Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (Vol.1&2). Jacob D. Cox

Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (Vol.1&2)

Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (Vol.1&2) - Jacob D. Cox

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that he marched after Lee without authority, so that, if unsuccessful, he might have been condemned for usurpation of command. It would be incredible that he adopted such a mere illusion, if he had not himself said it. It proves that some at least of the strange additions to history which he thus published had their birth in his own imagination brooding over the past, and are completely contradicted by the official records. 35 The consolidation of the armies under him was, in fact, a promotion, since it enlarged his authority and committed to him the task that properly belonged to Halleck as general-in-chief. For a few days, beginning September 1st, McClellan's orders and correspondence were dated "Headquarters, Washington," because no formal designation had been given to the assembled forces at the capital. When he took the field at Rockville on the 8th of September, he assumed, as he had the right to do in the absence of other direction from the War Department, that Burnside's and Pope's smaller armies were lost in the larger Army of the Potomac by the consolidation, and resumed the custom of dating his orders and dispatches from "Headquarters, Army of the Potomac," from the command of which he had never been removed, even when its divisions were temporarily separated from him. 36 The defences of Washington were now entrusted to Major-General Banks, strictly in subordination, however, to himself. 37The official record of authority and command is consistent and perfect, and his notion in his later years, that there was anything informal about it, is proven to be imaginary. 38 Halleck's direction, which I have quoted, to "let our troops move immediately," would be absurd as addressed to the commandant of the Army of the Potomac into which the Army of Virginia was consolidated, unless that commandant was to take the field, or a formal order relieved him of command as Pope was relieved. Certainly no other commander was designated, and I saw enough of him in those days to say with confidence that he betrayed no doubt that the order to "move immediately" included himself. McClellan's popularity with the Army of the Potomac had seemed to Mr. Lincoln the only power sufficient to ensure its prompt and earnest action against the Confederate invasion. His leadership of it, to be successful, had to be accompanied with plenary powers, even if the stultification of the government itself were the consequence. When the patriotism of the President yielded to this, the suggestion of McClellan twenty years afterward, that it had all been a pitfall prepared for him, would be revolting if, in view of the records, the absurdity of it did not prove that its origin was in a morbid imagination. It is far more difficult to deal leniently with the exhibition of character in his private letters, which were injudiciously added to his "Own Story" by his literary executor. In them his vanity and his ill-will toward rivals and superiors are shockingly naked; and since no historian can doubt that at every moment from September, 1861, to September, 1862, his army greatly outnumbered his enemy, whilst in equipment and supply there was no comparison, his persistent outcry that he was sacrificed by his government destroys even that character for dignity and that reputation for military intelligence which we fondly attributed to him.