Mr Lincoln's Army by Bruce Catton Page B

of triumphant militia regiments, whose bright uniforms and martial
bearing would make up for any deficiencies in military experience and
leadership. The war was going to be long, mean, and bloody, and above all else
there was needed a really competent general who could turn the volunteer forces
into an army.
    To be sure, Lincoln had at his elbow
Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the hero of two wars; but Scott was old and
nearly senile, he was too fat and infirm to mount a horse or even to review his
troops, let alone lead them into action, and his great reputation and his stout
old heart were all he could place at the government's disposal. Inevitable,
then, that everyone should look at McClellan. His achievement in western
Virginia took on an added shine when measured against Bull Run. His troops had
not fled in terror after a few random volleys; they had gone into action
coolly, scaling lofty mountains and annihilating two armies. This man knew
what he was doing, and knew how to make people believe that he knew what he was
doing, which was even more important just then; and the very depth of the
country's shame and disappointment at Bull Run helped to lift McClellan to the
peak. Overnight he was called to Washington and invested with the command.
    No American general ever came to high command
under circumstances quite like these. He was thirty-five, and it was just
three months since he had sat in Governor Dennison's office and received the
tender of command of Ohio's volunteers. Now he was in Washington, with the
safety of the entire nation on his shoulders; and before he had even started on
this new job he was being universally acclaimed as a genius, with a fanfare
that built his brief Virginia campaign up into an achievement that would stand
comparison with the records of the great captains of history. He was "the
young Napoleon" to one and all—even to himself, apparently, for he permitted
himself to be photographed in the traditional Napoleonic pose, one arm folded
behind his back, the other hand thrust into his coat front, a look of intense
martial determination on his face. In a letter home, written the day after he
reached Washington, McClellan sounds like a man who can hardly believe that
what is happening to him is real: "I find myself in a new and strange
position here: President, cabinet, Gen. Scott, and all deferring to me. By some
strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land." A
few days later he went to Capitol Hill, to argue for a new law permitting him
to appoint aides to his staff from civil life if he chose. The experience among
the lawmakers was giddying—all experiences were, from the height he occupied
just then—and he unburdened himself in another letter to his wife:
    "I went to the Senate to get it through,
and was quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received and the respect
with which I was treated. I suppose half a dozen of the oldest made the remark
I am becoming so much used to: 'Why, how young you look, and yet an old
soldier!' It seems to strike everybody that I look young. They give me my way
in everything, full swing and unbounded confidence. All tell me that I am held
responsible for the fate of the nation, and that all its resources shall be
placed at my disposal. It is an immense task that I have on my hands, but I
believe I can accomplish it."
    And he added, bemused: "Who would have
thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my
country?"
    He was young, for a conquering hero, and it was only natural
that he himself should have been impressed by his own eminence. And yet, in
these letters to the young wife he had married little more than a year earlier,
one presently begins to find something more than the natural blinking of a man
who is dazzled by his own good fortune; something more than the artless
self-congratulation a man is entitled to indulge in when he brags innocently to
the wife of his bosom. It gets said too