On Hallowed Ground by Robert M Poole Read Free Book Online Page A

best planned battles of the Civil War,” Gen. William T. Sherman concluded later, “but one of the worst
fought.” 55
    McDowell was made subservient to Gen. George B. McClellan, the bantam Napoleon who replaced him as commander of Union forces
in Virginia—and who would soon absorb Winfield Scott’s duties as general in chief as well. Although McDowell was no longer
in charge of Union operations in Virginia, he kept his tent at Arlington and continued working there. His influence was waning
as 1861 drew to a close. With McDowell and Scott in eclipse, the old plantation was losing two friends who had tried to make
the terrible business of war a bit less brutal.
    In his own way, so did George McClellan. He insisted on protecting Confederate property, much to the consternation of Army
colleagues including Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. William T. Sherman, and other realists who favored total war. McClellan and
others wanted to avoid offending loyalists in the South, an attitude that also made him reluctant to take a stance against
slavery. In his view, the war was being fought not to emancipate slaves but to preserve the Union, which was also then President
Lincoln’s view.

    When McClellan took command of Union forces at Arlington, he seldom worked there, preferring to keep house across the river
in Washington. He lobbied the War Department for more troops and supplies, restyled his command as the Army of the Potomac, and ringed
    Washington with a new system of forty-eight forts, batteries, and earthen redoubts. 56 He drilled his troops to perfection, preened at the head of numerous parades, gave frequent champagne-and-oyster luncheons
for influential friends, and made elaborate preparations for an offensive that was much discussed but painfully slow to start. Over the misgivings of President Lincoln and the War Department, McClellan proposed to strike Richmond from the side instead of the front. Rather than approaching through Manassas, he would sweep down the Chesapeake Bay and westward up the riverine approaches to the Confederate capital. This crab-wise advance took the war away from the capital’s doorstep, coincidentally relieving pressure on Arlington.
    Nonetheless, the grounds around the mansion were soon flattened by the passage of a thousand boots, and more of the magnificent
oak forest disappeared with the first chill of autumn 1861, as soldiers from Indiana and Wisconsin waded into the woods, brandished
their axes, and built winter quarters on the heights, where a raw collection of log stables, cooking houses, and cabins outfitted
with mud chimneys appeared on the skyline. These western soldiers of the Iron Brigade, whose ranks included farmers from Scandinavia,
Germany, and Ireland, were unimpressed by the anemic eastern landscape, which one of them described as “cussed poor country
… I would not live here if i [sic] had the best farm in the country.” 57
    While Union troops settled in at Arlington that winter, Confederate president Jefferson Davis dispatched Lee to shore up the
coastal defenses of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. From his outpost in South Carolina, Lee informed his daughter
Mildred that he had grown a white beard. “It is much admired,” he reported in a Christmas letter in 1861. “At least much remarked
on.” 58 He folded some violets into a letter to his daughter Annie and regretted that he could not deliver them in person. Lee’s
thoughts turned toward happier times, and he meditated upon the fate of Arlington.
    “Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies, has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it,” he wrote a daughter. 59 Once more he counseled Mary Lee to accept the loss of Arlington. “Our old home, if not destroyed, will be difficult ever
to be recognized,” he wrote from Coosawhatchie, South Carolina, on Christmas day.
    Even if the enemy had wished to preserve it, it would almost have been impossible. With the number