Mr Lincoln's Army by Bruce Catton Page A

didn't
happen. McClellan never did go to Harrisburg, command of the Pennsylvanians
went to someone else, and if McClellan himself ever mused about it in later
years there is no record of it. What did happen was that as soon as he got his
Ohio regiments mustered into United States service he found himself holding one
of the key jobs in the whole army. Ohio was on the frontier. The western part
of Virginia was just across the river and the Confederates had sent troops deep
into the mountains. It was correctly supposed in Washington that this part of
Virginia was strongly Unionist—the Confederate commander, getting no recruits,
complained that the inhabitants were full of "an ignorant and bigoted
Union sentiment"—and it seemed important to drive the Confederates out.
Also, the Rebels were cutting the Baltimore and Ohio railway, main traffic
artery from the capital to the West. So McClellan, by the end of May, found
himself across the Ohio River, commanding a substantial little force of sixteen
Ohio regiments, nine from Indiana, and two newly organized regiments of
Unionist Virginians from Parkersburg and Wheeling, together with twenty-four
guns. He moved carefully up into the mountains, found two Confederate detachments
drawn up in the passes, attacked one and caved it in, causing the other to
retreat posthaste, and moved on to the town of Beverly, taking prisoners,
securing everything west of the Alleghenies for the Union, and making possible
the eventual formation of the state of West Virginia.
    It
had been neatly done, it was the North's first feat of arms, and the country
rejoiced at the news—the more so, perhaps, because it looked like a good deal
more of an achievement than it actually was. McClellan always knew how to make
his soldiers take pride in their own deeds, and he gave it to them strong after
they marched into Beverly, congratulating them in an official order which told
them that they had "annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and
experienced soldiers, entrenched in mountain fastnesses fortified at their
leisure." This was all right, and it was the sort of thing that built up
morale; but the "two armies" had in fact been separate parts of one
ill-equipped, untrained force that hardly numbered forty-five hundred men all
told, and the "annihilation" consisted in the retreat of this force
and the loss by it of about a thousand men. The order was reprinted in the
North, together with McClellan's dispatches to the War Department, which were
somewhat less flamboyant but which still made the conquest look like something
out of Napoleon's campaign in northern Italy. Also reprinted, and widely
admired, was the address McClellan had issued to his soldiers just before the
battle: "Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to
place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one
thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel. I know that I can
rely upon you."
    All of this, remember, was happening in the
early summer of 1861, when the war was still spanking new and people were
hungry for heroes and for victories, and when the country was ready to take a
general at his own evaluation. Some of McClellan's officers, to be sure, were
just a bit baffled. One of his brigadiers wrote that McClellan's dispatches
and proclamations seemed to have been written by "quite a different person
from the sensible and genial man we knew in daily life and conversation"
and remarked that the young major general appeared to be "in a morbid
condition of mental exaltation." 2 But in the country at large
it went over big; and just then, before anybody had forgotten about it, the
news came in of the humiliating disaster at Bull Run, with untrained regiments
legging it all the way back to Washington, and carriage-loads of distinguished
sight-seers contributing to the rout. Everybody had been chanting, "On to
Richmond"; now came the realization that the war was not going to be a gay
parade