The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

by Shelby Foote

  The government could use such a man, despite his idiosyncrasies, his sudden judgments and hostile attitude. So could Lincoln use him in his official family, despite the abuse he knew that Stanton had been heaping on him since they first met in Cincinnati, when the big-time lawyer referred to the country one as “that long-armed creature.” More recently he had been employing circus epithets; “the original gorilla,” he called him, “a low, cunning clown,” and “that giraffe.” Lincoln knew of some of this, but he still thought he could use him—provided he could handle him. And he believed he could. Stanton’s prancing and bouncing, he said, put him in mind of a Methodist preacher out West who got so wrought up in his prayers and exhortations that his congregation was obliged to put bricks in his pockets to hold him down. “We may have to serve Stanton the same way,” Lincoln drawled. “But I guess we’ll let him jump a while first.”

  The bricks were applied much sooner than anyone expected. One day the President was busy with a roomful of people and Stanton came hurrying through the doorway, clutching a sheet of paper in his hand. “Mr President,” he cried, “this order cannot be signed. I refuse to sign it!” Lincoln told him calmly, “Mr Secretary, I guess that order will have to be signed.” In the hush that followed, the two men’s eyes met. Then Stanton turned, still with the order in his hand, and went back to his office and signed it.

  Whether or not McClellan could handle him, too, was one of the things that remained to be seen. At the outset, the general had good cause to believe that the change in War Department heads would work to his advantage. For on the evening of January 13—the one on which he rose from his sickbed to confront the men who had been conferring behind his back—Stanton came by his quarters and informed him that his nomination as Secretary of War had gone to the Senate that afternoon. Personally, he went on to say, he considered the job a hardship, but the chance of working in close harness with his friend McClellan persuaded him to undergo the sacrifice involved. If the general would approve he would accept. McClellan did approve; he urged acceptance on those grounds. Two days later the nomination was confirmed. Stanton took the post the following day. And almost immediately, from that January 16 on, McClellan found the doors of the War Department barred to him. The Secretary, suddenly hostile, became at once the Young Napoleon’s most outspoken critic. McClellan had been given another lesson in the perfidy of the human animal. One more had been added, at the top, to that “set of men … unscrupulous and false.”

  What he did not know was that, all this time, Stanton had been working both sides of the street. While his name was up for approval in the Senate, Charles Sumner was saying: “Mr Stanton, within my knowledge, is one of us.” Ben Wade thought so, too. And on the day the new Secretary moved into office their opinion was confirmed. After saying that he was going to “make Abe Lincoln President,” Stanton added that as the next order of business, “I will force this man McClellan to fight or throw up.” Later that same day he said baldly, “This army has got to fight or run away. And while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”

  Formerly he had run with the fox and hunted with the hounds. Now he was altogether with the latter. On January 20, at his own request, he appeared before the Joint Committee, and after the hearing its members were loud in his praise. “We are delighted with him,” Julian of Indiana exclaimed. In the Senate, Fessenden of Maine announced: “He is just the man we want! We agree on every point: the duties of the Secretary of War, the conduct of the war, the Negro question and everything.” In the Tribune Horace Greeley hailed him as the man who would know how to deal with “the greatest danger now facing the country—treason in Washington, treason in the army itself, especially the treason which wears the garb of Unionism.”

  Treason was a much-used word these days. For Greeley to use it three times within a dependent clause was nothing rare. In fact it was indicative. The syllables had a sound that caught men’s ears, overtones of enormity that went beyond such scarehead words as rape or arson or incest. Observing this, the radicals had made it their watchword, their cry in the night, expanding its definition in the process.

  Many acts were treasonous now which had never been considered so before. Even a lack of action might be treason, according to these critics in long-skirted broadcloth coats. Delay, for instance: all who counseled delay were their special targets, along with those who favored something less than extermination for rebels. Obviously, the way to administer sudden death was to march out within musket range and bang away until the serpent Rebellion squirmed no more. And as a rallying cry this forthright logic was effective. Up till now the Administration’s opposition had been no more than an incidental irritant. By mid-January of this second calendar year of the war, however, so many congressmen had discovered the popular value of pointing a trembling finger at “treason” in high places that their conglomerate, harping voice had grown into a force which had to be reckoned with as surely as the Confederates still intrenched around Manassas.

  Lincoln the politician understood this perfectly. They were men with power, who knew how to use it ruthlessly, and as such they would have to be dealt with. McClellan the soldier could never see it at all, partly because he operated under the disadvantage of considering himself a gentleman. For him they were willful, evil men, “unscrupulous and false,” and as such they should be ignored as beneath contempt, at least by him. He counted on Lincoln to keep them off his back: which Lincoln in fact had promised to do. “I intend to be careful and do as well as possible,” McClellan had said. “Don’t let them hurry me, is all I ask.” And Lincoln had told him, “You shall have your own way in the matter, I assure you.” Yet now he seemed to be breaking his promise to McClellan, just as he had broken his word to Frémont, whom he had told: “I have given you carte-blanche. You must use your own judgment, and do the best you can.” Frémont had used his judgment, such as it was, and been flung aside. McClellan was discouraged.

  That was something else he never understood: Lincoln himself. Some might praise him for being flexible, while others called him slippery, when in truth they were both two words for just one thing. To argue the point was to insist on a distinction that did not exist. Lincoln was out to win the war; and that was all he was out to do, for the present. Unfettered by any need for being or not being a gentleman, he would keep his word to any man only so long as keeping it would help to win the war. If keeping it meant otherwise, he broke it. He kept no promise, anyhow, any longer than the conditions under which it was given obtained. And if any one thing was clear in this time when treason had become a household word, it was that the conditions of three months ago no longer obtained. McClellan would have to go forward or go down.

  On January 27, without consulting anyone—least of all McClellan—Lincoln himself composed and issued over his signature, as Commander in Chief of the nation’s military forces, General War Order Number 1, in which he announced that a forward movement by all land and naval units would be launched on February 22, to celebrate Washington’s Birthday and also, presumably, to disrupt the Confederate inaugural in Richmond. It was not a suggestion, or even a directive. It was a peremptory order, and as such it stated that all commanders afield or afloat would “severally be held to their strict and full responsibilities” for its “prompt execution.” Lest there be any misunderstanding as to whether this applied to the general-in-chief and his army around Washington, Lincoln supplemented this with a Special Order four days later, directing that on or before the date announced an expedition would move out from the capital, leaving whatever force would insure the city’s safety, and seize a point on the railroad “southwestward of … Manassas Junction.”

  McClellan was aghast. He had counted on the President to keep the hot-eyed amateurs off his back: yet here, by a sudden and seemingly gleeful leap, Lincoln had landed there himself, joining the others in an all-out game of pile-on. Besides, committed as he was to the Urbanna Plan for loading his army on transp
orts, taking it down the Potomac and up the Rappahannock for a landing in Johnston’s rear, the last thing he wanted now was any movement that might alarm the enemy at Manassas into scurrying back to safety. So he went to Lincoln and outlined for the first time in some detail the plan which would be spoiled by any immediate “forward” movement. Lincoln did not like it. It would endanger Washington, he said, in case the rebels tried a quick pounce while the Federal army was making its roundabout boat-trip to Urbanna. McClellan then asked if he could submit in writing his objections to the President’s plan and his reasons for favoring his own. Lincoln said all right, go ahead. While the general was preparing his brief he received from Lincoln a set of questions, dated February 3: “Does not your plan involve a larger expenditure of time and money than mine? Wherein is a victory more certain by your plan than mine? Would it not be less valuable in that yours would not break a great line of the enemy’s communications, while mine would? In case of disaster, would it not be more difficult to retreat by your plan than mine?”

  In asking these questions Lincoln was meeting McClellan on his own ground, and McClellan answered him accordingly, professionally ticking off the flaws in Lincoln’s plan and pointing up the strong points of his own. At best, he declared, the former would result in nothing more than a barren and costly victory which would leave still harder battles to be fought all the way to Richmond, each time against an enemy who would have retired to a prepared defensive position, while the Federal supply lines stretched longer and more vulnerable with every doubtful success: whereas the latter, striking at the vitals of the Confederacy, would maneuver Johnston out of his formidable Bull Run intrenchments by requiring him to turn in defense of his capital and give battle wherever McClellan chose to fight him, with control of all Virginia in the balance. Supply lines would run by water, which meant that they would be secure, and in event of the disaster which Lincoln seemed to fear, the army could retreat down the York-James peninsula, an area which afforded plenty of opportunity for maneuver because, “the soil [being] sandy,” the roads were “passable at all seasons of the year.” Nor was this all. Besides its other advantages, he wrote, his plan had a flexibility which the other lacked entirely. If for some reason Urbanna proved undesirable, the landing could be made at Mob jack Bay or Fortress Monroe, though admittedly this last would be “less brilliant.” As for the question as to whether victory was more certain by the roundabout route, the general reminded his chief that “nothing is certain in war.” However, he added, “all the chances are in favor of this project.” If Lincoln would give him the go-ahead, along with a little more time to get ready, “I regard success as certain by all the chances of war.”

  There Lincoln had it. In submitting the questions he had said, “If you will give me satisfactory answers … I shall gladly yield my plan to yours.” Now that the Young Napoleon had given them, Lincoln yielded; but not gladly. Though he liked McClellan’s plan better now that the general had taken him into his confidence and explained it in detail, he was still worried about what Johnston’s army—better than 100,000 men, according to the Pinkerton reports—might do while McClellan’s was in transit. Confederates in Washington might win foreign recognition for their government, and with it independence. However, since McClellan had come out so flatly in favor of his own plan and in rejection of the other, Lincoln had no choice except to fire him or sustain him. And that in fact was no choice at all. To fire Little Mac would be to risk demoralizing the Army of the Potomac on the eve of great exertions. All the same, Lincoln did not rescind the order for an advance on the 22d. He merely agreed not to require its execution.

  Whereupon the radicals returned to the charge, furious that their demands had gone unheeded. Lincoln held them off as best he could, but they were strident and insistent. “For God’s sake, at least push back the defiant traitors!” Wade still cried. Lincoln saw that something had to be done to appease them—perhaps by clearing the lower Potomac of enemy batteries, or else by reopening the B & O supply line west of Harpers Ferry. Either would be at least a sop to throw the growlers. So he went again to McClellan: who explained once more that the rebels along the lower Potomac were just where he wanted them to be when he made his Urbanna landing in their rear, forcing them thus to choose between flight and capture. It would be much better to have them there, he said, than back on the Rappahannock contesting his debarkation. Lincoln was obliged to admit that as logic this had force.

  As for the reopening of the B & O, McClellan remarked that he had it in mind already. What he wanted to avoid was another Ball’s Bluff or anything resembling the fiasco which had resulted from making a river crossing without a way to get back in event of repulse. He was bringing up from downriver a fleet of canal boats which could be lashed together to bridge the upper Potomac. Across this newfangled but highly practical device he would throw a force for repairing and protecting the railroad, a force that would be exempt from disaster because its line of retreat would be secure. Lincoln liked the notion and was delighted that something at last was about to be done. Then came word from McClellan that the project had had to be abandoned because the boats turned out to be six inches too wide for the lift-locks at Harpers Ferry. Once more Lincoln was cast down, his expectations dashed, and Secretary Chase, a solemn, indeed a pompous man, got off his one joke of the war. The campaign had died, he said, of lockjaw.

  Washington’s Birthday came and went, and the Army of the Potomac remained in its training camps, still awaiting the day when its commander decided that the time had come for it to throw the roundhouse left designed to knock Virginia out of the war. In the West, meanwhile, Thomas had counterpunched Crittenden clean out of East Kentucky, and Grant had delivered to Sidney Johnston’s solar plexus the one-two combination that sent him reeling, all the way from Bowling Green to northern Alabama. Burnside, down in North Carolina, had rabbit-punched Huger and Wise, and even now was following up with a series of successes. Everywhere, boldness had been crowned with success: everywhere, that was, except in Virginia, where boldness was unknown.

  Stanton could see the moral plainly enough, and when Greeley came out with an editorial praising the new Secretary and giving him chief credit for the victories—he had been in office exactly a month on the day Fort Donelson fell—Stanton replied with a letter that was printed in the Tribune, declining the praise and making a quick back-thrust at McClellan in the process: “Much has been said recently of military combinations and ‘organizing victory.’ I hear such phrases with apprehension. They commenced in infidel France with the Italian campaign, and resulted in Waterloo. Who can organize victory? We owe our recent victories to the spirit of the Lord, that moved our soldiers to rush into battle and filled the hearts of our enemies with terror and dismay.… We may well rejoice at the recent victories, for they teach that battles are to be won now, and by us, in the same and only manner that they were ever won by any people, since the days of Joshua—by boldly pursuing and striking the foe. What, under the blessing of Providence, I conceive to be the true organization of victory and military combinations to win this war was declared in a few words by General Grant’s message to General Buckner: ‘I propose to move immediately upon your works.’ ”

  Lincoln, too, could praise Grant and the Lord for victories in the West, but the news came at a time when there was sickness in the house and, presently, sorrow. Robert was at Harvard; “one of those rare-ripe sort,” his father called him once, “that are smarter at about five than ever after.” It was Willie, the middle son and his mother’s favorite, who was the studious member of the family; Tad, the youngest, could still neither read nor write at the age of nine. Now Willie lay sick with what the doctor said was “bilious fever.” He got better, then worse, then suddenly much worse, until one afternoon Lincoln came into the room where one of his secretaries lay half-asleep on a couch. “Well, Nicolay,” he said, “my boy is gone. He is actually gone!” And then, as if having spoken the words aloud had brought their reality home to him, he broke
into tears and left.

  Hard as it was for Lincoln to absorb the shock in this time of strain, the blow was even harder on his wife. All her life she had been ambitious, but in her ambition she had looked forward more to the pleasures than to the trials of being First Lady—only to discover, once the place was hers, that the tribulations far outnumbered the joys. In Richmond, Varina Davis could overlook, or anyhow seem to overlook, being referred to as “a coarse Western woman,” which was false. Mary Lincoln could not weather half so well being criticized for “putting on airs,” which was true. A fading Kentucky belle, she clung to her gentility, already sorely tried by two decades of marriage with a man who, whatever his political attainments, liked to sit around the house in slippers and shirtsleeves. She punctuated her conversation with “sir” and spent a great deal of money on dresses and bonnets and new furnishings for the antiquated White House. Washington was not what she had expected, its former social grace having largely departed with the southern-mannered hostesses whose positions had been taken over by Republican ladies whose chief virtues were not social.

  Yet these disappointments were by no means the worst she had to bear. Her loyalty was undivided, but the same could not be said of her family, which had split badly over the issues that split Kentucky and the nation. A brother and a half-sister stayed with the Union; another brother and three half-brothers went with the South, while three half-sisters were married to Confederates. This division of her family, together with her Bluegrass manner, caused critics to say that she was “two-thirds slavery and the other third secesh.” The rumors were enlarged as the war continued. The President’s enemies sought to make political capital with a whispering campaign, accusing Mrs Lincoln of specific acts of treason, which at last reached such proportions that the matter was taken up by a congressional investigating committee. One morning her husband came unexpectedly into one of its secret sessions to announce in a sad voice: “I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, appear of my own volition before this committee of the Senate to say that I, of my own knowledge, know that it is untrue that any of my family hold treasonable communication with the enemy.”