This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [104]
Neither the War Department nor the Cabinet could see this, but Lincoln could, and he acted on what he saw — risking that which he dared not lose in order to win that which he had to have. He put McClellan back in command and in effect told him to pull the army together and go out and whip the Army of Northern Virginia.
… It became a legend, and a true thing to be remembered in the long years of peace, how McClellan this one time rose to a great challenge and met it fully. He was a small man, and he missed many chances, and he probably was afraid of something; not of death — there is much testimony about his courage under fire, and he had picked up the hard West Point training — but of life and the things that can go wrong in it; but for one evening of his life he was great, and the Confederate tide began to ebb as the sun went down over the Virginia hills to the sound of men who cheered as if they had touched the shores of dream-come-true. McClellan rode out from Alexandria on his great black war horse, a jaunty little man with a yellow sash around his waist, every pose and gesture perfect. He cantered down the dusty roads and he met the heads of the retreating columns, and he cried words of encouragement and swung his little cap, and he gave the beaten men what no other man alive could have given them — enthusiasm, hope, confidence, an exultant and unreasoning feeling that the time of troubles was over and that everything would be all right now. And it went into the legend — truthfully, for many men have testified to it — that down mile after mile of Virginia roads the stumbling columns came alive, and threw caps and knapsacks into the air, and yelled until they could yell no more, and went on doing it until the sun went down; and after dark, exhausted men who lay in the dust sprang to their feet and cried aloud because they saw this dapper little rider outlined against the purple starlight.4
And this, in a way, was the turning point of the war. It was odd that it should happen this way, because this war was one of the great hinges of history, a closing and an opening of mighty doors, and McClellan believed that it was something very different — a bit of a disagreement among gentlemen, which would be settled presently in the way of gentlemen so that everyone could go back to what they had had before the disagreement began; and no one would go back to anything after this. McClellan rode down the roads to the sound of a mighty cheering and a great crying, and because he did the war would go on and on to its destined end, with McClellan himself fading out of it in an extended anticlimax and with most of the men who called out to him dying or drifting off into the limbo of old soldiers who have had it.
No one could ever quite explain it. The men who threw their caps and yelled themselves hoarse and of their own will became a solid army again could never quite find the words for it, and the best McClellan himself could say finally was: “We are wedded and should not be separated” — which, after all, perhaps was the obscure essence of it. But whatever it was that really happened, it would finally give Abraham Lincoln what he was looking for. And American history would be different forever after.
3. High-Water Mark
The tension became almost unendurable, yet it lasted just a little more than a fortnight. Then it snapped, in a great explosion of fire and sound and violence, and the war came to a climax in its worst single day of death.
The Army of Northern Virginia had crossed the Potomac, and no one knew just where it was. No one could be sure, either, where Bragg’s western army had gone. The rumor suddenly reached Washington that Bragg’s men, having given Buell the slip, were coming east to join Lee, over whatever impossible mountain route across eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and Lincoln was anxiously wiring the western commanders, asking them: “What degree of certainty have you that Bragg with his command