This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [103]
A victory was needed for more reasons than one. Overseas, the British Government seemed to be on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation — an act that would almost certainly bring effects as far-reaching and decisive as French recognition of the American colonies had brought in 1778. Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Cabinet seemed at last ready to take the step. They would wait just a little while to see what came of Lee’s invasion of the North. Then, if all went well …
Then the wild impossible dream would come true, America would become two nations, and the outworn past with its beauty and its charm, its waste and its cruelty and its crippling limitations, would reach down into the future. Here was the crisis of the war, the great Confederate high-water mark. Never afterward was a final southern victory quite as close as it was in September 1862. The two halves of the war met here — the early formative half, when both the war and the change that would come from the war might still be limited and controlled, and the terrible latter half, which would grind on to its end without limits and without controls.
By one of the singular ironies in American history, the man who was standing precisely at this point of fusion — the man through whom, almost in spite of himself, the crisis would be resolved — was that cautious weigher of risks and gains, General McClellan.
McClellan had been quietly but effectively shelved. When his army came north it was fed down to Pope by bits and pieces, until by the final day of the Bull Run fight all of it was gone and McClellan was left isolated in Alexandria, across the river from Washington, a general without an army. He had not formally been removed from command, but his command had been most deftly slipped out from under him. The thing had been done deliberately. Secretary Stanton disliked and distrusted him, such men as Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase considered him no better than an outright traitor, and the Republican party leadership was almost mutinous against Lincoln for having supported him so long; and, anyway, it appeared that victory just was not in the man. He had been set aside, and the war would go on without him.
But the trouble was that at this particular moment McClellan was indispensable.
He had warned Lincoln that Union soldiers would not fight in an avowed war against slavery, and there would be time enough later on to find out whether that was so; but what mattered most right now was that this could never be turned into a war against slavery or anything else unless the Army of the Potomac very speedily won a victory over Robert E. Lee, and there was not a remote chance that it could do that now without General McClellan. Its elements had been thrown in with Pope’s and had been beaten. Pope was wholly discredited, and the dispirited troops who were retreating into the Washington lines were not, at the moment, an army at all in any real sense of the word. They never had been an army, as the word is properly understood; they were young men who had heard bugles and drums and had seen flags waving and had felt something outside of themselves come in and move them; and now they were tired, dirty, unhappy, conscious that they had been beaten because they had been poorly led, the flame gone out of them. They were ready to quit and they could not conceivably be turned into a useful army again, in time to do any good, by anyone but the one man who had trained them, the man in whom they had unwavering