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.
On the other side, Benjamin F. Butler, a criminal lawyer, who knew
nothing whatever of the military art, was a major-general by virtue of
political influence alone, and as such outranked and dominated officers
immeasurably his superiors. Think of Lee banished to the coast of South
Carolina, while Beauregard and Johnston were needlessly fortifying
at Centreville against an absurdly impossible advance of McClellan's
forces. Think of McClellan himself in command of the most important
Union army, while Grant and Sherman and George H. Thomas remained in
subordinate positions!
And in the navy a similar discrimination against demonstrated capacity
and in favor of mere "rank" equally prevailed. Farragut, with all his
already and abundantly proved capacity, waited for the best part of
a year before he could get permission to bring his great powers into
play, and when at last he got such permission from the ignorant and
arrogant civilians who dominated the navy department at Washington,
it came to him with an insulting suggestion of doubt as to his
courage, his patriotism and his capacity. That is a sad story to be
told hereafter. Our present purpose is merely to show how lamely and
incompetently the war was carried on on both sides during the first
year of its progress. He who considers the simple facts is well nigh
forced to the conclusion that had either side conducted its contest
with half the brains and energy that came later into play it must have
won at once.