CHAPTER IX
THE DISASTERS OF THE NORTH
1. Military Policy of the North.
The story of the war has here to be told from the point of view of the civilian administrator, the President; stirring incidents of combat and much else of interest must be neglected; episodes in the war which peculiarly concerned him, or have given rise to controversy about him, must be related lengthily. The President was an inexperienced man. It should be said, too—for respect requires perfect frankness—that he was one of an inexperienced people. The Americans had conquered their independence from Great Britain at the time when the ruling factions of our country had reached their utmost degree of inefficiency. They had fought an indecisive war with us in 1812-14, while our main business was to win at Salamanca and Vittoria. These experiences in some ways warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained. An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first involved may make the chief incidents of the war throughout easier to follow.
Immediately after Bull Run McClellan had been summoned to Washington to command the army of the Potomac. In November, Scott, worn out by infirmity, and finding his authority slighted by "my ambitious junior," retired, and thereupon McClellan, while retaining his immediate command upon the Potomac, was made for the time General-in-Chief over all the armies of the North. There were, it should be repeated, two other principal armies besides that of the Potomac: the army of the Ohio, of which General Buell was given command in July; and that of the West, to which General Halleck was appointed, though Frémont seems to have retained independent command in Missouri. All these armies were in an early stage of formation and training, and from a purely military point of view there could be no haste to undertake a movement of invasion with any of them.
Three distinct views of military policy were presented to Lincoln in the early days. Scott, as soon as it was clear that the South meant real fighting, saw how serious its resistance would be. His military judgment was in favour of a strictly defensive attitude before Washington; of training the volunteers for at least four months in healthy camps; and of then pushing a large army right down the Mississippi valley to New Orleans, making the whole line of that river secure, and establishing a pressure on the South between this Western army and the naval blockade which must slowly have strangled the Confederacy. He was aware that public impatience might not allow a rigid adherence to his policy, and in fact, when his view was made public before Bull Run, "Scott's Anaconda," coiling itself round the Confederacy, was the subject of general derision. The view of the Northern public and of the influential men in Congress was in favour of speedy and, as it was hoped, decisive action, and this was understood as involving, whatever else was done, an attempt soon to capture Richmond. In McClellan's view, as in Scott's, the first object was the full preparation of the Army, but he would have wished to wait till he had a fully trained force of 273,000 men on the Potomac, and a powerful fleet with many transports to support his movements; and, when he had all this, to move southwards in irresistible force, both advancing direct into Virginia and landing at points on the coast, subduing each of the Atlantic States of the Confederacy in turn. If the indefinite delay and the overwhelming force which his fancy pictured could have been granted him, it is plain, the military critics have said, that "he could not have destroyed the Southern armies—they would have withdrawn inland, and the heart of the Confederacy would have remained untouched." But neither the time nor the force for which he wished could be allowed him. So he had to put aside his plan, but in some ways perhaps it still influenced him.
It would have been impossible to disregard the wishes of those, who in the last resort were masters, for a vigorous attempt on Richmond, and the continually unsuccessful attempts that were made did serve a military purpose, for they kept up a constant drain upon the resources of the South. In any well-thought-out policy the objects both of Scott's plan and of the popular plan would have been borne in mind. That no such policy was consistently followed from the first was partly a result of the long-continued difficulty in finding any younger man who could adequately take the place of Scott; it was not for a want of clear ideas, right or wrong, on Lincoln's part.
Only two days after the battle of Bull Run, he put on paper his own view as to the future employment of the three armies. He thought that one should "threaten" Richmond; that one should move from Cincinnati, in Ohio, by a pass called Cumberland Gap in Kentucky, upon Knoxville in Eastern Tennessee; and that the third, using Cairo on the Mississippi as its base, should advance upon Memphis, some 120 miles further south on that river. Apparently he did not at first wish to commit the army of the Potomac very deeply in its advance on Richmond, and he certainly wished throughout that it should cover Washington against any possible attack. Memphis was one of the three points at which the Southern railway system touched the great river and communicated with the States beyond—Vicksburg and New Orleans, much further south, were the others. Knoxville again is a point, by occupying which, the Northern forces would have cut the direct railway communication between Virginia and the West, but for this move into Eastern Tennessee Lincoln had other reasons nearer his heart. The people of that region were strongly for the Union; they were invaded by the Confederates and held down by severe coercion, and distressing appeals from them for help kept arriving through the autumn; could they have been succoured and their mountainous country occupied by the North, a great stronghold of the Union would, it seemed to Lincoln, have been planted securely far into the midst of the Confederacy. Therefore he persistently urged this part of his scheme on the attention of his generals. The chief military objection raised by Buell was that his army would have to advance 150 miles from the nearest base of supply upon a railway; (for 200 miles to the west of the Alleghanies there were no railways running from north to south). To meet this Lincoln, in September, urged upon a meeting of important Senators and Representatives the construction of a railway line from Lexington in Kentucky southwards, but his hearers, with their minds narrowed down to an advance on Richmond, seem to have thought the relatively small cost in time and money of this work too great. Lincoln still thought an expedition to Eastern Tennessee practicable at once, and it has been argued from the circumstances in which one was made nearly two years later that he was right. It would, one may suppose, have been unwise to separate the armies of the Ohio and of the West so widely; for the main army of the Confederates in the West, under their most trusted general, Albert Sidney Johnston, was from September onwards in South-western Kentucky, and could have struck at either of these two Northern armies; and this was in Buell's mind. On the other hand, Lincoln's object was a wise one in itself and would have been worth some postponement of the advance along the Mississippi if thereby the army in the West could have been used in support of it. However this may be, the fact is that Lincoln's plan, as it stood, was backed up by McClellan; McClellan was perhaps unduly anxious for Buell to move on Eastern Tennessee, because this would have supported the invasion of Virginia which he himself was now contemplating, and he was probably forgetful of the West; but he was Lincoln's highest military adviser and his capacity was still trusted. Buell's own view was that, when he moved, it should be towards Western Tennessee. He would have had a railway connection behind him all his way, and Albert Johnston's army would have lain before him. He wished that Halleck meanwhile should advance up the courses of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers; Eastern Tennessee (he may have thought) would be in the end more effectively succoured; their two armies would thus have converged on Johnston's. Halleck agreed with Buell to the extent of disagreeing with Lincoln and McClellan, but no further. He declined to move in concert with Buell. Frémont had disorganised the army of the West, and Halleck, till he had repaired the mischief, permitted only certain minor enterprises under his command.
Each of the three generals, including the General-in-Chief, who was the Government's chief adviser, was set upon his own immediate purpose, and indisposed to understanding the situation of the others—Buell perhaps the least so. Each of them had at first a very sound reason, the unreadiness of his army, for being in no hurry to move, but then each of them soon appeared to be a slow or unenterprising commander. Buell was perhaps unlucky in this, for his whole conduct is the subject of some controversy; but he did appear slow, and the two others, it is universally agreed, really were so. As 1861 drew to a close, it became urgent that something should be done somewhere, even if it were not done in the best possible direction. The political pressure upon the Administration became as great as before Bull Run. The army of the Potomac had rapidly become a fine army, and its enemy, in no way superior, lay entrenching at Manassas, twenty miles in front of it. When Lincoln grew despondent and declared that "if something was not done soon, the bottom would drop out of the whole concern," soldiers remark that the military situation was really sound; but he was right, for a people can hardly be kept up to the pitch of a high enterprise if it is forced to think that nothing will happen. Before the end of the year 1861 military reasons for waiting were no longer being urged; McClellan had long been promising immediate action, Buell and Halleck seemed merely unable to agree.
In later days when Lincoln had learnt much by experience it is hard to trace the signs of his influence in military matters, because, though he followed them closely, he was commonly in full agreement with his chief general and he invariably and rightly left him free. At this stage, when his position was more difficult, and his guidance came from common sense and the military books, of which, ever since Bull Run, he had been trying, amidst all his work, to tear out the heart, there is evidence on which to judge the intelligence which he applied to the war. Certainly he now and ever after looked at the matter as a whole and formed a clear view of it, which, for a civilian at any rate, was a reasonable view. Certainly also at this time and for long after no military adviser attempted, in correcting any error of his, to supply him with a better opinion equally clear and comprehensive. This is probably why some Northern military critics, when they came to read his correspondence with his generals, called him, as his chief biographers were tempted to think him, "the ablest strategist of the war." Grant and Sherman did not say this; they said, what is another thing, that his was the greatest intellectual force that they had met with. Strictly speaking, he could not be a strategist. If he were so judged, he would certainly be found guilty of having, till Grant came to Washington, unduly scattered his forces. He could pick out the main objects; but as to how to economise effort, what force and how composed and equipped was necessary for a particular enterprise, whether in given conditions of roads, weather, supplies, and previous fatigue, a movement was practicable, and how long it would take any clever subaltern with actual experience of campaigning ought to have been a better judge than he. The test, which the reader must be asked to apply to his conduct of the war, is whether he followed, duly or unduly his own imperfect judgment, whether, on the whole, he gave in whenever it was wise to the generals under him, and whether he did so without losing his broad view or surrendering his ultimate purpose. It is really no small proof of strength that, with the definite judgments which he constantly formed, he very rarely indeed gave imperative orders as Commander-in-Chief, which he was, to any general. The circumstances, all of which will soon appear, in which he was tempted or obliged to do so, are only the few marked exceptions to his habitual conduct. There are significant contrary instances in which he abstained even from seeking to know his general's precise intentions. At the time which has just been reviewed, when the scheme of the war was in the making, his correspondence with Buell and Halleck shows his fundamental intention. He emphatically abstains from forcing them; he lucidly, though not so tactfully as later, urges his own view upon the consideration of his general, begging him, not necessarily to act upon it, but at least to see the point, and if he will not do what is wished, to form and explain as clearly a plan for doing something better.