The Whole Matter Is With General Banks

In which rival strategic visions lead to the arrival of John Pope, good for no one

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June 26 is best known as Robert E. Lee's first offensive with the Army of Northern Virginia, and the second day of the Seven Days, the spectacular offensive that reversed the war's strategic situation and began the legend of Lee. But for Maj. General Irvin McDowell, lately commanding the Department of the Rappahannock, it was another day when his dreams of rehabilitation and glorious military command were yanked from him.

The Confederate Maj. General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and his second-in-command, Maj. General Dick Ewell, had over the month of May upended all the carefully restored order from the banks of the Potomac to the Allegheny Mountains with a campaign that had made fools of the Union commanders he faced (all that had saved their careers thus far was that the size of Jackson's army remained greatly exaggerated). McDowell, with authority over all of northern Virginia, but only west to the Blue Ridge Mountains, had initially resisted having men from his department dragged into the affair, then pledged to solve the problem the other generals couldn't, then when it appeared clear the situation had been defused again tried to extricate his command from it. Jackson's twin victories at Cross Keys and Port Republic only further cemented in McDowell's mind that his men should never have been involved.

Where McDowell's men belonged, in McDowell's mind was not Front Royal, not Manassas Junction, not even Fredericksburg, but outside Richmond with the rest of the Army of the Potomac, from which his command had been carved. That's where the war was being one, he believed, and that's where he had the chance to redeem his name from the shame of the battle at Bull Run, which was really the fault of his subordinate commanders' inability to execute his plan. The nonsense with Jackson stood between McDowell and getting to Richmond.

McDowell had sent two divisions to the Valley, his First Division under Maj. General James Shields, and his Second Division under the temporary command of Brig. General James Ricketts after its former commander was transferred out West to remove him from his feud with McDowell. It was half of Shields' division that had been defeated by Jackson at Port Republic, but nonetheless McDowell was urging their return to Falmouth the day after the battle. From his headquarters in Manassas Junction he practically begged the commander of the Department of the Shenandoah, Maj. General Nathaniel Banks, to resume responsibility for the Valley. In McDowell's mind he had bailed out Banks, so Banks owed it to him to quickly relieve his men.

Banks had other ideas, though. While McDowell thought the Jackson calamity had occurred because the borders of the departments had been drawn in a way that seemed to give him some responsibility for the Valley, Banks believed it had happened because McDowell had taken away almost all of his troops, leaving him with only two brigades to defend a vitally important area. Both were right, in a way. The real problem was without an overall commander with a broad view of the situation, the individual commanders had set conflicting plans of operation into motion. McDowell could not march to reinforce McClellan while Banks also had sufficient forces to protect against a Confederate army moving up the Valley to threaten Maryland. One of the safety of Washington, the reinforcement of McClellan, or the Confederate army had to be eliminated before the others could happen.

There was a third person involved in the affair, Maj. General John Fremont, commander of the Mountain Department. Fremont had also been ordered into the Valley to bail out Banks, and his and McDowell's forces were supposed to have worked together to cut off Jackson and destroy his army. But McDowell had let Jackson get by him and followed him to Cross Keys, where he had been defeated.

Why Was There A Valley Campaign?

In which we look at Northern organization and strategy

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This is the second in a two part post on Northern mistakes in the first month of May.

Last week we looked at how mistakes in intelligence gathering and analysis led leaders of the Northern war effort to coalesce behind a likely enemy course of action that ended up being drastically different from the one actually pursued by their Southern opponents. But history is full of poor intelligence gathering and analysis that nevertheless ends in victory. So this week, we'll look at the mistakes those same leaders made in their own planning--mistakes that allowed Stonewall Jackson to execute his brilliant Valley Campaign.

Central to our discussion is what are known in modern military doctrine as the "levels of war." The concept goes back to ancient times, when it was recognized that some leaders needed to tell individuals where to stand and who to fight, while others needed to decide where the battle should occur. The "general" officer was created precisely to make those sorts of general decisions. By the time of the American Civil War, it was already long understood that even among general officers there were further levels of responsibility, with some moving groups of men in the field, and some deciding where to move armies several months hence. Today, we recognize roughly four levels of war: national-strategic, theater-strategic, operational, and tactical.

Prior to the American Civil War, there had never been a clear delineation of responsibility for military strategy in the United States--who to put where and when, in order to win a war. At the highest level, which we would call today "National-Strategic" and some 1862 contemporaries would have called "Grand Strategy", control depended on the personality of the Secretary of War. More aggressive secretaries would locate and direct men and materiel themselves, while secretaries selected more for their politics than their smarts would defer to the senior general in the U.S. Army, which, after 1841, meant Winfield Scott. But there was no clearly expressed distinction between the responsibilities of the general-in-chief and the Secretary.

Why Was There A Valley Campaign?

Wherein we examine failures of intelligence

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The first of two posts on mistakes by the North the first week of May 1862.

May 8, 1862, was the date of the Battle of McDowell, the beginning of Stonewall Jackson's legendary Valley Campaign. Much has justly been written about Jackson's operational-level brilliance and an equal amount has unjustly been written about his rather mundane tactics. Only in recent years, have reevaluations of the campaign been conducted, most notably in Peter Cozzens fantastic Shenandoah 1862 which acknowledges the immense personal cost to the soldiers of Jackson's army and, in the words of the friend who gifted the book to me, "bothers to examine the Yankee sources."

The Valley, though technically in the Potomac watershed, has simply been beyond the capacity of your blogger to post on, which means the area that drains directly into the Shenandoah has usually been beyond the scope of this blog. But Jackson's campaign deeply threatened the area we usually cover, and ended up being the strategic center of gravity for the entire Virginia theater. Without Jackson's operation, Joe Johnston, hundreds of miles away on the Virginia Peninsula, would have been unable to fend of McClellan's army, and Richmond would have been scrambling to find defenders in fall 1862 instead of Washington.

Edwin Stanton

It was largely planning mistakes made in Washington at the strategic level from May 8 to May 17 that allowed Jackson to conduct his famous campaign. This post focuses on the first part of those mistakes, the failure in intelligence collection and analysis.

With the demotion of McClellan in March, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton became the Administration's principle war planner. Unlike his predecessor, Simon Cameron, Stanton believed the Secretary should be active in decisions about the prosecution of the war, rather than only concerned with supplying and administering the armies. Stanton signaled this when he added Peter H. Watson as a second Assistant Secretary of War as a condition of joining the Administration himself. Watson was appointed to straighten out and manage the contracts the Department made to supply the army, which was usually a tightly held responsibility of the Secretary in order to bestow political favors.

Before It's Too Late

Wherein the end of the war is imminent

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On May 6, 1862 nowhere was the imminent Union victory in the Civil War more apparent than in Northern Virginia, and no one in Northern Virginia was working harder to put the final nail in the Confederacy than the man who had botched up the whole thing ten months earlier. Maj. General Irvin McDowell, commander of the Department of the Rappahannock was working night and day to repair both the historic Potomac Path [U.S. 1] and the Fredericksburg and Richmond Railroad to allow a full advance towards Richmond.

McDowell can be forgiven for being swept up into the prevailing opinion that the end of the war was months away. In the West, several armies had been united under the command of Maj. General Henry Halleck in what we would call an "Army Group" today, with the purpose of capturing Confederate strongholds on the Mississippi and, by controlling the continent's great river, slicing the Southern nation in half and crushing their internal economy. Halleck's armies were drawing tight around Corinth, the key to defending Memphis, and General P.G.T. Beauregard, in command by accident after the death of the preferred Albert Sidney Johnston, appeared out-manned, out-gunned, and out-generaled.

At the other end of the Mississippi, Tennessee native and loyal Unionist Commodore David Farragut had completed a daring operation in cooperation with Maj. General Benjamin Butler and captured New Orleans, providing an ideal harbor for the Gulf Blockade Squadron as well as closing the best blockade-running port for cotton transited south from the cotton-growing Confederate heartland. With major Northern armies present in Pensacola, Port Royal, and Roanoke, too, the South was being dissected.

And in Virginia, McClellan was finally on the move. By May 6, word had arrived that the siege at Yorktown on the Virginia Peninsula was over, and McClellan was on the heels of Joe Johnston's army as it bolted back towards Richmond. Lincoln and his Secretaries of War, Navy, and the Treasury had taken the revenue cutter Miami the evening of May 5 to Fort Monroe to view the collapse of the major army defending Richmond personally. While they did so, Johnston had made a stand at Williamsburg, where after a brutal day of fighting for Joe Hooker's division, the Army of the Potomac had triumphed [Johnston's army had belatedly and at last assumed its famous name, the Army of Northern Virginia].

WAR!

Wherein the old and new Fuss and Feathers blast each other to pieces

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George B. McClellan

"How does he think that I can save this country when stopped by Genl Scott?" George McClellan fumed to his wife, Mary Ellen, in his nightly letter after a frustrating meeting with Secretary of State William Seward.

I do not know whether he [Scott] is a dotard or a traitor! I can't tell which. He cannot or will not comprehend the condition in which we are placed & is entirely unequal to the emergency. If he cannot be taken out of my path I will not retain my position, but will resign & let the admn take care of itself. I have hardly slept one moment for the last three nights, knowing well that the enemy intend some movement & fully recognizing our own weakness.

The trouble should hardly have been a surprise. Too alike in temperament, the aged Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott and the ambitious Major General George McClellan had grown tired of each other in less than two weeks. Each was a man obsessed with professionalism, each believed himself a master of grand strategy, and each regarded everyone as a threat to his own special mission to save the Union.

5:30 am: 2nd Div (US) turns off the Turnpike for Sudley Springs Ford

Farm Path to Sudley Ford
Burnside’s men crossed Cub Run and turned off the Warrenton Turnpike onto a farm road. The remaining troops in line would follow them on their 6 mile detour to cross at Sudley Ford.

Fiske remembered walking with the 2nd New Hampshire pleasantly:

I wish I could adequately describe the loveliness of this summer Sabbath morning. In the midst of war we were in peace. There was not a cloud in the sky; a gentle breeze rustled the foliage over our heads, mingling its murmurs with the soft notes of the wood-birds; the thick carpet of leaves under our feet deadened the sound of artillery wheels and the tramp of men. Everybody felt the influence of the scene, and the men, marching on their leafy path, spoke in subdued tones. A Rhode Island officer riding beside me quoted some lines from Wordsworth fitting the morning…

Yorkshire

Beauregard decided that if McDowell wanted to be aggressive too, he would not shrink from a battle. He sent orders to Dick Ewell, whose brigade with Holmes’ would lead the attack on McDowell, to “hold yourself in readiness to take the offensive on Centreville at a moment’s notice…”

Key to People and Sources

Attacking the Left

Wherein two generals make plans to swap places

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While Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, commanding the Army of Northeastern Virginia on behalf of the Federal government and the Unionist states, professionally prepared his study of bypassing the Confederate defensive position on Bull Run, the Confederate position was being reinforced. Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson had started the reinforcements after dark on the night of the 19th, bringing just under 2,500 men to add to the total. Throughout the night parts of two more brigades arrived by train at Manassas Junction, and at noon, the commander of the Army of the Shenandoah himself, Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston.

Joseph Eggleston Johnston

Porter Alexander, Chief Engineer for the Confederate Army of the Potomac defending Manassas Junction, remembered his first look at Johnston years later:

I think [he] was more the soldier in looks, carriage, and manner than any of our other generals... His pictures, which are common, give an excellent idea of his strong and intellectual face. He was of a medium stature but of most extraordinary strength, vigor, and quickness.

Like many of his peers, Johnston was a decorated hero of the Mexican War, leading his men over the wall at Chapultepec (without their guide, Joe Hooker), getting wounded time and again in battle (Winfield Scott had once quipped, "Johnston is a great soldier, but he had an unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in nearly every engagement."). He had also been the first West Point graduate to attain the rank of general in the U.S. Army, being appointed Brigadier General as Quartermaster of the U.S. Army, but held the rank only a short time before resigning to follow Virginia to the Confederacy. He was the highest ranking officer to do so.

The Manassas Campaign: Day Two

Fairfax Court-House in 1863, with Union soldiers posing.

"The general commanding the Army of the Potomac" sergeants throughout the Confederate army based on Manassas Junction read to the assembled men early on July 17, "Announces to his command that, at length, the enemy have advanced to subjugate a sovereign State, and to oppose upon a free people an odious government." The words were Brigadier General G.T. Beauregard's, and were contained in his General Orders No. 41 dictated to Assistant Adjutant General Thomas Jordan during the night to be read to the men at dawn. They referred to the march of the Federal government's army, the Army of Northeastern Virginia, which had marched from Alexandria County the previous afternoon.

The Confederate camps were a frenzy of excitement. At last, the Yankees were coming."Notwithstanding they're numerical superiority, they can be repelled," Beauregard boldly assured his men. "And the general commanding relies confidently on his command to do it, and to drive the invader back beyond his intrenched lines." This new found confidence in victory had to do with a decision made in Richmond in the early hours of the morning to order the Confederate Army of the Shenandoah under Brigadier General Joe Johnston in Winchester to load onto trains and move to Manassas Junction. Beauregard had been requesting the union of the two forces for over a month, to the great resistance of provisional President Jefferson Davis (not taking any chances, Beauregard went ahead and telegraphed Johnston himself to relay the news).