CHAPTER III

Summer 1862-Autumn 1862

On July 11, 1862, after a four month period during which the President, assisted by the Secretary of War, had performed the duties of the General-in-Chief, Mr. Lincoln appointed Major General Henry W. Halleck to the vacant post. General Halleck would occupy the post of General-in-Chief until early 1864. During his stewardship, he gave the President military advice, but exercised very little command over theater operations. Most observers agree that General Halleck "delighted to counsel, but he hated to decide." Nevertheless, he was able to provide the President with the type of "technical information the President did not have and that he needed to solve certain military problems." Indeed, if Mr. Lincoln had "wanted only an advisor, he could not have chosen a better one than Halleck," but, in July, 1862, the President hoped that his new General-in-Chief would directly plan and command the unified Federal operations encompassing all the theaters of war. While he made attempts in that direction, his reluctance to command his theater generals would ultimately reduce his role to that of a “technical advisor to the President and a staff critic of the plans of field generals." Notwithstanding his failure as a central war director, however, the President retained General Halleck as the General-in-Chief because he apparently “valued Halleck's technical knowledge and respected his character."1

With the departure of General Halleck from the western theater, command responsibility over the west was divided between Generals Buell and Grant. General Buell was to continue his advance toward Chattanooga which he had commenced soon after the capture of Corinth. Summarizing General Buell's situation, Allen Nevins noted,

He was ordered to repair the Memphis and Charleston railroad as he advanced and to use it as his line of supply-a line which left the ever

extending flank of his communications exposed to raids from the south. As a result his advance grew slower and lost weight as it went, for the danger of his life-line being cut by the Confederate cavalry or guerrilla bands was ever present.2

Notwithstanding General Halleck's repeated directives to move as rapidly as possible toward Chattanooga, however, General Buell was eventually forced to halt his advance. As Professors Beringer, Hattaway, Jones, and Still observed,

Already harassed by guerrillas, he halted in August, when cavalry raiders interrupted his communications in the first major application of what became a fundamental and most effective Confederate defensive strategy. Adequately supplemented by the activities of guerrillas, cavalry broke the fragile rail lines in Buell's rear, burning bridges and tearing up track. Without rail communications and out of reach of river steamers, Buell refused to advance farther in such sparsely settled country with only primitive roads for supply.3

Meanwhile, as General Buell was supposed to be advancing toward Chattanooga, General Grant was to maintain his defensive stance in northern Mississippi. Union troops in Arkansas were to be reinforced, not only to help consolidate the gains already made in the trans-Mississippi region, particularly Missouri, but also to set the stage for additional territorial gains. In the Virginia theater, General-in-Chief Halleck was confronted with an exterior lines situation: General Pope's Army of Virginia, located in northern Virginia, and General McClellan's Army of the Potomac, positioned defensively on the banks of the James River, each unable to reinforce the other quickly. The Confederates occupied a central position between these two Union forces. Notwithstanding the scholarly Halleck's theoretical distaste for exterior lines type operations, the new General-in-Chief visited General McClellan, his former superior and now subordinate, at the Army of the Potomac's encampment on the James, in order to ascertain McClellan's intentions. The Commander of the Army of the Potomac expressed his conviction that the best way to decisively defeat the Confederates was to extensively reinforce his command for another advance against Richmond from the east or south. General McClellan proposed,

...

to cross in force to the south side of the James and move on Petersburg, thereby severing a number of vital railroads from the deep

South to Richmond. Lee himself acknowledged that so long as the National Army was astride the James near Richmond, he could not weaken the Southern Army defending the capital in order to move northward toward Washington. Petersburg was then practically undefended.* General Halleck, however, remained unconvinced that General McClellan would, even if reinforced with the maximum number of troops available to the Federal high command at that time, take the initiative and act aggressively to defeat the Confederates. The General-in-Chief concluded that without such action, only the risks inherent with an exterior lines operation would remain. In such case, the enterprising Confederates were likely to themselves seize the initiative and utilize their interior lines to strike at General Pope's Army of Virginia and McClellan's Army of the Potomac successively. Hence, on August 3, General McClellan was formally told that the Army of the Potomac would be withdrawn as quickly as possible from the peninsula and consolidated with the Union forces located in northern Virginia in preparation for a new offensive."

the

General McClellan strongly protested the order arguing that army was already in the best position to resume the offensive against Richmond. He further stated,

Add to this the certain demoralization of this army, which would ensue, the terribly depressing effect upon the people of the North, and the strong probability that it would influence foreign powers to recognize our adversaries, and there appear to me sufficient reasons to make it my imperative duty to urge, in the strongest terms afforded by our language, that this order may be rescinded, and that, far from recalling this army, it be promptly reinforced to enable it to resume the offensive Here, directly in front of this army, is the heart of the rebellion Here is the true defense of Washington; it is here, on the banks of the James, that the fate of the Union should be decided."

Partly agreeing with General McClellan, T. Harry Williams maintained that the Federal high command

... would have done better to have left the army where it was. It was only twenty-five miles from Richmond and on a supply line that could always be kept open. It was closer to Richmond than it would be until 1864. Seldom if ever in military history has an army that near to an enemy capital retired without the enemy firing a shot at it. Lincoln would have made a wiser decision if he had kept the army on the James and removed McClellan as its commander. He should have replaced

McClellan with a general who was not afraid to fight and who had some capacity to estimate the strength of the enemy. He could have given the command to Pope, who was soon to show that he had plenty of defects but who was pugnacious and who might have smashed his way into Richmond. There is no evidence that Lincoln considered keeping the army in the Peninsula and giving it a new leader. He was impressed with Halleck's learned and theoretical talk about the military error and the danger of having the armies of McClellan and Pope separated and the necessity of obeying the textbooks by uniting them. In a technical sense, the two Union armies were separated, which according to the books was bad, and there was an enemy force, the Confederate army at Richmond, between them, which according to the books was worse. Actually the Federal armies were not separated in a dangerous or strategic sense, because the Federal navy controlled the water lines between Washington and the Peninsula, and some kind of cooperation was always possible.'

Moreover, the Confederate armies in Virginia were not nearly as strong as McClellan's inflated estimates suggested."

As the General-in-Chief feared, however, with General Grant on the defensive in northern Mississippi, General Buell, harassed by enemy raids on his lines of communications, very slowly plodding eastward toward Chattanooga, and General McClellan passively awaiting the withdrawal of his army from the peninsula, the Confederate high command seized the initiative both east and west of the Appalachians. In Virginia, the Confederate commander, General Lee, decided not merely to passively guard against another advance by General McClellan against Richmond from the east, while, simultaneously, defending against the threat posed by General Pope's new army to the Virginia Central Railroad which linked Richmond with the Shenandoah. Instead, he and his lieutenants opted to employ only a portion of the Southern forces then in the Richmond area to guard the inert Army of the Potomac, while utilizing the remainder to attack and, if possible, destroy the individual corps components of General Pope's army before the latter could concentrate. Meanwhile, on the Union side, the General-in-Chief informed General Pope of his intention to withdraw the Army of the Potomac from the peninsula, combine it with the Army of Virginia, and launch a new, offensive campaign. This decision by Washington, of course, negated a portion of General Pope's original mission and eliminated, or at least significantly reduced the im