After Second Bull Run, Lee’s army threatened Washington: Halleck (exhausted) and Lincoln on September 1 put McClellan, the builder of the fortifications and the shaper of defenses, in charge simply of the defense of the capital. When word came from Pope reporting “unsoldierly and dangerous conduct” in the upper ranks of the Army of the Potomac, a demoralization caused by resentment over the change in high command, Lincoln told McClellan that he should tell his subordinates to give Pope full support, and ostensibly McClellan did that, wiring his closest associate Fitz John Porter “for my sake and that…of the old Army of the Potomac” to give Pope “the fullest and most cordial co-operation…the same support they ever have to me.” But the touches of implicit egotism chipping away at the telegram’s explicit message took over in a last sentence, undercutting his earlier dutiful words. “I am in the charge of the defenses of Washington,” McClellan wired to his old comrades, “and am doing all I can do to render your retreat safe should that become necessary.” This told them that as the army fell back to Washington, it would come once again under his command, and that was indeed what happened.*33
On September 2 Lincoln and Halleck appeared at McClellan’s house during his breakfast and asked him to take command of the combination of the Army of the Potomac with the army that Pope had commanded. Lincoln did so with great misgivings, and intended it to be temporary and for the defense of the city only, as he told his dismayed cabinet at a meeting later that day. Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “There was a more…desponding feeling than I have ever witnessed…the President was greatly distressed.” Welles reported the president’s explanation of his action: “McClellan knows this whole ground; his specialty is to defend; he is a good engineer, all admit; there is no better organizer; he can be trusted to act on the defensive; but he is troubled with the ‘slows’ and good for nothing for an onward movement.”
But Robert E. Lee did not know he was supposed to attack Washington so that McClellan could show his defensive skills. Instead he boldly led his army across the Potomac into Maryland—to rouse Maryland’s slumbering rebel spirit, to forage in the North, and to win the war.
So now the Union armies needed to be led in the field in pursuit of Lee. Who could command? Lincoln and Halleck tried to persuade Burnside, but he declined. Lincoln left open the possibility that Halleck himself might do it, but the man they called “Old Brains” was not going to leave his desk. That left McClellan, who in any case was already commanding. While Lincoln would be entrusting this task to McClellan with the deepest misgivings, McClellan would be writing to his wife, “Again I have been called upon to save my country.”
When McClellan and his armies pursued Lee into Maryland, Providence tried to give McClellan a unique personal boost, and it still did not move him to action. The tale of the “lost order” is one of those episodes that seems to have spilled into history from fiction. A Union army corporal from Indiana discovered in a field near Frederick an envelope containing three cigars, and wrapped around the cigars was a paper with official writing on it, and at the end of the writing was this heart-stopping signature: “By command of Robert E. Lee.” So Order No. 191, giving the disposition of Confederate forces before Harpers Ferry, was passed up through ranks, authenticated, and put in General McClellan’s hands. McClellan, who had been welcomed on that very morning to the Maryland town of Frederick with cheers, flowers, flags, and kisses, sent an unusually ebullient telegram to Lincoln gloating that “I have all the plans of the rebels and will catch them.”
For McClellan to take advantage of the order, however, he would have had to order immediate exertion—which was not his way. Kenneth Williams remarks: “[I]t is to be hoped that some capable smokers derived more good out of the three cigars than McClellan was to get out of the order in which they were wrapped.”
On September 17 the two armies near Antietam Creek in Maryland produced the bloodiest single day in American history. Because the Union army at the end of the day possessed the field and stopped Robert E. Lee’s advance into Maryland and Pennsylvania, it was deemed a Union strategic victory, but it was a heavily qualified victory, deeply disappointing to Lincoln because of what might have been.
McClellan thought Lee had 120,000 men, three times more than he in fact had, and he kept troops in reserve that, had he used them, would have provided a decisive result: “the practical annihilation of Lee’s army.” On the morning after the terrible battle, on September 18, McClellan declined to attack: “The fault was in the man. There was force enough at his command either day [September 17 or 18] had he seen fit to use it.”
Lee, who had taken McClellan’s measure, kept his battered army in place on the eighteenth, and only after dark withdrew back across the Potomac into Virginia. From Lincoln’s point of view, it was another opportunity missed. McClellan claimed that he had saved Maryland and Pennsylvania and that, as he wired Halleck, “[w]e may safely claim a complete victory.” To his wife he wired that “our victory [is] complete.” But the destruction of Lee’s army, which was Lincoln’s objective and should have been McClellan’s, was not accomplished.
It is often said that McClellan, ironically, made more likely the very outcomes that he did not want. He did not want the war to deal with slavery, and if he had had the characteristics of Robert E. Lee and had used this great army to trounce the rebels early, then the abolition of slavery might have been postponed.
The battle of Antietam had ironies in the opposite direction. General McClellan thought that he had “defeated Lee so utterly and saved the North so completely” that now his enemies Stanton and Halleck would be replaced, and that he would be honored as a general who could win and be restored to the position of general in chief in place of Halleck. He expected the vindication to begin with a meeting of Northern governors in Altoona. However, the governors called for the removal not of Halleck or of Stanton—but of McClellan.
He found that the great victory he had won, which Lincoln did not regard as a victory, would nevertheless be used by Lincoln as the occasion for an immense development in policy, which he, McClellan, abominated: the preliminary emancipation proclamation, issued September 22.
McClellan considered making a public criticism of the president’s proclamation “inaugurating servile war and emancipating slaves,” but his fellow generals and political friends talked him out of it. Instead he issued a general order stating that “firm steady and honest support of the Authority of the Government…is the highest duty of an American soldier, and that discussions of public matters within the ranks should not be carried to a point that impairs discipline and efficiency.” It was, actually, quite a sound statement, but still the question arose: Why was it necessary to issue it? And it did say that “the remedy for political error if any are committed is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls,” which is where McClellan himself would before long seek to remedy Lincoln’s errors.
“After the battle of Antietam,” Lincoln would tell Hay, “I went up to the field to try to get him [McClellan] to move.” This was the first week in October. He encountered yet again what his secretaries called McClellan’s “amiable inertia.” The widely disseminated photographs of General McClellan and Lincoln in camp come from this visit. Lincoln wrote to his wife a subtle jibe at McClellan that she surely would pick up: “We are about to be photographed,” he wrote; that is, “[i]f we can sit still long enough. I feel Gen. M. should have no problem.” Sitting still was what Gen. M. was best at.
A more famous instance of Lincoln’s wryness about McClellan came on an early morning walk with a friend on October 3, 1862, when Lincoln visited McClellan and his armies in Maryland after Antietam. From a hilltop he and his friends saw the vast army camp spread before them. Gesturing, Lincoln asked:
“Did you know what this is?”
“It is the Army of the Potomac,” replied the astonished friend.
“So it is called,” said Lincoln. “But that is a mistake. It is only McClellan’s bodyguard.”
In his summary two years later Lincoln told Hay: “I came back [from that October visit] thinking he would move at once. But when I got home he began to argue why he ought not to move. I peremptorily ordered him to advance.” That order was issued by Halleck on October 6. But McClellan had long since demonstrated that he regarded presidential orders simply as topics for discussion. “The dispatch opened a thirty-day war of words between McClellan and [his superiors in] Washington. Unwilling either to obey the order…or resign in protest,” writes his biographer, Stephen W. Sears, “McClellan generated one excuse after another…[W]hile Lincoln and Halleck pressed him almost daily to march, he was playing host to his wife and his year-old daughter and his mother-in-law in a farmhouse near his camp.”
On October 13 Lincoln tried reason again, in a blunt letter to McClellan: “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” Lincoln, now a good deal more confident in his understanding of these matters than he had been at the start of their relationship in July 1861, quoted from his reading in military strategy the maxim “to operate on your enemy’s communication without exposing your own,” and wrote: “You seem to act as if this applies against you, but can not apply in your favor. Change positions with the enemy, and think you not he would break your communication with Richmond within the next twenty four hours?”
Reversing positions is a necessary, self-correcting exercise not only in moral reasoning but also in military strategy. Lincoln described, with clarity and economy, the ways the opposing armies might get to Richmond. The route the enemy must take, wrote this self-taught student of Euclid, was the arc of circle, while the route McClellan could take was the chord: “Why can you not reach [Richmond] before him, unless you admit that he is more than your equal on a march?” Lincoln again stated the necessity to defeat the rebel army and not to postpone, avoid acting, or procrastinate: “We should not operate as to merely drive him away. As we must beat him somewhere, or fail finally, we can do it, if at all, easier near to us, than far away. If we cannot beat the enemy where he is now, we never can.”
He closed this notable letter with another insistence that Union troops could match the rebels: “It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.”
BUT STILL the great army stayed in camp, and its commander sent justifying messages insisting on his lack of shoes, guns, knapsacks—and horses.
McClellan sent to General in Chief Halleck an extract from a cavalry officer noting that out of 267 horses, 128 “are positively and absolutely unable to leave the camp…The horses…are absolutely broken down from fatigue and want of flesh.”
A telegram in response came immediately, sent not to the cavalry officer but to General McClellan, and coming not from Halleck but from the president of the United States: “I have just read your dispatch about sore tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything. A. Lincoln”*34
This famous telegram set off a three-day telegraphic dustup on the great subject of McClellan’s horses. Already at six on the same day an indignant McClellan fired back a detailed defense, having the honor to specify all the arduous work his army’s horses had done—foraging, scouting, picketing, expeditions of two hundred miles, seventy miles, laborious service back on the Peninsula—and ending with the proud claim that no horses had worked harder. President Lincoln responded not only by suggesting that if the army moved maybe the horses would not have to do so much “foraging,” but also by perhaps inadvertently stepping right on McClellan’s toes by mentioning Jeb Stuart’s horses: “Stuart’s cavalry outmarched ours,” wired Lincoln, “having certainly done more marked service on the Peninsula and everywhere since.”
That blew all of McClellan’s whistles. Those spectacular raids by the bold rebel cavalry commander Jeb Stuart, more than once riding clear around McClellan’s army, obviously were an acute embarrassment. McClellan wired back to Lincoln at nine that same evening a sputtering insistence that someone was giving the president an erroneous impression. McClellan responded as though there were some kind of Olympic contest between the cavalries and Stuart had cheated:
Stuart…received a relay of fresh horses when he crossed the river…had extra lead horses to take the places of those that gave out on the road…stole some 1,000 horses in Pennsylvania…Notwithstanding all this, he dropped a great many broken-down horses along the road. [The Union cavalry] made…the entire trip without a change of horses.
After this statement of facts…I feel confident you will concur with me that our cavalry is equally as efficient as that of the rebels.
Lincoln’s point had not been to denigrate the Union cavalry as less “efficient” than the Confederates’ but to ask that it be used. Jeb Stuart acted; McClellan didn’t.*35
In his next message—now on October 27—Lincoln gave a hint of an apology, explaining the reasons “something of impatience” may have been forced into his messages by the almost hopeless prospect McClellan kept presenting:
To be told after more than five weeks total inaction of the Army, and during which period we had sent to that Army every fresh horse we possibly could…that the cavalry horses were too much fatigued to move, presented a very cheerless, almost hopeless, prospect… and it may have forced something of impatience into my dispatches. If not…rested then, when could they ever be?
When could they ever be? Once more has a sharp sense of the different meaning to each of them of time. Lincoln had said to McClellan in his strong letter of October 13, about one of McClellan’s perfectionist projects, that although he would “certainly be pleased for you to have the advantage of the Railroad from Harper’s Ferry [sic] to Winchester, but it wastes all the remainder of autumn to give it to you; and, in fact ignores the question of time, which can not, and must not be ignored.”
McClellan’s main army sat on the north bank of the Potomac from September 18 until October 26. Lincoln was then startled to receive, at three o’clock in the afternoon of the same day as he sent his “something of impatience” telegram, a message requesting that a draft be ordered to fill McClellan’s depleted regiments, which message included the quite disheartening phrase “before taking them [these regiments] again into action.”
Just twenty-five minutes later, Lincoln fired a telegram back, asking for a “distinct answer” to this question: “Is it your purpose not to go into action again until the men now being drafted in the States are incorporated into the old regiments?” McClellan, embarrassed, scrambled to answer and blamed a subordinate.
Finally he did start to bring his army across the Potomac, slowly. Lincoln in his summary to Hay would remember the precise count: “It was 19 days before he put a man over the river. It was 9 days longer before he got his army across and then he stopped again, delaying on little pretexts of wanting this and that.”
Lincoln had defended the general against the charges of the Radical Republicans, but at this point, looking back, he said, “I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy.” And so again he made a trial: “I saw how he could intercept the enemy on the way to Richmond. I determined to make that the test. If he let them get away I would remove him. He did so & I relieved him.”
He relieved him not before but immediately after the fall elections on November 5, so that Lincoln’s dismissal of this heavily politicized figure would not affect the outcome. Lincoln told Halleck to replace McClellan with Burnside, and George McClellan’s military career was over.
In the days after he relieved McClellan, in November 1862, Lincoln told Francis Blair that he had “tried long enough to bore with an augur that would not take hold.”
And he also said about him, as Nicolay wrote to his girlfriend, “He is an excellent engineer, but he seems to have a special talent for the stationary
engine.”
A PARADOXICAL NECESSITY
IN 1862 AMERICANS would have been astonished to know that in the twenty-first century a political writer would assert that in his dealings with generals, in comparison with more recent presidents, Lincoln was “an exceptionally unforgiving boss.” Unforgiving? Lincoln? In relation to McClellan? Most of his cabinet and much of Congress and the public thought the opposite.
Were his dealings with McClellan an instance of Lincoln carrying his “unbounded magnanimity” too far? Radical Republicans thought so; according to Hay, mail from the public said so; Stanton surely thought so—in the end almost the whole cabinet thought so. When Lincoln came to the cabinet meeting on September 2 to tell them that he had restored McClellan to command, Stanton had been ready with a petition, signed by a majority of the cabinet, voicing strong opposition to entrusting the army to McClellan.
So we come to the question: Why did Lincoln not dismiss McClellan until almost a year and a half of war had been endured?
His restraint was not solely or primarily due to his magnanimity, although at a personal level it was that. Overlooking slights and not holding grudges were virtues of Lincoln’s that helped him to focus on larger public purposes. Lincoln had two justifications for his incredibly patient, perhaps even perversely patient, support for George McClellan and specifically for returning him to command in September 1862. The first was the paucity of alternatives. When questioned by Senator Ben Wade, Lincoln responded as follows: “Well…put yourself in my place for a moment. If I relieve McClellan whom shall I put in command?” “Why,” said Wade, “anybody.” “Wade,” replied Mr. Lincoln, with weary resignation, “anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 24