Free This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton Page A

beginning to demand that he move out at once and capture Richmond, first defeating a Confederate army that was in camp near Manassas, some two dozen miles from Washington. The fact that this army was in no better shape than his own was cold comfort: before he had his carefree militia regiments organized and drilled enough to make any sort of cross-country march possible (let alone a formal battle) the terms of service of a great many of them would begin to expire. The United States Army has not had very many generals as unlucky, all things considered, as Irvin McDowell.
    In Ohio there was a very different man — short, stocky, handsome young George B. McClellan, West Pointer, Mexican War veteran, official observer for the War Department in the Crimea when the Britishand French fought the Russians; an ambitious, brilliant man who had left the army to become a railroad president and who now held a major general’s commission. He commanded everything along the Ohio line, he was revolving elaborate plans for a down-the-Mississippi invasion of the South, and he was moving now to slice western Virginia off from the Old Dominion and create a new state between the Alleghenies and the Ohio River.
    McClellan was worth a second look. If his fellow West Pointers had balloted on a “most likely to succeed” classmate, they would almost certainly have elected him. He had brains, connections, a winning personality, the quality known as brilliance. Putting together the new Ohio regiments, he was showing a definite knack for organization and administration; leading them across the river and into western Virginia—as he was doing this June — he was also showing powerful qualities of leadership, with a marked ability to make his troops believe in themselves and in him. His campaign was going well, and it was one of the Union’s most important moves this summer.
    Leading twenty-seven regiments, mostly from Ohio and Indiana, McClellan struck at a Confederate force that had come west with the dual intent of holding this part of Virginia for the Confederacy and of cutting the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line, which connected Washington with the West. He had chosen his troops wisely — ninety-day regiments they were, for the most part, selected so that they might do a little service before their time expired while the three-year volunteers got a little more seasoning — and if these men were imperfectly drilled, the Southerners they were going up against were in no better case and in addition were substantially fewer in numbers.
    Campaigning in the picturesque mountain country struck the ninety-day soldiers as exciting, even though the men did make disparaging remarks about the region as “a land of secession, rattlesnakes, rough mountains and bad whiskey,” and when they were finally led up to the Rebel outposts around Rich Mountain they still had their enthusiasm. Actual fighting, to be sure, turned out to be a little different from what they had imagined it would be. One Ohioan whose regiment had to attack a log blockhouse wrote indignantly that the Southerners were “cowardly dogs” who fired through loopholes in the log walls instead of coming out in the open and fighting like men. To their surprise, the men looked at the prisoners they took and discovered that Virginia boys looked exactly like Ohio boys; and they concluded that if all Southerners were like these “we have no mean enemy to contend with.” 5
    In the end McClellan’s troops swept the Confederates off the mountain range and out of the valley that lay beyond it, driving them all theway back to the main ridge of the Alleghenies; and if their victory was not especially spectacular — except in McClellan’s prose: his message of congratulations to his soldiers sounded like something Napoleon might have said after an especially good campaign — its effects were permanent. There would be a spatter of skirmishes, advances, retreats, and sullen little mountain battles