Defeating Lee: A History of the Second Corps, Army of the Potomac

1 Beginnings The Organization of the Second Corps

1 1 Beginnings T h e Orga n i z at ion of t h e Secon d Cor p s TheSecondCorpsofficiallycameintoexistenceonMarch8,1862,when President Lincoln ordered the creation of the first four Union army corps. Yet the history of the Second Corps dates back to the Confederatebombardmentof Fort Sumter onApril 12,1861.Overthe intervening eleven months, the Union high command debated when to create army corps, how they should be organized, and who should command them. All the while, the soldiers who first served in the Second Corps received their introduction into military life and discussed why they fought. The events that occurred across the Union in 1861 and early 1862 had a significant influence on the Second Corps, and any analysis of its history most properly begins with them. Creating the Second Corps Major General George McClellan remembered seeing only an armed rabble when he arrived in late July 1861 to take command of the Union forces stationed in and around Washington, D.C. The Union army had suffered a near-rout around Bull Run, Virginia, only a few days earlier , after going into battle for the first time. The results still told when McClellan arrived. Stragglers skulked through the streets of Washington , while their officers found shelter in nearby barrooms. Soldiers who had enlisted for three-month terms of service in the spring, as long as many northerners expected the fighting to last at the time, began to stream home. Everything appeared in disarray. An exasperated 2 defeating lee The Eastern Theater, 1861–65. Over these grounds, the Second Corps lost more men than any other comparable Union command. Reprinted from David Jordan, Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier’s Life, 41. Beginnings 3 McClellan later claimed that he had no army to command, “only a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac.”1 McClellan certainly believed himself capable of bringing order from confusion. McClellan was vain and, often, petulant. But he had reason to express pride in his professional accomplishments. Graduating second in his class from West Point in 1846, McClellan had served with distinction as an engineer in the Mexican War. He traveled to Europe in 1855, as part of a commission appointed by the War Department to study military organization and development there. McClellan resigned from the army two years later, to accept a job as chief engineer oftheIllinoisCentralRailroad.Successalsocamequicklyinthecivilian world, and by 1861 McClellan served as president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. With the start of the Civil War, McClellan received appointment as the second-ranking officer in the Union army. Assigned toprotectthestronglypro-UnionresidentsofwesternVirginia,McClellan won battlefield victories at Rich Mountain and Corrick’s Ford. The two battles marked some of the few Union military successes to date and won McClellan praise across the Union as a “young Napoleon.”2 The laurels continued outside Washington, where, displaying superb organizational and administrative skills, McClellan built the newly named Army of the Potomac from the ground up. Regiments enlisted for two- and three-year terms of service arrived daily. Regiments fielded ten companies, each with an authorized strength of one hundred officers and enlisted men. McClellan grouped three to four regiments into brigades, a tactical formation most recently employed by Americans during the Mexican War. McClellan brigaded together regiments as they arrived in Washington, a practice with some drawbacks . The battlefield experience varied widely between brigades. Some brigades fielded regiments that all had participated in the Bull Run Campaign. In other brigades, the regiments had only recently arrived in Washington. Soldiers in these units had yet to experience life in the field, let alone the sounds and sights of battle. The payoff to the quick organizationofbrigadescamewiththearmysoonreadytotakethefield. This was no small consideration to McClellan, who feared that a quick Confederate strike northward might capture Washington. The worry exaggeratedConfederateoffensivecapacitiesatthetime,butMcClellan 4 defeating lee correctly recognized the disaster that such a blow would deal the Union war effort.3 Grouping brigades into divisions was the next organizational task to occupy McClellan. He determined assignments by the geographic proximity of brigades in camp to create as little disruption to his deployments as possible. The three brigades that served in Brigadier General Charles Stone’s division—and that later fought in the Second Corps—all were stationed along the upper Potomac River when brought together in early October.Stone’scommandnumberedabout11,140menascreated,nearly aslargeastheAmericanarmythathadcapturedMexicoCityin1847.The numbers of men in Stone’s division were similar to...