Evidence Said to Impeach

In which Charles P. Stone testifies a second time

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McClellan's winter offensive came sputtering to a halt on the last day of January. Since the end of his illness, he had worked politically to regain complete control of the U.S. war effort, and he thought he had achieved it. But on January 27, President Lincoln had issued General Order No. 1 ordering all Federal armies to begin advancing by February 22. Throughout the week he rapidly put together a plan and pitched it to the President, but on January 31, McClellan received the President's rejection--by reading a copy of Special Order No. 1, directed to the commander of the Army of the Potomac (McClellan, concurrently with his responsibilities as general-in-chief), as shown to him by a member of the press.

Ordered, That all the disposable force of the Army of the Potomac, after providing safely for the defense of Washington, be formed into an expedition for the immediate object of seizing and occupying a point upon the railroad southwestward of what is known as Manassas Junction; all details to be in the discretion of the General in Chief, and the expedition to move before or on the 22d day of February next.

One thing McClellan didn't take into account was the fracturing of Lincoln's political base over the winter, best epitomized by the rise of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The Radical Republican-dominated Committee had spent most of January interviewing McClellan's division commanders about the possibility of forward advance. They had concluded it was, and they had conveyed that assurance to Lincoln's new Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. McClellan wasn't aware of it yet, but despite Stanton's reliable Democratic politics his views on the war were actually closely aligned with the Committee's. While McClellan had spent a great deal of time consulting with Stanton before his appointment to Secretary of War, it was almost certainly Stanton who suggested Lincoln's two orders.


Stanton's regular meetings with members of the Committee had yielded another decision in their favor that struck a blow at McClellan's control of the Army of the Potomac. On January 28, almost certainly on the advice of members of the Committee who had met with him the previous day, Stanton issued an order to arrest Brig. General Charles P. Stone.

McClellan was aghast. Not only was Stone one of his handpicked division commanders (even though he had also been a protege of Winfield Scott, a rarity), but the attacks in the Republican press and in both chambers of Congress had taken on a decidedly partisan tone towards Stone's conservative politics, which happened to be McClellan's as well. Eager to avoid carrying out the order, McClellan convinced both Stanton and the members of the Committee that Stone's first, confrontational testimony before the Committee had been incomplete, and to allow him another chance.

Rec'd: Losing a Distinguished Soldier

Recommendations for a light week

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"The Small Politicians in Congress Cackling at Gen. McClellan" (Harper's Weekly)

Two hundred and thirty-nine days earlier, Gustave Toutant Beauregard arrived by train at Manassas Junction to organize the defense of Northern Virginia. He built the Army of the Potomac and decisively won the largest battle of the war up to that point. But on January 30, he was dismissed.

Beauregard had been done in by a number of factors, most of them within his control. First he had annoyed Jefferson Davis with his insistence on composing grand strategy for the whole Confederacy, then, after Manassas, he had thwarted Davis' intended structure for the Army of the Potomac, and he had used his close friends in the Confederate Congress to publish his grievances over the conduct of the war in the Richmond newspapers. But in addition to angering the President, Beauregard had simply become redundant, with Joe Johnston increasingly making more and more of the decisions.

By mid-January, Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, who had immigrated to Louisiana and was able to appeal to their common home, had worked out that Beauregard would accept an appointment elsewhere. The hero of Fort Sumter's career had fallen to Earth as sharply and quickly as it had risen.

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Over at All Not So Quiet Along the Potomac, check out the two parter on winter around Washington. The first deals with daily life, and the second deals with organization.

Here's a good piece on the defenses of Washington and the importance of a national capital in warfare.

To the Sounds of the Guns looks at Virginia's upcoming decision about uranium mining in light of battlefield preservation.

A blog called Booktryst got its hands on some not so savory Currier and Ives plates last February.

The Deadline

Wherein Lincoln sets deadlines, luckily for Hooker

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Gen. Order No. 1, with quotation highlighted (LOC)

On January 27, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln decided it was time to stop waiting for his general-in-chief's report on how the nation's army would take to the field. Maj. General George McClellan had promised Lincoln such a document when he wrested control of the war strategy back following his sickness. But the report hadn't come. And so Lincoln issued an order to attack using his Article II power as commander-in-chief:

Ordered that the 22nd day of February 1862, be the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.

The order didn't specify which movements, though, which Lincoln expected McClellan to fill in.

But McClellan's plan was probably not complete. Assuming that the Confederate forces around Centreville numbered at least 150,000 in fixed positions, he wanted to use the Rappahannock River to split his opponents off from Richmond and either take their capital or induce them to attack him in a strong defensive position. That much had been conveyed to Lincoln by his loyal surrogate, Brig. General William B. Franklin. But the actual plan of operations was still known only to McClellan, and it was this that Lincoln hoped General Orders No. 1 would elicit (as well as the plans for other theaters).

But even if McClellan wasn't providing plans to the President, plans were being made. On the same day, Brig. General Joseph Hooker responded to an inquiry from McClellan's adjutant general, Seth Williams, about his thoughts on the best way to attack. Hooker had been in Southern Maryland's Charles County since late October, suppressing the region's trade of goods and information with the Confederacy and keeping an eye on the batteries at Evansport [Quantico]. But Hooker was an ambitious man, and he had plotted how he could turn his lonely post on the extreme right of the army into a way to crush the Confederate army.

The Other Feud

Wherein we follow the little remembered Southern command crisis

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Joe Johnston wrote with a barely contained rage:

Sir: A colonel of a Mississippi regiment has just informed me that you had referred him to me for information in relation to the recent act of Congress granting bounties and furloughs to non-commissioned officers and privates of the Provisional Army. I have received no order from the War Department directly on this subject.

If the first winter of the war for the North was headlined by the struggle between McClellan and the Lincoln Administration, it was equally true that the winter for the South revolved around a similar power battle between Johnston and the Davis Administration. But the latter fight is remembered only as a side-note by even the more diligent historians while the former is the centerpiece of even the most casual histories of the war.

There are many reasons this may be. For one, Johnston was a far less colorful character, who bequeathed history no inflammatory personal letters. But the story also lacks a hero. Johnston was not a great general in his campaigning and won no great victories that he could claim sole credit for (forever having to share Manassas with Beauregard), while the gross mismanagement of the Davis Administration hardly provides a sympathetic character to the reader. And the later success of Lee commanding the same army helps write a simple narrative for the war: South is dominant up until Gettysburg, when either the little guy North wins through pluck and determination or the resource-rich North crushes the valiant South tragically, but inevitably (depending on your persuasion). Johnston, and his feud with Davis and his surrogates, sullies that narrative by forcing us to recognize two equally inept factions, struggling to create a physical embodiment of their ideological passions and impose it on the continent.

When General Joseph E. Johnston started writing Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin on January 18, the specific issue was bounties and furloughs, an ill advised solution to a manpower problem. In the early days of 1861, when it was still a secession crisis and not yet a war, the Provisional Confederate Congress had to solve the problem of how to protect their would-be nation from the U.S. Army. After all, it had been Maj. General Winfield Scott that had mobilized U.S. soldiers in South Carolina to help put an end to the Nullification Crisis a quarter of a century earlier, and it was Winfield Scott who was advising Lincoln on how to deal with the Secession Crisis in 1861.

Defenseless Women

Wherein the Rebel Rose is sent to jail

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Greenhow and her daughter at the Old Capitol prison

On January 18, Allan Pinkerton's patience ran out. Since the end of August, Rose O'Neal Greenhow had been under house arrest at her house on 16th and K [site of today's Hay-Adams Hotel] for aiding the Confederacy, particularly in the run up to Bull Run. In that time she had been nothing short of a nightmare for Washington's provost-marshal, Brig. General Andrew Porter, responsible for maintaining military security across the expanding area of operations for the Army of the Potomac. Greenhow was alternating charming and haughty, and loved playing the beleaguered Southern woman to the press.

She also was still sending messages to the Confederate Army of the Potomac and her old friend, Thomas Jordan, adjutant to General G.T. Beauregard. On December 26 she had managed to smuggle out a letter to Jordan through a mutual friend and member of his spy ring in Washington.

In a day or two, 1,200 cavalry supported by four batteries of artillery will cross the river above to get behind Manassas and cut off railroad and other communications with our army, whilst an attack is made in front. For God's sake, heed this. It is positive. They are obliged to move or give up.

McClellan's Winter Offensive

Wherein Little Mac strikes back against his enemies

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Long Bridge [14th Street Bridge] across the Potomac

"Your Excellency," Maj. General George B. McClellan, general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, wrote President Abraham Lincoln on the morning of January 15, 1862, "I am so much better this morning that I am going before the Joint Committee. If I escape alive I will report when I get through."

McClellan was in the midst of a campaign to reassert his authority. Three weeks earlier, he had fallen sick, usually reported as typhoid fever. It couldn't have happened at a less convenient time, for the general. In mid-December there had already been grumbling about the lack of movement by the massive army he had assembled along the Potomac, and the disaster at Ball's Bluff and the winter campaign of Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley had stirred up the embers from the pre-Bull Run fire for rapid advance. Without McClellan's boundless energy for political wrangling to quash it, the fire had blazed up fiercer than ever in Washington, fueled by frustrated officers who had been slighted by McClellan's remaking of the army hierarchy.

The Joint Committee for the Conduct of the War was certainly the most prominent organ of dissent. Committee Chair Senator Benjamin Wade (R-OH) and member Senator Zachariah Chandler (R-MI) had interviewed almost all of McClellan's division commanders (the exceptions: Banks and Hooker, furthest away from Washington), attempting to establish a case that McClellan could attack at any time, and simply wasn't. Both men and a growing number of the so-called "Radical" wing of the Republican Party were becoming more and more convinced that this was because of treasonous beliefs among the conservative West Point officers in charge of the war effort.

Unusual Preparations

Wherein the USS Pensacola attempts to run the Potomac blockade

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The Pensacola moored at Alexandria in 1861

In the post-midnight blackness of January 12, the U.S.S. Pensacola slipped her mooring, and Captain Henry W. Morris and his sailors prepared to run the gauntlet. Morris had received his instructions four days earlier--from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles himself--ordering him to take the 3,000 ton screw steamer to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, where he would then be ordered south to the Gulf of Mexico to blockade New Orleans and other ports there. "It is important that every precaution should be made to pass the Rebel batteries on the Potomac with safety to the vessel and those under your command," Welles had written Morris. "The Department relies upon your skill and upon such means as your judgment may dictate to accomplish this object."

Since November, Confederate batteries along the lower Potomac in Prince William and Stafford Counties had made traffic to the capital by river too risky. A single shot from the large guns in the right place could send any ship to the bottom with a fiery explosion. The Pensacola was one of the Navy's top ships in 1862 and was needed to stem the tide of Confederate trade in the Gulf states.

Unlike the hodge-podge of ships that made up the local Potomac Flotilla, the Pensacola had been built by the Navy for warfare, and had been completed in late 1859, only just before the war. She had been laid up in the Washington Navy Yard for two years while additional machinery was installed, and had only been fully ready in September 1861. She had then sat off Alexandria, drilling her crew, and waiting for orders, which were delayed because of the lack of any ports to which she could return for supplies and repairs in the American South. Around the turn of the year, Welles decided to utilize Key West as a base for the Gulf Squadron, since its Southern-sympathizing residents had failed to evict its garrison, and set to work building it.

The Pensacola was a natural fit. She wasn't the fastest, able to make nearly 10 knots, which was good for its day, but with her steam screws she could do it in all weather, if required. She also carried 16 9-inch Dahlgren guns, at the time a massive broadside, each of which required 16 men to operate and could fire a 90-pound shot (though they more often fired exploding shells). By comparison, this was twice the amount of weight that could be fired by the 52 cannons on the vaunted U.S.S. Constitution (only taken off active battle stations in 1855). To cap it off, the Pensacola was equipped with a singe 11-inch Dahlgren gun that pivoted, and could fire a massive 166-pound shot almost two-thirds of a mile.

To get this warship there, however, Morris was going to have to navigate down the Potomac in darkness, past the Confederate batteries. The Pensacola drew 19 feet of water, meaning she had to stay within a very narrow pathway or risk running aground and making an easy target for Confederate gunners. To prepare, Morris moved his ship to White House Point, part of the already historic Belvoir plantation of the Fairfaxes [now part of Fort Belvoir] and anchored at low tide. The first battery he had to pass was at Cockpit Point, on the bluffs above the north side of Quantico Creek. The channel ran close to the bluffs, in those days, making it necessary to slip by after the moon had set, but Mattawoman Creek, which emptied into the Potomac on the Maryland side just north of Cockpit Point, dumped (and still does) massive amounts of silt into the river, creating dangerous mud flats that could ruin Morris's ship.

A Disloyal Man

Wherein the Joint Committee checks every Stone

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Fort Corcoran [Rosslyn] (Harper's Weekly)

January 5, 1862 was a Sunday, and in the town of Hancock, Maryland, a small force of Union troops under Brig. General Frederick Lander was receiving an ultimatum from Stonewall Jackson. Lander's men had been chased out of Bath the day before [today, in West Virginia, and primarily known by its unofficial name, Berkeley Springs]. Lander arrived during the day on January 5 and was told by Jackson that the town would be shelled if the Northerners didn't abandon it. With characteristic bravado, Lander told his envoy (Colonel Turner Ashby) to "bombard and be damned!... He will injure more of his friends than he will of the enemy, for this is a damned secesh place anyhow!" Lander then scribbled a more professional note for Ashby, and sent a message back to Washington for reinforcements. But the environment it would find in Washington was one that pointedly illustrates the differences between 1861 and 1862.

Lander was in charge of the Department of Harper's Ferry and Cumberland, located on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, between, not surprisingly, Cumberland and Harper's Ferry, but including a 30 mile patch of land on the southern side of the river (which, modified based on later military organizations, became the basis for that strange nub in the West Virginia panhandle, established in 1863). This little department had been established by Winfield Scott months earlier, because Lander pledged to be more aggressive than the Army of the Potomac's George McClellan and reopen the B&O Railroad to freight traffic, but he had been delayed in reaching his command. In the meantime, McClellan had succeeded Scott as general-in-chief of the U.S. Army and Lander's department had been added to the Army of the Potomac as a division (despite McClellan not countermanding the order that it was an independent command).

So Lander sent his request down the line to the next division commander, Maj. General Nathaniel P. Banks, in Frederick, Maryland. Banks, who heartily shared Lander's belief that an immediate offensive was needed to gain Winchester and control of the lower Shenandoah Valley as well as reopen the B&O, would have sent the request on down the line. Next in line was the division of Brig. General Charles P. Stone, headquartered in Poolesville (though the request probably would have taken the direct route from Frederick, through Gaithersburg and Rockville). Next were the divisions of Brig. Generals George McCall (the Pennsylvania Reserves) and W.F. "Baldy" Smith, placed on the Virginia side of the Potomac (in Langley and Lewinsville, respectively), completing the right-wing of the Army of the Potomac.