deliberate of men, but in the beginning he was impatient—impatient with incompetence, with pomposity and its fumbling ineptitudes, with the techniques of delay. He knew what was wrong with the Federal war effort and he knew how to set it right, and neither the President, the general-in-chief nor anyone else could stand in his way. To the restless men who wanted the rebellion put down at the earliest possible moment McClellan briefly appeared to be the very embodiment of the spirit that would win the war.

It fitted neatly with his position as national hero. He reached the capital when the military relics of the Bull Run disaster were still being collected and sorted out, and he brought with him the record of victory in the western Virginia mountains— the proof that Northern soldiers could beat Southern soldiers if they were just led by the right man. He had a cool self-assurance, a winning manner, and a jaunty readiness to accept unlimited responsibility, and to a capital and a nation grown disillusioned with militiamen he seemed to be all soldier. His first steps were to sweep the stragglers off the streets, to police the barrooms, to get the innumerable stray officers back on duty, and to create an organization which looked like business. He not only made the capital safe; he made it look and feel safe, and when he rode about the camps on his business he was greeted by cheers.

On July 27 McClellan was formally welcomed by the President and was invited to come back to the White House in the afternoon and meet the cabinet. This was somewhat displeasing to General Scott, who felt that this new commander ought to stay within prescribed channels and approach the Chief Executive only through the commanding general, but after touring the city, making note of its defenseless condition and remarking that drunken soldiers and officers made the downtown section "a perfect pandemonium," McClellan shook hands with the top brass, and in the evening wrote to his wife to tell her all about it. Apparently the experience had been somewhat dazzling.

"I find myself in a new and strange position here: President, cabinet, General Scott and all deferring to me," he wrote. "By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that was I to win one whole success now I could become dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won't be Dictator. Admirable self denial! I see already the main causes of our recent failure." ¹

For a man who had been in town hardly more than twenty-four hours these were strong words; yet it is easy to see how McClellan came to write them. He had become the power of the land, and everybody was deferring to him. He had come on the scene at that magical moment (which, for an ambitious man, may lead either to apotheosis or to downfall) when people long so desperately for a miracle worker that they take their appointed hero on faith, so that for a time he can do nothing wrong and can have, quite literally, anything he wants. All of the deep determination to wipe out the shame of Bull Run and go on to victory was expressing itself just now in the feeling toward McClellan. As far as Washington could speak for the country, the nation was putting itself unreservedly in his hands, and McClellan could not help knowing it . . . nor could he help being affected by the knowledge.

On August 2 he wrote to his wife full of confidence. He had just given the President "a carefully considered plan for conducting the war on a grand scale," and he went on: "I shall carry this thing on en grand and crush the Rebels in one campaign. I flatter myself that Beauregard has gained his last victory. We need success and must have it. I will leave nothing undone to gain it." But he must have a free hand: "Gen. Scott has been trying to work a traverse to have Emory made Inspector General of my army and of the army. I respectfully declined the favor and perhaps disgusted the old man. . . . He cannot long retain command I think—when he is retired I am sure to succeed him, unless in the meantime I lose a battle —which I do not expect to do." ²

He had been in Washington no more than one week, and not for two more days would he even be ready to organize the regiments of his army into brigades; yet already he was fiercely possessive regarding that army, and he was looking ahead to the day when Scott would be removed from his path and he himself would be general-in-chief. If this was largely due to the simple fact that he had a good professional's pride in his job and resented anything that might delay him in its performance, it might have been heightened just a little by the kind of talk that was being poured into his ears. The attention he was getting was enough to test any man's poise.

On the night of August 4 there was a state dinner at the White House, given in honor of Prince Napoleon of France, who had come over to have a look at America and at the war. McClellan and Scott entered together, Scott leaning on McClellan's arm—swollen, gouty age stumping along with vigorous, handsome young manhood—and McClellan felt correctly that "many marked the contrast." At the dinner table a lieutenant colonel on Prince Napoleon's staff, Camille Ferri Pisani, found himself seated between McClellan and the British minister, Lord Lyons. The officer talked with McClellan at some length; then, during a lull in the conversation, Lord Lyons asked him: "You are aware that you are talking with the next President of the United States?" Ferri Pisani repeated the remark to McClellan, who "answered with a fine, modest and pleasant smile." ³

When a newcomer in Washington finds, after no more than ten days on the job, that he is being spoken of casually as the next President, his self-esteem is apt to grow beyond manageable proportions. Yet it seems clear that at this time what was driving McClellan was chiefly an intense desire to get on with the job. In his memorandum to the President, written on the day of that White House dinner, McClellan had recognized that this war was not going to be like other wars, in which the object usually was "to conquer a peace and make a treaty on advantageous terms." There could be no treaty here: what was necessary was not merely to beat the enemy in the field but "to display such an overwhelming strength as will convince all our antagonists, especially those of the governing aristocratic classes, of the utter impossibility of resistance." The contest "began with a class; now it is with a people," and only decisive military success could settle things. McClellan urged a comprehensive war plan: tighten the blockade, open the Mississippi, invade eastern Tennessee, establish a force of 38,000 men to protect the upper Potomac, the line of the Baltimore & Ohio and the capital itself, and then form a field army of 225,000 men to smash Confederate strength in Virginia and roll on "into the heart of the enemy's country, and crush out the rebellion at its very heart." Possibly a smaller force could do the job, but speed was essential: "the question to be decided is simply this: shall we crush the rebellion at one blow, terminate the war in one campaign, or shall we leave it for a legacy to our descendants?" ⁴

In a Washington which had come increasingly to feel that

General Scott's famous Anaconda Plan represented an inert defensive policy and foreshadowed an unendurably long war fought at a leisurely pace, this sort of talk was like a breath of fresh air. Crusty Gideon Welles summed up Scott's policy by saying that the old lieutenant general wanted only to enforce "non-intercourse with the insurgents, shut them out from the world by blockade and military frontier lines, but not to invade their territory," and he felt that this was unwise for the country.⁵ He noticed, as did others, that Secretary Seward, still active as a policy-maker, quickly transferred his support from Scott to McClellan. The two men conferred almost daily, and it presently developed that Seward knew more about McClellan's plans and his disposition of troops than Scott himself knew. If, in his memorandum to Lincoln, McClellan had stepped far out of his sphere as army commander to outline grand strategy for the entire nation, he was unquestionably getting Seward's energetic support.

On August 8, McClellan wrote a letter to his wife that showed how things were going: "Rose early today (having retired at three a.m.) and was pestered to death with senators, etc, and a row with General Scott until about four o'clock; then crossed the river and rode beyond and along the line of pickets for some distance. Came back and had a long interview with Seward about my 'pronunciamento' against General Scott's policy. . . . How does he (Seward) think that I can save this country when stopped by General Scott—I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor! He cannot or will not comprehend the condition in which we are placed and is unequal to the emergency. If he cannot be taken out of my path I will not retain my position but will resign and let the admin, take care of itself." ⁶

The row with Scott grew out of a letter which McClellan had that same day sent to the general-in-chief, saying that military intelligence indicated a threatened offensive by Beauregard, that Washington was woefully insecure, and that it was necessary to reinforce Washington at once to a strength of at least 100,000 men "before attending to any other point." Scott became indignant, telling Secretary of War Cameron that he had been unable to get McClellan to discuss the matter in person, that he himself did not think Washington was in any danger at all, and that he was tired of being bypassed and overridden by his junior—as a result of which, Scott urged that the President "allow me to be placed on the officers' retired list, and then quietly to lay myself up—probably forever—somewhere in or about New York."⁷ President Lincoln intervened, and at his request McClellan withdrew the letter, "with the most profound assurance for General Scott and yourself," but the old general was not appeased. He refused to withdraw his own letter, asserting that McClellan persisted in discussing with various members of the cabinet matters that he should properly be discussing with the general-in-chief, and adding: "With such supports on his part, it would be as idle for me as it would be against the dignity of my years, to be filing daily complaints against an ambitious junior who, independent of the extrinsic advantages alluded to, has unquestionably very high qualifications for military command." ⁸

The pace was getting faster. On the same day that he withdrew the offending letter, McClellan wrote to his wife: "Gen. Scott is the great obstacle. He will not comprehend the danger. I have to fight my way against him. Tomorrow the question will probably be decided by giving me absolute control independently of him. I suppose it will result in enmity on his part against me; but I have no choice. The people call upon me to save the country. I must save it, and cannot respect anything that is in the way. I receive letter after letter, have conversation after conversation, calling on me to save the nation, alluding to the presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be united with you forever in heaven, I have no such aspiration. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved. I am not spoiled by my unexpected new position. I feel sure that God will give me the strength and wisdom to preserve this great nation; but I tell you, who share all my thoughts, that I have no selfish feeling in this matter. I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands. I have not sought it. I know how weak I am, but I know that I mean to do right, and I believe that God will help me and give me the wisdom I do not possess. Pray for me, that I may be able to accomplish my task, the greatest, perhaps, that any poor, weak mortal ever had to do." ⁸

Three days after this letter, McClellan wrote that "Gen. Scott is the most dangerous antagonist I have," adding that "our ideas are so widely different that it is impossible for us to work together much longer," and on August 16 he summed it up: "I am here in a terrible place—the enemy have from 3 to

4 times my force—the Presid't is an idiot, the old General is in his dotage—they cannot or will not see the true state of affairs." He enlarged on this slightly: "I have no ambition in the present affairs; only wish to save my country, and find the incapables around me will not permit it. They sit on the verge of the precipice and cannot realize what they see. Their reply to everything is, 'Impossible! Impossible!' They think nothing possible which is against their wishes." ¹⁰

Three weeks in Washington: the general-in-chief was either a dotard or a traitor and in any case was the "most dangerous antagonist," and the President was an idiot; and talk about the presidency and a dictatorship was fluttering through the heated air. Yet the real problem was not so much General McClellan's troubles with his superiors and with himself as it was the fact that the Washington atmosphere was clouding his vision.

To begin with, he was losing sight of military realities. He believed that Beauregard was about to attack him, and in mid-August he assured his wife: "Beauregard probably has 150,000 men—I cannot count more than 55,000!"¹¹ At this moment the Confederate Army in his front (commanded, to be sure, by Joseph E. Johnston) had a total present-for-duty strength of just over 30,000, and six weeks later Johnston and Beauregard would abandon all plans for an offensive when they were told that their strength could not possibly be raised to as much as 60,000. McClellan believed that when he arrived on the scene Washington was all but totally defenseless, and although he wanted to take the offensive he must begin by taking massive precautions against disaster. Actually, the city had never been open to a sudden Confederate thrust, and although he had moved efficiently and swiftly to perfect the city's defenses he had after all had a moderately good foundation on which to build; and the defensive effort, which he properly put first, had begun to warp his understanding of the real situation.¹²

Even worse, in some ways, was his inability to understand the political currents that were swirling about him. He was engaging in an all-out struggle with General Scott for control of the Army, and he wanted political support. Understanding that the men who had made the Republican party and had put Lincoln in office wanted a vigorous prosecution of the war, he courted their help. He had been in Washington no more than a fortnight before he was inducing Senator Charles Sumner to urge the Governor of Massachusetts to rush more troops to Washington; he told Sumner that Scott did not share his own feeling of urgency and that Scott, in fact, was an embarrassment to him.¹⁸ But McClellan did not quite understand just what the Republican leaders really wanted. They were demanding a hard war because they believed that to destroy the Confederacy must also mean destruction of the slave power and the slave system. They were as impatient with "the incapables" as McClellan was, because they feared that the incapables would fumble and stumble their way into some sort of a South-saving compromise. If they helped to create a new commanding general, they would expect hard-driving action and an end to all delays and all fuzziness of purpose; and if the commanding general did not give this to them they would turn on him without mercy.

Viewing the matter from London, Charles Francis Adams in mid-August wrote that the nation had already gone through three stages of "this great political disease." First, he said, there was "the cold fit, when it seemed as if nothing would start the country." Then came the hot fit, "when it seemed almost in the highest continual delirium." Now there was the third stage, when the country was in the process of "waking to the awful reality before it." He did not know what the fourth stage might be, but he felt that there must be a high principle to contend for; "I am for this reason anxious to grapple with the slave question at once." ¹⁴ John Bigelow, who stopped this month in Washington to accept appointment as United States consul in Paris, regretfully saw "a certain lack of sovereignty" in President Lincoln, and wrote that he seemed to be "a man utterly unconscious of the space which the President of the United States occupied that day in the history of the human race." David Davis, the stout Illinois jurist who had managed Lincoln's presidential campaign, heard from a pessimistic friend in Washington that the cabinet was incapable and that Seward was "leading Lincoln into a pit," and the correspondent gave a blunter phrasing to Adams's thought: "I am no prophet, but it appears to me we are only at the beginning of a mighty revolution."¹⁵

The summer weeks passed. The army constantly grew larger, showing its increased size and its improved drill in periodic reviews which encouraged soldiers and spectators alike. The chain of forts protecting Washington was made stronger, the task of piling up the innumerable things which the new army would wear or eat or shoot made progress despite woeful deficiencies in Secretary Cameron's organization . . . and the contest for control between the young general and the old general went on without a moment's letup, McClellan quietly contemptuous, Scott coldly furious. In September there were new rumors of a Confederate offensive, and Cameron—apparently forgetting that there was such a person as Scott—sent McClellan a fatuous note begging him to say how the War Department could be of service. McClellan asked for heavy reinforcements, including 25,000 of Fremont's men and the whole of the Regular Army, saying that the Army of the Potomac must be increased to 300,000 men even if this meant going on the defensive everywhere else in the United States. He added that he wanted sole control over the assignment of officers in his command.¹⁶

Scott protested in vain. He decreed that a general could communicate with a cabinet minister only through channels—that is, through his superior officer—and he was ignored. He formally ordered McClellan to give him a complete report on "the positions, state and number of troops under him," and to submit day-by-day reports on new arrivals and assignments. McClellan let the order lie for three weeks, then casually sent over an inadequate reply. Scott thought of having McClellan arrested and court-martialed, but concluded that "a conflict of authority near the head of the army would be highly encouraging to the enemies and depressing to the friends of the Union," and at length (having heard that 40,000 troops were being moved across the Potomac to the Virginia front) the gen-eral-in-chief found himself writing to the War Department to ask if he might be told "the meaning of the extraordinary movement of troops going on in the city." ¹⁷

Nothing like this would have been happening if Scott had not been slated for early retirement. He knew this as well as anyone, and he was hanging on during the early fall in the hope that a man of his own choice rather than McClellan might succeed him. He had settled on Henry Wager Halleck, another of the studious officers whom Old Army people labeled "brilliant," a West Pointer who had won a Phi Beta Kappa key at Union College, who had published a work called Elements of Military Art and Science, and had translated Jomini's classic four-volume Vie Politique et Militaire de Napoleon. Halleek had resigned from the Army in 1854 and had settled in California, prospering mightily as a corporation lawyer. Late in August, Scott had had him appointed a major general in the Regular Army, and when Cameron went to Missouri in October to examine the decaying Fremont situation at firsthand Scott agreed to stay on the job until the Secretary's return, hoping that Halleck would be with him by that time.¹⁸

It was a vain hope. By this time no one could possibly replace Scott but McClellan. To the soldiers and to the Washington public, McClellan was the martial spirit incarnate. William Howard Russell of the London Times noted that the young general had gone to elaborate lengths to make himself known to the soldiers and especially to their officers. He was seen in the camps or on the parade grounds every day, appearing in the morning and not disappearing until after dark, seeing everything, being seen by everyone, playing to the fullest the part of the general who carried the fate of the Republic on his shoulders; and he did this, Russell felt, "either to gain the good will of the army, or for some larger object." ¹⁹ The good will of the Army he had won, beyond question; if a larger object was in view, McClellan had only to wait.

He did not have to wait much longer, for the Army of the Potomac was about to suffer one more public disgrace, and the shock of it would force a change—and, in the end, would arm and perpetuate a bitterness that would be felt to the last day of the war and beyond. On October 21 a small Federal detachment was routed in an engagement at Ball's Bluff, on the Virginia side of the Potomac thirty-five miles upstream from Washington. The engagement had little military significance, but it was one more dreary licking. The Confederates inflicted heavy losses and they killed, in hot battle action, a prominent Union commander—Colonel Edward D. Baker, an unskilled soldier but an orator and politician Of much renown, a member of the United States Senate and for years an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln.

Ball's Bluff represented a fumble. Earlier in the summer the Confederates had occupied Leesburg, Virginia, a few miles inland from Ball's Bluff, with a brigade under the same Brigadier General "Shanks" Evans who had fought so well in the opening hours of the Bull Run battle. There had been intermittent skirmishes up and down the Potomac between Confederates and Federals, and early in September Jeb Stuart's cavalry had won laurels by beating a party of Federals near the Virginia hamlet of Lewinsville. On October 19, McClellan sent a division under Brigadier General George A. McCall forward on the Virginia side to Dranesville, fifteen miles below Leesburg, to find out what Evans was doing. McCall was to send patrols out to tap at Evans's lines, and McClellan ordered Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, commanding a division at Poolesville, Maryland, to keep a sharp lookout along the river and see whether McCall's advance made the Confederates evacuate Leesburg. He closed with the suggestion: "Perhaps a slight demonstration on your part would have the effect to move them." At the same time he told McCall to return to camp as soon as his reconnaissance was finished.²⁰

Out of all of this came tragedy. On October 21, McCall completed his work and withdrew. At the same time Stone, to make the "slight demonstration" that had been called for, had Colonel Baker take his 1700-man brigade across the river at Ball's Bluff to threaten Evans's left. Baker obeyed enthusiastically but inexpertly. He floundered forward from the top of the bluff, ran into Evans's main body, and got into a battle which he was unable to handle. His force was routed, with some 200 men killed or wounded and more than 700 captured, he himself was shot dead, and the survivors came straggling back to the Maryland side of the Potomac in woeful disorganization and dejection.²¹

Exactly three months had passed since Bull Run—three months of sober rededication, of immense effort, of hope rising from the ashes: and the harvest of those months seemed to be this ignominious defeat. It did riot even have the stature of the earlier disaster. Bull Run at least came as the result of an honest effort to strike a blow; Ball's Bluff was just a blunder, the sort of thing which—in the judgment of men whose impatience was rising like a flood tide—came logically out of a timid defensive policy. It was not to be endured, and some of the most forceful Republicans in the Senate promptly undertook to bring about a change.

Their immediate target was old General Scott, the living symbol of inaction and delay. (Scott, to be sure, had nothing whatever to do with Ball's Bluff, but he was general-in-chief and if the Army was not being used properly the fault must be his.) Less than a week after the battle the opposition was in full cry.

Spearhead was a triumvirate of three Senators—Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio. Trumbull, the mildest-mannered of the three, was a former Democrat just nearing fifty, a man who had become a Republican during the anti-Nebraska fight, a member of the Senate since 1855, an all-out war man always alert to uphold the authority of Congress. Chandler, a wealthy merchant who had helped found the Republican party and who had a dictatorial control over the party organization in Michigan, was Trumbull's age but tougher and more rough-hewn, a man who had declared during the spring that the Union would never be worth a rush without a little bloodletting and who was working furiously now to bring that bloodletting to pass. Wade, in his early sixties, was one of the most determined of the anti-slavery men in Congress—he had tried, in 1852, to repeal the fugitive slave law outright—and in the smoky Senate debates of the late 1850s he had been ostentatiously defiant of the slave-state spokesmen; wholly grim, wholly determined, altogether one of the rockiest men in Washington.

These three called on Lincoln, and then on Lincoln and Seward, insisting that it was time for action to drive the Rebels away from the vicinity of Washington. They also went to see McClellan, in a meeting held at Montgomery Blair's house and lasting for three hours, and McClellan convinced them that Scott was the great obstacle. To his wife, immediately after the conference was over, McClellan summed it up: "They will make a desperate effort to have Gen. Scott retired at once; until that is accomplished I can effect but little good. He is ever in my way, and I am sure does not desire effective action. I want to get through with the war as rapidly as possible." Once Wade remarked that even an unsuccessful battle would be better than continued delay, because "swarming recruits" would come in to make good any losses; to which McClellan quietly replied that he would rather have a few recruits before a victory than a flock of them after a defeat. This was sober good sense, to be sure, but sober good sense was not quite what these Republican "radicals" were looking for, and Mr. Lincoln warned McClellan that this demand for action was a political reality that had to be taken into account, adding: "At the same time, General, you must not fight until you are ready." McClellan was confident. "I have everything at stake," he replied. "If I fail, I will not see you again, or anybody." ²²

Chandler recorded his own thoughts in a letter to Mrs. Chandler the next day.

"If Wade and I fail in our mission, the end is at hand," he wrote. "If we fail I may take my seat in the Senate this winter, but doubt it." He told about the meetings with McClellan and with Mr. Lincoln, and went on: "If we fail in getting a battle here now all is lost, and up to this time a fight is scarcely contemplated. Washington is safe now, and that seems to be all they care for. ... If the South had one tenth our resources Jeff Davis would today be in Philadelphia and before a month in Boston." ²³

In the end, the mission succeeded. The Senators apparently were just a little skeptical about McClellan's willingness to make a quick move, but they had reached something of an understanding with him and for the moment they were backing him. Scott's resignation was formally accepted on November 1, his attempt to get Halleck as his successor was ridden down, and McClellan was announced as the new general-in-chief, with authority over the entire United States Army. Mr. Lincoln and cabinet paid a formal call on General Scott, and when Scott left the city McClellan and his staff went to the railroad station to see him off: a dark, rainy morning, the two soldiers preserving the amenities and parting with courteous farewells, McClellan inwardly touched by this melancholy close to "the career of the first soldier of his nation." Then McClellan assumed his new responsibilities and the capital prepared for action.

How the whole business looked to the radical Republican element is set forth in a confidential letter which the editors of the Chicago Tribune got from their Washington correspondent shortly after this change took place.

"Matters have a better look," wrote the Tribune man. "Scott is squelched and with him those who have been using his disloyalty to further and veneer their schemes for deadening the progress of the war. A stormy week in the counsels of managers of affairs here sees McClellan placed at the head of affairs. The people should be made to thoroughly acquit him of the Edwards Ferry affair." (By "Edwards Ferry," the writer referred to the Ball's Bluff business.) "That, and the proposition to go at once into winter quarters here, and suspend hostilities, broke the back of the opposition to him in the Cabinet and the Army." ²⁴