seeing an Administration compelled to print a campaign document (for
such is General McClellan's Report in a double sense) directed against
itself. Yet in the present case, had it been possible to escape the
penance, it had been unwise, for we think that no unprejudiced person
can read the volume without a melancholy feeling that General McClellan
has foiled himself even more completely than the Rebels were able to
do. He should have been more careful of his communications, for a line
two hundred and forty-two pages long is likely to have its weak points.
The volume before us is rather the plea of an advocate retained to
defend the General's professional character and expound his political
opinions than the curt, colorless, unimpassioned statement of facts
which is usually so refreshing in the official papers of military men,
and has much more the air of being addressed to a jury than to the War
Department at Washington. It is, in short, a letter to the people of
the United States, under cover to the Secretary of War. General
McClellan puts himself upon the country, and, after taking as much time
to make up his mind as when he wearied and imperilled the nation in his
camp on the Potomac, endeavors to win back from public opinion the
victory which nothing but his own over-caution enabled the Rebels to
snatch from him before Richmond. He cannot give us back our lost time
or our squandered legions; but how nice it would be if we would give
him back his reputation, which has never been of any great use to us,
and yet would be so convenient for him! It was made for him, and
accordingly fits him better than it would any one else. But it is
altogether too late. There is no argument for the soldier but success,
no wisdom for the man but to acknowledge defeat and be silent under it.
The Great Captain on his sofa at Longwood may demonstrate how the
Russian expedition might, could, would, and should have ended
otherwise; but meanwhile its results are not to be reasoned with,--the
Bourbons are at the Tuileries, and he at St. Helena. There is hardly
anything that may not be made out of history by a skilful manipulator.
Characters may be white-washed, bigotry made over into zeal, timidity
into prudence, want of conviction into toleration, obstinacy into
firmness; but the one thing that cannot be theorized out of existence,
or made to look like anything else, is a lost campaign.
We have had other unsuccessful generals, but not one of them has ever
been tempted into the indecorum of endeavoring to turn a defeat in the
field to political advantage. Not one has thought of defending himself
by imputations on his superiors. Early in the war General McDowell set
an example of silence under slanderous reproach that won for him the
sympathy and respect of whoever could be touched by self-reliant
manliness. It is because General McClellan has seen fit to overstep the
bounds of a proper official reserve, because, after more than a year
for reflection, he has repeated charges of the grossest kind against
those under whose orders he was acting, and all this from a political
motive, that we think his Report deserving of more than usual
attention. It will be no fault of his if he be not put in nomination
for the Presidency, and accordingly it becomes worth our while to
consider such evidences of character and capacity as his words and
deeds afford us.
We believe that General McClellan has been ruined, like another general
whose name began with Mac, by the "All hail hereafter" of certain
political witches, who took his fortunes into their keeping after his
campaign in Western Virginia. He had shown both ability and decision in
handling a small force, and he might with experience have shown similar
qualities in directing the operations of a great army, had not the
promise of the Presidency made him responsible to other masters than
military duty and unselfish patriotism. Thenceforward the soldier was
lost in the politician. He thought more of the effect to be produced by
his strategy on the voters behind him than on the enemy in his front.
What should have been his single object--the suppression of the
rebellion for the sake of the country--was now divided with the desire
of merely ending it by some plan that should be wholly of his own
contrivance, and should redound solely to his own credit and
advancement. He became giddy and presumptuous, and lost that sense of
present realities, so essential to a commander, in contemplating the
mirage that floated the White House before his eyes. At an age
considerably beyond that of General Bonaparte when he had triumphantly
closed his first Italian campaign, he was nick-named "the _young_
Napoleon," and from that time forth seems honestly to have endeavored,
like Toepffer's Albert, to resemble the ideal portrait which had been
drawn for him by those who put him forward as their stalking-horse. And
it must be admitted that these last managed matters cleverly, if a
little coarsely. They went to work deliberately to Barnumize their
prospective candidate. No _prima donna_ was ever more thoroughly
exploited by her Hebrew _impresario_. The papers swarmed with
anecdotes, incidents, sayings. Nothing was too unimportant, and the new
commander-in-chief pulled on his boots by telegram from Maine to
California, and picked his teeth by special despatch to the Associated
Press. We had him warm for supper in _the very latest_ with three
exclamation marks, and cold for breakfast in _last evening's
telegraphic news_ with none. Nothing but a patent pill was ever so
suddenly famous.
We are far from blaming General McClellan for all this. He probably
looked upon it as one of the inevitable discomforts of distinction in
America. But we think that it insensibly affected his judgment, led him
to regard himself as the representative of certain opinions, rather
than as a general whose whole duty was limited to the army under his
command, and brought him at last to a temper of mind most unfortunate
for the public interests, in which he could believe the administration
personally hostile to himself because opposed to the political
principles of those who wished to profit by his "availability." It was
only natural, too, that he should gradually come to think himself what
his partisans constantly affirmed that he was,--the sole depositary of
the country's destiny. We form our judgment of General McClellan solely
from his own Report; we believe him to be honest in his opinions, and
patriotic so far as those opinions will allow him to be; we know him to
be capable of attaching those about him in a warm personal friendship,
and we reject with the contempt they deserve the imputations on his
courage and his military honor; but at the same time we consider him a
man like other men, with a head liable to be turned by a fame too
easily won. His great misfortune was that he began his first important
campaign with a reputation to save instead of to earn, so that he was
hampered by the crowning disadvantage of age in a general without the
experience which might neutralize it. Nay, what was still worse, he had
two reputations to keep from damage, the one as soldier, the other as
politician.
He seems very early to have misapprehended the true relation in which
he stood to the government. By the operation of natural causes, as
politicians would call them, he had become heir presumptive to the
chair of state, and felt called on to exert an influence on the policy
of the war, or at least to express an opinion that might go upon record
for future convenience. He plunged into that Dismal Swamp of
constitutional hermeneutics, in which the wheels of government were
stalled at the outbreak of our rebellion, and from which every
untrained explorer rises with a mouth too full of mud to be
intelligible to Christian men. He appears to have thought it within the
sphere of his duty to take charge of the statesmanship of the President
no less than of the movements of the army, nor was it long before there
were unmistakable symptoms that he began to consider himself quite as
much the chief of an opposition who could dictate terms as the military
subordinate who was to obey orders. Whatever might have been his
capacity as a soldier, this divided allegiance could not fail of
disastrous consequences to the public service, for no mistress exacts
so jealously the entire devotion of her servants as war. A mind
distracted with calculations of future political contingencies was not
to be relied on in the conduct of movements which above all others
demand the constant presence, the undivided energy, of all the
faculties, and the concentration of every personal interest on the one
object of immediate success. A general who is conscious that he has an
army of one hundred and fifty thousand voters at his back will be
always weakened by those personal considerations which are the worst
consequence of the elective system. General McClellan's motions were
encumbered in every direction by a huge train of political baggage.
This misconception of his own position, or rather his confounding the
two characters of possible candidate and actual general, forced the
growth of whatever egotism was latent in his nature. He began erelong
to look at everything from a personal point of view, to judge men and
measures by their presumed relation to his own interests, and at length
fairly persuaded himself that the inevitable results of his own want of
initiative were due to the hostile combination against him of Mr.
Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and General Halleck. Regarding himself too much
in considering the advantages of success, he regards others too little
in awarding the responsibility of failure.
The intense self-consciousness of General McClellan and a certain aim
at effect for ulterior and unmilitary purposes show themselves early.
In October, 1861, addressing a memorial to Mr. Cameron, then Secretary
of War, he does not forget the important constituency of Buncombe. "The
unity of this nation," he says, "the preservation of our institutions,
are so dear to me that I have willingly sacrificed my private happiness
with the single object of doing my duty to my country. When the task is
accomplished, I shall be glad to retire to the obscurity from which
events have drawn me. Whatever the determination of the government may
be, I will do the best I can with the Army of the Potomac, and will
share its fate, whatever may be the task imposed upon me." Not to speak
of taste, the utter blindness to the true relations of things shown in
such language is startling. What sacrifice had General McClellan made
which had not been equally made by every one of the hundred and fifty
thousand men of his army? Educated at the expense of the country, his
services were a debt due on demand. And what was the sacrifice of which
a soldier speaks so pathetically? To be raised from the management of a
railway to one of the most conspicuous and inspiring positions of
modern times, to an opportunity such as comes rarely to any man, and
then only as the reward of transcendent ability transcendently
displayed! To step from a captaincy of engineers to the command in
chief of a great nation on fire with angry enthusiasm, spendthrift of
men, money, devotion, to be the chosen champion of order, freedom, and
civilization,--this is indeed a sacrifice such as few men have been
called upon to make by their native land! And of what is General
McClellan thinking when he talks of returning to obscurity? Of what are
men commonly thinking when they talk thus? The newspapers would soon
grow rich, if everybody should take to advertising what he did not
want. And, moreover, to what kind of obscurity can a successful general
return? An obscurity made up of the gratitude and admiration of his
countrymen, a strange obscurity of glory! Nor is this the only occasion
on which the General speaks of his willingness to share the fate of his
army. What corporal could do less? No man thoroughly in earnest, and
with the fate of his country in his hands and no thought but of that,
could have any place in his mind for such footlight phrases as these.
General McClellan's theory from the first seems to have been that a
large army would make a great general, though all history shows that
the genius, decision, and confidence of a leader are the most powerful
reinforcement of the troops under his command, and that an able captain
makes a small army powerful by recruiting it with his own vigor and
enthusiasm. From the time of his taking the command till his removal,
he was constantly asking for more men, constantly receiving them, and
constantly unable to begin anything with them after he got them. He
could not move without one hundred and fifty thousand pairs of legs,
and when his force had long reached that number, the President was
obliged by the overtaxed impatience of the country to pry him up from
his encampment on the Potomac with a special order. What the army
really needed was an addition of one man, and that at the head of it;
for a general, like an orator, must be moved himself before he can move
others. The larger his army, the more helpless was General McClellan.
Like the magician's _famulus_, who rashly undertook to play the
part of master, and who could evoke powers that he could not control,
he was swamped in his own supplies. With every reinforcement sent him
on the Peninsula, his estimate of the numbers opposed to him increased.
His own imagination faced him in superior numbers at every turn. Since
Don Quixote's enumeration of the armies of the Emperor Alifanfaron and
King Pentapolin of the Naked Arm, there has been nothing like our
General's vision of the Rebel forces, with their ever-lengthening list
of leaders, gathered for the defence of Richmond. His anxiety swells
their muster-roll at last to two hundred thousand. We say his anxiety,
for no man of ordinary judgment can believe that with that number of
men the Rebel leaders would not have divided their forces, with one
army occupying General McClellan, while they attempted the capital he
had left uncovered with the other.
The first plan proposed by General McClellan covered operations
extending from Virginia to Texas. With a main army of two hundred and
seventy-three thousand he proposes "not only to drive the enemy out of
Virginia and occupy Richmond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans; in other words, to move
into the heart of the enemy's country and crush the rebellion in its
very heart." We do not say that General McClellan's ambition to be the
one man who should crush the rebellion was an unworthy one, but that
his theory that this was possible, and in the way he proposed, shows
him better fitted to state the abstract problems than to apprehend the
complex details of their solution when they lie before him as practical
difficulties. For when we consider the necessary detachments from this
force to guard his communications through an enemy's country, as he
wishes the President to do, in order to justify the largeness of the
force required, we cannot help asking how soon the army for active
operations would be reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. And how
long would a general be in reaching New Orleans, if he is six months in
making up his mind to advance with an army of that strength on the
insignificant fortifications of Manassas, manned, according to the best
information, with forty thousand troops? At the same time General
McClellan assigns twenty thousand as a force adequate for opening the
Mississippi. This plan, to be sure, was soon abandoned, but it is an
illustration of the want of precision and forethought which
characterizes the mind of its author. A man so vague in his conceptions
is apt to be timid in action, for the same haziness of mind may,
according to circumstances, either soften and obscure the objects of
thought, or make them loom with purely fantastic exaggeration. There is
a vast difference between clearness of head on demand and the power of
framing abstract schemes of action, beautiful in their correctness of
outline and apparent simplicity. It is a perception of this truth, we
believe, which leads practical men always to suspect plans supported by
statistics too exquisitely conclusive.
It was on precisely such a specious basis of definite misinformation
that General McClellan's next proposal for the campaign by way of the
Peninsula rested,--precise facts before he sets out turning to
something like precise no-facts when he gets there,--beautiful
completeness of conception ending in hesitation, confusion, and
failure. Before starting, "the roads are passable at all seasons of the
year, the country much more favorable for offensive operations than
that in front of Washington, much more level, the woods less dense, the
soil more sandy" (p. 47). After arriving, we find "the roads
impassable," "very dense and extensive forests, the clearings being
small and few;" and "the comparative flatness of the country and the
alertness of the enemy, everywhere in force, rendered thorough
reconnoissances slow, dangerous, and difficult" (p. 79). General
McClellan's mental constitution would seem to be one of those, easily
elated and easily depressed, that exaggerate distant advantages and
dangers near at hand,--minds stronger in conception than perception,
and accordingly, as such always are, wanting that faculty of swift
decision which, catching inspiration from danger, makes opportunity
success. Add to this a kind of adhesiveness (we can hardly call it
obstinacy or pertinacity) of temper, which can make no allowance for
change of circumstances, and we think we have a tolerably clear notion
of the causes of General McClellan's disasters. He can compose a good
campaign beforehand, but he cannot improvise one out of the events of
the moment, as is the wont of great generals. Occasion seldom offers
her forelock twice to the grasp of the same man, and yet General
McClellan, by the admission of the Rebels themselves, had Richmond at
his mercy more than once.
He seems to attribute his misfortunes mainly to the withdrawal of
General McDowell's division, and its consequent failure to cooperate
with his own forces. But the fact is patent that the campaign was lost
by his sitting down in front of Yorktown, and wasting a whole month in
a series of approaches whose scientific propriety would have delighted
Uncle Toby, to reduce a garrison of eight thousand men. Without that
delay, which gave the Rebels time to send Jackson into the Shenandoah
valley, General McDowell's army would have been enabled to come to his
assistance. General McClellan, it is true, complains that it was not
sent round by water, as he wished; but even if it had been, it could
only have been an addition of helplessness to an army already too
unwieldy for its commander; for he really made the Rebel force double
his own (as he always fancied it) by never bringing more than a quarter
of his army into action at once. Yet during the whole campaign he was
calling for more men, and getting them, till his force reached the
highest limit he himself had ever set. When every available man, and
more, had been sent him, he writes from Harrison's Bar to Mr. Stanton,
"To accomplish the great task of capturing Richmond and putting an end
to this rebellion, reinforcements should be sent to me _rather much
over than less than one hundred thousand men_." This letter General
McClellan has not seen fit to include in his Report. Was the government
to be blamed for pouring no more water into a sieve like this?
It certainly was a great mistake on Mr. Lincoln's part to order General
McDowell off on a wild-goose chase after Jackson. The cooperation of
this force might have enabled General McClellan even then to retrieve
his campaign, and we do not in the least blame him for feeling bitterly
the disappointment of wanting it. But it seems to us that it was mainly
his own fault that there was anything to retrieve, and the true
occasion to recover his lost ground was offered him after his bloody
repulse of the enemy at Malvern Hill, though he did not turn it to
account. For his retreat we think he would deserve all credit, had he
not been under the necessity of making it. It was conducted with great
judgment and ability, and we do not love that partisan narrowness of
mind that would grudge him the praise so fairly earned. But at the same
time it is not ungenerous to say that the obstinate valor shown by his
army under all the depression of a backward movement, while it proves
how much General McClellan had done to make it an effective force,
makes us regret all the more that he should have wanted the decision to
try its quality under the inspiration of attack. It is impossible that
the spirit of the army should not have been affected by the doubt and
indecision of their general. They fought nobly, but they were always on
the defensive. Had General McClellan put them at once on the
aggressive, we believe his campaign would have been a triumphant one.
With truly great generals resolve is instinctive, a deduction from
premises supplied by the eye, not the memory, and men find out the
science of their achievements afterwards, like the mathematical law in
the Greek column. The stiffness rather than firmness of mind, the
surrender of all spontaneous action in the strait-waistcoat of a
preconceived plan, to which we have before alluded, unfitted him for
that rapid change of combinations on the great chess-board of battle
which enabled General Rosecrans at Murfreesboro to turn defeat into
victory, an achievement without parallel in the history of the war.
General McClellan seems to have considered the President too careful of
the safety of the capital; but he should measure the value of
Washington by what he himself thought of the importance of taking
Richmond. That, no doubt, would be a great advantage, but the loss of a
recognized seat of government, with its diplomatic and other
traditions, would have been of vastly more fatal consequence to us than
the capture of their provisional perch in Virginia would have been to
the Rebel authorities. It would have brought foreign recognition to the
Rebels, and thrown Maryland certainly, and probably Kentucky, into the
scale against us. So long as we held Washington, we had on our side the
two powerful sentiments of permanence and tradition, some insensible
portions of which the Rebels were winning from us with every day of
repose allowed them by General McClellan. It was a clear sense of this
that both excited and justified the impatience of the people, who saw
that the insurrection was gaining the coherence and prestige of an
established power,--an element of much strength at home and abroad.
That this popular instinct was not at fault, we have the witness of
General Kirby Smith, who told Colonel Fremantle "that McClellan might
probably have destroyed the Southern army with the greatest ease during
the first winter, and without much risk to himself, as the Southerners
were so much over-elated by their easy triumph at Manassas, and their
army had dwindled away."