Lincoln was especially careful not to drag the issue of slavery into the war, although it was a hesitation he did not enjoy. Privately, Lincoln regarded Southern secession as a blow not just against the Union but also against the most basic principles of democratic government, and for Lincoln, slavery was the uttermost negation of a people’s government. No matter what Southerners might claim for their aims in secession, Lincoln was clear that “this is essentially a People’s contest,” in which the Union was struggling to assert the virtues of economic mobility against planter aristocracies, the hopeless caste system of the Southern backwoods and the working-class slum. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”34
But Lincoln dared not push that conviction, or the war, to the point of making it an outright assault on slavery. For one thing (as he repeatedly acknowledged), he had no constitutional authority to emancipate anyone’s slaves; if he tried, the attempt would be at once appealed to the federal courts, and the final desk the appeal would arrive upon would be that of Roger B. Taney, who was still the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and frankly unsympathetic to Lincoln and to emancipation.35 Even more to the point, Lincoln believed that if the abolition of slavery became a federal war issue, the white Southern nonslaveholders (whom Lincoln still looked upon as closet Unionists) would be backed into an irreversible racial alliance with the planters, in which nonslaveholding whites would defend the slaveholders in order to prevent being put on an equal plane with freed blacks. This situation would, he feared, make them resolve to fight to the finish, resulting in a long, bloody, and expensive war. Lincoln also had to remember that there were still four slave states—Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland—that had not seceded from the Union. Any attempt on his part to expand the war to include the abolition of slavery would drive these border states straight into the Confederacy and render the war unwinnable under any strategic circumstances.
This, then, was why Lincoln had taken such pains in his inaugural address in March to disassociate the federal government from any suggestion that the preservation of the Union would lead to the abolition of slavery. “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered,” Lincoln calmly observed. They need not worry, he assured the country, for “the property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the now incoming Administration.” Four months later, addressing the July emergency session of Congress, Lincoln again strained to reassure the South that his aim in going to war was only to restore the Union, not to interfere with slavery in the Southern states. “Lest there be some uneasiness in the minds of candid men, as to what is to be the course of the government, towards the Southern States, after the rebellion shall have been suppressed, the Executive deems it proper to say… that he probably will have no different understanding of the powers, and duties of the federal government, relatively to the rights of the States, and the people, under the Constitution, than that expressed in the inaugural address.”36 Southern states who wanted to rethink their secession ordinances would thus find a bridge back into the Union still standing, and border states that still suspected the intentions of the Republican president would have a reassuring incentive not to join the Confederacy.
George McClellan, as both general in chief of all the Union armies and the commander of the Army of the Potomac, had no argument with Lincoln’s conception of the war’s purposes. He was relieved to find that “the president is perfectly honest & is really sound on the nigger question.” Born and raised in comfortable circumstances in Philadelphia, and a Douglas Democrat by conviction and habit, McClellan genuinely disliked slavery, but without feeling the slightest desire to free African Americans. “When I think of some of the features of slavery I cannot help shuddering,” he wrote to his wife in November 1861, and he vowed that “when the day of adjustment comes I will, if successful, throw my sword into the scale to force an improvement in the condition of those poor blacks.”
McClellan looked only for a day of adjustment, not a day of judgment; for “improvement,” not freedom. He scorned the secessionists and the abolitionists in equal parts, and promised his wife that “I will not fight for the abolitionists.” He begged his fellow Democrat Samuel Barlow to “help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & power of the Govt” and “on no other issue.”37 On those grounds, McClellan was happy to agree with the president that the purpose of waging war was to nudge the Confederacy back into the Union, not to punish the South, seize its property, or subjugate its people.
To that end, McClellan proposed to incorporate most of the features of Scott’s passive Anaconda Plan into his own strategic initiative. First, McClellan authorized a combined army-navy operation that would secure critical locations along the Atlantic seaboard of the Confederacy. On November 7, 1861, Captain Samuel F. Du Pont steamed into Port Royal Sound, fifty miles south of Charleston, landed a small contingent of Federal soldiers, and cleared the islands of Hilton Head, Port Royal, and St. Helena of Confederates. Two months later, a Federal force of 15,000 men under a Rhode Island inventor, manufacturer, and railroad man named Ambrose E. Burnside landed on Roanoke Island in Hatteras Sound and easily drove off a scattering of Confederate defenders. In April, another naval expedition bombarded Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, into submission.38
In five months’ time, Federal naval and land forces controlled virtually all of the Atlantic coastline between Savannah and Norfolk, except for Charleston harbor and Wilmington, on the estuary of North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. At the same time, McClellan also authorized Major General Don Carlos Buell, now commanding McClellan’s old Department of the Ohio, to march a small Federal army of 45,000 men through Kentucky and into eastern Tennessee, where (it was assumed) loyal Tennesseans would rise in support of the Union and overthrow the secessionist state government in Nashville. Then McClellan proposed to lead the Army of the Potomac in a major invasion of Virginia, aimed at the capture of Richmond. The result would be “to advance our centre into South Carolina and Georgia; to push Buell either towards Montgomery, or to unite with the main army in Georgia.”39
This was not a bad plan, and in fact it conformed rather handsomely to the indirect methods of campaigning Dennis Hart Mahan had championed at West Point (McClellan had been one of Mahan’s prize pupils at the academy). It aimed at the acquisition of territory, not the expensive confrontation of armies, and even though the Union forces would be forced to operate on exterior lines in coordinating these movements, the Union’s superiority in terms of ships and railroad support would help to overcome that deficit. Politically speaking, McClellan’s plan also had the advantage of carrying the war to those areas that had shown the least fervor for secession and probably would show the least resistance.
There were two factors working against McClellan that no one in a West Point classroom could easily have anticipated, much less corrected, and both of them would help to undercut McClellan and his plan. One of these was McClellan’s simple personal vanity. McClellan had at first been flattered by the attention paid to him by official Washington, but the more he listened and believed the complimentary nonsense heaped upon him by the press, the bureaucrats, and the politicians, the more he began to believe himself superior to all three. “I am becoming daily more disgusted with this administration—perfectly sick of it,” he wrote to his wife, “There are some of the greatest geese in the Cabinet I have ever seen.” Even “the President is an idiot.”40
Two weeks after McClellan succeeded Winfield Scott as general in chief, Lincoln called
at McClellan’s temporary headquarters in Washington, only to be told that McClellan was out, though he “would soon return.” Lincoln waited for an hour. But when McClellan at last arrived, the general paid no “particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up stairs,” and went to bed. Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, took this as a “portent of evil to come … the first indication I have yet seen, of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities.” It would not be the last, either. “I have no ambition in the present affairs,” McClellan claimed, “only wish to save my country—& find the incapables around me will not permit it!” His conclusion that the administration was incapable was precisely what fired his ambition, and he began to entertain fantasies about “the Presidency, Dictatorship &c.”41
He grew increasingly uncooperative with the cabinet, especially Lincoln’s new secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and increasingly contemptuous of and uncommunicative with Lincoln. “The Genl: it seems, is very reticent,” complained Attorney General Edward Bates. “Nobody knows his plans. The Sec of war and the President himself are kept in ignorance of the actual condition of the army and the intended movements of the General—if indeed they intend to move at all.” McClellan rationalized this as a necessary security precaution. “If I tell [Lincoln] my plans,” McClellan assured Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, “they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret.” At this point Republicans in Congress began to wonder if McClellan was keeping secrets about more plans than just military ones. On December 31, the newly formed Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War complained to Lincoln about McClellan’s inertia, and in a meeting with the entire cabinet on January 6, the committee urged Lincoln to remove McClellan and reinstate Irvin McDowell.42
There was also a problem with McClellan’s fussiness. One railroad executive remembered that in civilian life McClellan had been “constantly soliciting advice, but he knows not more about a situation and has no more confidence in his own judgment after he has received it, than before.” This characteristic was not going to disappear from McClellan “as a soldier.”43 The debacle at Bull Run had demonstrated the foolishness of rushing untrained soldiers into combat, and so Congress had been willing to give McClellan what it had not given McDowell, the time to train and equip an army. As the summer of 1861 faded into autumn, and autumn into winter, McClellan showed no desire to do more than train and equip, plus organize elaborate reviews.
Part of the politicians’ impatience with McClellan was generated by a persistent unwillingness on the part of the politicians to recognize the immense difficulties in arming, feeding, clothing, and then moving an army that was larger than the entire Mexican War enlistments. A good deal of it was also the result of a West Point engineer’s love for perfecting technical details. McClellan’s first plan for Virginia, which he formulated in late 1861, dismissed the notion of assaulting the Confederates at Manassas Junction directly and called for an ambitious joint army-navy landing operation that would unload Federal forces at Urbanna, on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, and march from there overland to Richmond, only fifty miles away. By January 1862 McClellan had changed his mind: he would need to wait on Buell’s advance into Kentucky before doing anything in Virginia, and he even considered moving his army to Kentucky and abandoning all notion of a Virginia invasion.
Neither of these plans produced any movement on McClellan’s part, and by the end of January Lincoln was so exasperated with his general in chief that on January 27 he issued a presidential order mandating a “general movement of the land and naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces” on February 22, followed by a second order on January 31 that assigned McClellan particular responsibility for “an expedition for the immediate object of seizing and occupying a point upon the railroad southwestward of what is known as Manassas Junction.”44
McClellan, incensed at what he saw as unprofessional meddling on Lincoln’s part, replied by resurrecting the Urbanna plan and proposing to move down to the Rappahannock instead of Manassas. “The Lower Chesapeake Bay… affords the shortest possible land route to Richmond, and strikes directly at the heart of the enemy’s power in the east,” McClellan argued. “A movement in force on that line obliges the enemy to abandon his intrenched position at Manassas, in order to hasten to cover Richmond and Norfolk. … During the whole movement our left flank is covered by the water. Our right is secure, for the reason that the enemy is too distant to reach us in time. He can only oppose us in front. We bring our fleet into full play.” By March 8 McClellan was no closer to moving on Urbanna than he was to the moon, and Lincoln called him onto the White House carpet for an explanation. The prodding finally worked, and on March 10 McClellan and his grand army marched out of Washington to attack what McClellan was sure would be a Confederate Sevastopol, filled with abundant Confederate soldiers who would inflict thousands of casualties that his Urbanna plan would have avoided.45
To McClellan’s unspeakable surprise, the Confederate entrenchments at Manassas turned out to be empty. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, who now had sole command of the Confederacy’s northern Virginia army, had far fewer men than McClellan thought, and he prudently eased himself out of the Manassas lines before McClellan’s hammer fell, withdrawing to the Rappahannock. The next day McClellan read in the newspapers that Lincoln had relieved him of his post of general in chief, ostensibly to allow McClellan to concentrate his energies on the Virginia theater.46
For McClellan, this was a humiliation of the first order. But Lincoln had by now learned that humiliation was a remarkably effective medicine for McClellan’s case of “the slows”: the next day McClellan laid out yet another plan for invading Virginia. He had no interest in an overland campaign from Manassas, and the original Urbanna campaign was now impossible with Joe Johnston sitting behind the Rappahannock. McClellan insisted that the basic idea of a combined army-navy operation was still feasible, provided one changed the target area to the James River, where the federal government still retained possession of Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the James River peninsula. He would load the 120,000 men of the Army of the Potomac onto navy transports and, relying on the superiority of the Federal navy in the waters of Chesapeake Bay and the strategic cover provided by Fortress Monroe, land his soldiers on the James River peninsula just below Richmond, then draw up to the Confederate capital and besiege it before Johnston’s Confederate army on the Rappahannock knew what was happening.47
In McClellan’s mind, this plan had all the proper advantages to it. By using Federal seapower, he would overcome the Confederate advantage of interior lines in Virginia, constitute a gigantic turning movement that would force the Confederates to abandon everything north of Richmond without a shot, and take the rebel capital rather than the rebel army as the real object of the campaign, thus avoiding unnecessary battles and unnecessary loss of life. To Lincoln, who had borrowed books on military science from the Library of Congress in an effort to give himself a crash course on strategy and tactics, this looked instead like an unwillingness on McClellan’s part to advance to a decisive Napoleonic battle, and it was only a matter of time before Lincoln’s administration began to impute political as well as strategic motives to McClellan’s indirect methods. Secretary of War Stanton at once objected that the James River plan merely demonstrated how unaggressive McClellan was. And since piloting the Army of the Potomac down to the James River would leave Washington almost undefended, it also left a question in Stanton’s suspicious mind as to whether McClellan was deliberately opening the national capital to a Confederate strike from northern Virginia.
Still, McClellan was the expert, and the army was solidly behind him, so Lincoln (despite Stanton’s reservations) decided to authorize the venture—provided that McClellan left approximately 30,000 men under the rehabilitated Irvin McDowell in front of Washington to protect the capital. When McClellan discovered this caveat, he protested
that he needed every last man of the Army of the Potomac for his offensive. Lincoln was adamant, however: he would release McDowell’s troops only if Washington was safe beyond doubt, and even then McDowell would need to march overland, down to the James, to link up with McClellan.48 On March 17, 1862, McClellan began the laborious process of transporting nearly 90,000 men of the Army of the Potomac to the tip of the James River peninsula at Fortress Monroe, leaving the remainder behind in scattered commands and forts around Washington, and McDowell at Alexandria.
The resulting Peninsula Campaign confirmed everyone’s worst fears about McClellan’s vanity and slowness, and for a few others raised fears about his loyalty to a Republican administration. True to McClellan’s prediction, the Army of the Potomac’s landing on the James peninsula caught the Confederate army in Virginia totally by surprise. Only a thin force of 15,000 rebel infantry, under the command of former West Pointer and amateur actor John Magruder, held a defensive line across the James peninsula at the old Revolutionary War battlefield of Yorktown, and if McClellan had but known the pitiful numbers opposing him, he could have walked over Magruder and into Richmond without blinking. What Magruder lacked in terms of numbers, however, he more than made up for with theatrical displays of parading troops and menacing-looking artillery emplacements, and he successfully bluffed McClellan into thinking that a major Confederate army stood in his path. By the time McClellan was finally ready to open up a major assault on the Yorktown lines on May 5, 1862, Joe Johnston’s Confederate army in Virginia had been regrouped around Richmond and was prepared to give McClellan precisely the kind of defensive battle he had hoped to avoid. To make matters worse, Johnston enjoyed the reputation of being one of the finest defensive strategists in the old army.
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