The way of life that Lincoln declared the Union Army was protecting was nearly identical to the political and economic vision underlying his primary mentor’s conception of the American ideal. Lincoln said, “This just and generous, and prosperous system . . . opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”7 The freedom to become a “self-made man” was now the fundamental ideal that Lincoln believed the war was being fought to protect.8 The foundation for linking the purpose of the war to eradicating bondage was thus set.
However, Lincoln encountered two immediate problems as commander in chief. First was his lack of any experience and knowledge of war compared with the fanatical leader on the other side. Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point and had distinguished himself as a colonel during the Mexican War. Only self-education could fill the absence of anything in his background to match that. Throughout the transition and his presidency, Lincoln tackled the study of military strategy as thoroughly as he had taught himself grammar, the law, geometry, and land surveying. “I am never easy now,” he once explained, “when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west.”9 Herndon had witnessed firsthand that Lincoln “not only went to the root of a question, but dug up the root, and separated and analyzed every fiber of it.”10 John Hay, too, saw how Lincoln “gave himself, night and day, to the study of the military situation.” Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general and military theorist, published posthumously his masterwork, On War, in 1832, the same year Lincoln was entering the state legislature. The leading treatise in the field, it defined war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” Lincoln agreed. He was witness to the breakdown in American politics that brought the contending sides to war. He “pored over the reports from the various departments and districts of the field of war. He held long conferences with esteemed generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge and the keen intelligence of his questions.”11
Lincoln familiarized himself, too, with the relevant precedents as to the basic chain of command set forth in the Constitution; commanding generals reported to the secretary of war, who in turn reported to the president. Ironically, this principle of civilian control of the military had been cemented most clearly and recently by Jefferson Davis when he served as Pierce’s secretary of war after he had had trouble getting the army’s commanding general, Winfield Scott, to report to him rather than directly to the president. Pierce came down on the side of Davis and the idea of civilian control of the military, ordering Scott to report to Davis, who in turn would report to him. Unhappily, Scott obliged.
As war secretary, Jefferson Davis had overseen the improvement of American weaponry and the professionalization of the army. Because of him, the Union Army was in better shape in 1861 than it had ever been before, with more advanced training and arms, as well as new standards for promotion that were designed to ensure that the best officers moved up the ranks. Lincoln was also familiar with presidents reprimanding or removing incompetent or disloyal generals, as Polk claimed to have done with Taylor, who had defied his orders, and as Monroe had done with Jackson during the Seminole War for going well beyond his instructions.
As Lincoln explained to Nicolay, Simon Cameron had been of no help in the struggle threatening the Union. He was, Lincoln said, “utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things . . . Selfish and openly discourteous to the President. Obnoxious to the Country. Incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.”12 Because Cameron was inept and often absent and unreachable, Lincoln requested Scott on April 1, 1861, to “make short, comprehensive daily reports to me of what occurs in his Department, including movements by himself, and under his orders, and the receipt of intelligence.”13 Getting the facts was essential. Lincoln would visit battlefields at least a dozen times over the course of his presidency, lifting men’s spirits when he could and assessing the progress of war, as well as the men he had charged to end it. Lincoln respected the opinions of experts, the experienced military personnel in the field. Scott was fussy, as everyone said, but Lincoln did not care about his demeanor, and trusted his opinion more than that of anyone else around him. Nothing was more important than winning the war, so Lincoln put aside his ego to find and listen to the generals who could end it as soon as possible.
Scott’s place in the firmament did not last long, however. It soon became clear that advanced age, poor health, lack of energy, and the inability to mediate disputes about scenarios and plans among his generals made it impossible for Scott to run the army competently, and he submitted his resignation letter to Lincoln. At first, Lincoln did not accept it. He was unsure who would be a suitable replacement. Scott urged Lincoln to name his chief of staff, Henry Halleck, as his replacement. Nicknamed Old Brains because of his high forehead and supposedly high intellect, Halleck had returned to the army only a couple of months before, after having served for many years as an expert on mining law in California. The other possible choice was General George McClellan, who was pushing hard for the job. After the Union forces led by Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, who reported to Scott, had been routed in the First Battle of Bull Run, in Virginia on July 21, 1861, Lincoln summoned McClellan from western Virginia, where his forces had been more successful than Scott’s men had been. On July 26, the Department of the Shenandoah (under Major General Nathanial Banks) was merged with McClellan’s Division of the Potomac (which included the Department of Northeast Virginia, led by McDowell, and the Department of Washington, under Brigadier General Joseph Mansfield). The merged forces became known as the Army of the Potomac, the Union’s principal army in the eastern theater of the war. However, McClellan almost immediately began clashing with Scott and Halleck over nearly everything, from tactics and strategy to how much autonomy he had. Aware that Scott was ailing, McClellan met with senators to lobby for Scott’s position and to force the old general out. On October 18, 1861, Lincoln and his Cabinet accepted Scott’s resignation, which he had resubmitted, and on November 1, Lincoln named McClellan as his replacement. On turning the entire command over to McClellan, the president confided to him his concerns that “this vast increase of responsibility . . . will entail a vast labor upon you.”14 McClellan assured him, “I can do it all.”15
II
* * *
At thirty-four, dashing George McClellan was the youngest man ever placed in command of the U.S. armed forces. Though his appointment raised great hopes for a swift Union victory, it took only four months for him to be a greater disappointment than Scott. He had graduated second in his class at West Point but was egotistical and duplicitous. As Lincoln’s biographer Michael Burlingame suggests, “Compounding his paranoia was a streak of narcissism, predisposing him to envy, arrogance, grandiosity, vanity, and hypersensitivity to criticism.”16 An unabashed Democrat, McClellan was a protégé of Jefferson Davis, but Lincoln figured this might be an asset for McClellan in anticipating the enemy’s moves. Lincoln was wrong. Except for Davis, McClellan had a record of holding every other one of his superiors in contempt, especially Lincoln. McClellan told his wife that Lincoln was his “inferior” and “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.”17 When in Lincoln’s presence, he could barely look at him, much less speak with him.
McClellan’s downfall was more than a story of his own undoing. It was the story of Lincoln’s mastering one of the most important but most underestimated powers of the presidency—the power to remove, without any other branch’s approval, badly performing, disloyal, or incompetent executive branch officials. In this case, Lincoln had plenty.
III
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Of the six presidents preceding Andrew Jackson, only one—Thomas Jefferson—had been confident that the Constitution gave the president the authority to remove Cabinet and other officers whenever he saw fit, regardless of whether the Senate had confirmed them. Proclaiming himself the
heir to Jefferson, Jackson had taken this practice to a new level. He called it the principle of rotation, which merely meant that a president could dismiss officials and replace them with his friends and allies as he pleased.
Whig presidential candidates campaigned hard against the principle of rotation. They thought it was just a cover for the spoils system and that it encouraged corruption and undercut the professionalism and expertise that they hoped would distinguish the federal workforce. Nevertheless, when Whig presidents got into office, they followed Jackson’s model anyway. Subsequently, Tyler and Fillmore, the latter perhaps the most faithful Whig president of all, removed their Cabinets when they didn’t obey. Zachary Taylor removed nearly two-thirds of his predecessors’ political appointees during his first year in office and was on the verge of replacing his entire Cabinet before he died.
Once he became president, Lincoln did Taylor one better and orchestrated the largest turnover in office of any president up until that time. He was convinced that his power to remove men not performing as he liked was his most important weapon for winning the war. He not only rotated Buchanan’s entire Cabinet out of office, but also removed 1,457 men from the 1,639 offices to which he was entitled to make nominations. Like Jackson, who had introduced the spoils system to American politics, Lincoln understood, as David Herbert Donald observed, that “patronage is one sure way of binding local political bosses to the person and principles of the President, and for this reason [Lincoln] used and approved the spoils system . . . Lincoln’s entire administration was characterized by astute handling of patronage.”18 Lincoln proudly declared that his administration “distributed to [its] party friends as nearly all the civil patronage as any administration ever did.”19 Yet, removal was easier for Democrats who believed that the Cabinet was supposed to serve the president rather than for the Clay Whigs, who believed that the president served the Cabinet. Many of the former Whigs in Lincoln’s Cabinet—like Seward and Chase—would have preferred that Lincoln do no tinkering with the Cabinet but instead defer to them on whether or not to dismiss any of their underlings.
When it was Lincoln’s turn to decide whether or not he had the unilateral authority to remove a Cabinet officer, he deftly tried to follow the Jackson model but paid lip service to the Whig orthodoxy of seeking congressional acquiescence, if not approval. Whigs, particularly Henry Clay, had made this a central tenet of their party in response to what they perceived as Jackson’s arrogation of congressional authority through his overabundant use of the veto and determination to impose his will on the entire executive branch, beginning with the Cabinet. If presidents allowed their Cabinets to give them direction on domestic issues, their function would become more confined to carrying out the will of either the Cabinet or Congress. Either way, the president would be contained.
Harrison was president only for thirty-one days, but from the first day of his administration, Harrison bristled at suggestions from his Cabinet, including Secretary of State Daniel Webster, that decisions should be made by majority rule, with each Cabinet member having a single vote and with the president having only a tie-breaking vote if the Cabinet was deadlocked. Harrison opposed the idea, and he kept his temper in check until the day when Webster told him that the Cabinet had rejected his preferred candidate John Chambers for the position of governor of Iowa and instead appointed someone else more to their liking. After a few seconds of awkward silence, Harrison motioned for a piece of paper on which he wrote a few words. He asked Webster to read the message to the Cabinet; the message was succinct: “William Henry Harrison, President of the United States.” Harrison then rose to his feet and angrily told the Cabinet, “—And William Henry Harrison, President of the United States, tells you, gentlemen, that . . . John Chambers shall be Governor of Iowa.”20
In early January 1862, Lincoln did not formally seek his Cabinet’s approval to dismiss Cameron. In this case, several Cabinet members—Seward, Welles, and Chase—had been encouraging Lincoln for some time to remove him, making this a decision unlikely to backfire. Besides concerns about inadequacy, corruption, and mismanagement of the department’s finances (the War Department was commonly described as “the lunatic asylum,” with generals running things as they saw fit), Lincoln ordered Cameron to withdraw a declaration that he had made in December 1861 announcing, in an effort to ingratiate himself with Radical Republicans, the emancipation of all rebel-owned slaves. Congressional leaders were aghast that Cameron had done this on his own volition, so when the time came to replace him, Lincoln had the tacit approval of Congress. Lincoln cushioned the dismissal with an offer to appoint Cameron U.S. minister to Russia.
Lincoln’s choice of Edwin Stanton to replace Cameron surprised nearly everyone. Besides insulting Lincoln when they first met in 1855, Stanton had been a loyal Democrat who had served as Buchanan’s attorney general and a confidant of McClellan. (McClellan’s reference to Lincoln as a “baboon”—or “gorilla,” as sometimes quoted—likely was borrowed from Stanton.) However, Lincoln needed competence, decisiveness, intelligence, and energy at the helm of the War Department, not a friend. The appointment would be a helpful bridge to Democrats who wanted a voice in the administration, and Stanton, renowned for his integrity and relentless commitment to excellence and organization, would bring to the War Department sorely needed administrative leadership. Indeed, Lincoln knew Stanton had tried during the last months of the Buchanan administration to do what his boss refused to do: find a way to help the federal forts under siege in South Carolina and Florida. That effort, though unsuccessful, strengthened his suitability for the appointment.
Stanton enjoyed considerable support with influential leaders in both parties. Both Seward and Chase favored his appointment. Even Cameron is said to have approved of, or at least taken credit for, Stanton’s replacing him. The Senate confirmed Stanton on January 15, 1862, eight days after Cameron’s removal.
A few months later, Cameron’s nomination as minister to Russia was delayed while a congressional committee considered censuring him for financial mismanagement in the War Department. Once Lincoln assured committee members that Cameron was not responsible for the irregular procurement practices of his department thus far in the war, the committee relented, and Cameron was confirmed.
While Cameron lasted less than a year in his new position, Stanton did all that Lincoln wanted and more. Over the next few years, he brought order, high standards, and efficiency to the War Department. He continued in the position until after Lincoln’s death, when Andrew Johnson fired him. His dismissal became a basis for Johnson’s impeachment, because Congress, after the assassination, had, based on its distrust of Johnson, modified its Tenure in Office law to require Senate approval as a condition for removal of a Cabinet officer.
Rotation in office was not the only Jacksonian principle that Lincoln followed as president. He met with his Cabinet only when he felt the need. Even then, he used it primarily as a sounding board. He never expected the Cabinet to be harmonious or loyal, but he did expect it to be helpful. Thus he was following the predominant models of presidential-Cabinet relations. (The composition of Pierce’s Cabinet had remained steady, although it sometimes tried to impose its will on the president.) Jackson and Polk, too, had used their Cabinets primarily as sounding boards and to rally support for and help in implementing the president’s policies.
One dramatic episode illustrating this help arose in December 1861, when two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell (the latter of whom Polk had previously used to try to settle the tensions with Mexico before the conflict) were seized from the British passenger ship Trent by Union officers. Fears of a large-scale conflict with Britain had already prevented the sale of bonds in Britain to finance the war against the Confederacy. Lincoln consulted his Cabinet, as well as Browning, who wrote a memorandum for Lincoln on the points of international law involved in the removal of Mason and Slidell from the Trent. Browning initially favored using force if Britain “were determined to force
a war upon us,” but he and Lincoln eventually “agreed that the question was easily susceptible of a peaceful solution if England was at all disposed to act justly.”21 Browning urged a policy of conciliation—in order to ensure that the Union was fighting just one war at a time—which Lincoln followed in settling the matter by letting the two envoys go.
Lincoln handled the Cabinet much as he had dealt with temperamental foes in legislatures, courtrooms, and conventions. Perhaps illustrating the truth of John Todd Stuart’s insight that Lincoln’s wrestling match with Sullivan was a turning point in his life, Lincoln surprised opponents by using their own arguments and actions against them. He followed the same pattern in deciding to remove McClellan as the general in chief.
In his four-month tenure, McClellan strained Lincoln’s patience to the breaking point. Less than two weeks after he was appointed supreme commander, Lincoln, Seward, and Hay visited his home on the evening of November 13, 1861, to check on the progress of the war. Told McClellan was out, the trio waited for his return. After an hour, McClellan returned through a different entrance. Notified by a servant that Lincoln and two others were waiting for him, McClellan made no comment and went straight to his room. After another half hour of waiting, Lincoln inquired again about McClellan’s availability and was told that he had already retired for the evening. Hay was outraged and begged Lincoln to do something about such insolence, but Lincoln responded that it was “better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.”22 Lincoln could put up with anything if it helped to end the war as soon as possible. Although McClellan raised morale, the troops under his command lay fallow and inactive. Lincoln understood that victory meant destruction of the enemy and that such destruction required engagement and bloodshed, which McClellan appeared to want to avoid as much as possible.
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