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By Root 1823 0

but he went for this one with enthusiasm and Burnside was told to go ahead. Hardly had this been done when the navy picked up a couple of Ben Butler’s regiments and a battery of artillery and whisked them down into the Gulf of Mexico, to occupy desolate Ship Island, a sprawling sand dune dotted with marsh grass and scrub oaks and pines, which lay a few miles offshore some little distance west of the entrance to Mobile Bay. The original idea seems to have been to hold the place as a coaling depot for light-draft gunboats, with which the navy hoped to break the Confederate traffic between New Orleans and Mobile. But the men and guns deposited on Ship Island were hardly seventy-five miles in an air line from New Orleans itself, largest city in the Confederacy, and they were an equal distance from the entrance to the all-important Mississippi River; a fact that was bound to call itself to strategic attention before long.

Thus by the middle of the fall the government was beginning to get on with the war even though most of the progress was as yet invisible. If McClellan’s army was doing nothing in particular in Virginia, the Confederate army in that state was keeping equally quiet; and although the idea would never have dawned on McClellan, it is just possible that by keeping quiet in Virginia his army was fulfilling its most important function. The strategy by which the Confederacy would eventually be destroyed was taking shape that fall — seal off the coast, strike down the Mississippi, destroy secession state by state, working east from the West — and the unhappy Army of the Potomac, which was to do the worst of the fighting and suffer the heaviest casualties, was not, in the end, actually required to do anything more than hold the line in front of Washington.

What was to happen would bear a striking resemblance to Scott’s original Anaconda Plan, but Scott himself would not be around to see it — except dimly, as an outsider, from afar. The old man had obviously grown too old and infirm to command the country’s armies. Also, McClellan, who was still on his way up, looked on him as an encumbrance and by-passed him whenever possible. Finally, early in November, Scott grew tired of being continually snubbed by his subordinate and went off into retirement, and McClellan was put in his place. Now McClellan had it all; immediate command of the Army of the Potomac, top command of all the country’s armies. He said stoutly, “I can do it all,” when Lincoln suggested that the burden might be too heavy; yet he did know a moment of humility when, with his staff, he went to the railway station to see Scott off, was touched by the sight of a once-great soldier shuffling sadly away into the discard, and reflected that unless things broke right he himself might someday be in Scott’s position, riding dejectedly away to make place for another man.3

But that would be a long way off. For the time being all the war was in McClellan’s hands, and the moments of self-doubt that plagued the brilliant young general were kept hidden from the multitude. Aside from the coastal operations, he had three principal theaters for action — Virginia, Kentucky, and the Missouri-Mississippi valley area — and he was resolved not to let political pressure force him, as it had forced McDowell, to move before everything was ready.

In Virginia he had unwittingly shouldered a great handicap; he had given himself Allan Pinkerton, the famous detective, as chief of military intelligence. Pinkerton was expert at catching bank robbers, railway bandits, and absconding fiduciaries, but he was almost completely incompetent at giving the general-in-chief the data he needed about the opposing army. He was telling McClellan now that Joe Johnston, Confederate commander in northern Virginia, had a large and aggressive army, and since what he told McClellan fitted perfectly with McClellan’s own native caution, McClellan soon came to believe that he was actually outnumbered. In actual fact, McClellan had just about twice as many men as Johnston had, they were fully as well trained