Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

he saw as unprofessional meddling on Lincoln’s part, replied by resurrecting the Urbanna plan and proposing to move down to the Rappahannock instead of Manassas. “The Lower Chesapeake Bay… affords the shortest possible land route to Richmond, and strikes directly at the heart of the enemy’s power in the east,” McClellan argued. “A movement in force on that line obliges the enemy to abandon his intrenched position at Manassas, in order to hasten to cover Richmond and Norfolk. … During the whole movement our left flank is covered by the water. Our right is secure, for the reason that the enemy is too distant to reach us in time. He can only oppose us in front. We bring our fleet into full play.” By March 8 McClellan was no closer to moving on Urbanna than he was to the moon, and Lincoln called him onto the White House carpet for an explanation. The prodding finally worked, and on March 10 McClellan and his grand army marched out of Washington to attack what McClellan was sure would be a Confederate Sevastopol, filled with abundant Confederate soldiers who would inflict thousands of casualties that his Urbanna plan would have avoided.45

To McClellan’s unspeakable surprise, the Confederate entrenchments at Manassas turned out to be empty. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, who now had sole command of the Confederacy’s northern Virginia army, had far fewer men than McClellan thought, and he prudently eased himself out of the Manassas lines before McClellan’s hammer fell, withdrawing to the Rappahannock. The next day McClellan read in the newspapers that Lincoln had relieved him of his post of general in chief, ostensibly to allow McClellan to concentrate his energies on the Virginia theater.46

For McClellan, this was a humiliation of the first order. But Lincoln had by now learned that humiliation was a remarkably effective medicine for McClellan’s case of “the slows”: the next day McClellan laid out yet another plan for invading Virginia. He had no interest in an overland campaign from Manassas, and the original Urbanna campaign was now impossible with Joe Johnston sitting behind the Rappahannock. McClellan insisted that the basic idea of a combined army-navy operation was still feasible, provided one changed the target area to the James River, where the federal government still retained possession of Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the James River peninsula. He would load the 120,000 men of the Army of the Potomac onto navy transports and, relying on the superiority of the Federal navy in the waters of Chesapeake Bay and the strategic cover provided by Fortress Monroe, land his soldiers on the James River peninsula just below Richmond, then draw up to the Confederate capital and besiege it before Johnston’s Confederate army on the Rappahannock knew what was happening.47

In McClellan’s mind, this plan had all the proper advantages to it. By using Federal seapower, he would overcome the Confederate advantage of interior lines in Virginia, constitute a gigantic turning movement that would force the Confederates to abandon everything north of Richmond without a shot, and take the rebel capital rather than the rebel army as the real object of the campaign, thus avoiding unnecessary battles and unnecessary loss of life. To Lincoln, who had borrowed books on military science from the Library of Congress in an effort to give himself a crash course on strategy and tactics, this looked instead like an unwillingness on McClellan’s part to advance to a decisive Napoleonic battle, and it was only a matter of time before Lincoln’s administration began to impute political as well as strategic motives to McClellan’s indirect methods. Secretary of War Stanton at once objected that the James River plan merely demonstrated how unaggressive McClellan was. And since piloting the Army of the Potomac down to the James River would leave Washington almost undefended, it also left a question in Stanton’s suspicious mind as to whether McClellan was deliberately opening the national capital to a Confederate strike from northern Virginia.

Still, McClellan was the expert, and the army was solidly behind him, so Lincoln (despite Stanton’s reservations) decided to authorize the venture—provided that McClellan left approximately 30,000 men under the rehabilitated Irvin McDowell in front of Washington to protect the capital. When McClellan discovered this caveat, he protested that he needed every last man of the Army of the Potomac for his offensive. Lincoln was adamant, however: he would release McDowell’s troops only if Washington was safe beyond doubt, and even then McDowell would need to march overland, down to the James, to link up with McClellan.48 On March 17, 1862, McClellan began the laborious process of transporting nearly 90,000 men of the Army of the Potomac to the tip of the James River peninsula at Fortress Monroe, leaving the remainder behind in scattered commands and forts around Washington, and McDowell at Alexandria.

The resulting Peninsula Campaign confirmed everyone’s worst fears about McClellan’s vanity and slowness, and for a few others raised fears about his loyalty to a Republican administration. True to McClellan’s prediction, the Army of the Potomac’s landing on the James peninsula caught the Confederate army in Virginia totally by surprise. Only a thin force of 15,000 rebel infantry, under the command of former West Pointer and amateur actor John Magruder, held a defensive line across the James peninsula at the old Revolutionary War battlefield of Yorktown, and if McClellan had but known the pitiful numbers opposing him, he could have walked over Magruder and into Richmond without blinking. What Magruder lacked in terms of numbers, however, he more than made up for with theatrical displays of parading troops and menacing-looking artillery emplacements, and he successfully bluffed McClellan into thinking that a major Confederate army stood in his path. By the time McClellan was finally ready to open up a major assault on the Yorktown lines on May 5, 1862, Joe Johnston’s Confederate army in Virginia had been regrouped around Richmond and was prepared to give McClellan precisely the kind of defensive battle he had hoped to avoid. To