THE PARALYSIS OF VICTORY
On the evening of the twenty-first day of July, 1861, the Confederate
army at Manassas rested upon one of the completest and most spectacular
victories that had ever been won by any army over any adversary.
The assailing army had not only been repelled--all possibility of
resistance was gone from it. Not only had it been driven pell-mell from
the field with every circumstance of demoralization that could add
picturesqueness to its flight, but the uttermost link of cohesion that
could hold its battalions together for any purpose of resistance was
completely broken up and destroyed. Divisions were dissipated, brigades
were broken into bits, regiments no longer existed and even companies
were scattered to the winds. Only demoralized and panic-stricken
fugitives, each madly seeking safety, remained. That which had been a
most gallant "army with banners" at sunrise had become before nightfall
a panic-stricken mob without possibility of cohesion or stamina and
utterly without a sense of soldierly duty.
Then followed the strangest event of the war. This victory, the
completest, the most picturesque, the most absolute that could be
imagined, had the effect of paralyzing the winners of it to an extent
to which even defeat could not have done.
The story is too strange and historically of too much import to be told
otherwise than in its fulness.
Let us first consider the character and composition of the two armies
that fought at Manassas. The Confederate volunteers were enlisted for
twelve months. The term might have been made longer without the loss
of a volunteer. For these young men, whatever their contract with the
Government might stipulate, fully intended to remain in the service so
long as the war should last. They felt it to be their own personal war
and most of them had nothing else to do than fight it out to the end,
however long it might endure. Indeed it was certain that so long as
it lasted no young man of the South could long remain out of the army
without incurring damning disgrace at home.
As a consequence, the organization of the Confederates when the
battle of Manassas occurred was far more perfect and had far more of
permanency in it than was the case with that of McDowell's forces.
These consisted largely of men who had volunteered for no more than a
three months' service, and the terms of many regiments were expiring
or about to expire when the call to battle was issued. Many of those
whose terms were at an end turned back on the very eve of battle--_four
thousand of them quitting on the day of battle itself_. They refused to
participate in the conflict because their time was up.
This was a manifestation of indifference to all patriotic and manly
considerations such as was nowhere witnessed on the Southern side at
any time during the war.
But let us not judge too harshly. These young men were civilians,
not soldiers. They had enlisted only for a period of three months.
They were callow youths unaccustomed to war. They had regarded a
three months' service in the volunteers as a sort of exciting picnic
excursion to the South. They had done their duty during the term for
which they had agreed to serve, with very tolerable faithfulness.
They had had their outing. Their frolic was over. Their contract was
fulfilled. They very naturally wanted to return to their homes. When
under such circumstances a fierce battle confronted them, with the
enemy very manifestly in no "excursion" mood but bent upon all that was
possible of slaughter, is it any wonder that these young men faltered
and failed?
They were scathingly assailed in patriotically inspired prose and
verse, and certainly a similar turning back on the part of Southern
youths on the very eve of battle would have been punished with an
enduring and all-embracing social ostracism harder to bear than death.
But there were differences between Northern and Southern sentiment
that must be taken into the reckoning. At the North there was a party
more or less openly opposing the war. At the South there was none
such. At the North the military impulse did not inspire all minds as
it did at the South. At the North personal courage was not held to
be the one supreme test of manhood, as it was at the South. At the
North a man might fail in that and have laughter for his portion,
while at the South the punishment for a like fault was the eternal
damnation of scorn and contempt, with universal social outlawry as an
accompaniment. If any man in Beauregard's army had gone home because
his enlistment had expired while the battle was pending he could never
more have visited any neighbor or aspired to any woman's hand; he would
have been everywhere treated with contempt and measureless scorn. His
neighbors would not have sat on the same bench with him in church. He
would have been instantly rejected as a juryman by both sides in every
case. No other crime that he might commit could have added in the least
degree to the depth of his degradation.
At the North very different standards prevailed. The poets and the
newspaper writers might lavish opprobrious epithets upon these young
men in a collective capacity without mentioning their individual names,
but their neighbors, their sweethearts, their daily associates were not
apt to take so quixotic a view of their duty or so severely to judge
their conduct. It must always be borne in mind that men's standards
of duty and obligation are apt to conform in a general way at least
to those of their neighbors. In passing upon human conduct we must be
attentive to this fact if we would justly judge.
As for the men who went into the fight on the Union side we must
remember that at the end of it the companies and regiments and brigades
of which they had formed a part in the morning had been dissipated
into the thinnest of thin air at three o'clock in the afternoon by the
lightning-like stroke of panic. There were no longer any companies left
or any regiments or any brigades or any organizations of any other
sort. There was no longer any such thing as cohesion among them. There
was nobody authorized to give orders--nobody capable of enforcing
obedience. The multitude of men who in the morning had seemed to
constitute an army had been resolved before nightfall into a wild-eyed
and uncontrollable mob of irresponsible fugitives, intent only upon
seeking safety, without any regard whatever to any obligation or
impulse, of honor or duty or shame--any impulse except the instinct of
self-preservation.
There were many such panic-stricken fugitives on the Confederate side
also--so many that when Jefferson Davis met a mob of them on his
approach to the battlefield, he was convinced that the Southern army
had been defeated and broken. But these were individuals merely, and
while their aggregate was large, it embraced no command, no entire
body of troops, whether company, regiment or brigade. The Confederate
commands remained intact. They preserved their organizations perfectly
and remained absolutely obedient to orders. At the end of the battle
theirs was not only still an army; it was an army flushed with victory,
illimitably confident both in itself and in its leaders, eager for
further action, clamorous for advance and ready to do and dare anything
and everything that might promise further glory.
That army eagerly wanted to march at once upon Washington, and there
was absolutely no military reason why it should not have done so. There
was no fighting force to resist it on the march. There was no force
at Washington which could have seriously disputed its entry into the
city. It could easily have trampled to earth the feeble resistance it
must have encountered at the gateways of the capital. Stuart, almost
with tears on his cheeks, besought permission to lead such an advance
with his handful of cavalry men, pledging his honor and reputation as
a soldier and all that he hoped for of a future career, in bail of his
promise to clear away every obstacle and open an unobstructed road to
the columns of Beauregard and Johnston in their victorious march across
the Long Bridge and into the streets of the Federal capital.
Stuart was accustomed to boast that he never used profane language. But
his impatient cavaliers heard and heartily echoed some strong words
from his lips when finally the paralyzing prohibition of an immediate
advance came to him in the shape of an order to encamp his men in a
muddy cornfield on that rainy night, when in his judgment they should
have been gaily galloping on march for Washington as the advance guard
of a victory-inspired army, intent upon making the most of its success
and crowning its achievements with historic consequences.
Stuart at least anticipated no difficulty in galloping into Washington
and Stuart's stalwart cavaliers were ready for any enterprise to which
that born leader of men might invite them.
Those Virginia horsemen had been for ten consecutive days and nights
forbidden to remove a saddle. For ten consecutive days and nights
they had stood at the heads of their horses at feeding time and held
the temporarily removed bridle bit in one hand and the ear of corn
from which the horse was feeding in the other. For ten consecutive
days and nights those men had been ceaselessly in the saddle, their
only sleep being snatched in brief fragments, while their horses were
tethered to their wrists. Yet so eager were they to follow up this
victory that every man of them "swore like a trooper" on that Sunday
evening when the pursuit was senselessly called off, and every man of
them ejaculated a hearty "amen" to their leader's vituperation of that
superior authority which forbade him and his devoted cavalry men to
ride into Washington close upon the heels of the broken, panic-stricken
and utterly demoralized Federal fugitives from the battlefield.
There is now not the slightest doubt that he could have done this.
There is not the smallest question that if he had been permitted to
do it, with a supporting column of infantry and artillery following
as closely as it could upon his horses' heels, Washington would have
become a Confederate possession on that Sunday night, and--who knows
what else might have happened? Perhaps four years of the bloodiest of
modern wars might have been spared to the American people.
However that may be, the historian of the Confederate War is bound
to regard the failure of the Confederates to follow up their victory
and pursue their broken, fleeing and utterly disintegrated enemy into
Washington during that night and the next morning as one of the most
stupendous blunders recorded anywhere in history.
It was perfectly well known to the two Confederate commanders, that
Washington was not defended on the South by any fortifications which
a determined assailing column could not easily have run over. There
was only one earthwork, and that an incomplete one, in the way, and it
was so little in the way that a column moving upon the Federal capital
could easily have passed on toward the city by thoroughfares that lay
quite out of the effective range of its guns.
In brief there was absolutely no conceivable reason for the failure
of the Confederate generals to follow up their phenomenal success on
the battlefield by an instant and dramatic march upon their enemy's
capital over a road which was obstructed by nothing more menacing or
embarrassing than huge piles of abandoned food supplies.
General Beauregard and General Johnston have courageously and manfully
assumed all responsibility for that failure to advance at the right
and critical moment. For a time that failure was attributed to the
paralyzing hand of Jefferson Davis, who came upon the field near the
end of the battle. But that accusation was unjust. Mr. Davis has been
exonerated from all responsibility for the failure by the deliberately
recorded testimony of his lieutenants. Mr. Davis was in fact eager for
an immediate advance which might crown the victory with its legitimate
consequences. He even dictated and had written out a peremptory order
to that effect, which Johnston and Beauregard persuaded him to withhold.
Their reasons for doing so have been fully set forth by themselves.
In spite of the facts that lay before their eyes, they could not
believe in the completeness of the victory they had achieved. Neither
had they confidence in the army that had won that victory. They were
sure that it was tired. They thought it needed rest. They doubted its
trustworthiness. They had no adequate conception of its enthusiasm for
the enterprise for which it was clamorously eager. It is one of the
embarrassments of war that a commanding general has sometimes no means
of knowing what the men under his command are thinking and feeling.
So far were the two Confederate commanders from appreciating the
magnitude and the completeness of their victory, that after it was all
over, and after events of every kind had demonstrated the extremity of
Federal demoralization, they were by their own confession, frightened
half out of their wits by the movement of certain Confederate forces
which they believed to be a new and determined advance by the
hopelessly demoralized enemy.
They ought to have known better, of course; but they did not, and
they would not let Stuart teach them better, though he, with his
preternatural activity, had followed the panic-stricken fugitives far
enough to know what their moral condition was.
Let us frankly recognize facts and take account of them in the
reckoning of history. Johnston and Beauregard were accomplished
officers, familiar with every detail of technical military duty. But
neither of them was as yet experienced in the command of armies or
the conduct of campaigns. Until a few months before that battle was
fought they had been mere captains of engineers. Neither had ever
commanded any force greater than a company. Neither had ever seen an
army of proportions half so large as those of the force that fought at
Manassas. Neither had ever had even the smallest experience in grand
strategy. They were mere apprentices still in the art of war. They had
not yet fully learned their trade. They utterly failed to understand
what their victory meant. They had no conception of the disorganizing,
disintegrating effects of that victory upon their adversaries. They
were utterly incapable of understanding their opportunity or of taking
advantage of it. Because of their inexperience they let slip the finest
opportunity that was at any time afforded to commanders on either side
to achieve a quick and decisive result.
With no purpose or willingness to undervalue the ability or the
devotion of two officers who afterwards achieved well-deserved
distinction as the commanders of armies, it may fairly be pointed
out that they were in command at Manassas not because of known
and demonstrated fitness for command, but solely because of their
technical rank in the old, peace-time army of the United States, where
promotion was exclusively by seniority--perhaps the unsafest ground of
promotion that was ever devised by the evil ingenuity of officialism
and professional self-regard. Whatever capacity these two officers
afterwards developed, it is very manifest that at the time of the
Manassas battle they both showed themselves incapable of seizing upon
the opportunity that victory offered them in any such masterful way as
that in which Lee afterwards seized upon far less obvious opportunities
at the end of the Seven Days' Battles and again after Chancellorsville.
Having won the completest and most conspicuous victory of modern
times, they set to work to fortify themselves for defense against the
enemy they had so disastrously overthrown, precisely as if they had
been beaten in the fight and were called upon to defend themselves
against further aggression at the hands of an enemy to be feared.
Having everything of opportunity their own way, they threw it all
into the adversary's hands. Having reduced their enemy's army to pulp
they deliberately gave him time and opportunity to reconstruct it, to
reinforce it, to reorganize and discipline it, as he presently did,
into a superb fighting machine instead of pushing forward and fighting
it vigorously while it possessed no fighting force at all.
Both sides in this war suffered for a time from this paralysis of
officialism and routine which set inferior men to command their
superiors and balked conclusions by incapacity. It will be related
later in this history, how Grant--the most masterful man in the Federal
army--was long denied his opportunity by the arbitrary will of the
immeasurably inferior Halleck, to whom a false system and an old man's
favor gave control in despite of fact and achievement.
At present we deal only with the facts of a single case. On the night
of July 21, 1861, and on the following morning, there was open to the
Confederate commanders at Manassas an opportunity which hopefully
promised to bring the war to an immediate end. They utterly failed to
embrace that opportunity and the price paid for their neglect was
four years of bloody conflict, involving the loss of lives by scores
of thousands and the infliction of incalculable suffering upon the
American people. At several other points in the history of the struggle
like opportunities presented themselves, less conspicuously indeed but
none the less positively, to one side or the other. In many cases they
were similarly neglected, and the war went on with all its horrors.
But if we wonder at the failure of the Confederates to follow up their
victory on the evening of its achievement and on the days immediately
following, how much greater must be our astonishment at their failure
to take the initiative during the long months of inaction that followed
it, or to make any effort to direct the further progress of a war upon
the success of which their very existence depended!
The singularly complete victory at Manassas was won on the twenty-first
of July, 1861. That was almost at the beginning of the season favorable
to military operations in Virginia. Yet after that battle was over
there was no effort made on either side to utilize the time in military
movements of any kind. The Confederates advanced to Fairfax Court
House and threw their pickets as far forward as Mason's and Munson's
Hills, within a few miles of Washington, but they undertook no military
operations of importance. They inaugurated no campaigns. They made
no advance upon Washington, which was the one thing that ordinary
intelligence was entitled to expect at their hands. They did not at all
behave like victors. They nowhere assailed their enemy. They made no
effort of any kind to strengthen themselves, either by the occupation
of strategic positions or by giving battle where battle promised every
chance of victory. They simply sat still, and their sitting still was
one of the most inexplicable things that ever happened during the
Confederate or any other war. There were several other pauses of like
kind during the gigantic struggle, but there was none so completely
without an explanation, as was this utter throwing away of half a year
of superb campaigning weather.
On the Northern side the inaction was not only explained but justified
by the utter demoralization of the army which had been so terribly
beaten, and so utterly disintegrated at Manassas. But nobody has ever
yet offered so much as a plausible suggestion of a reason for the more
astonishing inaction of the Confederates during all that summer and
autumn, when the very causes of inaction on the other side afforded
the utmost inducement to tireless activity on the Southern side. At a
time when all that could be desired of achievement was freely open to
them, they sat still, doing nothing except to aid their adversaries in
undoing what had been accomplished by hard fighting.[4]
[4] Gen. Beauregard insists that he did indeed submit a plan of
aggressive campaign a little while after the battle but it
involved so much of preparation that it was rejected at
Richmond. As it led to no activity it has no historic
significance.
McClellan succeeded McDowell in command of the Federal army during
the month of August. His difficult problem was to organize that
army anew; to create it out of chaotic elements and in the face of
the difficulties that were thrown in his way by its experience in
battle. He must give it morale. He must teach his soldiers the very
primer lessons of military service; he must overcome their phenomenal
demoralization and gradually mold them into a shape fit to take the
field.
An alert enemy, under such circumstances, would have insisted upon
interfering, morning, noon and night, with the exercises of the
adversary's military kindergarten. A commander on the Confederate side,
possessed of large capacity and energy, would have interrupted the
work of McClellan by daily and disturbing incursions in force; or more
probably still he would have crossed the Potomac, and forced McClellan
to accept battle in Maryland or Pennsylvania with his utterly untrained
and badly demoralized volunteers. All of this was so obvious that
dulness itself must have seen it. Yet the two Confederate generals at
Manassas and Centreville seem never to have opened their eyes to the
opportunity, and so nothing in this way was done.
In the meanwhile, McClellan was diligently strengthening himself. He
was daily adding to his forces those new levies of volunteers which
came freely from the North in spite of the disaster at Manassas. He
was also strengthening the fortifications at Washington in a way that
made their conquest forever afterwards a hopeless enterprise. He sent
out many columns to one point and another, not to bring on battle, but
to practice his men in the school of the soldier, and to use them to
"standing fire" without flinching.
Incidentally, these operations brought on only one action of
considerable moment, that which occurred at Leesburg or Ball's Bluff on
the Potomac, on the twenty-first of October. It was an action involving
rather heavy losses particularly to the Federal troops, but it had no
strategic significance whatever. Military critics have not been able to
conjecture why the action was brought on at all.
Under orders of General C. P. Stone, Colonel Baker crossed the Potomac
near Leesburg to reconnoiter at a point where no reconnoissance was
needed, and where no action could by any possibility have aught of
significance or consequence. Colonel Baker was disastrously defeated
and killed. The Union troops were driven into the river, and large
numbers of them were drowned. The effect of the action was to increase
rather than diminish the demoralization that the Manassas battle had
wrought in the Union army, and to increase in like proportion the
self-confidence of the Confederates--all but their generals. Even after
this second victory they did not push their columns across the Potomac.
To the like result all the minor actions of that time contributed.
McClellan sent out forces to Drainesville, to Falls Church, to
Vienna, and to other points, with the distinct purpose, as he himself
afterwards explained, of accustoming his demoralized battalions and his
newly enlisted men to the idea of fighting. In every instance Stuart
assailed them promptly and vigorously, and in every instance except at
Drainesville, where they stood their ground well, they ran to cover
with a precipitancy which convinced the Confederates that there was
no stability in them, no nerve, no soldierly quality whatever. How
great a mistake this was, the subsequent actions of the war served to
demonstrate--actions in which these same men, properly organized and
disciplined, grandly and gallantly played the part of soldiers.
Apart from these insignificant contests, the war in Virginia went to
sleep after the battle of Manassas, and to an expectant world was
presented the spectacle of a phenomenally victorious army taking a
siesta upon its arms, while its adversaries recruited and drilled and
fortified, and in every other conceivable way strengthened themselves
for the future. In brief the victor--the most complete and conspicuous
victor in all the history of the war--having utterly crushed his
adversary, and having for the time being destroyed in that adversary
all capacity for resistance, meekly adopted the attitude of the
vanquished. An army flushed with victory, an army that had completely
destroyed the fighting force of its enemy, sat down behind earthworks
and waited for more than half a year for that enemy to recuperate and
choose at its leisure the next date and place of its fighting.
It is not necessary to characterize all this inactivity in harsh terms.
Its stupidity needs no emphasis of rhetoric. The only excuse that
history can find for the phenomenal failure to compel results either in
July or later, is the fact that Beauregard and Johnston were merely two
ex-captains, who had had no experience in the command of armies or in
the conduct of great campaigns.