  arrived  before  him.  Reaching 
Pittsburg  Landing  on  the  nth  of  April,  he 
n  with  industry  to  cure  the  disorders  pro- 
duced by  the  recent  battle.  Critics  who  still 
accuse  the  Lincoln  administration  of  ignorant 
meddling  with  military  affairs  are  invited  to 
remember  the  language  of  the  Secretary  of 
War  to  Halleck  on  this  occasion :  "  I  have  no 
instructions  to  give  you.  Go  ahead,  and  suc- 
cess attend  you." 
The  arrival  of  Pope  was  utilized  by  Halleck 
to  give  his  united  command  an  easy  and  im- 
mediate organization  into  army  corps.  His 
special  field  orders  of  April  28  named  the 
Army  of  the  Tennessee  the  First  Army  Corps, 
commanded  by  Grant,  and  constituting  his 
right  wing ;  the  Army  of  the  Ohio  the  Second 
Army  Corps,  commanded  by  Buell,and  consti- 
tuting the  center ;  and  the  newly  arrived  Army 
of  the  Mississippi  the  Third  Army  Corps,  com- 
manded by  Pope,  and  forming  the  left  wing. 
Two  days  later  (April  30)  another  order  gave 
command  of  the  right  wing  to  General  Thomas, 
whose  division  of  the  Army  of  the  Ohio  was 
added  to  it ;  it  also  organized  a  reserve  corps 
under  General  McClernand,  and  had  this 
provision  : 
Major-General  Grant  will  retain  the  general  com- 
mand of  the  district  of  West  Tennessee,  including  the 
Army  Corps  of  the  Tennessee,  and  reports  will  be 
made  to  him  as  heretofore;  but  in  the  present  move- 
ments he  will  act  as  second  in  command  under  the 
major-general  commanding  the  department. 
The  exact  intent  of  this  assignment  remains 
to  this  day  a  matter  of  doubt.  Nominally,  it 
advanced  Grant  in  rank  and  authority;  prac- 
tically, it  deprived  him  of  active  and  important 
duty.  Halleck  being  on  the  field  in  person  is- 
sued his  orders  directly  to  the  corps  command- 
ed received  reports  from  them,  and  for 
about  two  months  Grant  found  himself  with- 
out serious  occupation.  The  position  became  so 
irksome  that  he  several  times  asked  to  be  re- 
lieved, but  Halleck  refused;  though  he  finally 
allowed  him  to  go  for  a  season  into  a  species 
of  honorable  retirement,  by  removing  his 
juarters  from  the  camp  of  the  main  army. 
(  orning  to  the  front  so  soon  after  the  great 
battle,  Halleck  seems  to  have  been  impressed 
with  the  seriousness  of  that  conflict,  for  all  his 
preparations  to  assume  the  offensive  were 
made  with  the  most  deliberate  caution.  It 
was  manifest  that  the  enemy  intended  to  de- 
fend Corinth,  and  necessarily  that  place  be- 
came his  first  objective.  With  all  the  efforts 
that  the  Confederate  Government  could  make, 
however,  Beauregard  succeeded  in  bringing 
together  only  about  fifty  thousand  effective 
troops.  Halleck's  combined  armies  contained 
more  than  double  that  number ;  but  such  was 
his  fear  of  another  disaster,  that  his  advance 
upon  Corinth  was  not  like  an  invading  march, 
but  like  the  investment  of  a  fortress.  An  army 
carrying  a  hundred  thousand  bayonets,  in  the 
picturesque  language  of  General  Sherman, 
moved  upon  Corinth  "  with  pick  and  shovel." 
Intrenching,  bridge-building,  road-making, 
were  the  order  of  the  day.  Former  carelessness 
and  temerity  were  succeeded  by  a  fettering 
over-caution. 
The  Administration  expected  more  ener- 
getic campaigning  from  a  commander  of  Hal- 
leck's reputed  skill  and  the  brilliant  results 
realized  since  his  advent.  The  country  seemed 
at  the  culmination  of  great  events.  Since  the 
beginning  of  the  year  success  had  smiled  al- 
most continuously  upon  the  Union  cause.  As 
the  crowning  inspiration,  in  the  midst  of  his 
march  there  had  come  the  joyful  news  of  Far- 
ragut's  triumph  and  the  capture  of  New  Or- 
leans. "  Troops  cannot  be  detached  from  here 
on  the  eve  of  a  great  battle,"  telegraphed 
Halleck  to  Stanton.  "  We  are  now  at  the  en- 
emy's throat."  To  such  encouraging  assur- 
ances the  Administration  responded  with  every 
possible  exertion  of  reenforcement  and  sup- 
ply. But  days  succeeded  days,  and  the  Presi- 
dent's hope  remained  deferred.  Nearly  a 
month  later,  when  reports  came  that  Halleck 
was  awaiting  the  arrival  of  a  fourth  Union 
army, —  that  of  Curtis  from  Arkansas, —  and 
these  reports  were  supplemented  by  intima- 
tions that  he  would  like  to  be  joined  by  a 
fifth  army  from  somewhere  else,  Mr.  Lincoln 
sent  him  a  letter  of  so  kindly  an  explanation, 
that,  in  the  actual  condition  of  things,  every 
word  was  a  stinging  rebuke : 
Several  dispatches  from  Assistant-Secretary  Scott 
and  one  from  Governor  Morton,  asking  reinforce- 
ments for  you,  have  been  received.  I  beg  you  to  be 
assured  we  do  the  best  we  can.  I  mean  to  cast  no 
blame  when  I  tell  you  each  of  our  commanders  along 
our  line  from  Richmond  to  Corinth  supposes  himself 
to  be  confronted  by  numbers  superior  to  his  own. 
Under  this  pressure  we  thinned  the  line  on  the  Upper 
Potomac,  until  yesterday  it  was  broken  at  heavy  loss  to 
us  and  General  Banks  put  in  great  peril,  out  of  which 
he  is  not  yet  extricated  and  may  be  actually  captured. 
We  need  men  to  repair  this  breach,  and  have  them  not 
at  hand.  My  dear  general,  I  feel  justified  to  rely  very 
much  on  you.  I  believe  you  and  the  brave  officers 
and  men  with  you  can  and  will  get  the  victory  at 
Corinth. 
In  reply  Halleck  resorted  to  the  usual  ex- 
pedient of  reading  the  Secretary  of  War  a 
military  lecture.     May  26  he  wrote: 
Permit  me  to  remark  that  we  are  operating  upon  too 
many  points.  Richmond  and  Corinth  are  now  the 
great  strategical  points  of  war,  and  our  success  at  these 
points  should  be  insured  at  all  hazards.
7 7/ A'    MISSISSIPPI   AND    Sill LO II. 
His  herculean  effort  expended  itself  with- 
out corresponding  result,  when,  a  week  later, 
he  marched  into  the  empty  intrenchments  of 
Corinth,  only  to  find  that  the  fifty  thousand 
men  composing  Beauregard's  army  —  the  vital 
strength  of  rebellion  in  the  West  —  were  re- 
treating at  leisure  to  Baldwin  and  Okalona, 
railroad  towns  some  fifty  miles  to  the  south. 
It  had  required  but  two  days  for  the  rebel  army 
to  go  from  Corinth  to  the  Shiloh  battle-field. 
Halleck  consumed  thirty-seven  days  to  pass 
over  the  same  distance  and  the  same  ground, 
with  an  army  twice  as  strong  as  that  of  his 
adversary.  Pope  had  reached  him  April  22, 
and  it  was  the  29th  of  May  when  the  Union 
army  was  within  assaulting  distance  of  the 
rebel  intrenchments.  The  campaign  had  ad- 
vanced with  scientific  precision,  and  attained 
one  object  for  which  it  was  conducted :  it 
gained  the  fortifications  of  Corinth.  In  the 
end,  however,  it  proved  to  be  but  the  shell  of 
the  expected  victory.  Beauregard  had  not  only 
skillfully  disputed  the  advance  and  deceived 
his  antagonist,  but  at  the  critical  moment 
had  successfully  withdrawn  the  rebel  forces 
to  wage  more  equal  conflict  on  other  fields. 
The  enemy  evacuated  Corinth  on  the  night 
of  the  29th,  and  beyond  the  usual  demoraliza- 
tion which  attends  such  a  retrograde  move- 
ment suffered  little,  for  Halleck  ordered  only 
pursuit  enough  to  drive  him  to  a  convenient 
distance.  The  achievement  was  the  triumph 
of  a  strategist,  not  the  success  of  a  general. 
Instead  of  seizing  his  opportunity  to  win  a 
great  battle  or  to  capture  an  army  by  siege,  he 
had  simply  manoeuvred  the  enemy  out  of 
position. 
In  reporting  his  success  to  Washington, 
Halleck  of  course  magnified  its  value  to  the 
utmost,*  and  for  the  moment  the  Administra- 
tion, not  having  that  full  information  which 
afterward  so  seriously  diminished  the  estimate, 
accepted  the  report  in  good  faith  as  a  grand 
Union  triumph.  It  was  indeed  a  considera- 
ble measure  of  success.  Besides  its  valuable 
moral  effect  in  strengthening  the  patriotism 
and  the  confidence  of  the  North,  and  the  sec- 
ondary military  advantage  that  the  combined 
Western  armies  gained  in  the  two  months' 
strict  camp  discipline  and  active  practical  in- 
struction in  the  art  of  field  fortification,  there- 
was  the  positive  possession  of  an  important 
railroad  center,  and  the  apparent  security 
of  western  and  central  Tennessee  from  rebel 
occupation. 
In  addition  to  these  it  had  one  yet  more 
immediate  and  valuable  military  result.  U  he- 
remaining  rebel  strongholds  on  the  upper 
Mississippi  were  now  so  completely  turned 
that  they  were  no  longer  tenable.  Forts  Pil- 
low and  Randolph  were  hastily  evacuated  by 
the  enemy,  and  the  Union  flotilla  took  pos- 
session of  their  deserted  works  on  June  5. 
Halleck  had  been  looking  somewhat  anxiously 
for  help  on  the  river,  and  had  complained  of 
the  unwillingness  of  the  gun-boats  to  run  past 
the  Fort  Pillow  batteries  and  destroy  the  river 
fleet  of  the  rebels.  Flag-Officer  Davis  had  con- 
sidered the  risk  too  great  and  had  remained 
above  Fort  Pillow,  occupying  his  time  in 
harassing  the  works  by  a  continuous  bombard- 
ment. Now  that  the  way  was  opened  he  im- 
mediately advanced  in  force,  and  at  night  of 
June  5  came  to  anchor  two  miles  above  the 
city  of  Memphis.  His  flotilla  had  lately  re- 
ceived a  notable  reenforcement.  One  of  the 
many  energetic  impulses  which  Stanton  gave 
to  military  operations  in  the  first  few  months 
after  he  became  Secretary  of  War  was  his  em- 
ployment of  an  engineer  of  genius  and  daring. 
Charles  Ellet,  Jr.,  to  extemporize  a  fleet  of 
steam  rams  for  service  on  the  Western  rivers. 
The  single  blow  by  which  the  iron  prow  of 
the  Merrimac  sunk  the  frigate  Congress  in 
Hampton  Roads,  during  the  famous  sea-fight 
between  the  Merrimac  and  the  Monitor,  had 
demonstrated  the  effectiveness  of  this  novelty 
in  marine  warfare.  Ellet's  proposal  to  the  Sec- 
retary of  the  Navy,  to  try  it  on  the  Western 
rivers,  wras  not  favorably  entertained;  proba- 
bly because  the  Navy  Department  already 
had  its  officers  and  its  appropriations  engaged 
in  other  more  methodical  and  permanent  na- 
val constructions.  But  the  eager  and  impa- 
tient Secretary  of  War  listened  to  Ellet's  plans 
with  interest,  and  commissioned  him  to  col- 
lect such  suitable  river  craft  as  he  could  find 
on  the  Ohio,  and  to  convert  them  post-haste 
into  steam  rams,  "the  honorable  Secretary.'' 
reports   Ellet,  "  expressing  the  hope  that  not 
*  Pope,  condensing  into  one  dispatches  from  Rose- 
crans,  Hamilton,  and  Granger,  telegraphed  to  Halleck: 
"The  two  divisions  in  the  advance  under  Rosecrans  are 
slowly  and  cautiously  advancing  on  Baldwin  this  morn- 
ing, with  the  cavalry  on  both  flanks.  Hamilton  with  two 
divisions  is  at  Rienzi  and  between  there  and  Boonville, 
ready  to  move  forward  should  they  be  needed.  One 
brigade  from  the  reserve  occupies  Danville.  Rosecrans 
reports  this  morning  that  the  enemy  has  retreated  from 
Baldwin,  but  he  is  advancing  cautiously.  The  woods, 
for  miles,  are  full  of  stragglers  from  the  enemy,  who  are 
coming  in  in  squads.  Not  less  than  ten  thousand  men 
Vol.  XXXVI.— 93. 
are  thus  scattered  about,  who  will  come  in  within  a 
day  or  two."  General  Halleck  dispatched  to  the  War 
Department:  "General  Pope,  with  40x00  men,  is  30 
miles  south  of  Corinth,  pushing  the  enemy  hard.  He 
already  reports  10,000  prisoners  and  deserters  from  the 
enemy,  and  15,000  stand  of  arms  captured."  This  dis- 
patch of  General  Halleck' s  made  a  great  sensation. 
The  expectation  that  the  stragglers  would  come  into 
the  national  camp  was  disappointed  ;  the  prisoners 
taken  were  few,  and  Pope  was  censured  for  making 
a  statement  of  fact  which  he  neither  made  nor  author- 
ized.    [Force,  "From  Fort  Henry  to  Corinth."")
674 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
m  >re  than  twenty  days  would  be  consumed 
string  them  ready  for  service."  Ellet  re- 
ceived ins  orders  March  27.*  On  May  26 
he  joined  the  flotilla  o(  Davis  with  a  fleet  of 
six  vessels,  formerly  swift  and  strong  river  tugs 
and  si  5,  but  now  strengthened  and  con- 
I   for   their    new   and    peculiar    service, 
and  these  accompanied  the  gun-boats  in  the 
ince   against    Memphis.     On   the   morn- 
g     flune  6  the  rebel  flotilla  of  eight  gun- 
ts  was  discovered  in  front  of  the  city  pre- 
paring for  fight,  and  there  occurred  another 
of  the  many  dramatic  naval  combats  of  the 
war. 
1  ne  eight  rebel  gun-boats  ranged  them- 
selves in  two  lines  abreast  the  city.  The  hills 
of  Memphis  were  covered  with  thousands  of 
spectators.  With  the  dawn  five  of  the  Union 
gun-boats  began  backing  down  the  Missis- 
sippi, holding  their  heads  against  the  strong 
current  to  insure  easier  control  and  manage- 
ment of  the  vessel.  The  steam  rams  were  yet 
tied  up  to  the  river  bank.  Soon  the  rebel  flo- 
tilla opened  fire  on  the  Union  gun- boats,  to 
which  the  latter  replied  with  spirit.  Four  of 
Kllet's  rams,  hearing  the  guns,  cast  loose  to 
take  part  in  the  conflict.  One  of  them  dis- 
abled her  rudder,  and  another,  mistaking  her 
orders,  remained  out  of  fighting  distance.  But 
the  Queen  of  the  West  and  the  Monarch,  pass- 
ing swiftly  between  the  gun-boats,  dashed  into 
the  rebel  line.  The  gun-boats,  now  turning 
their  heads  down  the  stream,  hastily  followed. 
There  was  a  short  and  quick  melee  of  these  un- 
couth-looking river  monsters,  ram  crashing  in- 
to ram  and  gun-boat  firing  into  gun-boat  in  a 
confusion  of  attack  and  destruction.  In  twenty 
minutes  four  rebel  vessels  and  one  Union  ram 
sunk  or  disabled.  At  this  the  other  four 
els  turned  and  fled  down-stream,  and 
in  a  running  pursuit  of  an  hour,  extending  some 
niles,  three  additional  vessels  of  the  enemy 
captured  or  destroyed.    The  Confeder- 
ate fleet  was  almost  annihilated;  only  one  of 
their  gun-boats    escaped.    The  two   disabled 
m  ships  were  soon  raised  and  repaired, 
but  the  ram  fleet  had  suffered  an  irreparable 
nander,  Ellet,  was  wounded  by 
a  pistol-shot,  from  the  effect  of  which  he  died 
two  weeks  later.  The  combat  was  witnessed 
I  5  J  :(t.  Thompson,  commanding  the  city  with 
a  small  de  :nt  of  rebel  troops.   In  his  re- 
port of  the  affair  he  mentions  that "  we  were  hur- 
ried in  our  retirement  from  Memphis,"  and  that 
afternoon  the  Union  flag  floated  over  the  city. 
The  naval  victory  of  Memphis  supplemented 
and  completed  the  great  Tennessee  campaigns 
begun  by  Grant's  reconnaissance  of  January 
9.  A  division  of  Buell's  army  under  General 
Mitchell  had  in  the  meanwhile  occupied  and 
held  the  line  of  the  Tennessee  River  between 
Tuscumbia  and  Stevenson;  and  thus  the 
frontier  of  rebellion  had  been  pushed  down 
from  middle  Kentucky  below  the  southern 
boundary  of  the  State  of  Tennessee. 
But  the  invading  movement  following  the 
line  of  the  Tennessee  River  had  expended  its 
advantage;  the  initial  point  of  a  new  cam- 
paign had  been  reached.  We  are  left  in  doubt 
under  what  conviction  Halleck  formed  his 
next  plans,  for  he  determined  to  dissolve  and 
scatter  the  magnificent  army  of  more  than  one 
hundred  thousand  men  under  his  hand  and 
eye;  apparently  in  violation  of  the  very  mili- 
tary theory  he  had  formulated  two  weeks  be- 
fore, when  he  said, "  We  are  operating  on  too 
many  points."  In  a  dispatch  to  the  Secretary 
of  War  on  the  9th  of  June  he  announced  his 
purpose  to  do  three  distinct  things:  First,  to 
hold  the  Memphis  and  Charleston  railroad; 
secondly,  to  send  relief  to  Curtis  in  Arkansas; 
thirdly,  to  send  troops  to  east  Tennessee.  To 
these  three  he  added  a  fourth  purpose  in  a 
dispatch  of  June  12: 
If  the  combined  fleet  of  Farragut  and  Davis  fail  to 
take  Vicksburg,  I  will  send  an  expedition  for  that  pur- 
pose as  soon  as  1  can  reenforce  General  Curtis. 
Up  to  this  point  the  country's  estimate  of 
General  Halleck's  military  ability  had  steadily 
risen,  but  several  serious  errors  of  judgment 
now  arrested  his  success.  The  greatest  of 
these  errors,  perhaps,  was  the  minor  impor- 
tance he  seems  to  have  attached  to  a  continua- 
tion of  the  operations  on  the  Mississippi  River. 
We  have  mentioned  the  victory  of  Farragut, 
and  we  need  now  to  follow  the  upward  course 
of  his  fleet.  After  receiving  the  surrender  of 
New  Orleans  in  the  last  days  of  April,  he 
promptly  pushed  on  an  advance  section  of  his 
ships  up  the  Mississippi,  which  successively, 
and  without  serious  opposition,  received  the 
surrender  of  all  the  important  cities  below 
Vicksburg,  where  Farragut  himself  arrived  on 
the  20th  of  May.  Vicksburg  proved  to  be  the 
most  defensible  position  on  the  Mississippi,  by 
reason  of  the  high  bluffs  at  and  about  the 
city.  The  Confederates  had  placed  such  faith 
in  their  defenses  of  the  upper  river,  at  Colum- 
bus, Island  No.  10,  and  Fort  Pillow,  that  no 
*  In  response  to  that  order  I  selected  three  of  the  est  part,  and  8  feet  hold.    At  New  Albany  I  secured  a 
-t  and   swiftest  stern-wheel  coal   tow-boats  at  boat  of  about  the  same  length  but  rather  less  beam, 
Pittsburg,  of  which  the  average  dimensions  are  about  and  subsequently  I  selected  another  at  Cincinnati,  of 
170  feet  length,  30  feet  beam,  and  over  5  feet  hold.    At  about  the  same  class  as  the  last,  and  sent  her  to  Madi- 
Cincinnati  I  selected  two  side- wheel  boats,  of  which  son  to  be  fitted  out.     [Ellet  to  McGunnigle,  April  27,  , 
the  largest  is  180  feet  long,  37^  feet  beam  in  the  wid-  1862.    War  Records.]
THE  MISSISSIPPI  AND   SI  1 1 /.Oil. 
early  steps  were  taken  to  fortify  Vicksburg ; 
but  when  Farragut  passed  and  captured  the 
lower  forts  and  the  upper  defenses  fell,  the 
rebels  made  what  haste  they  could  to  create 
a  formidable  barrier  to  navigation  at  Vicks- 
burg. Beauregard  sent  plans  for  fortifications 
while  he  was  yet  disputing  Halleck's  advance 
from  Shiloh  to  Corinth;  and  Lovell  at  New 
Orleans,  retreating  before  Farragut's  invasion, 
shipped  the  heavy  guns  he  could  no  longer 
keep,  and  sent  five  regiments  of  Confederate 
troops,  which  he  could  no  longer  use,  to  erect 
the  works.  These  reached  their  destination  on 
May  12,  and  continuing  the  labors  and  prep- 
arations already  begun,  he  had  six  batteries 
ready  for  service  on  Farragut's  arrival.  Re- 
membering these  dates  and  numbers,  we  can 
realize  the  unfortunate  results  of  Halleck's 
dilatory  Corinth  campaign.  He  had  then  been 
in  command,  for  a  whole  month,  of  forces 
double  those  of  his  antagonist.  If,  instead  of 
digging  his  way  from  Shiloh  to  Corinth  "  with 
pick  and  shovel,"  he  had  forced  such  a  prompt 
march  and  battle  as  his  overwhelming  numbers 
gave  him  power  to  do,  the  inevitable  defeat 
or  retreat  of  his  enemy  would  have  enabled 
him  to  meet  the  advance  of  Farragut  with  an 
army  detachment  sufficient  to  effect  the  re- 
duction of  Vicksburg  with  only  slight  resistance 
and  delay.  Such  a  movement  ought  to  have 
followed  by  all  the  rules  of  military  and  po- 
litical logic.  The  opening  of  the  Mississippi 
outranked  every  other  Western  military  enter- 
prise in  importance  and  urgency.  It  would 
effectually  sever  four  great  States  from  the 
rebel  Confederacy ;  it  would  silence  doubt  at 
home  and  extinguish  smoldering  intervention 
abroad  ;  it  would  starve  the  rebel  armies  and 
feed  the  cotton  operatives  of  Europe.  There 
would  have  been  ample  time  ;  for  he  was  ad- 
vised as  early  as  the  27th  of  April  that  New 
Orleans  had  been  captured  and  that  Farra- 
gut had  "  orders  to  push  up  to  Memphis  im- 
mediately," and  he  ought  to  have  prepared  to 
meet  him. 
No  such  cooperation,  however,  greeted 
Farragut.  Reaching  Vicksburg,  his  demand 
for  the  surrender  of  the  place  was  refused. 
The  batteries  were  at  such  a  height  that  his 
guns  could  have  no  effect  against  them.  Only 
two  regiments  of  land  forces  accompanied  the 
fleet.  There  was  nothing  to  be  done  but  to  re- 
turn to  New  Orleans,  which  he  reached  about 
the  1st  of  June.  Here  he  met  orders  from 
Washington  communicating  the  great  desire 
of  the  Administration  to  have  the  river  opened, 
and  directing  further  efforts  on  his  part  to  that 
end.  Farragut  took  immediate  measures  to 
comply  with  this  requirement.  His  task  had 
already  become  more  difficult.  The  enemy 
quickly  comprehended  the  advantage  which 
the  few  high  bluffs  of  the  Mississippi  afforded 
them,  if  not  to  obstruct,  at  least  to  harass 
and  damage  the  operations  of  a  fleet  unsup- 
ported by  land  forces.  The  places  which  had 
been  surrendered  were,  on  the  retirement  of 
the  ships,  again  occupied,  and  batteries  \\  ere 
soon  raised,  which,  though  unable  to  cope  with 
larger  vessels,  became  troublesome  and  dan- 
gerous to  transports,  and  were  intermittently 
used  or  abandoned  as  the  advantage  or  neces- 
sity of  the  enemy  dictated. 
Farragut  again  reached  Vicksburg  about 
June  25,  accompanied  this  time  by  Porter  with 
sixteen  of  his  mortar-boats,  and  by  General 
Williams  at  the  head  of  three  thousand  Union 
troops.  The  mortar-sloops  were  placed  in  po- 
sition and  bombarded  the  rebel  \\  orks  on  the 
27th.  On  the  morning  of  June  28,  before  day- 
light, Farragut's  ships,  with  the  aid  of  the  con- 
tinued bombardment,  made  an  attack  on  the 
Vicksburg  batteries,  and  most  of  them  suc- 
ceeded in  passing  up  the  river  with  compara- 
tively small  loss.  Here  he  found  Ellet — brother 
of  him  who  was  wounded  at  Memphis  —  with 
some  vessels  of  the  ram  fleet,  who  carried  the 
news  to  the  gun-boat  flotilla  under  Davis  yet 
at  Memphis.  This  flotilla  now  also  descended 
the  river  and  joined  Farragut  on  the  1st  of 
July- 
We  have  seen,  by  the  dispatch  heretofore 
quoted,  that  Halleck  expected  the  combined 
naval  and  gun-boat  forces  to  reduce  the  Vicks- 
burg defenses,  but  also  that,  in  the  event  of 
their  failure,  he  would  send  an  army  to  help 
them.  The  lapse  of  two  weeks  served  to 
modify  this  intention.  The  Secretary  of  War. 
who  had  probably  received  news  of  Farragut's 
first  failure  to  pass  the  Vicksburg  batteries, 
telegraphed  him  (on  June  23)  to  examine  the 
project  of  a  canal  to  cut  off  Vicksburg.  sug- 
gested by  General  Butler  and  others.  Hal- 
leck replied  (on  June  28),  "  It  is  impossible  to 
send  forces  to  Vicksburg  at  present,  but  I  will 
give  the  matter  very  full  attention  as  soon  as 
circumstances  Mill  permit."  That  same  day 
Farragut  passed  above  the  batteries,  and  of  this 
result  Halleck  was  informed  by  Grant,  who 
was  at  Memphis.  Grant's  dispatch  added  an 
erroneous  item  of  news  concerning  the  num- 
ber of  troops  with  Farragut.  but  more  trust- 
worthy information  soon  reached  Halleck  in 
the  form  of  a  direct  application  from  Farragut 
for  help.  To  this  appeal  Halleck  again  felt 
himself  obliged  to  reply  in  the  negative,  July 
3,  1862: 
The  scattered  and  -weakened  condition  of  my  forces 
renders  it  impossible  for  me,  at  the  present,  to  detach 
any  troops  to  cooperate  with  you  on  Vicksburg.  Prob- 
ably I  shall  be  able  to  do  so  as  soon  as  I  can  get  my 
troops  more  concentrated.  This  may  delay  the  clearing 
of  the  river,  but  its  accomplishment  will  be  certain  in 
a  few  weeks.
o-o 
/  BRA  IL IM  LINCOLN. 
The  hopeful  promise  with  which  the  tele- 
gram closed  dwindled  away  during  the  eleven 
days  that  followed.  On  the  14th  of  July 
Stanton  asked  him  the  direct  question : 
The  S  of  the  Navy  desires  to  know  whether 
you  have,  or  intend  to  have,  any  Land  force  to  cooperate 
in  the  operations  at  Vicksburg.  Please  inform  me 
immediately,  inasmuch  as  orders  he  intends  to  give 
will  depend  on  your  answer. 
The  answer  this  time  was  short  and  conclu- 
sive. "  1  cannot  at  present  give  Commodore 
Farragut  any  aid  against  Vicksburg." 
A  c  >6perative  land  force  of  from  12,000  to 
15,000  men,  Farragut  estimated  in  his  report 
of  June  28,  would  have  been  sufficient  to  take 
the  works.  If  we  compare  the  great  end  to  be 
attained  with  the  smallness  of  the  detachment 
thought  necessary,  there  remains  no  reason- 
able explanation  why  Halleck  should  not 
have  promptly  sent  it.  But  the  chance  had 
been  lost.  The  waters  of  the  Mississippi  were 
falling  so  rapidly  that  Farragut  dared  not 
tarry  in  the  river;  and  in  accordance  with  or- 
ders  received  from  the  Department  on  July  20, 
he  again  ran  past  the  Vicksburg  batteries  and 
returned  to  New  Orleans. 
If  Halleck's  refusal  to  help  Farragut  take 
Vicksburg  seems  inexplicable,  it  is  yet  more 
difficult  to  understand  the  apparently  sudden 
cessation  of  all  his  former  military  activity,  and 
his  proposal,  just  at  the  point  wdien  his  army 
had  gathered  its  greatest  strength  and  effi- 
ciency, abruptly  to  terminate  his  main  cam- 
paign, and,  in  effect,  go  into  summer  quarters. 
He  no  longer  talked  of  splitting  secession  in 
twain  in  one  month,  or  of  being  at  the  enemy's 
throat.  He  no  longer  pointed  out  the  waste 
of  precious  time,  and  uttered  no  further  com- 
t  about  his  inability  to  control  BuelPs 
army.  His  desires  had  been  gratified.  He 
commanded  half  of  the  military  area  within 
the  Union  ;  he  had  three  armies  under  his 
own  eye ;  the  enemy  was  in  flight  before 
him;  he  could  throw  double  numbers  of  men 
at  any  given  point.  At  least  two  campaigns 
ofoversh  dowing  importance  invited  his  re- 
sistless march.  But  in  the  midst  of  his  success, 
in  the  plenitude  of  his  power,  with  fortune 
thrusting  opportunity  upon  him,  he  came  to  a 
sudden  halt,  folded  his  contented  arms,  and  im- 
itated the  conduct  that  he  wrongfully  imputed 
.••ant  after  Donelson — :;  Satisfied  with  his 
victory,  he  sits  down  and  enjoys  it  without  re- 
gard to  the  future."  In  a  long  letter  to  the 
Secretary  of  War,  dated  June  25,  after  review- 
ing  the   sanitary  condition  of  the   army  and 
pronouncing  it  very  good,  he  asks,  apparently 
as  the  main  question,  "  Can  we  carry  on  any 
summer  campaign  without  having  a  large  por- 
tion of  our  men  on  the  sick-list  ?  "  This  idea 
seems  to  dominate  his  thought  and  to  decide 
his  action.  Buell  had  been  ordered  eastward 
on  a  leisurely  march  towards  Chattanooga. 
Halleck  proposed  to  plant  the  armies  of  Grant 
and  of  Pope  on  the  healthy  uplands  of  northern 
Mississippi  and  Alabama  as  mere  corps  of  ob- 
servation. Having  personally  wrested  Corinth 
from  the  enemy,  he  exaggerated  its  strategical 
value.  As  a  terminal  point  in  the  southward 
campaign,  along  the  line  of  the  Tennessee 
River,  its  chief  use  was  to  aid  in  opening  the 
Mississippi  River  by  turning  the  Confeder- 
ate fortifications  from  Columbus  to  Memphis. 
Those  strongholds  once  in  Federal  possession, 
Corinth  inevitably  fell  into  a  secondary  role, 
especially  since  the  summer  droughts  ren- 
dered the  Tennessee  River  useless  as  a  mili- 
tary highway. 
Carrying  out  this  policy  of  Halleck,  a  large 
portion  of  the  Western  armies  of  the  Union 
wasted  time  and  strength  guarding  a  great  area 
of  rebel  territory  unimportant  for  military  uses, 
and  which  could  have  been  better  protected 
by  an  active  forward  movement.  The  secur- 
ity and  the  supply  of  Corinth  appears  to  have 
been  the  central  purpose.  Buell  was  delayed 
in  his  march  thoroughly  to  repair  the  railroad 
from  Corinth  eastward  towards  Chattanooga. 
Other  detachments  of  the  army  were  employed 
to  repair  the  railroads  westward  from  Corinth 
to  Memphis,  and  northward  from  Corinth  to 
Columbus.  For  several  months  all  the  ener- 
gies of  the  combined  armies  were  diverted 
from  their  more  legitimate  duty  of  offensive 
war  to  tedious  labor  on  these  local  railroads ;  * 
much  of  the  repairs  being  destroyed,  almost  as 
rapidly  as  performed,  by  daring  guerrilla  hos- 
tilities, engendered  and  screened  amidst  the 
surrounding  sentiment  of  disloyalty. 
It  is  impossible  to  guess  what  Halleck's 
personal  supervision  in  these  tasks  might  have 
produced,  for  at  this  juncture  came  a  culmi- 
nation of  events  that  transferred  him  to  an- 
other field  of  duty ;  but  the  legacy  of  policy, 
plans,  and  orders  that  he  left  behind  contrib- 
uted to  render  the  whole  Western  campaign 
sterile  throughout  the  second  half  of  1862. 
The  infatuation  of  Halleck  in  thus  tying  up 
the  Western  forces  in  mere  defensive  inaction 
comes  out  in  still  stronger  light  in  the  incident 
that  follows,  but  it  especially  serves  to  show 
once  more  how,  in  the  West  as  well  as  in  the 
*  I  inclose  herewith  a  copy  of  a  report  of  Brigadier- 
ral  McPherson,  superintendent  of  railroads,  from 
which  it  will  be  seen  that  we  have  opened  367  miles 
of  road  in  less  than  one  month,  besides  repairing  a 
number  of  locomotives  and  cars  which  were  captured     ords.] 
from  the  enemy  greatly  injured.  Indeed,  the  wood- 
work of  most  of  the  cars  has  been  entirely  rebuilt, 
and  all  this  work  has  been  done  by  details  from  the 
army.    [Halleck  to  Stanton,  July  7,  1862.    War  Rec-
THE  MISSISSIPPI  AND   SHILOH. 
East,  President  Lincoln  treated  his  military 
commanders,  not  with  ignorant  interference, 
as  has  been  so  often  alleged,  but  with  the 
most  fatherly  indulgence.  Future  chapters 
will  describe  the  complete  failure  in  the  East 
of  the  campaign  undertaken  by  McClellan 
against  Richmond,  and  which,  on  the  30th  of 
June,  brought  to  Halleck  an  order  from  the 
Secretary  of  War,  dated  the  28th,  immediately 
to  detach  and  send  25,000  men  to  assist  that 
imperiled  enterprise.  The  necessity  was  de- 
clared "  imperative."  "  But  in  detaching  your 
force,"  explained  the  order,  "  the  President 
directs  that  it  be  done  in  such  a  way  as  to 
enable  you  to  hold  your  ground  and  not  inter- 
fere with  the  movement  against  Chattanooga 
and  east  Tennessee."  Halleck  took  instant 
measures  to  obey  the  order,  but  said  in  reply 
that  it  would  jeopardize  the  ground  gained  in 
Tennessee  and  involve  the  necessity  of  aban- 
doning Buell's  east  Tennessee  expedition.  This 
result  the  President  had  in  advance  declared 
inadmissible.  He  now  telegraphed  emphatic- 
ally on  June  30 : 
Would  be  very  glad  of  25,000  infantry  —  no  artillery 
or  cavalry  ;  but  please  do  not  send  a  man  if  it  endan- 
gers any  place  you  deem  important  to  hold,  or  if  it 
forces  you  to  give  up  or  weaken  or  delay  the  expedi- 
tion against  Chattanooga.  To  take  and  hold  the  rail- 
road at  or  east  of  Cleveland,  in  east  Tennessee,  I  think 
fully  as  important  as  the  taking  and  holding  of  Rich- 
mond.* 
This  request,  but  accompanied  by  the  same 
caution  and  condition,  was  repeated  by  the 
President  on  July  2;  and  again,  under  the 
prompting  of  extreme  need,  Lincoln  on  July 
4  sent  a  diminished  request,  still,  however, 
insisting  that  no  risk  be  incurred  in  the  West: 
You  do  not  know  how  much  you  would  oblige  us 
if,  without  abandoning  any  of  your  positions  or  plans, 
you  could  promptly  send  us  even  ten  thousand  infantry. 
Can  you  not  ?  Some  part  of  the  Corinth  army  is  cer- 
tainly fighting  McClellan  in  front  of  Richmond.  Pris- 
oners are  in  our  hands  from  the  late  Corinth  army. 
In  Halleck's  response  on  the  following  day 
it  is  important  to  notice  the  difference  in  the 
opinions  entertained  by  the  two  men  upon  this 
point.  Lincoln  wished  to  gain  east  Tennes- 
see, Halleck  desired  to  hold  west  Tennessee. 
The  distinction  is  essential,  for  we  shall  see 
that  while  Halleck's  policy  prevailed,  it  tended 
largely,  if  not  principally,  to  thwart  the  reali- 
zation of  Lincoln's  earnest  wish.  Halleck  tel- 
egraphed : 
For  the  last  week  there  has  been  great  uneasiness 
among  Union  men  in  Tennessee  on  account  of  the  secret 
organizations  of  insurgents  to  cooperate  in  any  attack  of 
the  enemy  on  our  lines.  Every  commanding  officer  from 
Nashville  to  Memphis  has  asked  for  reinforcements. 
Under  these  circumstances  I  submitted  the  question 
of  sending  troops  to  Richmond  to  the  principal  officers 
of  my  command.   They  are  unanimous  in  opinion  that 
*  War  Records. 
if  this  army  is  seriously  diminished  the  Chattel 
expedition  must  he  revoked  or  the  hope  of  holding 
south-west  Tennessee  abandoned.     I  must  ean 
protest  against  surrendering  what  has  cost  so  mucil 
blood  and  treasure,  and  which  in  a  military  point  of 
view  is  worth  more  than  Richmond. 
He  had  already,  in  a  previous  telegram 
(July  1 ),  acknowledged  and  exercised  the  dis- 
cretion which  Lincoln  gave  him,  replying, 
"  Your  telegram,  just  received,  saves  western 
Tennessee." 
It  was  found  by  the  Washington  authorities 
that  the  early  reports  of  McClellan's  reverses 
had  been  unduly  exaggerated,  and  that  by 
straining  resources  in  the  East,  the  Western 
armies  might  be  left  undiminished.  But  with 
this  conviction  President  Lincoln  also  reached 
the  decision  that  the  failure  of  the  Richmond 
campaign  must  be  remedied  by  radical  meas- 
ures. To  devise  new  plans,  to  elaborate  and 
initiate  new  movements,  he  needed  the  help  of 
the  highest  attainable  professional  skill.  None 
seemed  at  the  moment  so  available  as  that  of 
Halleck.  Under  his  administration  order  had 
come  out  of  chaos  in  Missouri,  and  under  his 
guiding  control,  however  feeble  in  the  par- 
ticular cases  that  we  have  pointed  out,  the 
Western  armies  had  won  the  victories  of  Fort 
Henry,  Fort  Donelson,  Pea  Ridge,  Shiloh,  Isl- 
and No.  10,  and  Corinth.  It  was  a  record  of 
steady  success,  which  justified  the  belief  that 
a  general  had  been  found  who  might  be  in- 
trusted with  the  direction  of  the  wax  in  its 
larger  combinations.  The  weakness  of  his 
present  plans  had  not  yet  been  developed. 
Accordingly  on  the  nth  of  July  this  order 
was  made  by  the  President : 
That  Major-General  Henry  W.  Halleck  be  assigned 
to  command  the  whole  land  forces  of  the  United  States 
as  General-in-Chief,  and  that  he  repair  to  this  capital 
so  soon  as  he  can  with  safety  to  the  positions  and  op- 
erations within  the  department  under  his  charge. 
It  seemed  at  the  moment  the  best  that 
could  be  done.  In  his  short  Corinth  campaign 
Halleck  had  substantially  demonstrated  his 
unfitness  for  the  leadership  of  an  army  in  the 
field.  He  had  made  a  grievous  mistake  in  com- 
ing away  from  his  department  headquarters 
at  St.  Louis.  He  was  a  thinker  and  nor  a 
worker;  his  proper  place  was  in  the  military 
study  and  not  in  the  camp.  No  other  soldier 
in  active  service  equaled  him  in  the  technical 
and  theoretical  acquirements  of  his  profession. 
The  act  of  the  President  in  bringing  him  to 
Washington  restored  him  to  his  more  natural 
duty. 
In  following  the  future  career  of  Halleck. 
one  of  the  incidents  attending  this  transfer 
needs  to  be  borne  in  mind.  The  first  intima- 
tion of  the  change  came  in  the  President's  dis- 
patch of  the  2d  of  July  which  asked  :  "  Please 
tell  me  could  you  not  make  me  a  flying  visit
o;> 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
for  consultation  without  endangering  the  ser- 
vice in  your  department  ?  "  A  few  clays  later 
one  of  the  President's  friends  went  from  Wash- 
ington to  Corinth  bearing  a  letter  of  intro- 
duction to  llalleek.  explaining  among  other 
thing-  : 
1  know  the  object  of  his  visit  to  you.  He  has  my 
rful  consent  to  go,  but  not  my  direction.  He 
wishes  to  get  you  and  part  of  your  force,  one  or  both, 
to  come  here.  You  already  know  I  should  be  exceed- 
glad  of  this  if  in  your  judgment  it  could  be  done 
without  endangering  positions  and  operations  in  the 
Southwest. 
To  this  Halleck  replied  on  July  10: 
Governor  Sprague  is  here.  If  I  were  to  go  to  Wash- 
ington I  could  advise  but  one  thing — to  place  all  the 
f  >rces  in  North  Carolina,  Virginia,  and  Washington  un- 
der one  head  and  hold  that  head  responsible  for  the 
result. 
It  is  doubtful  if  Halleck  measured  fully  the 
import  of  his  language;  or  whether  he  real- 
ized the  danger  and  burden  of  the  responsi- 
bility which,  if  he  did  not  invite,  he  at  least 
thus  voluntarily  assumed.  Nominally  he  be- 
came General-in-Chief,  but  in  actual  practice 
his  genius  fell  short  of  the  high  requirements 
of  that  great  station.  While  he  rendered  memo- 
rable service  to  the  Union,  his  judgment  and 
courage  sometimes  quailed  before  the  momen- 
tous requirements  of  his  office,  and  thrust  back 
upon  the  President  the  critical  acts  which  over- 
awed  him.  In  reality,  therefore,  he  was  from 
the  first  only  what  he  afterward  became  by  tech- 
nical orders  —  the  President's  chief-of-staff. 
Before  Halleck's  transfer  to  Washington 
he  had  ordered  Buell  to  move  into  east  Ten- 
nessee, but  that  commander  never  seemed  to 
appreciate  the  great  military  and  political 
importance  of  such  a  movement.  He  consid- 
ered the  defense  of  west  Tennessee  a  more 
essential  object;  and  while  his  mind  was  en- 
gaged in  that  direction,  Bragg  planned  and 
carried  into  effect  a  campaign  into  Kentucky 
that  threatened  at  one  time  the  most  disas- 
trous consequences  to  the  Union  cause  in 
that  region.  He  moved  northward  early  in 
:,nber,  1862,  Kirby  Smith  preceding  him 
with  a  strong  detachment  by  way  of  Cumber- 
Gap,  which  marched  without  successful 
opposition  almost  to  the  Ohio  River.  Buell, 
believing  that  Bragg's  real  object  was  Nash- 
ville, made  such  dispositions  that  Bragg  got 
a  long  start  before  him  in  the  race  to  Louis- 
ville. Pie  would,  in  fact,  have  had  that  city 
at  his  mercy  if  he  had  not  left  the  direct  road 
and  turned  to  the  right  to  join  Kirby  Smith 
at  Frankfort  to  assist  in  the  melancholy  farce 
of  inaugurating  a  Confederate  governor  for 
Kentucky.  Buell  thus  reached  Louisville  and 
immediately  marched  south  in  pursuit  of  Bragg. 
He  overtook  his  army  at  Perry  ville  and  fought, 
on  the  8th  of  October,  a  severe  but  indecisive 
battle ;  Buell  kept  the  field  and  Bragg  retired 
in  the  night,  and  hurried  out  of  Kentucky  at  a 
pace  that  soon  distanced  his  antagonist.  The 
President  renewed  his  earnest  solicitations  to 
Buell  to  occupy  east  Tennessee;  Buell  thought 
this  impracticable,  and  was  relieved  of  com- 
mand on  the  24th  of  October,  and  General 
Rosecrans  was  appointed  to  succeed  him. 
Rosecrans  paid  as  little  attention  as  Buell 
had  done  to  the  orders  of  the  President  for 
the  occupation  of  east  Tennessee.  He  estab- 
lished his  headquarters  at  Nashville,  completed 
and  strengthened  his  communications,  and  in 
the  latter  part  of  December  moved  upon  Gen- 
eral Bragg,  who  had  gone  into  winter  quarters 
at  Murfreesboro'.  The  two  armies  came  within 
sight  of  each  other  on  the  night  of  the  30th 
of  December,  1862,  and  the  next  morning  at 
daybreak  each  general  moved  to  the  fight,  in 
pursuance  of  plans  that  were  the  exact  coun- 
terpart of  each  other — Rosecrans  having  or- 
dered his  left  wing  to  strike  Bragg's  right, 
double  it  up  and  take  the  position  at  Murfrees- 
boro' in  reverse,  while  Bragg  proposed  to  crush 
the  right  wing  of  Rosecrans,  and  swinging 
the  Confederate  army  around  pivoting  on  its 
right  to  cut  the  Union  force  off  from  Nashville. 
Bragg  struck  the  first  blow  with  so  much  vigor 
that  Rosecrans  was  obliged  to  give  up  his 
movement  on  the  Confederate  right  and  de- 
vote all  his  energies  to  the  defense  of  his  own 
position;  and  in  spite  of  his  utmost  efforts, 
and  the  distinguished  bravery  with  which  he 
was  supported  by  Thomas,  Sheridan,  and 
others,  he  lost  ground  all  day,  and  at  night 
the  lines  of  the  two  armies  were  almost  per- 
pendicular to  those  that  they  had  occupied  in 
the  morning.  But  Bragg  had  lost  so  severely 
in  this  day's  fighting  that  he  was  unable  to 
pursue  his  advantage  on  the  1st  of  January, 
1863;  and  on  the  2d  Rosecrans  resumed  the 
offensive  on  his  left  with  such  success  that 
Bragg*  found  himself  forced  to  abandon  the 
field  in  the  night.  The  losses  on  both  sides 
were  appalling,  and  the  result  of  the  fight  was 
so  damaging  to  Bragg  that  he  was  unable  to 
resume  active  operations  during  the  winter  or 
spring,  and  was,  in  fact,  so  weakened,  that 
when,  in  the  summer  of  1863,  Rosecrans  at 
last  marched  against  him,  he  gave  up  his  po- 
sitions one  after  another,  until  the  Union  army 
occupied,  in  September,  without  striking  a  blow, 
the  coveted  and  important  mountain  fortress 
of  Chattanooga. 
&r-iX
A   RAINBOW  STUDY. 
91 1 
well  within  the  clump,  and  there  the  nest  is 
built.  If  the  cactus  bed  is  preferred,  the  mead- 
ow-lark hollows  out  a  little  place  in  the  ground, 
lines  it  with  soft  and  curly  buffalo-grass,  and 
then  builds  over  it  a  little  canopy,  pulling 
down  the  longer  blades  which  grow  even 
among  the  thick-set  lobes  of  prickly-pear  upon 
the  uplands,  and  weaving  them  together  until 
a  small,  conical  covering  is  made,  having  in 
one  side  of  it  a  round  opening  to  serve  for  a 
door.  The  location  of  the  nest  is  such  as  to 
afford  protection  from  the  tramping  hoofs  of 
cattle-herds  that  feed  upon  the  plains,  and 
which  carefully  avoid  treading  upon  the  long, 
sharj)  spines  of  the  cactus.  There  the  bird 
rears  one,  and  sometimes  two,  broods  of  young, 
which  are  ready  for  self-sustenance  and  flight 
in  July. 
In  August,  when  the  mating  season  is  ended, 
the  songs  of  the  meadow-lark  of  the  West  are 
heard  more  rarely,  and  then  only  in  the  early 
morning.  In  October  the  bird  leaves  this 
latitude,  to  pass  the  winter  months  in  the 
warmer  climes  of  New   Mexico. 
Charles  N.  Allen. 
A    RAINBOW    STUDY. 
BEHOLD  the  rainbow  like  a  brilliant  scroll 
Of  colors  sevenfold, 
From  heaven's  high  dome  unrolled ! 
Lift  up  thine  eyes,  lift  up  the  adoring  soul, 
And  read  God's  writing  ere  it  passes  by. 
Fleet  clouds  of  amethyst 
Swim  in  a  golden  mist, 
Hidden  in  dripping  branches  are  the  birds, 
But  for  a  moment  gloriously  gleams, 
Through  flying  raindrops,  bursting  beams, 
The  legend  of  the  sky  — 
Seven  colors  and  seven  words! 
The  dim,  cold  violet 
Upon  the  outer  margin  set 
Is  sign  of  the  veiled  mystery  o(  pain  ; 
First  bitter  knowledge  when  young  life  is  sweet, 
And  sun-bright  hills  seem  near  to  eager  feet. 
And  as  the  heavy  purple  overflows 
The  paler  color,  so  the  wayside  grows 
To  midnight  gloom  when  sorrow  stoops   to 
smite 
And  rend  the  heart's  delight. 
A  path  of  thorns,  but  oh !  no  other  way 
Leads  to  the  rosy  fields  of  upper  day. 
But  see !  how  soft  and  fair 
The  tender  flower-like  blue 
Shines  tremulously  through 
The  broad,  dark  purple  border  of  despair. 
Rejoice!  for  out  of  anguish  blossoms  hope! 
Again  the  brilliant,  vivid  green 
Against  the  line  of  blue  is  seen, 
Earth's  color  painted  on  the  skies. 
So,  bringing  strength  to  cope 
With  woes  that  in  perpetual  tide  arise, 
Life-giving  faith  descends, 
And  though  beneath  the  storm  the  pilgrim 
bends, 
His  brow  is  bathed  in  dawn  of  paradise. 
Oh,  read  in  haste !  the  rain-cloud  far  has  blown, 
Brighter  and  broader  are  the  sun-waves  grown, 
And  the  delirious  birds 
Their  wild,  wet  wings  in  burning  beams  have 
dipped. 
Interpret  from  the  shining  manuscript 
The  seven  illumined  words. 
Warm,  amber  yellow  in  rich  waves 
The  edge  of  emerald  verdure  laves, 
Symbol  of  joy  —  when  faith  grows  deep 
And  full  and  strong ;   when  even  death's  sleep 
Has  lost  its  gloom,  and  eyes  that  weep 
See  starry  splendors  through  the  tears. 
The  blazing  orange  hue 
Is  triumptis  own  imperial  sign, 
The  victory  pure  and  true 
Which  falls  on  sunset  years, 
When  slow  unfold  the  gates  divine  — 
When  all  the  storms  are  spent,  and  lonely  ways 
Grow  beautiful  in  warm,  benignant  praise. 
Now  in  a  radiant  flush  of  crimson  fire 
The  rainbow  is  caught  up  to  heaven ! 
Behold  the  dearest  symbol  of  the  seven. 
When  at  the  long  day's  close, 
Through  pain  and  sorrow  dire, 
The  loyal  soul  has  won  its  true  repose, 
When  hope  and  trust  have  blossomed  into  joy, 
And  victory  comes  at  last  without  alloy. 
Then  in  celestial  love 
Enfolded,  borne  as  in  a  flame  above. 
Serene  in  homeward  flight, 
The  spirit  soars  and  vanishes  in  light. 
The    green    sod    sparkles    with    the   fleeting 
shower, 
Fresh  odors  pant  from  every  breathing  flower, 
The  sky  effulgent  glows  ! 
What  though  the  purple  violet 
Upon  the  grassy  mound  is  wet 
WTith  dew  of  fond  regret : 
The  rainbow  reached  from  earth  to  heaven, 
And  the  last  color  of  the  seven 
Was  love's  transcendent  rose. 
Frances  L.
ABRAHAM    LINCOLN:    A    HISTORY.* 
PLANS    OF    CAMPAIGN. 
BY    JOHN"    G.    NICOLA Y    AND    JOHN    HAY,    PRIVATE    SECRETARIES    TO    THE    PRESIDENT. 
gBOUT  the  ist  of  Decem- 
I  ber.  1 86 1,  Mr.  Lincoln, 
who  saw  more  clearly  than 
McClellan,  then  General- 
in-Chief,  the  urgent  neces- 
sity for  some  movement  of 
the  army,  suggested  to  him 
a  plan  of  campaign  which, 
afterward  much  debated  and  discussed  and 
finally  rejected,  is  now  seen  to  have  been 
eminently  wise  and  sagacious.  He  made  a 
brief  autograph  memorandum  of  his  plan, 
which  he  handed  to  McClellan,  who  kept  it 
for  ten  days  and  returned  it  to  Mr.  Lincoln, 
with  a  hurried  memorandum  in  pencil,  show- 
hat  it  made  little  impression  on  his  mind. 
The  memorandum  and  answer  are  so  illus- 
trative of  the  two  men  that  we  give  them 
here  in  full,  copied  from  the  original  manu- 
script : 
If  it  were  determined  to  make  a  forward  movement 
of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  without  waiting  further 
increase  of  numbers,  or  better  drill  and  discipline,  how 
long  would  it  require  to  actually  get  in  motion?  [An- 
.  in  pencil:  If  bridge-trains  ready  by  December 
15th — probably  25th.] 
After  leaving  all  that  would  be  necessary,  how  many 
could  join  the  movement  from  south-west  of 
vet  ?   [In  pencil,  71,000.] 
How    many    from    north-east    of   it?      [In    pencil, 
33,000.] ose  then  that  of  those  south-west  of  the  river 
pencil,  50,000]  move  forward  and  menace  the  en- 
t  Centreville?    The  remainder  of  the  movable 
force  on  that  side  move  rapidly  to  the  crossing  of  the 
I  uan  by  the  road  from  Alexandria  towards  Rich- 
id;  there  to  be  joined  by  the  whole  movable  force 
of  the  river,  having  landed  from  the 
i  tac  just  below  the  mouth  of  the  Occoquan,  move 
by  land  up  the  south  side  of  that  stream,  to  the  cross- 
ing-point named  ;   then  the  whole   move  together,  by 
to  B     v-.  ill<  ,  and  beyond,  to  the  rail- 
ro     ing  of  Broad  Run,  a  strong 
:hment  of  cavalry  having  gone  rapidly  ahead  to  de- 
the  railroad  bridges  south  and  north  of  the  point. 
'  0  '  oquan  by  those  from  above 
e  landing  from  the    Potomac  below  to 
force  of  the  enemy  in  rear ;  or,  if  the 
landin  -  Potomac  be  resisted,  those  crossing 
the  Occoquan  from  above  to  take  that  resisting  force 
in  rear.  Both  points  will  probably  not  be  successfully 
1  at  the  same  time.  The  force  in  front  of  Cen- 
treville, if  pre-  ed  too  hardly,  should  fight  back  slowly 
into  the  intrenchments  behind  them.  Armed  vessels 
and  transports  should  remain  at  the  Potomac  landing 
to  cover  a  possible  retreat. t 
General  McClellan  returned  the  memoran- 
dum with  this  reply : 
I  inclose  the  paper  you  left  with  me,  filled  as  you 
requested.  In  arriving  at  the  numbers  given,  I  have 
left  the  minimum  number  in  garrison  and  observation. 
Information  received  recently  leads  me  to  believe 
that  the  enemy  could  meet  us  in  front  with  equal  forces 
nearly,  and  I  have  now  my  mind  actively  turned  to- 
wards another  plan  of  campaign  that  I  do  not  think  at 
all  anticipated  by  the  enemy,  nor  by  many  of  our  own 
people,  t 
The  general's  information  was,  as  usual, 
erroneous.  Johnston  reports  his  "  effective  to- 
tal" at  this  time  as  about  47,000  men — less 
than  one-third  what  McClellan  imagined  it. 
Lincoln,  however,  did  not  insist  upon  knowing 
what  the  general's  "  other  plan  "  was  ;  nor  did 
he  press  further  upon  his  attention  the  sugges- 
tion that  had  been  so  scantily  considered  and 
so  curtly  dismissed.  But  as  the  weeks  went  by 
in  inaction,  his  thoughts  naturally  dwelt  upon 
the  opportunities  afforded  by  an  attack  on  the 
enemy's  right,  and  the  project  took  more  and 
more  definite  shape  in  his  mind. 
Congress  convened  on  the  2d  of  December, 
and  one  of  its  earliest  subjects  of  discussion 
was  the  battle  of  Ball's  Bluff.  Roscoe  Conkling 
in  the  House  of  Representatives,  andZachariah 
Chandler  in  the  Senate,  brought  forward  reso- 
lutions for  the  appointment  of  committees  to 
investigate  and  determine  the  responsibility 
for  that  disaster ;  but  on  motion  of  Grimes 
the  Senate  chose  to  order  a  permanent  joint 
committee  of  three  senators  and  four  repre- 
sentatives to  inquire  into  the  conduct  of  the 
war.  This  action  was  unanimously  agreed 
to  by  the  House,  and  the  committee  was 
appointed,  consisting  of  senators  Wade, 
Chandler,  and  Johnson,  and  of  representatives 
Gooch,  Covode,  Julian,  and  Odell.  This  com- 
mittee, known  as  the  Committee  on  the  Con- 
duct of  the  War,  was  for  four  years  one  of  the 
most  important  agencies  in  the  country.  It 
assumed,  and  was  sustained  by  Congress  in  as- 
suming, a  great  range  of  prerogative.  It  became 
a  stern  and  zealous  censor  of  both  the  army 
and  the  government;  it  called  soldiers  and 
t  Lincoln  to  McClellan,  autograph  MS. 
X  McClellan  to  Lincoln,  Dec.    10,  1861.    Autograph 
MS. 
Copyright  by  J.  G.  Nicolay  and  John  Hay,  1886.     All  rights  reserved.
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
9*3 
statesmen  before  it  and  questioned  them  like 
refractory  school-boys.  It  claimed  to  speak  for 
the  loyal  people  of  the  United  States,  and  this 
claim  generally  met  with  the  sympathy  and 
support  of  a  majority  of  the  people's  repre- 
sentatives in  Congress  assembled.  It  was  often 
hasty  and  unjust  in  its  judgment,  but  always  ear- 
nest, patriotic,  and  honest;  it  was  assailed  with 
furious  denunciation  and  defended  with  head- 
long and  indiscriminating  eulogy  ;  and  on  the 
whole  it  must  be  said  to  have  merited  more 
praise  than  blame. 
Even  before  this  committee  was  appointed, 
as  we  have  seen,  senators  Chandler  and  Wade, 
representing  the  more  ardent  and  eager  spirits 
in  Congress,  had  repeatedly  pressed  upon  the 
Government  the  necessity  of  employing  the 
Army  of  the  Potomac  in  active  operations; 
and  now  that  they  felt  themselves  formally 
intrusted  with  a  mandate  from  the  people  to 
that  effect,  were  still  more  urgent  and  persist- 
ent. General  McClellan  and  his  immediate 
following  treated  the  committee  with  some- 
thing like  contempt.  But  the  President,  with 
his  larger  comprehension  of  popular  forces, 
knew  that  he  must  take  into  account  an 
agency  of  such  importance ;  and  though  he 
steadily  defended  General  McClellan,  and  his 
deliberateness  of  preparation,  before  the  com- 
mittee, he  constantly  assured  him  in  private 
that  not  a  moment  ought  to  be  lost  in  getting 
himself  in  readiness  for  a  forward  movement. 
A  free  people,  accustomed  to  considering 
public  affairs  as  their  own,  can  stand  reverses 
and  disappointments;  they  are  capable  of 
making  great  exertions  and  great  sacrifices : 
the  one  thing  that  they  cannot  endure  is  inac- 
tion on  the  part  of  their  rulers ;  the  one  thing 
that  they  insist  upon  is  to  see  some  result  of 
their  exertions  and  sacrifices.  December  was 
the  fifth  month  that  General  McClellan  had 
been  in  command  of  the  greatest  army  ever 
brought  together  on  this  continent.  It  was  im- 
possible to  convince  the  country  that  a  longer 
period  of  preparation  was  necessary  before 
this  army  could  be  led  against  one  inferior 
in  numbers,  and  not  superior  in  discipline  or 
equipment.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  coun- 
try did  not  believe  the  rebel  army  to  be  equal 
to  the  army  of  the  Union  in  any  of  these  par- 
ticulars. It  did  not  share  the  strange  delusion 
of  General  McClellan  and  his  staff  in  regard 
to  the  numbers  of  his  adversary,  and  the  com- 
mon sense  of  the  people  was  nearer  right  in 
its  judgment  than  the  computations  of  the 
general  and  his  inefficient  secret  service.  Mc- 
Clellan reported  to  the  Secretary  of  War 
that  Johnston's  army,  at  the  end  of  October, 
numbered  150,000,  and  that  he  would  there- 
fore require,  to  make  an  advance  movement 
with  the  Army  of  the   Potomac,  a  force  of 
240,000.  Johnston's  report  of  that  date  shows 
an  effective  total  of  41,000  men  !  It  was  use- 
less to  try  to  convince  General  McClellan  of 
the  impossibility  of  such  a  concentration  of 
troops  in  front  of  him  ;  he  simply  added  to- 
gether the  aggregates  furnished  by  the  guesses 
of  his  spies  and  implicitly  believed  the  mon- 
strous sum.  It  is  worthy  of  notice  that  the 
Confederate  general  rarely  fell  into  the  cor- 
responding error.  At  the  time  that  McClellan 
was  quadrupling,  in  his  imagination,  the  rebel 
force,  Johnston  was  estimating  the  army  under 
McClellan  at  exactly  its  real  strength. 
Aware  that  his  army  was  less  than  one- third 
as  strong  as  the  Union  forces,  Johnston  eon- 
tented  himself  with  neutralizing  the  army  at 
Washington,  passing  the  time  in  drilling  and 
disciplining  his  troops,  which,  according  to 
his  own  account,  were  seriously  in  need  of  it. 
He  could  not  account  for  the  inactivity  of 
the  Union  army.  Military  operations,  he  says, 
were  practicable  until  the  end  of  December; 
but  he  was  never  molested. 
Our  military  exercises  had  never  been  interrupted. 
No  demonstrations  were  made  by  the  troops  of  that 
army,  except  the  occasional  driving  in  of  a  Confeder- 
ate cavalry  picket  by  a  large  mixed  force.  The  Federal 
cavalry  rarely  ventured  beyond  the  protection  of  infan- 
try, and  the  ground  between  the  two  armies  had  been 
less  free  to  it  than  to  that  of  the  Confederate  army. 
There  was  at  no  time  any  serious  thought 
of  attacking  the  Union  forces  in  front  of  Wash- 
ington. In  the  latterpart  of  September,  General 
Johnston  had  thought  it  possible  for  the  Rich- 
mond government  to  give  him  such  additional 
troops  as  to  enable  him  to  take  the  offensive, 
and  Jefferson  Davis  had  come  to  headquarters 
at  Fairfax  Court  House  to  confer  with  the  prin- 
cipals on  that  subject.  At  this  conference, 
held  on  the  1st  of  October,  it  was  taken  for 
granted  that  no  attack  could  be  made,  with 
any  chances  of  success,  upon  the  Union  army 
in  its  position  before  Washington ;  but  it  was 
thought  that,  if  enough  force  could  be  concen- 
trated  for  the  purpose,  the  Potomac  might  be 
crossed  at  the  nearer  ford,  Maryland  brought 
into  rebellion,  and  a  battle  delivered  in  rear 
of  Washington,  where  McClellan  would  fight 
at  a  disadvantage.  Mr.  Davis  asked  the  three 
generals  present,  Johnston,  Beauregard,  and 
G.  W.  Smith,  beginning  with  the  last,  how 
many  troops  would  be  required  for  such  a 
movement.  Smith  answered  "  fifty  thousand  "' ; 
Johnston  and  Beauregard  both  said  "  sixty 
thousand";  and  all  agreed  that  they  would 
require  a  large  increase  of  ammunition  and 
means  of  transportation.  Mr.  Davis  said  it 
was  impossible  to  reenforce  them  to  that  ex- 
tent, and  the  plan  was  dropped.  It  is  hard  to 
believe  that  during  this  same  month  of  Octo- 
ber, General  McClellan,  in  a  careful  letter  to
9*4 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
the  War  Department,  with  an  army,  according 
to  his  own  account,  oi  "  147,695  present  for 
duty,"  should    have  bewailed   his  numerical 
inferiority  to  the  enemy,  and  begged  that  all 
other  departments  should  be  stripped  of  their 
troops  and  stores  to  enable  him  to  make  a 
forward  movement,  which  he  professed  him- 
mxious  to  make  ''not  later  than  the  25th 
oi  November,"  if  the  Government  would  give 
him  men  enough  to  meet  the  enemy  on  equal 
terms.  This  singular  infatuation,  difficult  to 
understand  in  a  man  of  high  intelligence  and 
physically  brave,  as  McClellan  undoubtedly 
was.  must  not  be  lost  sight  of.  It  furnishes 
the  sole  explanation  of  many  things  other- 
wise inexplicable.  He  rarely  estimated  the 
force  immediately  opposed  to  him  at  less  than 
double  its  actual  strength,  and  in  his  corre- 
spondence with  the  Government  he  persist- 
ently minimized  his  own  force.  This  rule  he 
applied  only  to  the  enemy  in  his  immediate 
vicinity.  He  had  no  sympathy  with  command- 
ers at  a  distance  who  asked  for  reinforcements. 
When  Rosecrans  succeeded  him  in  western 
Virginia,  and  wanted  additional  troops,  Gen- 
eral McClellan  was  shocked  at  the  unreason- 
able request.  When  William  Tecumseh  Sher- 
man telegraphed  that  75,000  men  were  needed 
to  defend  the  Ohio  line,  and  to  make  a  forward 
movement  into  Kentucky,  he  handed  the  dis- 
patch to  Mr.  Lincoln,  who  was  sitting  in  his 
headquarters  at  the  moment,  with  the  remark, 
"  The  man  is  crazy,"  Every  man  sent  to  any 
other  department  he  regarded  as  a  sort  of  rob- 
bery of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac. 
All  his  demands  were  complied  with  to  the 
full  extent  of  the  power  of  the  Government. 
Not  only  in  a  material,  but  in  a  moral  sense  as 
well,  the  President  gave  him  everything  that 
he  could.  In  addition  to  that  mighty  army,  he 
gave  him  his  fullest  confidence  and  support. 
All  through  the  autumn  he  stood  by  him, 
urging  "him  in  private  to  lose  no  time,  but  de- 
fending him  in  public  against  the  popular  im- 
patience;  and  when  winter  came  on,  and  the 
of  (  on gress,  nearly  unanimous  in  de- 
manding active  operations,  added  its  authori- 
tative tones  to  the  clamor  of  the  country,  the 
ident  endangered  his  own  popularity  by 
insisting  that  the  general  should  be  allowed 
to  take-  his  own  time  for  an  advance.  In  the 
latter  part  of  December,  McClellan,  as  already 
stated,  fell  seriously  ill,  and  the  enforced 
paralysis  of  the  army  that  resulted  from  this 
illness  and  lasted  several  weeks  added  a 
keener  edge  to  the  public  anxiety.  The  Pres- 
ident painfuliy  appreciated  how  much  of  jus- 
tice there  was  in  the  general  criticism,  which 
he  was  doing  all  that  he  could  to  allay.  He 
gave  himself,  night  and  day,  to  the  study  of 
the  military  situation.    He  read  a  large  num- 
ber of  strategical  works.  He  pored  over  the 
reports  from  the  various  departments  and 
districts  of  the  field  of  war.  He  held  long  con- 
ferences with  eminent  generals  and  admirals, 
and  astonished  them  by  the  extent  of  his 
special  knowledge  and  the  keen  intelli- 
gence of  his  questions.  He  at  last  convinced 
himself  that  there  was  no  necessity  for  any 
further  delay ;  that  the  army  of  the  Potomac 
was  as  nearly  ready  as  it  ever  would  be  to 
take  the  field  against  the  enemy ;  and,  feeling 
that  he  could  not  wait  any  longer,  on  the  10th 
of  January,  after  calling  at  General  McClel- 
lan's  house  and  learning  that  the  general  was 
unable  to  see  him,  he  sent  for  Generals  Mc- 
Dowell and  Franklin,  wishing  to  take  coun- 
sel with  them  in  regard  to  the  possibility  of 
beginning  active  operations  with  the  army 
before  Washington.  General  McDowell  has 
preserved  an  accurate  report  of  this  confer- 
ence. The  President  said  that  he  was  in  great 
distress ;  to  use  his  own  expression  : 
If  something  were  not  soon  done,  the  bottom  would 
be  out  of  the  whole  affair ;  and  if  General  McClellan 
did  not  want  to  use  the  army  he  would  like  to  borrow 
it,  provided  he  could  see  how  it  might  be  made  to  do 
something. 
In  answer  to  a  direct  question,  put  by  the 
President  to  General  McDowell,  that  accom- 
plished soldier  gave  a  frank  and  straightfor- 
ward expression  of  his  conviction  that  by  an 
energetic  movement  upon  both  flanks  of  the 
enemy  —  a  movement  rendered  entirely  prac- 
ticable by  the  superior  numbers  of  the  Union 
army  —  he  could  be  forced  from  his  works  and 
compelled  to  accept  battle  on  terms  favorable 
to  us.  General  Franklin  rather  favored  an 
attack  upon  Richmond,  by  way  of  York  River. 
A  question  arising  as  to  the  possibility  of  ob- 
taining the  necessary  transportation,  the  Pres- 
ident directed  both  generals  to  return  the 
next  evening,  and  in  the  mean  time  to  inform 
themselves  thoroughly  as  to  the  matter  in 
question.  They  spent  the  following  day  in  this 
duty  and  went  the  next  evening  to  the  Execu- 
tive Mansion  with  what  information  they  had 
been  able  to  procure,  and  submitted  a  paper 
in  which  they  both  agreed  that,  in  view  of  the 
time  and  means  required  to  take  the  army  to 
a  distant  base,  operations  could  now  best  be 
undertaken  from  the  present  base  substan- 
tially as  proposed  by  McDowell.  The  Sec- 
retaries of  State  and  of  the  Treasury,  who 
were  present,  coincided  in  this  view,  and  the 
Postmaster-General,  Mr.  Blair,  alone  opposed 
it.  They  separated  to  meet  the  next  day  at 
3  o'clock.  General  Meigs,  having  been  called 
into  conference,  concurred  in  the  opinion  that 
a  movement  from  the  present  base  was  pref- 
erable; but  no  definite  resolution  was  taken, 
as  General  McClellan  was  reported  as  fully
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
9*5 
recovered  from  his  illness,  and  another  meet- 
ing was  arranged  for  Monday,  the  13th,  at 
the  White  House,  where  the  three  members 
of  the  Cabinet  already  mentioned,  with  Mc- 
Dowell, Franklin,  Meigs,  and  General  Mc- 
Clellan  himself,  were  present.  At  the  request 
of  the  President,  McDowell  made  a  statement 
of  what  he  and  Franklin  had  done  under  Mr. 
Lincoln's  orders,  and  gave  his  reasons  for 
advising  a  movement  to  the  front.  He  spoke 
with  great  courtesy  and  deference  towards 
his  superior  officer,  and  made  an  apology  for 
the  position  in  which  he  stood.  McClellan 
was  not  inclined  to  relieve  the  situation  of  any 
awkwardness  there  might  be  in  it.  He  merely 
said,  "  coldly,  if  not  curtly,"  to  McDowell, 
"  You  are  entitled  to  have  any  opinion  you 
please,"  and  made  no  further  remark  or  com- 
ment. The  President  spoke  somewhat  at 
length  on  the  matter,  and  General  McClellan 
said  very  briefly  "  that  the  case  was  so  clear 
a  blind  man  could  see  it"  and  went  off  in- 
stinctively upon  the  inadequacy  of  his  forces. 
The  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  whose  sympa- 
thies were  with  that  section  of  his  party  which 
had  already  lost  all  confidence  in  General 
McClellan,  asked  him  point  blank  what  he 
intended  to  do  with  the  army,  and  when  he 
intended  doing  it.  A  long  silence  ensued. 
Even  if  the  question  had  been  a  proper  one, 
it  is  doubtful  whether  General  McClellan  would 
have  answered  it;  as  it  was,  it  must  have  re- 
quired some  self-control  for  him  to  have  con- 
tented himself  with  merely  evading  it.  He 
said  that  Buell  in  Kentucky  must  move  first ; 
and  then  refused  to  answer  the  question  unless 
ordered  to  do  so.  The  President  asked  him 
if  he  counted  upon  any  particular  time,  not 
asking  what  the  time  w7as —  but  had  he  in 
his  own  mind  any  particular  time  fixed  when 
a  movement  could  be  begun  ?  This  ques- 
tion was  evidently  put  as  affording  a  means 
of  closing  a  conference  which  was  becoming 
disagreeable  if  not  dangerous.  McClellan 
promptly  answered  in  the  affirmative,  and 
the  President  rejoined,  "  Then  I  will  adjourn 
this  meeting." 
It  is  a  remarkable  fact  that  although  the 
plan  recommended  by  these  generals  was  ex- 
actly the  plan  suggested  six  weeks  before  by 
the  President  to  McClellan,  neither  of  them 
made  the  slightest  reference  to  that  incident. 
That  Mr.  Lincoln  did  not  refer  to  a  matter  so 
close  to  his  heart  is  a  striking  instance  of  his 
reticence  and  his  magnanimity;  that  General 
McClellan  never  mentioned  it  would  seem  to 
show  that  he  thought  so  little  of  the  matter  as 
to  have  forgotten  it.  He  seemed  also  to  have 
thought  little  of  this  conference ;  he  makes  no 
reference  to  it  in  his  report.  He  says,  refer- 
ring to  this  period: 
About  the  middle  of  January,  upon  recovering  from 
a  severe  illness,  I  found  that  excessive  anxiety  for  an 
immediate  movement  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  had 
taken  possession  of  the  minds  of  the  Administration. 
The  last  words  of  the  phrase  refer  not  only 
to  the  President,  but  to  Mr.  Stanton,  the  new 
Secretary  of  War,  who  began  as  soon  as  he 
took  charge  of  his  department  to  ply  the  com- 
mander of  the  army  with  continual  incitements 
to  activity.  All  suggestions  of  this  sort, 
whether  coming  from  the  Government,  Con- 
gress, or  the  press,  General  McClellan  received 
with  surprise  and  displeasure,  and  the  resent- 
ment and  vexation  of  his  immediate  friends 
and  associates  found  vent  in  expressions  of 
contempt  for  unmilitary  critics,  which,  being 
reported,  only  increased  the  evil  that  pro- 
voked them.  He  at  last  laid  before  the  Presi- 
dent his  plan  for  attacking  Richmond  by  the 
lower  Chesapeake,  which  the  President  dis- 
approved, having  previously  convinced  him- 
self of  the  superior  merit  of  the  plan  for  a 
direct  movement  agreed  upon  by  Generals 
McDowell,  Franklin,  and  Meigs,  who  were  ig- 
norant of  the  fact  that  it  was  his.  Further  delay 
ensued,  the  President  not  being  willing  to  ac- 
cept a  plan  condemned  by  his  own  judgment 
and  by  the  best  professional  opinions  that  he 
could  obtain,  and  General  McClellan  being 
equally  reluctant  to  adopt  a  plan  that  was  not 
his  own.  The  President  at  last,  at  the  end  of 
his  patience,  convinced  that  nothing  would  be 
done  unless  he  intervened  by  a  positive  com- 
mand, issued  on  the  27th  of  January  his 
"General  War  Order,  No.  1."  He  wrote  it 
without  consultation  with  any  one,  and  read 
it  to  the  Cabinet,  not  for  their  sanction,  but 
for  their  information.    The  order  directed 
that  the  22d  day  of  February,  1862,  be  the  day  for 
a  general  movement  of  the  land  and  naval  forces  of  the 
United  States  against  the  insurgent  forces ;  that  es- 
pecially the  army  at  and  about  Fortress  Monroe,  the 
Army  of  the  Potomac,  the  Army  of  western  Virginia, 
the  army  near  Munfordville,  Kentucky,  the  army 
and  flotilla  at  Cairo,  and  a  naval  force  in  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico,  be  ready  to  move  on  that  day ;  that  all  other 
forces,  both  land  and  naval,  with  their  respective  com- 
manders, obey  existing  orders  for  the  time,  and  be 
ready  to  obev  additional  orders  when  duly  given  ;  that 
the  heads  of  departments,  and  especially  the  Secre- 
taries of  War  and  of  the  Navy,  with  all  their  subor- 
dinates, and  the  General-in-Chief,  with  all  other  com- 
manders and  subordinates  of  land  and  naval  forces, 
will  severally  be  held  to  their  strict  and  full  responsi- 
bilities for  prompt  execution  of  this  order. 
Four  days  later,  as  a  necessary  result  of 
this  general  summons  to  action,  a  special 
instruction,  called  "  President's  Special  War 
Order,  No.  1,"  was  issued  to  General  Mc- 
Clellan, commanding 
that  all  the  disposable  force  of  the  Army  of  the 
Potomac,  after  providing  safely  for  the  defense  of 
Washington,  be  formed  into  an  expedition  for  the  im-
oi6 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN, 
mediate  object  of  seizing  and  occupying  a  point  upon 
the  railroad  south-westward  of  what  is  known  as  Ma- 
-  Junction,  all  details  to  be  in  the  discretion  of 
the  General-in-Chief,  and  the  expedition  to  move  before 
or  on  the  22d  day  of  February  next. 
This  is  the  President's  suggestion  of  Decem- 
ber i.  put  at  last  in  the  form  of  a  command. 
It  would  not  have  been  characteristic  of 
General  McClellan  to  accept  such  an  order 
as  final,  nor  of  Mr.  Lincoln  to  refuse  to  listen 
to  his  objections  and  to  a  full  statement  of  his 
own  views.  The  President  even  went  so  far 
as  to  give  him.  in  the  following  note,  dated 
February  3.  a  schedule  of  points  on  which  he 
might  base  his  objections  and  develop  his  views. 
My  DEAR  Sir:  You  and  I  have  distinct  and  differ- 
ent plans  for  a  movement  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac 
—  yours  to  be  done  by  the  Chesapeake,  up  the  Rap- 
pahannock, to  Urbana,  and  across  land  to  the  termi- 
nus of  the  railroad  on  the  York  River;  mine  to  move 
directly  to  a  point  on  the  railroads  south-west  of 
Manassas. 
If  you  will  give  me  satisfactory  answers  to  the  fol- 
lowing questions,  I  shall  gladly  yield  my  plan  to  yours : 
First.  Does  not  your  plan  involve  a  greatly  larger 
expenditure  of  time  and  money  than  mine  ? 
Second.  Wherein  is  a  victory  more  certain  by  your 
plan  than  mine  ? 
Third.  Wherein  is  a  victory  more  valuable  by  your 
plan  than  mine  ? 
Fourth.  In  fact,  would  it  not  be  less  valuable  in  this, 
that  it  would  break  no  great  line  of  the  enemy's  com- 
munications, while  mine  would? 
Fifth.   In  case  of  disaster,  would  not  a  retreat  be 
more  difficult  by  your  plan  than  mine  ? 
Yours  truly, 
Abraham  Lincoln. 
This  elicited  from  General  McClellan  a 
long  letter,  dated  the  same  day,  in  which  he 
dwelt  with  great  emphasis  on  all  the  possi- 
ble objections  that  could  lie  against  a  di- 
rect movement  from  Washington,  and  insisted 
with  equal  energy  upon  the  advantages  of 
a  campaign  by  the  lower  Chesapeake.  He 
rejects  without  argument  the  suggestion  of  an 
attack  on  both  flanks  of  the  enemy,  on  the 
ground  of  insufficient  force,  a  ground  that 
we  have  seen  to  be  visionary.  He  says  that 
an  attack  on  the  left  flank  of  the  enemy  is  im- 
practicable on  account  of  the  length  of  the  line, 
and  confines  his  statement  to  a  detail  of  the 
danger.^  and  difficulties  of  an  attack  on  the  Con- 
federate right  by  the  line  of  the  Occoquan.  He 
insists  that  he  will  be  met  at  every  point  by  a  de- 
termined  resistance.    To  use  his  own  words,  he 
brings  out,   in   bold   relief,   the  great   advantage  pos- 
d    by  the   enemy  in   the  strong   central  position 
he  00  h  road,  diverging  in  every  direction, 
and  a  strong  line  of  defense  enabling  him  to  remain  on 
the  defensive,  with  a  small  force  on  one  flank,  while 
tncentrates  everything  on  the  other  for  a  decisive 
action. 
Even  if  he  succeeded  in  such  a  movement, 
he  thought  little  of  its  results;  they  would  be 
merely  "  the  possession  of  the  field  of  battle, 
the  evacuation  of  the  line  of  the  upper  Poto- 
mac by  the  enemy,  and  the  moral  effect  of  the 
victory." 
They  would  not  end  the  war,  the  result  he 
seemed  to  propose  to  himself  in  the  one  de- 
cisive battle  he  expected  to  fight  somewhere. 
Turning  to  his  own  plan,  he  hopes  by  moving 
from  his  new  base  on  the  lower  Chesapeake 
to  accomplish  this  enormous  and  final  success 
—  to  force  the  enemy  either  "to  beat  us  in 
a  position  selected  by  ourselves,  disperse,  or 
pass  beneath  the  Caudine  forks."  The  point 
which  he  thought  promised  the  most  brilliant 
results  was  Urbana,  on  the  lower  Rappahan- 
nock ;  "  but  one  march  from  West  Point, —  on 
the  York  River,  at  the  junction  of  the  Pa- 
munkey  and  the  Mattapony, —  the  key  of  that 
region,  and  thence  but  two  marches  to  Rich- 
mond." He  enjoys  the  prospect  of  brilliant 
and  rapid  movements  by  which  the  rebel 
armies  shall  be  cut  off  in  detail,  Richmond 
taken,  and  the  rebellion  brought  to  a  close. 
He  says  finally : 
My  judgment  as  a  general  is  clearly  in  favor  of  this 
project.  ...  So  much  am  I  in  favor  of  the  south- 
ern line  of  operations,  that  I  would  prefer  the  move 
from  Fortress  Monroe  as  a  base  —  as  a  certain  though 
less  brilliant  movement  than  that  from  Urbana,  to  an 
attack  upon  Manassas. 
Most  of  the  assumptions  upon  which  this 
letter  was  based  have  since  proved  erroneous. 
The  enormous  force  which  McClellan  ascribed 
to  Johnston  existed  only  in  his  imagination 
and  in  the  wild  stories  of  his  spies.  His  force 
was  about  three  times  that  of  Johnston,  and 
was  therefore  not  insufficient  for  an  attack 
upon  one  flank  of  the  enemy  while  the  other 
was  held  in  check.  It  is  now  clearly  known 
that  the  determined  resistance  that  he  counted 
upon,  if  he  should  attack  by  the  line  of  the 
Occoquan,  would  not  have  been  made.  Gen- 
eral Johnston  says  that  about  the  middle 
of  February  he  was  sent  for  in  great  haste 
to  Richmond,  and  on  arriving  there  was  told 
by  Jefferson  Davis  that  the  Government 
thought  of  withdrawing  the  army  to  "  a  less 
exposed  position."  Johnston  replied  that  the 
withdrawal  of  the  army  from  Centreville  would 
be  necessary  before  McClellan's  invasion, — 
which  was  to  be  looked  for  as  soon  as  the  roads 
were  practicable, —  but  thought  that  it  might 
be  postponed  for  the  present.  He  left  Rich- 
mond, however,  with  the  understanding  on 
his  part  that  the  army  was  to  fall  back  as 
soon  as  practicable,  and  the  moment  he  re- 
turned to  his  camp  he  began  his  preparations 
to  retire  at  once  from  a  position  which  both 
he  and  the  Richmond  government  considered 
absolutely  untenable.  On  the  22d  of  Febru- 
ary he  says :  "  Orders  were  given  to  the  chiefs 
of  the  quartermaster's  and  subsistence  depart- 
ments to  remove  the  military  property  in  the
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
on 
depots  at  Manassas  Junction  and  its  depend- 
encies to  Gordonsville  as  quickly  as  possi- 
ble." The  railroads  were  urged  to  work  to 
their  utmost  capacity.  The  line  of  the  Occo- 
quan,  against  which  McClellan  was  arguing 
so  strenuously  to  the  President,  was  substan- 
tially the  route  by  which  Johnston  expected 
him,  believing,  like  the  thorough  soldier  that 
he  was,  that  it  would  be  taken,  because  "  in- 
vasion by  that  route  would  be  the  most  diffi- 
cult to  meet";  and  knowing  that  he  could 
not  cope  with  the  Federal  army  north  of  the 
Rappahannock,  he  was  ready  to  retire  behind 
that  stream  at  the  first  news  of  McClellan's 
advance.  Everything  now  indicates  that  if 
McClellan  had  chosen  to  obey  the  President's 
order  and  to  move  upon  the  enemy  in  his 
front  in  the  latter  part  of  February  *  or  the 
first  days  of  March,  one  of  the  cheapest  vic- 
tories ever  gained  by  a  fortunate  general 
awaited  him.  He  would  have  struck  an 
enemy  greatly  inferior  in  strength,  equipment, 
and  discipline,  in  the  midst  of  a  difficult  re- 
treat already  begun,  encumbered  by  a  vast 
accumulation  of  provisions  and  stores,f  which 
would  have  become  the  prize  of  the  victor. 
He  would  not  have  won  the  battle  that  was 
to  end  the  war.  That  sole  battle  was  a  dream 
of  youth  and  ambition;  the  war  was  not  of 
a  size  to  be  finished  by  one  fight.  But  he 
would  have  gained,  at  slight  cost,  what  would 
have  been  in  reality  a  substantial  success,  and 
would  have  appeared,  in  its  effect  upon  public 
opinion  and  the  morale  of  the  army,  an  achieve- 
ment of  great  importance.  The  enemy,  instead 
of  quietly  retiring  at  his  own  time,  would  have 
seemed  to  be  driven  beyond  the  Rapidan. 
The  clearing  the  Potomac  of  hostile  camps 
and  batteries  above  and  below  Washington, 
and  the  capture  of  millions  of  pounds  of  stores, 
would  have  afforded  a  relief  to  the  anxious 
public  mind  that  the  National  cause  sorely 
needed  at  that  time,  and  which  General  McClel- 
lan needed  most  of  all.  £ 
These  facts,  that  are  now  so  clear  to  every 
one,  were  not  so  evident  then ;  and  although 
the  President  and  the  leading  men  in  the  Gov- 
*  The  following  extract  shows  that  General  McClel- 
lan himself  had  some  vague  thought  of  moving  at  that 
time:  "February  came  and  on  the  13th  General 
McClellan  said  to  me, '  In  ten  days  I  shall  be  in  Rich- 
mond.' A  little  surprised  at  the  near  approach  of  a 
consummation  so  devoutly  to  be  wished,  I  asked, '  What 
is  your  plan,  General  ?'  '  Oh,'  said  he,  •  I  mean  to  cross 
the  river,  attack  and  carry  their  batteries,  and  push  on 
after  the  enemy.'  '  Have  you  any  gun-boats  to  aid  in 
the  attack  on  the  batteries  ?  '  '  No,  they  are  not  needed ; 
all  I  want  is  transportation  and  canal-boats,  of  which 
I  have  plenty  that  will  answer.'  I  did  not  think  it 
worth  while  to  reply ;  but  made  a  note  of  the  date 
and  waited.  The  ten  days  passed  away;  no  move- 
ment, and  no  preparation  for  a  movement,  had  been 
made."  [From  a  memorandum  written  by  Hon.  S.  P. 
Chase.  Schucker's  "  Life  of  S.  P.  Chase,"  p.  446.] 
Vol.  XXXVI.— 127. 
ernment  and  in  Congress  were  strongly  of  the 
opinion  that  the  plan  favored  by  Mr.  Lin- 
coln and  approved  by  McDowell,  Meigs,  and 
Franklin  was  the  right  one,  it  was  a  question 
of  the  utmost  gravity  whether  he  should  force 
the  General-in-Chief  to  adopt  it  against  his  ob- 
stinate protest.  It  would  be  too  much  to  ask 
that  any  government  should  assume  such  a 
responsibility  and  risk.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  removal  of  the  general  from  the  command 
of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  would  have  been 
a  measure  not  less  serious.  There  was  no  suc- 
cessor ready  at  all  his  equal  in  accomplish- 
ments, in  executive  efficiency,  or  in  popularity 
among  the  soldiers.  Besides  this,  and  in  spite 
of  his  exasperating  slowness,  the  President 
still  entertained  for  him  a  strong  feeling  of 
personal  regard.  He  therefore,  after  much 
deliberation  and  deep  distress  of  mind,  yielded 
his  convictions,  gave  up  his  plan  and  adopted 
that  of  General  McClellan  for  a  movement  by 
the  lower  Chesapeake.  He  never  took  a  res- 
olution which  cost  him  more  in  his  own  feel- 
ings, and  in  the  estimation  of  his  supporters 
in  Congress  and  in  the  country  at  large.  He 
made  no  explanation  of  the  reasons  that  in- 
duced this  resolution;  he  thought  it  better 
to  suffer  any  misrepresentation  rather  than  to 
communicate  his  own  grave  misgivings  to  the 
country.  The  Committee  on  the  Conduct  of 
the  War,  who  were  profoundly  grieved  and 
displeased  by  this  decision,  made  only  this 
grim  reference  to  it: 
Your  committee  have  no  evidence,  either  oral  or 
documentary,  of  the  discussions  that  ensued,  or  of  the 
arguments  that  were  submitted  to  the  consideration 
of  the  President,  that  led  him  to  relinquish  his  own 
line  of  operations  and  consent  to  the  one  proposed  by 
General  McClellan,  except  the  result  of  a  council  of 
war,  held  in  February,  1862. 
This  council,  which,  the  committee  say.  was 
the  first  ever  called  by  McClellan,  and  then 
only  at  the  direction  of  the  President,  was  com- 
posed of  twelve  general  officers  —  McDow- 
ell, Sumner,  Heintzelman,  Barnard,  Keyes, 
Fitz-John  Porter,  Franklin,  W.  F.  Smith,  Mc- 
Call,  Blenker,  Andrew    Porter,  and   Naglee 
t  The  subsistence  department  had  collected  at  Ma- 
nassas Junction  more  than  three  million  pounds  of  pro- 
visions. They  had  also  two  million  pounds  of  meat 
at  Thoroughfare  Gap,  besides  large  herds  of  cattle  and 
hogs.  This  accumulation  was  against  the  wish  and  to 
the  great  embarrassment  of  General  Johnston.  ['"John- 
ston's Narrative,"  pp.  98  and  99.] 
t  Mr.  William  Swinton,  who  habitually  takes  sides 
with  McClellan  against  the  President  where  it  is  pos- 
sible, says  on  this  point :  "  Had  Johnston  stood,  a  bat- 
tle with' good  prospect  of  success  might  have  been 
delivered.  But  had  he,  as  there  was  great  likelihood 
he  would  do,  and  as  it  is  now  certain  he  would  have 
done,  fallen  back  from  Manassas  to  the  line  of  the 
Rapidan,  his  compulsory  retirement  would  have  been 
esteemed  a  positive  victory  to  the  Union  arms."  [Swin- 
ton, "  Army  of  the  Potomac,"  p.  73.]
giS 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
(from  Hooker's  division).  The  first  four  voted 
against  the  Urbana  plan  ;  Keyes  only  favored 
it  on  condition  that  the  Potomac  batteries 
should  hist  be  reduced.  The  rest  voted  for  it 
without  conditions.  This  was  the  council  after- 
ward referred  to  by  Stanton  when  he  said, 
"We  saw  ten   generals  afraid  to  fight."* 
This  plan  o(  campaign  having  been  defi- 
nitely adopted.  Mr.  Lincoln  urged  it  forward 
as  eagerly  as  if  it  had  been  his  own.  John 
Tucker,  one  of  the  Assistant  Secretaries  of 
War,  was  charged  by  the  President  and  Mr. 
Stanton  with  the  entire  task  of  transporting  the 
Army  of  the  Potomac  to  its  new  base,  and  the 
utmost  diligence  was  enjoined  upon  him.  Quar- 
termasters Ingalls  and  Hodges  were  assigned 
to  assist  him.  We  shall  see  that  he  performed 
the  prodigious  task  intrusted  to  him  in  a  man- 
ner not  excelled  by  any  similar  feat  in  the 
annals  of  the  world. 
But  in  the  mean  while  there  were  two  things 
that  the  President  was  anxious  to  have  done, 
and  General  McClellan  undertook  them  with 
apparent  good-will.  One  was  to  reopen  the  line 
of  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railroad,  the  other 
to  clear  out  the  rebel  batteries  that  still  ob- 
structed the  navigation  of  the  Potomac.  For 
the  first,  extensive  preparations  were  made :  a 
large  body  of  troops  was  collected  at  Harper's 
Ferry ;  canal-boats  were  brought  there  in  suf- 
ficient quantity  to  make  a  permanent  bridge. 
General  McClellan  went  to  the  place  and,  find- 
ing everything  satisfactory  for  the  operation, 
telegraphed  for  a  large  additional  force  of 
cavalry,  artillery,  and  a  division  of  infantry  to 
rendezvous  at  once  at  Harper's  Ferry,  to  cross 
as  soon  as  the  bridge  was  completed,  which 
would  be  only  the  work  of  a  day,  and  then  to 
push  on  to  Winchester  and  Strasburg.  It  was 
only  on  the  morning  of  the  next  day,  when 
the  attempt  was  made  to  pass  the  canal-boats 
through  the  lift-lock,  that  it  was  discovered 
they  were  some  six  inches  too  wide  to  go 
through.  The  general  thus  discovered  that  his 
permanent  bridge,  so  long  planned,  and  from 
which  so  much  had  been  expected,  was  lm- 
iible.t  He  countermanded  his  order  for 
the  troops;  contented  himself  with  a  recon- 
naissance to  Charleston  and  Martinsburg;  and 
returned  to  Washington,  as  he  says,  "well 
&ed  with  what  had  been  accomplished." 
He  was  much  surprised  at  finding  that  his  satis- 
faction was  not  shared  by  the  President.  Mr. 
Lincoln's  slow  anger  was  thoroughly  roused 
at  this  ridiculous  outcome  of  an  important 
enterprise,  and  he  received  the  general  on  his 
return  in  a  manner  that  somewhat  disturbed 
his  complacency. 
McClellan   went   on    in  his  leisurely  way, 
*J.  H.,  Diary. 
t  Chase  in  his  Diary  said  the  expedition  died  of  lockjaw. 
preparing  for  a  movement  upon  the  batteries 
near  the  Occoquan,  undisturbed  by  the  in- 
creasing signs  of  electric  perturbation  at  the 
Executive  Mansion  and  the  Capitol,  which 
answered  but  faintly  to  the  growing  excite- 
ment in  the  North.  The  accumulating  hos- 
tility and  distrust  of  General  McClellan, — 
totally  unjust  as  it  affected  his  loyalty  and 
honor  and  his  ardent  desire  to  serve  his  coun- 
try in  the  way  that  he  thought  best, — though 
almost  entirely  unknown  to  him,  was  poured 
upon  the  President,  the  Government,  and  the 
leading  members  of  Congress  in  letters,  and 
conversations,  and  newspaper  leaders.  Mr. 
Lincoln  felt  the  injustice  of  much  of  this  crit- 
icism, but  he  also  felt  powerless  to  meet  it, 
unless  some  measures  were  adopted  to  force 
the  general  into  an  activity  which  was  as  nec- 
essary to  his  own  reputation  as  to  the  national 
cause.  The  2 2d  of  February  came  and 
passed,  and  the  President's  order  to  move  on 
that  day  was  not  obeyed.  McClellan's  inertia 
prevailed  over  the  President's  anxious  eager- 
ness. On  the  8th  of  March,  Mr.  Lincoln 
issued  two  more  important  General  Orders. 
The  first  directed  General  McClellan  to  divide 
the  Army  of  the  Potomac  into  four  army 
corps,  to  be  commanded  respectively  by  Gen- 
erals Irvin  McDowell,  E.  V.  Sumner,  S.  P. 
Heintzelman,  and  E.  D.  Keyes;  the  forces  to 
be  left  in  front  of  Washington  were  to  be 
placed  in  command  of  General  Wadsworth. 
The  Fifth  Corps  was  to  be  formed,  to  be  com- 
manded by  General  N.  P.  Banks.  For  months 
this  measure  had  been  pressed  upon  General 
McClellan  by  the  Government.  An  army  of 
150,000  men,  it  was  admitted,  could  not  be 
adequately  commanded  by  the  machinery  of 
divisions  and  brigades  alone.  But  though 
McClellan  accepted  this  view  in  principle,  he 
could  not  be  brought  to  put  it  into  practice. 
He  said  that  he  would  prefer  to  command  the 
army  personally  on  its  first  campaign,  and 
then  select  the  corps  commanders  for  their  be- 
havior in  the  field.  The  Government  thought 
better  to  make  the  organization  at  once,  giving 
the  command  of  corps  to  the  ranking  division 
commanders.  The  fact  that  of  the  four  generals 
chosen  three  had  been  in  favor  of  an  immedi- 
ate movement  against  the  enemy  in  front  of 
Washington  will  of  course  be  considered  as 
possessing  a  certain  significance.  It  is  usually 
regarded  as  a  grievance  by  the  partisans  of 
General  McClellan. 
The  other  order  is  of  such  importance  that 
we  give  it  entire  : 
President's  General  War  Order,  No.  3. 
Executive  Mansion, 
Washington,  March  8,  1862. 
Ordered,  That  no  change  of  the  base  of  operations 
of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  shall  be  made  without
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
919 
leaving  in  and  about  Washington  such  a  force  as,  in 
the  opinion  of  the  General-in-Chief  and  the  command- 
ers of  army  corps,  shall  leave  said  city  entirely  secure. 
That  no  more  than  two  army  corps  (about  fifty 
thousand  troops)  of  said  Army  of  the  Potomac  shall 
be  moved  en  route  for  a  new  base  of  operations  until 
the  navigation  of  the  Potomac  from  Washington  to 
the  Chesapeake  Bay  shall  be  freed  from  enemy's  bat- 
teries and  other  obstructions,  or  until  the  President 
shall  hereafter  give  express  permission.  That  any 
movement  as  aforesaid,  en  route  for  a  new  base  of 
operations,  which  may  be  ordered  by  the  General-in- 
Chief,  and  which  may  be  intended  to  move  upon  the 
Chesapeake  Bay,  shall  begin  to  move  upon  the  bay  as 
early  as  the  18th  of  March  instant,  and  the  General- 
in-Chief  shall  be  responsible  that  it  moves  as  early  as 
that  day. 
Ordered,  That  the  Army  and  Navy  cooperate  in  an 
immediate  effort  to  capture  the  enemy's  batteries  upon 
the  Potomac  between  Washington  and  Chesapeake 
Bay. 
Abraham  Lincoln. 
L.  Thomas,  Adjtttant-  General. 
This  order  has  always  been  subject  to  the 
severest  criticism  from  General  McClellan's 
partisans  ;  but  if  we  admit  that  it  was  proper 
for  the  President  to  issue  any  order  at  all, 
there  can  be  no  valid  objection  made  to  the 
substance  of  this  one.  It  was  indispensable 
that  Washington  should  be  left  secure;  it 
would  have  been  madness  to  allow  General 
McClellan  to  take  all  the  troops  to  the  Pen- 
insula, leaving  the  Potomac  obstructed  by  the 
enemy's  batteries,  so  near  the  capital ;  and 
the  fixing  of  a  date  beyond  which  the  begin- 
ning of  the  movement  should  not  be  post- 
poned had  been  shown  to  be  necessary  by 
the  exasperating  experience  of  the  past  eight 
months.  The  criticism  so  often  made,  that  a 
general  who  required  to  have  such  orders 
as  these  given  him  should  have  been  dis- 
missed the  service,  is  the  most  difficult  of  all 
to  meet.  Nobody  felt  so  deeply  as  Mr.  Lincoln 
the  terrible  embarrassment  of  having  a  gen- 
eral in  command  of  that  magnificent  army 
who  was  absolutely  without  initiative,  who 
answered  every  suggestion  of  advance  with 
demands  for  reinforcements,  who  met  entreat- 
ies and  reproaches  with  unending  arguments 
to  show  the  superiority  of  the  enemy  and  the 
insufficiency  of  his  own  resources,  and  who 
yet  possessed  in  an  eminent  degree  the  enthu- 
siastic devotion  of  his  friends  and  the  general 
confidence  of  the  rank  and  file.  There  was  so 
much  of  executive  efficiency  and  ability  about 
him  that  the  President  kept  on,  hoping  to  the 
last  that  if  he  could  once  "  get  him  started  " 
he  would  then  handle  the  army  well  and  do 
great  things  with  it. 
MANASSAS    EVACUATED. 
Sunday,  the  9th  of  March,  was  a  day  of 
swiftly  succeeding  emotions  at  the  Executive 
Mansion.    The  news  of  the  havoc  wrought  by 
the  Merriviac  in  Hampton  Roads  the  day 
before  arrived  in  the  morning,  and  was  re- 
ceived with  profound  chagrin  by  the  calmest 
spirits  and  with  something  like  consternation 
by  the  more  excitable.  But  in  the  afternoon 
astonishing  tidings  came  to  reverse  the  morn- 
ing's depression.  The  first  was  of  the  timely 
arrival  of  the  Monitor,  followed  shortly,  on 
the  completion  of  the  telegraph  to  Port  Mon- 
roe, by  the  news  of  her  battle  and  victory. 
The  exultation  of  the  Government  over  this 
providential  success  was  changed  to  amaze- 
ment by  the  receipt  of  intelligence  that  the 
rebel  batteries  on  the  Potomac  were  already 
abandoned,  and  the  tale  of  surprises  was  com- 
pleted by  the  news  which  came  in  the  evening 
that  the  Confederate  army  had  abandoned  their 
works  at  Manassas,  retreating  southward.  Gen- 
eral McClellan  was  with  the  President  and  the 
Secretary  of  War  when  this  message  arrived, 
and  he  received  it,  as  might  have  been  ex- 
pected, with  incredulity,  which  at  last  gave  way 
to  stupefaction.  He  started  at  once  across  the 
river,  ostensibly  to  verify  the  intelligence,  and 
in  his  bewilderment  and  confusion  issued  an 
order  that  night  for  an  immediate  advance  of 
the  army  upon  Centreville  and  Manassas.  In 
the  elaborate  report  by  which  he  strove,  a 
year  after  the  fact,  to  shift  from  himself  to  others 
the  responsibility  of  all  his  errors,  occurs  this 
remarkable  sentence : 
The  retirement  of  the  enemy  towards  Richmond  had 
been  expected  as  the  natural  consequence  of  the 
movement  to  the  Peninsula,  but  their  adoption  of  this 
course  immediately  on  ascertaining  that  such  a  move- 
ment was  intended,  while  it  relieved  me  from  the 
results  of  the  undue  anxiety  of  my  superiors  and  at- 
tested the  character  of  the  design,  was  unfortunate  in 
that  the  then  almost  impassable  roads  between  our 
positions  and  theirs  deprived  us  of  the  opportunity  for 
inflicting  damage  usually  afforded  by  the  withdrawal 
of  a  large  army  in  the  face  of  a  powerful  adversary. 
This  was  the  theory  immediately  adopted 
by  himself,  propagated  among  his  staff,  com- 
municated to  the  Prince  de  Joinville,  who 
published  it  in  France  on  his  return  there, 
and  to  the  Comte  de  Paris,  who  after  twenty 
years  incorporated  it  in  his  history  —  that  the 
enemy,  having  heard  of  his  scheme  for  going 
to  the  Peninsula,  through  the  indiscretion  of 
the  Government,  had  suddenly  taken  flight 
from  Manassas.  General  McClellan  asserts 
this  in  his  report  a  dozen  times ;  he  reiterates 
it  as  if  he  felt  that  his  reputation  depended 
upon  it.  If  it  is  not  true,  then  in  the  long  con- 
test with  the  President  in  regard  to  a  direct 
attack  from  Washington  the  President  was 
right  and  McClellan  was  wrong. 
The  straightforward  narrative  of  General 
Johnston,  and  the  official  orders  and  corre- 
spondence of  the  Confederate  officers,  show
9-« 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
that  there  is  not  the  slightest  foundation  for 
this  theory  of  General  McClellan's.  They 
show,  on  the  contrary,  that  the  rebel  govern- 
ment, nearly  a  month  before  this,  had  con- 
eluded  that  Johnston's  position  was  untenable; 
that  Johnston  had  shared  in  the  belief,  and 
had  begun  his  preparations  to  retire  on  the 
2 2d  of  February;  that  instead  of  "  ascertain- 
ing McClellan's  intention  to  move  to  the 
lower  Chesapeake,"  he  had  been  of  the  opin- 
ion that  McClellan  would  advance  upon  the 
line  designated  by  Mr.  Lincoln,  because  it 
was  the  best  line  for  attack  and  the  most  dif- 
ficult for  the  rebels  to  defend;  that  he  knew 
McClellan's  enormous  superiority  in  numbers 
and  did  not  purpose  to  risk  everything  in 
resisting  him  there  ;  that  on  the  5th  of  March, 
having  received  information  of  unusual  activ- 
ity in  our  army  in  the  direction  of  Dumfries, 
he  gave  his  final  orders,  and  on  the  7th  began 
to  move.  He  proceeded  with  the  greatest 
deliberation,  writing  to  one  of  his  generals  on 
the  15th,  "  McClellan  seems  not  to  value  time 
especially."  His  subordinates  were  equally 
convinced  that  the  Confederate  right  was  the 
object  of  the  Union  advance;  Holmes  wrote 
in  that  sense  to  Lee  on  the  14th  of  March. 
Lee,  who  was  then  directing  military  opera- 
tions in  Richmond,  answered  him  on  the  16th, 
concurring  in  this  view,  recognizing  the  "  ad- 
vantages "  of  such  a  plan,  and  saying,  "That 
he  will  advance  upon  our  line  as  soon  as  he 
can,  I  have  no  doubt."  Until  the  1 8th  of  March 
Johnston  did  not  suspect  that  McClellan  was 
not  advancing  to  strike  his  right  flank ;  he  then 
fell  back  behind  the  Rapidan,  to  guard  against 
other  contingencies.  Even  while  our  vast  army 
was  passing  down  the  Potomac  he  could  not 
make  out  where  it  was  going.  So  late  as  the 
early  days  of  April,  Jefferson  Davis  was  in 
doubt  as  to  McClellan's  destination,  and 
Johnston  only  heard  of  the  advance  upon 
Yorktown  about  the  5th  of  that  month. 
By  the  very  test,  therefore,  to  which  Gen- 
eral McClellan  appeals  in  the  paragraph  quoted 
above,  his  conduct  during  the  autumn  and 
winter  stands  finally  condemned.  By  their 
contemporaneous  letters  and  orders,  by  their 
military  movements  in  an  important  crisis,  by 
their  well-considered  historical  narratives,  the 
Confederate  government  and  generals  have 
established  these  facts  beyond  all  possibility 
of  future  refutation  :  that  the  plan  for  a  direct 
attack  suggested  by  Lincoln,  and  contemptu- 
"  Polla  ;..  Vol.  I.,  p.  184,  says  :    "  A  long, 
lingering  Indian  summer,  with  roads  more  hard  and 
skies  more  beautiful  than  Virginia  had  seen  for  many 
a  year,  invited  the  enemy  to  advance."  "Johnston's 
Narrative  "  says  that  the  roads  were  practicable  until 
the  last  of  December. 
From  the  admirable  monograph  of  Major-General 
A.   S.  Webb,  Chief-of-Staff  of  the  Army  of  the  Poto- 
ously  rejected  by  McClellan,  was  a  sound 
and  practicable  one ;  it  was  the  plan  they  ex- 
pected and  dreaded  to  see  adopted,  because 
it  was  the  one  easiest  to  accomplish  and  hard- 
est to  resist.  When  they  fancied  that  they  saw 
the  Army  of  the  Potomac  preparing  to  move, 
it  was  this  plan  alone  of  which  they  thought ; 
and  they  immediately  gave  up  their  position, 
which  McClellan  thought  impregnable,  as 
they  had  been  for  weeks  preparing  to  do  at 
the  first  intimation  of  a  forward  movement. 
The  long  delay  of  five  months,  during  three 
of  which  the  roads  were  in  unusually  fine  con- 
dition,* during  all  of  which  the  Union  forces 
were  as  three  to  one  of  the  enemy,  remains 
absolutely  without  excuse.  It  can  only  be  ex- 
plained by  that  strange  idiosyncrasy  of  Gen- 
eral McClellan  which  led  him  always  to  double 
or  treble  the  number  of  an  enemy  and  the 
obstacles  in  his  immediate  vicinity. 
It  is  little  blame  to  Confederate  generals 
that  they  could  not  divine  what  General  Mc- 
Clellan was  doing  with  the  grand  army  of  the 
Union  during  the  week  that  followed  the 
evacuation  of  Manassas.  No  soldier  could 
have  been  expected  to  guess  the  meaning  of 
that  mysterious  promenade  of  a  vast  army  to 
Centreville  and  Manassas,  and  back  to  Alex- 
andria. In  spite  of  the  "impassable  roads/' 
they  made  the  journey  with  ease  and  celerity. 
The  question  why  the  whole  army  was  taken 
has  never  been  satisfactorily  answered.  Gen- 
eral McClellan  started  away  in  too  much  con- 
fusion of  mind  to  know  precisely  what  he 
intended;  his  explanation  afterward  was  that 
he  wanted  the  troops  to  have  a  little  experience 
of  marching  and  to  "  get  rid  of  their  impedi- 
menta." He  claims  in  his  report  to  have  found 
on  this  excursion  a  full  justification  of  his  ex- 
travagant estimate  of  the  enemy's  force,  and 
speaks  with  indignation  of  the  calumnious 
stories  of  "  quaker  guns  "  which  were  rife  in 
the  press  at  the  time.  Every  one  now  knows 
how  fatally  false  the  estimate  was ;  and  as  to 
the  "  quaker  guns,"  this  is  what  General  John- 
ston says  about  them : 
As  we  had  not  artillery  enough  for  their  works  and 
for  the  army  fighting  elsewhere  at  the  same  time, 
rough  wooden  imitations  of  guns  were  made,  and  kept 
near  the  embrasures,  in  readiness  for  exhibition  in 
them.  To  conceal  the  absence  of  carriages,  the  em- 
brasures were  covered  with  sheds  made  of  bushes. 
These  were  the  quaker  guns  afterwards  noticed  in 
Northern  papers. 
Without  further  discussing  where  the  fault 
mac,  entitled  "The  Peninsula,"  we  quote  a  sentence 
on  this  subject :  "  During  all  the  time  Johnston's  army 
lay  at  Centreville  insolently  menacing  Washington 
...  it  never  presented  an  effective  strength  of  over 
50,000  men.  With  more  than  twice  that  number,  Mc- 
Clellan remained  inactive  for  many  precious  weeks, 
under  the  delusion  that  he  was  confronted  by  a  force 
nearly  equal  his  own."
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
921 
lay,  the  fact  is  beyond  dispute  that  when  the 
evacuation  of  Manassas  was  known  through- 
out the  country,  the  military  reputation  of 
General  McClellan  received  serious  damage. 
No  explanation  made  at  the  time,  and,  we  may 
add,  none  made  since  then,  could  account 
satisfactorily  for  such  a  mistake  as  to  the  con- 
dition of  the  enemy,  such  utter  ignorance  as 
to  his  movements.  The  first  result  of  it  was 
the  removal  of  General  McClellan  from  the 
command  of  the  armies  of  the  United  States. 
This  resolution  was  taken  by  the  President 
himself,  on  the  nth  of  March.  On  that  day 
he  prepared  the  order  known  as  "  President's 
War  Order,  No.  3,"  and  in  the  evening  called 
together  Mr.  Seward,  Mr.  Chase,  and  Mr. 
Stanton,  and  read  it  to  them.  It  was  in  these 
words : 
President's  War  Order,  No.  3. 
Executive  Mansion, 
Washington,  March  11,  1862. 
Major-General  McClellan  having  personally  taken 
the  field  at  the  head  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  un- 
til otherwise  ordered  he  is  relieved  from  the  command 
of  the  other  military  departments,  he  retaining  com- 
mand of  the  Department  of  the  Potomac. 
Ordered  further,  That  the  departments  now  under 
the  respective  commands  of  Generals  Halleck  and 
Hunter,  together  with  so  much  of  that  under  General 
Buell  as  lies  west  of  a  north  and  south  line  indefinitely 
drawn  through  Knoxville,  Tenn.,  be  consolidated  and 
designated  the  Department  of  the  Mississippi,  and 
that,  until  otherwise  ordered,  Major-General  Halleck 
have  command  of  said  department. 
Ordered  also,  That  the  country  west  of  the  Depart- 
ment of  the  Potomac  and  east  of  the  Department  of 
the  Mississippi  be  a  military  department,  to  be  called 
the  Mountain  Department,  and  that  the  same  be  com- 
manded by  Major-General  Fremont.  That  all  the 
commanders  of  departments,  after  the  receipt  of  this 
order  by  them  respectively,  report  severally  and  di- 
rectly to  the  Secretary  of  War,  and  that  prompt,  full, 
and  frequent  reports  will  be  expected  of  all  and  each 
of  them. 
Abraham  Lincoln. 
All  the  members  of  the  Cabinet  present 
heartily  approved  the  order.  The  President 
gave  his  reason  for  issuing  it  while  General 
McClellan  was  absent  from  Washington  —  a 
reason  indeed  apparent  in  the  opening  words, 
which  were  intended  to  take  from  the  act  any 
appearance  of  disfavor.  The  general's  inti- 
mate biographers  have  agreed  that  it  was  be- 
cause the  President  was  afraid  to  do  it  while 
the  general  was  in  Washington !  The  manner 
of  the  order,  which  was  meant  as  a  kindness, 
was  taken  as  a  grievance.  Mr.  Seward  advised 
that  the  order  be  issued  in  the  name  of  the 
Secretary  of  War,  but  this  proposition  met 
with  a  decided  protest  from  Mr.  Stanton.  He 
said  there  was  some  friction  already  between 
himself  and  the  general's  friends,  and  he  feared 
that  the  act,  if  signed  by  him,  would  be  attrib- 
uted to  personal  feeling.  The  President  de- 
cided to  take  the  responsibility.*  In  a  manly 
"J.  H.,  Diary. 
and  courteous  letter  the  next  day,  McClellan 
accepted  the  disposition  thus  made  of  hirn. 
On  the  13th  of  March,  at  Fairfax  Court 
House,  General  McClellan  called  together  the 
four  corps  commanders  who  were  with  him 
and  submitted  to  them  for  discussion  the 
President's  order  of  the  8th.  The  results  of 
the  council  cannot  be  more  briefly  stated  than 
in  the  following  memorandum,  drawn  up  by 
the  generals  who  took  part  in  it : 
A  council  of  the  generals  commanding  army  corps 
at  the  headquarters  of  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  were 
of  the  opinion  : 
I.  That  the  enemy  having  retreated  from  Manassas 
to  Gordonsville,  behind  the  Rappahannock  and  Rapi- 
dan,  it  is  the  opinion  of  the  generals  commanding  army 
corps  that  the  operations  to  be  carried  on  will  be  best 
undertaken  from  Old  Point  Comfort,  between  the  York 
and  James  rivers,  provided  — 
First.  That  the  enemy's  vessel  Merrimac  can  be 
neutralized ; 
Second.  That  the  means  of  transportation,  sufficient 
for  an  immediate  transfer  of  the  force  to  its  new  base, 
can  be  ready  at  Washington  and  Alexandria  to  move 
down  the  Potomac ;  and 
Third.  That  a  naval  auxiliary  force  can  be  had  to 
silence,  or  aid  in  silencing,  the  enemy's  batteries  on 
the  York  River. 
Fourth.  That  the  force  to  be  left  to  cover  Washing- 
ton shall  be  such  as  to  give  an  entire  feeling  of  secu- 
rity for  its  safety  from  menace.    (Unanimous.) 
II.  If  the  foregoing  cannot  be,  the  army  should  then 
be  moved  against  the  enemy  behind  the  Rappahan- 
nock at  the  earliest  possible  moment,  and  the  means 
for  reconstructing  bridges,  repairing  railroads,  and 
stocking  them  with  materials  sufficient  for  supplying 
the  army  should  at  once  be  collected  for  both  the 
Orange  and  Alexandria  and  Aquia  and  Richmond  rail- 
roads.   (Unanimous.) 
N.  B. —  That  with  the  forts  on  the  right  bank  of  the 
Potomac  fully  garrisoned,  and  those  on  the  left  bank 
occupied,  a  covering  force  in  front  of  the  Virginia  line 
of  25,000  men  would  suffice.  (Keyes,  Heintzelman, 
and  McDowell. )  A  total  of  40,000  men  for  the  defense 
of  the  city  would  suffice.    (Sumner.) 
These  conclusions  of  the  council  were  con- 
veyed to  Washington,  and  the  President  on 
the  same  day  sent  back  to  General  McClellan 
his  approval,  and  his  peremptory  orders  for  the 
instant  execution  of  the  plan  proposed,  in  these 
words,  signed  by  the  Secretary  of  War : 
The  President,  having  considered  the  plan  of  oper- 
ations agreed  upon  by  yourself  and  the  commanders 
of  army  corps,  makes  no  objection  to  the  same,  but 
gives  the  following  directions  as  to  its  execution :  First. 
leave  such  force  at  Manassas  Junction  as  shall  make  it 
entirely  certain  that  the  enemy  shall  not  repossess 
himself  of  that  position  and  line  of  communication. 
Second,  leave  Washington  entirely  secure.  Third,  move 
the  remainder  of  the  force  down  the  Potomac,  choosing 
a  new  base  at  Fortress  Monroe,  or  anywhere  between 
here  and  there,  or,  at  all  events,  move  such  remainder 
of  the  army  at  once  in  pursuit  of  the  enemy  by  some 
route. 
No  commander  could  ask  an  order  more 
unrestricted,  more  unhampered,  than  this. 
Choose  your  own  route,  your  own  course, 
only  go ;  seek  the  enemy  and  fight  him. 
Under  the  orders  of  Mr.  Tohn  Tucker,  of
0  -  - 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
the  War  Department,  a  fleet  of  transports  had 
been  preparing  since  the  27th  of  February.  It 
e  of  the  many  grievances  mentioned  by 
era!  McClellan  in  his  report,  that  this 
work  was  taken  entirely  out  of  his  hands  and 
committed  to  those  ot  Mr.  Tucker;  he  thus 
estops  himself  from  claiming  any  credit  for 
one  of  the  most  brilliant  feats  of  logistics  ever 
recorded.  On  the  27th  of  February,  Mr. 
fucker  received  his  orders;  on  the  17th  of 
March,  the  troops  began  their  embarkation; 
on  the  5th  of  April,  Mr.  Tucker  made  his  final 
report,  announcing  that  he  had  transported 
to  Fort  Monroe,  from  Washington,  Perryville, 
and  Alexandria,  "  121,500  men,  14,592  ani- 
mals, 1 1 50  wagons.  44  batteries,  74  ambu- 
lances, besides  pontoon  bridges,  telegraph 
materials,  and  the  enormous  quantity  of 
equipage,  etc.,  required  for  an  army  of  such 
magnitude.  The  only  loss," he  adds,  "of  which 
I  have  heard  is  eight  mules  and  nine  barges, 
which  latter  went  ashore  in  a  gale  within  a 
few  miles  of  Fort  Monroe,  the  cargoes  being 
saved.''  He  is  certainly  justified  in  closing 
his  story  with  these  words :  "  I  respectfully 
but  confidently  submit  that,  for  economy  and 
celerity  of  movement,  this  expedition  is  with- 
out a  parallel  on  record."  * 
The  first  corps  to  embark  was  Heintzel- 
man's ;  he  took  with  him  from  General  Mc- 
Clellan the  most  stringent  orders  to  do 
nothing  more  than  to  select  camping-grounds, 
send  out  reconnaissances,  engage  guides  and 
spies,  "  but  to  make  no  important  move  in 
advance."  The  other  forces  embarked  in  turn, 
M<  DowelFs  corps  being  left  to  the  last;  and 
before  it  was  ready  to  sail,  General  McClellan 
himself  started  on  the  1st  of  April,  with  the 
headquarters  on  the  steamer  Commodore,  leav- 
ing behind  him  a  state  of  things  that  made  it 
necessary  to  delay  the  departure  of  McDow- 
ell's troops  still  further. 
In  all  the  orders  of  the  President  it  had 
been  clearly  stated  that,  as  an  absolute  condi- 
tion precedent  to  the  army  being  taken  away 
to  a  new  base,  enough  troops  should  be  left  at 
ton  to  make  that  city  absolutely  safe, 
0  tly  from  capture,  but  from  serious  men- 
The  partisans  of  General  McClellan  then, 
and  ever  since  then,  have  contended  that,  as 
Washington  could  not  be  seriously  attacked 
without   exposing  Richmond  to  capture,  un- 
due  importance   was  attached  to  it  in  these 
orders.    It  would  be  a  waste  of  words  to  argue 
with  people  who  place  the  political  and  stra- 
tegic value  of  these  two  cities  on  a  level.  The 
*The  means  by  which  this  work  was  done  were  as 
folio.' 
113  steamers  at  an  average  price  per  day   $215.10 
188  schooners  at  an  average  price  per  day        24.45 
'83  barges  at  an  average  price  per  day           14.27 
capture  of  Richmond,  without  the  previous 
virtual  destruction  of  the  rebel  armies,  would 
have  been,  it  is  true,  an  important  achievement, 
but  the  seizure  of  Washington  by  the  rebels 
would  have  been  a  fatal  blow  to  the  Union 
cause.  General  McClellan  was  in  the  habit  of 
saying  that  if  the  rebel  army  should  take  Wash- 
ington while  he  was  at  Richmond  they  could 
never  get  back  ;  but  it  might  be  said  that  the 
general  who  would  permit  Washington  to  be 
taken  could  not  be  relied  on  to  prevent  the 
enemy  from  doing  what  they  liked  afterward. 
Mr.  Lincoln  was  unquestionably  right  in  in- 
sisting that  Washington  must  not  only  be 
rendered  safe  from  capture,  but  must  also 
be  without  the  possibility  of  serious  danger. 
This  view  was  adopted  by  the  council  of 
corps  commanders,  who  met  on  the  13th  of 
March  at  Fairfax  Court  House.  They  agreed 
unanimously  upon  this  principle,  and  then, 
so  as  to  leave  no  doubt  as  to  details,  three 
of  the  four  gave  the  opinion  that  after  the 
forts  on  the  Virginia  side  were  fully  garri- 
soned, and  those  on  the  Maryland  side  occu- 
pied, a  covering  force  of  25,000  men  would 
be  required. 
The  morning  after  General  McClellan  had 
sailed  for  Fort  Monroe,  the  Secretary  of  War 
was  astonished  to  hear  from  General  Wads- 
worth,  the  military  Governor  of  the  District  of 
Washington,  that  he  had  left  him  present  for 
duty  only  19,000  men,  and  that  from  that  force 
he  had  orders  to  detach  four  good  regiments 
to  join  General  McClellan  on  the  Peninsula, 
and  four  more  to  relieve  Sumner  at  Manassas 
and  Warrenton.  He  further  reported  that  his 
command  was  entirely  "  inadequate  to  the 
important  duty  to  which  it  was  assigned." 
As  General  Wadsworth  was  a  man  of  the 
highest  intelligence,  courage,  and  calm  judg- 
ment, the  President  was  greatly  concerned  by 
this  emphatic  statement.  Orders  were  at  once 
given  to  General  E.  A.  Hitchcock,  an  accom- 
plished veteran  officer  on  duty  at  the  War  De- 
partment, and  to  Adjutant-General  Thomas, 
to  investigate  the  statement  made  by  General 
Wadsworth.  They  reported  the  same  night 
that  it  would  require  30,000  men  to  man  and 
occupy  the  forts,  which,  with  the  covering 
force  of  25,000,  would  make  55,000  necessary 
for  the  proper  defense  of  the  city,  according 
to  the  judgment  of  the  council  of  corps  com- 
manders. They  confirmed  the  report  of  Wads- 
worth that  his  efficient  force  consisted  of 
19,000,  from  which  General  McClellan  had 
ordered  eight  regiments  away.  They  there- 
fore concluded  "  that  the  requirement  of  the 
President  that  the  city  should  be  left  entirely 
secure  had  not  been  fully  complied  with."  In 
accordance  with  this  report  the  President  di- 
rected that  General  McDowell's  corps  should
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
923 
not  be  sent   to  the  Peninsula  until  further 
orders.* 
YORKTOWN. 
General  McClellan  arrived  at  Fort 
Monroe  on  the  morning  of  the  2d  of  April. 
According  to  his  own  report  he  had  ready  the 
next  day  to  move  58,000  men  and  100  guns, 
besides  the  division  artillery.  They  were  of 
the  flower  of  the  volunteer  army,  and  included 
also  Sykes's  brigade  of  regulars,  Hunt's  artil- 
lery reserve,  and  several  regiments  of  cavalry. 
These  were  all  on  the  spot,  prepared  to  march, 
and  an  almost  equal  number  were  on  their 
way  to  join  him.  He  seemed  at  first  to  ap- 
preciate the  necessity  for  prompt  and  decisive 
action,  and  with  only  one  day's  delay  issued 
his  orders  for  the  march  up  the  Peninsula  be- 
tween the  York  and  James  rivers.  The  first 
obstacle  that  he  expected  to  meet  was  the 
force  of  General  J.  B.  Magruder  at  Yorktown, 
which  McClellan  estimated  at  from  15,000  to 
20,000.  Magruder  says  his  force  consisted  of 
11,000,  of  which  6000  were  required  for  the 
fortifications  of  Yorktown  and  only  5000  were 
left  to  hold  the  line  across  the  Peninsula,  13 
miles  in  length.  His  only  object  was  to  delay 
as  long  as  possible  the  advance  of  the  National 
troops  upon  Richmond,  and  his  dispositions 
were  made  to  that  end.  If  he  had  had  troops 
enough,  he  says  that  he  would  have  made  his 
line  of  defense  between  Ship  Point,  on  the  York, 
and  the  mouth  of  the  Warwick,  on  the  James. 
But  his  force  being  insufficient  for  that  pur- 
pose, he  took  up  as  a  second  line  the  Warwick 
River,  which  heads  only  a  mile  or  so  from 
Yorktown  and  empties  into  the  James  some 
thirteen  miles  to  the  south.  Yorktown  and  its 
redoubts,  united  by  long  curtains  and  flanked 
by  rifle-pits,  formed  the  left  of  his  line,  which 
was  continued  by  the  Warwick  River,  a  slug- 
gish and  boggy  stream  running  through  a 
dense  wood  fringed  with  swamps.  The  stream 
was  dammed  in  two  places,  at  Wynn's  Mill 
and  at  Lee's  Mill;  and  Magruder  constructed 
three  more  dams  to  back  up  the  river  and 
make  the  fords  impassable.  Each  of  these 
dams  was  protected  by  artillery  and  earth- 
works. 
General  McClellan  was  absolutely  ignorant 
not  only  of  these  preparations  made  to  receive 
him,  but  also  of  the  course  of  the  river  and  the 
nature  of  the  ground  through  which  it  ran.  He 
knew  something  of  the  disposition  of  Magru- 
der's  outposts  on  his  first  line,  and  rightly  con- 
jectured that  they  would  retire  as  he  ad  vai 
His  orders  for  the  4th  of  April  were  therefore 
punctually  carried  out,  and  he  seemed  to  I 
expected  no  greater  difficulty  in  his  plan  for 
the  next  day.  f  He  divided  his  force  into  two 
columns —  Heintzelman  to  take  the  right  and 
march  directly  to  Yorktown  ;  and  Keyes,  tak- 
ing the  road  to  the  left,  to  push  on  to  the 
Half-way  House  in  the  rear  of  Yorktown,  on 
the  Williamsburg  road.  He  expected  Keyes 
to  be  there  the  same  day,  to  occupy  the  nar- 
row ridge  in  that  neighborhood,  "  to  prevent 
the  escape  of  the  garrison  at  Yorktown  by 
land,  and  to  prevent  reinforcements  from  be- 
ing thrown  in."  Heintzelman  went  forward  to 
the  place  assigned  him  in  front  of  Yorktown, 
meeting  with  little  opposition .  Keyes  marched 
by  the  road  assigned  him  until  he  came  to  the 
enemy's  fortified  position  at  Lee's  Mill,  which, 
to  use  General  McClellan's  words,  "he  found 
altogether  stronger  than  was  expected,  unap- 
proachable by  reason  of  the  Warwick  River, 
and  incapable  of  being  carried  by  assault." 
The  discovery  of  this  "unexpected"  obstacle 
exercised  a  paralyzing  influence  upon  the  Gen- 
eral-in-Chief. The  energetic  and  active  cam- 
paign that  day  begun  was  at  once  given  up. 
Two  days  of  reconnaissances  convinced  him 
that  he  could  not  break  through  the  line  which 
Magruder's  little  army  of  11,000  men  had 
stretched  across  the  Peninsula,  and  he  resolved 
upon  a  regular  siege  of  the  place.  He  began 
at  the  same  time  that  campaign  of  complaint 
and  recrimination  against  the  Government 
which  he  kept  up  as  long  as  he  remained  in 
the  service. 
He  always  ascribed  the  failure  of  his  cam- 
paign at  this  point  to  two  causes;  first,  to  the 
want  of  assistance  by  the  navy  in  reducing 
Yorktown,  and  second,  to  the  retention  of 
McDowell's  corps  in  front  of  Washington.  If 
the  navy  had  silenced  the  batteries  at  Yorktown 
and  Gloucester,  he  contended,  he  could  have 
gone  up  the  Peninsula  unchecked.  This  is 
unquestionably  true;  it  would  be  equally  true 
to  say  in  general  terms  that  if  somebody  else 
would  do  our  work  we  would  have  no  work 
to  do.  He  brings  no  proof  to  show  that  he 
had  any  right  to  expect  that  the  navy  would 
do  this  for  him.  It  is  true  that  he  asked  before 
he  left  Washington  that  the  navy  might  co- 
operate with  him  in  this  plan,  and  received  in 
reply  the  assurance  that  the  navy  would  ren- 
der him  all  the  assistance  in  its  power.  The 
sworn  testimony  of  Mr.  Fox,  the  Assistant- 
*  General  McClellan  made  in  his  report  an  elaborate 
effort  to  explain  away  these  facts.  He  claims  to  have 
left  a  force  of  73,000  for  the  defense  of  Washington, 
including  in  the  number  all  the  troops  under  Dix  in 
Maryland,  under  Banks  in  the  Shenandoah,  all  those 
at  Warrenton,  at  Manassas,  and  on  the  lower  Potomac. 
But  he  does  not  deny  the  facts  stated  by  Wadsworth 
and  confirmed  by  Hitchcock  and  Thomas. 
\  In  a  letter  on  the  3d  he  wrote :  "  I  hope  to  get 
possession  of  Yorktown  day  after  to-morrow."  ["  Mc- 
Clellan's Own  Story,"  p.  307.]
9-4 
ABRAHAM  LINCOLN. 
Secretary  oi  the  Navy,  and  of  Admiral  Golds- 
borough',  shows  that  nothing  was  promised 
that  was  not  performed,  and  that  the  navy 
I  ready  to  give,  and  did  give,  all  the  as- 
sistance to  the  army  which  was  possible.  Mr. 
Fox  said  : 
\V      len  vessels  could  not  have  attacked  the  batter- 
Vorktown  and  Gloucester  with  any  degree  of 
--.     rhe    forts    at  Yorktown   were   situated  too 
high,  were  beyond  the  reach  of  naval  guns ;  and  I 
understood  that  General  McClellan  never  expected  any 
attack  to  be  made  upon  them  by  the  navy. 
Admiral  Goldsborough's  evidence  is  to  the 
same  effect :  he  promised  that  the  Merrimac 
should  never  go  up  the  York  River,  and  she 
did  not;  he  never  heard  that  he  was  expected 
to  cooperate  with  the  army  in  attacking  York- 
town;  he  did  everything  that  General  McClel- 
lan requested  of  him.  His  orders  from  the  de- 
partment were  clear  and  urgent,  though  gen- 
eral; he  was  "to  extend  to  the  army,  at  all 
times,  any  and  all  aid  that  he  could  render"; 
and  he  never  refused  to  honor  any  draft  that 
was  made  upon  him.  General  McClellan  pur- 
sued in  this  matter  his  invariable  system.  He 
asked  for  impossibilities,  and  when  they  were 
not  accomplished  for  him  he  cherished  it  ever 
after  as  a  precious  grievance — like  a  certain 
species  of  lawyer,  who  in  a  case  that  he  ex- 
pects to  lose  always  takes  care  to  provide 
himself  with  a  long  bill  of  exceptions  on  which 
to  base  his  appeal. 
The  greatest  of  his  grievances  was  the  re- 
tention of  McDowell's  corps,  and  his  clamor 
in  regard  to  this  was  so  loud  and  long  as  to 
blind  many  careless  readers  and  writers  to  the 
facts  in  the  case.  We  have  stated  them  already, 
but  they  may  be  briefly  recapitulated  here.  A 
council  of  war  of  General  McClellan's  corps 
commanders,  called  by  himself,  had  decided 
that  Washington  could  not  be  safely  left  with- 
out a  covering  force  of  55,000,  including  the 
garrisons  of  the  forts.  When  he  had  gone, 
eral  Wadsworth  reported  that  he  had  left 
only  19,000,  and  had  ordered  away  nearly 
half  of  these.  Two  eminent  generals  in  the 
W ar  Department  investigated  this  statement 
and  found  it  true,  whereupon  the  President 
ordered  that  McDowell's  corps  should  for  the 
present  remain  within  reach  of  Washington. 
McClellan  took  with  him  to  the  Peninsula  an 
egate  force  of  over  100,000  men,  after- 
wards largely  increased.    His    own  morning 
"  The  discrepancy  cannot  be  accounted  for.  General 
McClellan's  official  morning  report  of  the  13th  of 
April,  four  days  after  the  date  of  the  President's  letter, 
gives  the  following:  "Number  of  troops  composing 
the  Army  of  the  Potomac  after  its  disembarkation  on 
the  Peninsula:  Aggregate  present  for  duty,  100,970; 
on  special  duty,  sick,  and  in  arrest,  4265 ;  aggregate 
absent,   12,486,  —  total  aggregate,  117,721."  Yet  with 
report  of  the  13th  of  April,  signed  by  himself 
and  his  adjutant-general,  shows  that  he  had 
with  him  actually  present  for  duty  100,970. 
With  this  overwhelming  superiority  of  num- 
bers he  could  have  detached  30,000  men  at 
any  moment  to  do  the  work  that  he  had  in- 
tended McDowell  to  do.  But  all  the  energy  he 
might  have  employed  in  this  work  he  diverted 
in  attacking  the  Administration  at  Washington, 
which  was  doing  all  that  it  could  do  to  sup- 
port and  provide  for  his  army. 
The  attitude  of  the  President  towards  him 
at  this  time  may  be  seen  from  the  following 
letter  of  the  9th  of  April,  in  which  Mr.  Lincoln 
answers  his  complaints  with  as  much  consider- 
ation and  kindness  as  a  father  would  use  to- 
wards a  querulous  and  petulant  child : 
Your  dispatches  complaining  that  you  are  not  prop- 
erly sustained,  while  they  do  not  offend  me,  do  pain 
me  very  much. 
Blenker's  division  was  withdrawn  from  you  before 
you  left  here,  and  you  know  the  pressure  under  which 
I  did  it,  and,  as  I  thought,  acquiesced  in  it — certainly 
not  without  reluctance.  After  you  left,  I  ascertained 
that  less  than  20,000  unorganized  men,  without  a  single 
field  battery,  were  all  you  designed  to  be  left  for  the 
defense  of  Washington  and  Manassas  Junction,  and 
part  of  this  even  was  to  go  to  General  Hooker's  old 
position.  General  Banks's  corps,  once  designed  for 
Manassas  Junction,  was  diverted  and  tied  up  on  the  line 
of  Winchester  and  Strasburg,  and  could  not  leave  it 
without  again  exposing  the  upper  Potomac  and  the 
Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railroad.  This  presented,  or 
would  present  when  McDowell  and  Sumner  should 
be  gone,  a  great  temptation  to  the  enemy  to  turn  back 
from  the  Rappahannock  and  sack  Washington.  My 
official  order  that  Washington  should,  by  the  judg- 
ment of  all  the  commanders  of  army  corps,  be  left 
entirely  secure,  had  been  neglected.  It  was  precisely 
this  that  drove  me  to  detain  McDowell. 
I  do  not  forget  that  I  was  satisfied  with  your  ar- 
rangement to  leave  Banks  at  Manassas  Junction;  but 
when  that  arrangement  was  broken  up,  and  nothing 
was  substituted  for  it,  of  course  I  was  constrained  to 
substitute  something  for  it  myself.  And  now  allow  me 
to  ask,  do  you  really  think  I  should  permit  the  line 
from  Richmond  via  Manassas  Junction  to  this  city  to 
be  entirely  open,  except  what  resistance  could  be  pre- 
sented by  less  than  20,000  unorganized  troops  ?  This 
is  a  question  which  the  country  will  not  allow  me  to 
evade. 
There  is  a  curious  mystery  about  the  number  of 
troops  now  with  you.  When  I  telegraphed  you  on 
the  6th  saying  you  had  over  100,000  with  you,  I 
had  just  obtained  from  the  Secretary  of  War  a  state- 
ment taken,  as  he  said,  from  your  own  returns,  making 
108,000  then  with  you  and  en  route  to  you.  You  now 
say  you  will  have  but  85,000  when  all  en  route  to  you 
shall  have  reached  you.  How  can  the  discrepancy  of 
23,000  be  accounted  for  ?  * 
As  to  General  Wool's  command,  I  understand  it  is 
doing  for  you  precisely  what  a  like  number  of  your 
statements  like  these  on  file  in  the  War  Department, 
over  his  own  signature,  he  did  not  hesitate  to  inform 
the  President  that  his  force  amounted  to  only  85,000; 
and  even  this  sum  dwindled  so  considerably,  as  years 
rolled  by,  that  in  his  article  in  The  Centurv,  in  May, 
1885,  on  the  Peninsula  Campaign,  he  gives  his  available 
fighting  force  as  "67,000  or  68,000."
PLANS   OF  CAMPAIGN. 
own  would  have  to  do  if  that  command  was  away.  I 
suppose  the  whole  force  which  has  gone  forward  for 
you  is  with  you  by  this  time,  and  if  so,  I  think  it  is  the 
precise  time  for  you  to  strike  a  blow.  By  delay  the 
enemy  will  relatively  gain  upon  you  —  that  is,  he 
will  gain  faster  by  fortifications  and  reinforcements 
than  you  can  by  reinforcements  alone.  And  once 
more  let  me  tell  you  it  is  indispensable  to  you  that 
you  strike  a  blow.  I  am  powerless  to  help  this.  You 
will  do  me  the  justice  to  remember  I  always  insisted 
that  going  down  the  bay  in  search  of  a  field,  in- 
stead of  fighting  at  or  near  Manassas,  was  only  shift- 
ing and  not  surmounting  a  difficulty ;  that  we  would 
find  the  same  enemy  and  the  same  or  equal  intrench- 
ments  at  either  place.  The  country  will  not  fail  to 
note,  is  now  noting,  that  the  present  hesitation  to 
move  upon  an  intrenched  enemy  is  but  the  story  of 
Manassas  repeated. 
I  beg  to  assure  you  that  I  have  never  written  you  or 
spoken  to  you  in  greater  kindness  of  feeling  than  now, 
nor  with  a  fuller  purpose  to  sustain  you,  so  far  as,  in 
my  most  anxious  judgment,  I  consistently  can.  But 
you  must  act. 
These  considerations  produced  no  impres- 
sion upon  General  McClellan.  From  the  begin- 
ning to  the  end  of  the  siege  of  Yorktown, 
his  dispatches  were  one  incessant  cry  for  men 
and  guns.  These  the  Government  furnished  to 
the  utmost  extent  possible,  but  nothing  con- 
tented him.  His  hallucination  of  overwhelm- 
ing forces  opposed  to  him  began  again,  as 
violent  as  it  was  during  the  winter.  On  the  8th 
of  April  he  wrote  to  Admiral  Goldsborough, 
"  I  am  probably  weaker  than  they  are,  or 
soon  will  be."  His  distress  is  sometimes  comic 
in  its  expression.  He  writes  on  the  yth  of 
April,  "The  Warwick  River  grows  worse  the 
more  you  look  at  it."  While  demanding  Mc- 
Dowell's corps  en  bloc  he  asked  on  the  5th  for 
Franklin's  division,  and  on  the  10th  repeated 
this  request,  saying  that  although  he  wanted 
more,  he  would  be  responsible  for  the  results 
if  Franklin's  division  were  sent  him.  The  Gov- 
ernment, overborne  by  his  importunity,  gave 
orders  the  same  day  that  Franklin's  division 
should  go  to  him,  and  the  arrangements  for 
transporting  them  were  made  with  the  great- 
est diligence.  He  was  delighted  with  this  news ; 
and  although  the  weather  was  good  and  the 
roads  improving,  he  did  nothing  but  throw  up 
earth- works  until  they  came.  They  arrived  on 
the  20th,  and  no  use  whatever  was  made  of 
them !  He  kept  them  in  the  transports  in  which 
they  had  come  down  the  bay  more  than  two 
weeks  —  in  fact,  until  the  day  before  the  siege 
ended.  It  is  hard  to  speak  with  proper  mod- 
eration of  so  ridiculous  a  disposition  of  this 
most  valuable  force,  so  clamorously  demanded 
by  General  McClellan,  and  so  generously  sent 
him  by  the  President.  General  Webb,  the  in- 
timate friend  and  staff-officer  of  McClellan, 
thus  speaks  of  it : 
^  Lieutenant-Colonel  Alexander  of  the  Corps  of  En- 
gineers was  instructed  to  devise  the  proper  arrange- 
ments and  superintend  the  landing  of  the  troops  ;  but, 
Vol.  XXXVI.— 128. 
extraordinary  as  it  may  seem,  more  than  two  weeks  wen- 
consumed  in  the  preliminaries,  and  when  everything 
was  nearly  ready  for  the  disembarkation  the  enemy  had 
vanished  from  the  scene.  .  .  .  How  long  it  would  have 
taken  the  whole  of  McDowell's  corps  to  disembark  at 
this  rate  .  .  .  the  reader  may  judge;  and  yet  for  days 
it  had  been  McClellan's  pet  project, in  connection  with 
his  plan  of  campaign,  to  utilize  McDowell  in  just  this 
manner  as   a  flanking  column. 
The  simple  truth  is,  there  was  never  an  hour 
during  General  McClellan's  command  of  the 
army  that  he  had  not  more  troops  than  he 
knew  what  to  do  with  ;  yet  he  was  always  in- 
stinctively calling  for  more.  Mr.  Stanton  one 
day  said  of  him,  with  natural  hyperbole  : 
If  he  had  a  million  men,  he  would  swear  the  enemy 
had  two  millions,  and  then  he  would  sit  down  in  the 
mud  and  yell  for  three. 
As  usual  with  him,  he  entirely  mistook  the 
position,  the  strength,  and  the  intentions  of 
the  enemy.  He  repeatedly  telegraphed  to 
Washington  that  he  expected  to  fight  an  equal 
or  greater  force — in  fact,  "all  the  available 
force  of  the  rebels  "  in  the  neighborhood  of 
Yorktown.  We  have  the  concurrent  testimony 
of  all  the  Confederate  authorities  that  no  such 
plan  was  ever  thought  of.  Magruder's  inten- 
tions, as  well  as  his  orders  from  Richmond, 
were  merely  to  delay  McClellan's  advance  as 
long  as  practicable.  His  success  in  this  pur- 
pose surpassed  his  most  sanguine  expectations. 
In  the  early  days  of  April  he  was  hourly  ex- 
pecting an  attack  at  some  point  on  his  thinly 
defended  line  of  13  miles,  guarded,  as  he  says, 
by  only  5000  men,  exclusive  of  the  6000  who 
garrisoned  Yorktown.  "But  to  my  utter  sur- 
prise," he  continues,  "  he  permitted  day  after 
day  to  elapse  without  an  assault."  At  last, 
no  less  to  his  astonishment  than  to  his  delight, 
Magruder  discovered  that  McClellan  was  be- 
ginning a  regular  siege,  which  meant  a  gain  of 
several  weeks  for  the  rebel  defense  of  Rich- 
mond, and  absolute  safety  for  the  concentra- 
tion of  rebel  troops  in  the  mean  time. 
It  is  now  perfectly  clear  to  all  military 
critics  not  blinded  by  partisanship  or  personal 
partiality  that  McClellan  could  have  carried 
the  line  of  Magruder  by  assault  at  any  time 
during  the  early  days  of  April.  From  the 
mass  of  testimony  to  this  effect  before  us  we 
will  take  only  two  or  three  expressions,  of  the 
highest  authority.    General  A.  S.  Webb  says : 
That  the  Warwick  line  could  have  been  readily 
broken  within  a  week  after  the  army's  arrival  before 
it,  we  now  know. 
General  Heintzelman  says,  in  his  evidence 
before  the  Committee  on  the  Conduct  of  the 
War: 
I  think  if  I  had  been  permitted,  when  I  first  landed 
on  the  Peninsula,  to  advance,  I  could  have  isolated  the