Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 130.djvu/596

588 of the army he had framed with such care out of the roughest materials civilized warfare ever threw together; a tenacity long since acknowledged as remarkable, and now shown to be due to the hereditary qualities of the American volunteer. But in acknowledging these, the comte's introduction recalls to us the praise due to MacClellan for the care which developed them; and the skill and pains he bestowed on his primary task of organization deserve all the more recognition, since they drew on him to some extent the sarcasm of his less patient fellow-countrymen, or at least seriously diminished his early popularity.

It was perhaps a consciousness of this change in public feeling that gave so much force to Lincoln's obstinacy in contesting MacClellan's proposed strategy. The army of the Potomac once declared ready for field service in the early spring of 1862, its general was set on using the best means of water transport at his disposal for throwing it at once on to the southern part of Virginia near Richmond. The president was as earnest in insisting that it should advance against that city overland, so as to keep constantly between Washington, from which it started, and the Confederate army. It would be going beyond the limits we have assigned ourselves to discuss this question in detail. All subsequent experience proved the justice of MacClellan's views, and most of all the bloody and ineffectual trials made by Grant more than two years later of the line of operations favored by the president, which line the general, after boasting that he would keep to it throughout the summer, was finally obliged to abandon as hopeless, falling back upon that which MacClellan selected from the first. For our purpose it is here enough to say that there was a sort of compromise forced upon the latter against his will; and when the transhipment of his army to the James peninsula was far advanced, a curt despatch told him the supreme authority of the president had detained before Washington the best of his four army corps, numbering nearly forty thousand men, under MacDowell, on which too he had specially reckoned for turning the defence east of Richmond by a flanking movement to be made to the north of his own line of advance. The comte's personal feelings in favor of his old chief are as strong as his championship of the Union cause, which he identifies from the first with the abolition that it adopted later. With him, therefore, the deduction of this contingent assumes an importance which made it vitally injurious to the success of the campaign. But this assumption is by no means easy of proof, and indeed there is reason to dispute it from his own narrative. Those who read the subsequent chapters to which he refers will perhaps agree with us that the inherent difficulties of leading so great and yet so raw an army as MacClellan had against a chief such as Lee, who was soon to oppose him, and in such a country as that he entered on, would not have been lessened by a large numerical addition. The failure that followed was probably inherent in the conditions of the enterprise, including an element of over-caution in the commander, the action of which is hinted at not obscurely at various parts of the narrative. It is certainly impossible to lay the failure wholly on President Lincoln's shoulders; though no just critic can approve his interference with plans for the success of which he still held the general personally responsible.

Deprived of MacDowell's corps, the army of the Potomac was still a very formidable mass. The transhipment of one hundred and nine thousand men, with forty-four batteries of artillery and fifteen thousand mules and horses, might have seemed a difficult undertaking. In reality, however, it cost MacClellan less personal trouble than any other step of his campaign. Four hundred transports, with abundance of steam-power to move them, were at his disposal, and the operation was conducted with speed and success. On March 17th the first man stepped on board at Washington; on April 6th the last of the host landed at Fortress Munroe, near the extremity of the Jamestown peninsula, with no greater casualties reported than the loss of a few mules; two days earlier the advance-guard of the army had begun to move on Richmond, distant less than eighty miles in a direct line. The first twenty brought the head of its columns in face of an enemy.

We must pause here for a moment to illustrate from this point of the campaign how much more thoroughly the Comte de Paris has done his work than any of his predecessors. Former historians were content to say that the Confederates had taken up their first defensive position at Yorktown, some of them even omitting to remark that this spot, so important then, was still more famous eighty years before when the surrender of Cornvvallis there closed the Revolutionary War. We need 