[CHAPTER XIX]
The Era of Incapacity
This was the situation during the year 1861 and the early part of the year 1862. There were destined soon to come upon the scene two great masters of the military art—the one upon the one side and the other upon the other—Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. But during the early part of the struggle neither of these great men was in a position of mastery or control. Grant was struggling against all the difficulties that technicality and official jealousy could plant in his pathway. He found it difficult to get into the service at all. He was a West Point graduate and he had served with distinction in the regular army, but he had long ago resigned his commission. He had thus forfeited all claim to command those who had remained in the service and who had been promoted by seniority. These, and not Grant, were made generals.
When Grant offered his services and asked for the privilege of fighting the country's adversaries his application was left absolutely unanswered. His only way into the army was "by the back door." He was elected by the men to be colonel of a regiment of Illinois volunteers, but was not commissioned in the regular army until after he had conducted a campaign to the first considerable success achieved by the national arms, and not even then without every embarrassment and humiliation which it was possible for his inferiors in superior place to inflict upon him. Indeed, as will be related later, his first great victory, the first of any importance that had been anywhere won for the Federal arms, was promptly punished by his suspension from command and by the refusal of his distinctly inferior superiors to let him follow up his success with other and obviously easy operations.
On the Confederate side the one masterful military mind was that of Robert E. Lee. As a matter of fact it was Lee who selected Manassas as the first point of resistance, and it was under his wise direction that Beauregard and Johnston were able to concentrate their forces there and to win the victory of July 21, 1861. But in the meanwhile Lee was not himself appointed to command any considerable army. He was sent to West Virginia to patch up a peace between the civilian brigadiers who commanded there and who had managed among themselves to lose every action that had occurred in that quarter. While Beauregard and Johnston were weakly throwing away the opportunity so conspicuously opened to them by the Manassas victory, this officer of commanding genius was set to the task of organizing a mountain defense against expeditions that had nothing of serious purpose in them except the prevention of Confederate enlistments west of the Alleghenies.
In the same way, after the Carolina coast forts were reduced, Lee was sent to a pestilential hole called Coosawhatchie, in South Carolina, to plan a defense of the railroad line between Charleston and Savannah, while Johnston and Beauregard were fortifying their victorious army against a foe that it had beaten into temporary helplessness.
These two—Grant and Lee—were destined in the end to fight the war out to a conclusion. But in those earlier months of it neither was permitted to exercise his genius in any effective way, or to show in action what stuff he was made of. Lee indeed held high rank from the beginning and was the military adviser of the Confederate Government, but for a time his genius was dissipated on minor matters, while lesser men were wasting time.
And as it was with the great captains so was it with their great lieutenants. William T. Sherman was an unconsidered, unconsulted lieutenant of McDowell. Stonewall Jackson and Ewell and Longstreet were the subordinates of Beauregard and Johnston. Grant and Sherman on the one side and Stonewall Jackson on the other, had lost caste in the military service by resigning from the regular army at a time when the service neither offered nor promised a career worthy of them. Inferior men therefore, who had been content with a meaningless routine, outranked and commanded these really great men after that code of military ethics and etiquette which assumes that the officer—even though he be a dullard—who has been longest in continuous service is fit to command the officer—whatever his genius may be—who has served for a briefer time or who, finding the service to be a stupid and meaningless routine of camp duty in time of peace, has resigned from it in search of better opportunities for the exercise of his abilities, and has returned to it only when duty to his country has seemed to call him.
Thus the first year of the war was the period in which official incapacity ruled on both sides; the period in which technical rank overrode genius and trampled it to earth; the period in which the martinets were afflicted with victories which they were utterly incapable of turning to profitable account, and defeats which they knew not how to repair.
A better era was approaching, but it came slowly. For a time Grant was to be dominated by Halleck. For a time Stonewall Jackson was destined to have his carefully considered disposition of forces in the valley of Virginia overridden and canceled by an ignorant civilian in Richmond, who knew so little of military courtesy as to send his orders direct and not through Jackson's commander Johnston.