Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

calling for surrender and the resignation of Lincoln. “If the secesh officers and forces had immediately follow’d, and by a bold Napoleonic movement had enter’d Washington the first day, (or even the second,) they could have had things their own way.”30

In fact, the Confederate army did not follow up its victory at Bull Run with a hot pursuit. Fully as ill-prepared for battle as the Federal army had been, the Confederates were badly disorganized by their victory and in no condition to undertake an offensive of their own. Nor did they think it was necessary, since they had achieved in this triumph all that their defensive strategy had promised. For his part, Abraham Lincoln was temporarily shaken by the defeat, but not as badly as some other Northerners. Horace Greeley’s editorials in the New York Tribune had screamed “On to Richmond!” but now the editor decided that the rebels “cannot be beaten” and counseled Lincoln to “have Mr. Crittenden move any proposition that ought to be adopted.”31

Within a day, the president had recovered his composure, and on July 27 Lincoln sat down to draft a more aggressive program for conducting the war, calling for a three-pronged invasion of the Confederacy in Virginia and in east and west Tennessee. To accomplish that, he needed to do some housecleaning: he relieved the unfortunate McDowell of his command and called to Washington as his replacement the commander of the Department of the Ohio, George B. McClellan, who had managed to win some small-scale victories with Ohio volunteers in western Virginia that summer. Then in November Lincoln rid himself of the lumbering Winfield Scott and promoted McClellan to general in chief of all the Union armies, and in January 1862 he deposed Secretary of War Cameron and replaced him with a steely-eyed lawyer named Edwin M. Stanton.

The naive war, the glory-to-God war, the war of the thousand-colored uniforms, was over. The war in earnest had now begun.

THE YOUNG NAPOLEON

The arrival of George Brinton McClellan on the scene in Washington was a second wind to the demoralized Federal army. At age thirty-five, McClellan was dashing and dapper, the very storybook image of a general, a “Young Napoleon.” To support that image, he brought with him from his years as a railroad executive some substantial and useful experience as an organizer. And organize he did. Numerous three-months’ militia regiments that had been about to go home were reenlisted for three-year terms of service; the streets of Washington were cleared of loitering volunteers by a provost guard or regulars; the regiments were reorganized into brigades, the brigades into divisions, and the divisions into corps, and the corps were given commanders. Uniforms and weapons were given some measure of standardization, discipline and drill were imposed properly, and the bedraggled army encamped around Washington was given a name that would stick to it throughout the war—the Army of the Potomac.

The army responded by giving to McClellan its whole-souled devotion. “For the first time,” wrote Adam Gurowski, a dour expatriate Pole employed by the State Department, “the army… looks martial. The city, likewise, has a more martial look than it had all the time under Scott. It seems that a young, strong hand holds the ribbons.” McClellan made the volunteers feel like real soldiers, and at review after glorious review in the fall of 1861, the men of the Army of the Potomac shouted themselves hoarse for McClellan. “He had a taking way of returning such salutations,” recalled Jacob Dolson Cox, the Ohio state senator turned officer. “He went beyond the formal military salute, and gave his cap a little twirl, which with his bow and smile seemed to carry a little of personal good fellowship even to the humblest private soldier.” McClellan even acquired a portable printing press to haul around on campaign with him so that he could keep his exhortations and advice flowing constantly through the hands of his soldiers. “It was very plain that these little attentions to the troops took well, and had no doubt some influence in establishing a sort of comradeship between him and them. They were part of an attractive and winning deportment which adapted itself to all sorts and ranks of men.”32

At first McClellan received the same response from Lincoln, the cabinet, and Congress. Dinner invitations poured in upon him faster than the time available to schedule them, compliments from young and old were publicly showered upon him, and in a very short while McClellan was being hailed as the savior of the Union—a view that McClellan himself began to share after old Winfield Scott was retired in November and McClellan made general in chief in his place. “By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen Marcy McClellan, soon after his appointment. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me.”33 Dictator or not, McClellan found an appreciative audience in Abraham Lincoln, for at the time of McClellan’s appointment, he and Lincoln saw the purpose of the war in very much the same terms. Lincoln still believed that secession was a political bubble that only required some measure of squeezing before it popped, and he advocated the application of just enough force to persuade the South that armed resistance was in vain.

Lincoln was especially careful not to drag the issue of slavery into the war, although it was a hesitation he did not enjoy. Privately, Lincoln regarded Southern secession as a blow not just against the Union but also against the most basic principles of democratic government, and for Lincoln, slavery was the uttermost negation of a people’s government. No matter what Southerners might claim for their aims in secession, Lincoln was clear that “this is essentially a People’s contest,” in which the Union was struggling to assert the virtues of economic mobility against planter aristocracies, the hopeless caste system of the