Wherein Little Mac gets more free time than he wanted
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On the morning of March 12, 1862, Brig. General Randolph Marcy, chief of staff to the general-in-chief, as well as his father-in-law, sat in Army Headquarters in Washington City looking at the National Intelligencer. Something of a cross between today's Politico and New Republic, the Intelligencer was full of all the savviest political news and analysis, with a sharp Whig bent. As a political paper whose political party had joined the dinosaurs, the Intelligencer had found new life in the national crisis as the critique from center of the President's war policies.
Whether Marcy discovered it first for himself or someone else brought the paper to his attention, the paper led with Lincoln's war orders from March, including a new one that must have panicked Marcy--one relieving George B. McClellan of the duties of general-in-chief.
Major-General McClellan having personally taken the field at the head of the Army of the Potomac, until otherwise ordered he is relieved from the command of the other military departments, he retaining command of the Department of the Potomac.Seemingly without any warning or any direct communication, Lincoln had stripped McClellan of his authority. It was a vicious slight. Marcy hurried to telegraph McClellan at Fairfax Court-House, who, though deeply wronged, pledged himself to the President's war plan. Or at least this is the scenario that was later presented by McClellan himself, and subscribed to by pro-Union, but anti-Lincoln Northerners. The real story of McClellan's demotion is much more complex and harder to nail down.
Lincoln was well aware that McClellan would be upset at losing his status as the nation's top general. Though he didn't know about the vague fantasies of dictatorship that his general-in-chief had expressed in his private letters to his wife, he was well aware that McClellan believed all military matters should be in the military's control. But Lincoln had lost faith in McClellan during the two weeks that changed the war, and could not have the momentum of Union armies in the West slowed by McClellan's finicky insistence on ideal warfighting.
Like with his assignment of corps commanders for the Army of the Potomac, he also may have been holding try-outs for a new general. If McClellan's massive army around Washington created a natural power center within the Northern military, Lincoln intended to create two new ones to provide balance. First, he combined the Departments of Missouri and Kansas and the half of the Department of the Ohio west of Knoxville into a new Department of the Mississippi with McClellan's top rival, Maj. General Henry Halleck, in command. Halleck now had a command that straddled the mighty Mississippi, as well as all its major tributaries, giving him full authority over an advance downriver that would cut the Confederacy in two and reopen the Midwest's primary trade routes. It was a resurrection of Winfield Scott's war strategy, and if Halleck could pull it off he would be the nation's savior.
