This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [86]
When Johnston retreated McClellan followed. His advance ran into Johnston’s rear guard in a chain of fieldworks near old Williamsburg and fought a hard, wearing battle that did nothing but produce twenty-two hundred Union casualties and prove that both armies had long since got past the clumsy amateurish stage of the Bull Run era. Johnston kept on retreating until he had backed all the way into the suburbs of Richmond, and McClellan followed at a pace not much faster than the one Halleck had been displaying in Mississippi. May was nearly over by the time the Army of the Potomac was in line near the Confederate capital — badly behind the “three or four weeks” schedule McClellan had so optimistically laid down on February 20.
By now other things were going wrong, most of them growing out of a bitter difference of opinion between General McClellan and the Lincoln administration.
At bottom the difference of opinion reflected divergent ideas on the kind of war the country was fighting. ‘The administration had accepted it from the first as a revolutionary struggle, calling for hard blows hit fast; McClellan always saw it as a traditional war-between-gentlemen affair, of the sort which a professional soldier could play straight. The administration wanted relentless combat but lacked military knowledge; McClellan had military knowledge but could not see that at bottom this was a political war. It was becoming very hard for McClellan and Lincoln to agree about anything whatever.
A disagreement between general and government could have odd potentialities this spring. There was a great division of opinion in the North about war aims. The administration was coming to suspect that to put down the rebellion it would have to destroy slavery — and, with it, the social and economic system for which slavery was the base. It was nearly ready, in other words, to say that it would stamp out everything the South was fighting for. Northern Democrats, on the other hand, wanted nothing but simple restoration of the Union. On almost everything but secession itself they accepted the southern point of view. Northern Democrats were complaining that the Republican administration was growing intolerably oppressive, ruthless, and dictatorial; the Republicans were suspecting that Democrats believed in a soft and ineffective war and stood on the edge of outright disloyalty.
And McClellan embodied the Democratic position. Any military program he might adopt could be considered a Democratic program, and it was all too easy now to consider a Democratic program treasonous. So when general and administration differed about anything at all — the placement of a division of troops, a proper route for invasion and supply, the appointment of a soldier to command an army corps — neither one could quite trust the other’s motives.
The first disagreement had come because McClellan refused to invade the Richmond area until he was satisfied that his army was entirely ready. Because of this disagreement, in mid-March he had been deposed as commanding general of all the armies and reduced to command of the Army of the Potomac. Then, when he did move, there had been an argument over the way in which Washington should be protected.
McClellan felt that if he kept the Confederates busy in front of Richmond the defense of Washington would pretty well take care of itself. Lincoln and Stanton felt that a strong body of troops should be left behind, and when McClellan went down to the peninsula they held back some thirty-five thousand of his troops — under the luckless McDowell, who had commanded at Bull Run — to watch the line of the Rappahannock and upper Virginia. McClellan complained bitterly that he was being sent to do a job with inadequate strength, and he