A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  One of Lincoln’s greatest gifts was his ability to give voice to the war aspirations of the Union in compelling prose. On July 4, he did so by combining conservative and liberal goals. Lincoln’s ideas were conservative as he spoke of defending a deep-rooted, established order; they were liberal when he spoke of promoting and extending the rights of all people.

  In his message to the special session of Congress, Lincoln told his critics that he was, indeed, in charge. As he had answered Seward’s challenge in private, he now spoke in public. The speech was as much about establishing Lincoln’s political and moral authority to lead as anything else. In answer to the New York Times and other newspapers and politicians, Lincoln offered a policy that would be acted upon in the more than seventy provisions Congress would pass in the remaining twenty-eight days of the session.

  THE RESPONSE TO LINCOLN’S MESSAGE signified that at the beginning of the war almost all sides were willing to support the president. Politicians from both parties supported Lincoln’s proposal that Congress appropriate $400,000 to support an army of 400,000 men. Once in session, Congress boosted the amounts to $500,000 for an army of 500,000 men.

  George Curtis, an editorial writer for Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly, read Lincoln’s address with great interest. Living on Staten Island, Curtis had gone to Chicago to support his fellow New Yorker William Seward for the Republican nomination for president. After Lincoln was elected, Curtis expressed doubts about Lincoln’s capacity to lead the nation.

  The July 4 address changed his appraisal of Lincoln. In a letter to a younger friend, he offered his assessment. Curtis thought Lincoln’s “message was the most truly American message ever delivered.” As a literary critic, he believed Lincoln’s words were “wonderfully acute, simple, sagacious, and of antique honesty!” Curtis concluded, “I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, and the inability to make bows. Some of us who doubted were wrong.”

  In the midst of all of the accolades for Lincoln’s address, African-American abolitionist editor Frederick Douglass offered a lonely but prescient commentary. “In the late Message of our honest President, which purports to give an honest history of our present difficulties, no mention is, at all, made of slavery. … Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that a slaveholding war was waged upon the Government, determined to overthrow it.” Douglass gave voice to millions when he declared, “The proclamation goes forth at the head of all our armies, assuring the slaveholding rebels that slavery shall receive no detriment from our arms.”

  Indeed, Lincoln made no mention of slavery in his address, for in July 1861, the war was solely about preserving the Union. Lincoln understood this to be the sentiment of the Northern people. Elected by a minority of the citizenry, he needed the loyalty of Democrats, who remained distrustful of the intentions of Republicans. Lincoln believed he must continue to reiterate this message of fighting solely to preserve the Union if he was to hold on to the border states.

  PARTISAN POLITICS WERE QUIETED briefly after Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, message to Congress, but throughout April, May, and June, volunteers had streamed into both the Union and Confederate armies. The presence of troops from almost every Northern state, visible in daily parades in and around Washington, increased the call of politicians and newspaper editors to begin marching south. When the Confederate Congress announced they would convene on July 20 in Richmond, their new capital, only one hundred miles south of Washington, the pressure on Lincoln and his generals grew. One question dominated the daily conversations of the Northern public: “When would the army march toward Richmond?”

  Starting on June 26, 1861, managing editor Charles A. Dana placed this aggressive caption at the top of the editorial columns of the New York Tribune in bold italics.

  Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!

  The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there

  on the 20th of July.

  By that date the place must be held by the National Army!

  The same headline ran every day for eleven straight days.

  While Lincoln sought the right generals to lead the Union troops, he also had to contend with the so-called newspaper generals of New York. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, and William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, saw their jobs as not only reporting but shaping public opinion from their offices on newspaper row in New York City. Immediately after Fort Sumter, they began demanding action. Throughout late April, May, and June, the newspaper generals counseled and cajoled the president. They advised that the war should be carried to Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, and Montgomery. They made the case that if the border states did not respond immediately to a call to arms, their citizens should be treated as traitors.

  In the special session of Congress, the question about Richmond dominated deliberations. All around Washington, the capital regiments assembled, drilled, and paraded, but nearly three months had passed since Lincoln’s April 15, 1861, proclamation and still there was no major military engagement. Most of the soldiers were ninety-day militia, everyone well aware that their obligations of service would be up in the later part of July.

  Behind the scenes, Lincoln was shocked to learn the army was unprepared for war. He watched, in disappointment, as the War Department and the Navy Department struggled to become effective. The military bureaucracy was frustratingly inefficient. Seventy-two years after the inauguration of its first president, the United States boasted no professional military literature and thus an absence of critical military theory in the preparation of army officers at West Point. The Bureau of Topographical Engineers owned few accurate maps of the South.

  Rivalries broke out between Cameron and Welles over the preparation for and conduct of the war, with both men complaining that Seward was constantly interfering with their authority and jurisdiction. Lincoln believed the public wanted the military to move soon, or he ran the risk of cooling the ardor of war fever.

  Lincoln asked General Scott; Irvin McDowell, commander of the Union forces in Virginia; Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs; and other senior military leaders to attend a special cabinet meeting to discuss a summer offensive. He directed everyone’s attention to a map on the wall of his office and said he wanted McDowell to attack a Confederate force at Manassas, Virginia, a rail junction thirty miles southwest of Washington. Scott dissented, arguing that the army could not possibly be ready to fight until the fall.

  Scott then presented to the full cabinet his own plan. He would tighten the blockade on the East Coast and then, with sixty thousand troops, sail down the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico, establishing a string of forts along the way: his so-called “boa constrictor” plan. The South thus sealed, the Union would wait for calmer voices to drown out the fire-eaters, as Union sentiment in the South rose. The press, when hearing of this plan, named it for a different snake, the anaconda, the largest and most powerful snake in the Western Hemisphere, who lived in water and killed its prey by constriction or squeezing. Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” failed to consider what the Southern troops would be doing while the Northern troops took several months to travel to and sail down the Mississippi. Lincoln knew that the public would never have the patience for Scott’s plan. In listening to his daily visitors, he came to understand that his Northern audience needed to see some results if he and the Union would retain their support.

  After this, Lincoln focused on finding a leader to produce real results. He believed he found this man in Brigadier General McDowell. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1818, McDowell grew up in France before returning to study at West Point. Six feet tall, square and strong, he had put on considerable weight by the summer of 1861. He had a reputation as a gargantuan eater—at one time consuming a whole watermelon for dessert—yet he abstained from al
cohol, tobacco, and coffee. McDowell had served on Scott’s staff in the campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City. His career had been pushed along in Washington by influential Ohio senator John Sherman and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase. Honest and upright, McDowell could also be stern and inflexible. Now, at age forty-two, he was about to become the first general in America to lead an army of thirty thousand men into battle.

  Irvin McDowell became the first American general to lead an army of thirty thousand men into battle. He also suffered the ignominy of the Union defeat at Bull Run at the end of July 1861.

  But it was now McDowell’s turn to demur. He told Lincoln and the cabinet that his men could not possibly be ready to march in July. He had an undersized staff, his men were untrained volunteers, and he did not even possess a map of Virginia that showed anything beyond the main roads. Scott rallied to the defense of McDowell, saying he agreed that the army was unprepared.

  But Lincoln believed it was time to act, and countered McDowell’s objections. “You are green, it is true; but they are green, also; you are all green alike.” As commander in chief, Lincoln ordered McDowell to prepare for his men to march by July 9.

  LINCOLN ROSE EARLY ON a warm, muggy Sunday morning, July 21, 1861, as McDowell, twelve days behind schedule and unsure of his inexperienced troops, began his march to the meandering, tree-lined Bull Run River, several miles north of Manassas Junction. McDowell’s plan was straightforward: He would lead his army of thirty thousand recruits in three columns against a Confederate force of twenty thousand re cruits, commanded by Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had been in charge of the Confederate forces that shelled Fort Sumter. Although outnumbered, Beauregard, making his headquarters at the farmhouse of Wilmer McLean, believed he could take advantage of the lay of the land and the bends in the river.

  McDowell’s movements caught no one by surprise. Confederate operatives in Washington conveyed his plans to General Beauregard, but there was no need to do so. McDowell’s march became a spectator sport as politicians, ladies with picnic baskets, and a ragtag assembly of onlookers traveled south from Washington to witness the great victory that would prelude the march on Richmond.

  McDowell crossed the Bull Run River and started to turn the Confederate left. Men on both sides, who had never before been in battle, fought fiercely. McDowell believed he had the Confederates outnumbered. Union troops quickly forced the Confederates into retreat up Henry House Hill. Telegraphs of the initial successes were sent to the War Department in Washington every fifteen minutes from Fairfax, ten miles from the battle. But the Union attacks were too uncoordinated, and attack and counterattack swelled back and forth. McDowell held on to his two reserve brigades instead of using them strategically in battle.

  One Confederate general held his ground. Thomas Jackson, a West Point graduate and a devout Presbyterian layman, had begun the day on his knees in prayer in his tent. When other Confederate forces were falling back before Union artillery and troops, Jackson’s West Point friend Barnard Bee pointed his sword toward the crest of Henry Hill and called out, “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall.” The little-known Jackson, wearing his blue faculty member’s uniform from the Virginia Military Institute, pointed his left hand to the sky and rallied his men. When McDowell brought forward more artillery pressure, a New York regiment that had moved toward the pines where Jackson was located suddenly found themselves overrun by James E. B. “Jeb” Stuart and his First Virginia Cavalry.

  LINCOLN ASKED SCOTT on the morning of July 21, 1861, for his assessment of the prospects of the battle. The general assured the president that everything was going well. Lincoln, as was becoming his custom, went off to church.

  After lunch, he walked over to the War Department’s telegraph office to read some of the telegrams coming from the battle. Mounted couriers, coordinated by twenty-five-year-old Andrew Carnegie, sustained telegraph communication with General McDowell’s headquarters. At 3 p.m., as Lincoln pored over maps, the telegraph spelled out in Morse code, “Our army is retreating.”

  Alarmed, Lincoln walked to Scott’s office, only to find the general fast asleep. Awakened, the general counseled the president that there was always an ebb and flow in battles and not to worry. Reassured, the president went for a carriage ride to the Naval Yard.

  When Lincoln returned, Secretary of State Seward handed him a telegram from McDowell. “The day is lost. … Save Washington and the remnants of this army. … The routed troops will not reform.” Lincoln returned to the telegraph office at intervals until after midnight, when all telegraph messages ceased.

  How did this calamitous defeat happen? As Jackson held his ground for nearly three hours, Confederate reinforcements had arrived from the South. Although the Southern army would quickly develop a reputation for lightning-like cavalry, the use of the railroad helped change the Battle of Bull Run. Nine thousand men in the Shenandoah Valley loaded themselves and their horses into freight and cattle cars and traveled on the Manassas Gap Railroad, sometimes as slowly as four miles per hour because of the weight of the horses, toward Manassas and Bull Run. Their arrival and counterattack stunned the Union forces, which began to retreat in panic. McDowell tried to regroup north of Bull Run, but it was no use.

  Soldiers retreated all the way back to Washington, sometimes overtaking the surprised spectators. Senators Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, who had ridden out to enjoy the fruits of victory with rifles in hand, now were aghast as soldiers, horses, and wagons hurried back to Washington. Wade, enraged, leapt from the wagon, shouting, “Boys, we will stop this damned run-away.” Brandishing his rifle, along with Chandler and several others, he blocked the road and “commanded an immediate halt” to the retreating soldiers.

  In the middle of the night, Lincoln learned that after ten hours of fighting, almost nine hundred men, including five hundred Union soldiers, lay dead on the fields of Henry House Hill, Matthews Hill, and Chinn Ridge. The hopes of both North and South for a quick war were shattered. A spiral of violence was just beginning. The South had won a great tactical victory, but even more important, the Confederacy stalled any march into Virginia until 1862.

  For Lincoln, Bull Run was an alarming defeat. He pulled his cabinet together for an emergency late-night meeting at the War Department. Afterward, Lincoln could not sleep. He lay on a lounge all night, but from time to time talked with soldiers and spectators returning from the battle. Senator Chandler arrived at midnight to give Lincoln his report of the disastrous battle. The President was shaken.

  In the South, they were jubilant. An unknown Southern poet wrote:

  Yankee Doodle, near Bull Run

  Met his adversary,

  First he thought the fight he’d won,

  Fact proved quite contrary.

  Panic-struck he fled, with speed

  Of lightning glib with unction,

  Of slippery grease, in full stampede,

  From famed Manassas Junction.

  In the wake of the defeat at Bull Run, political leaders put aside their partisanship in order to rally to the Union cause and restate the purpose of the war. On Monday, July 22, 1861, John J. Crittenden from Kentucky and Andrew Johnson from Tennessee introduced identical resolutions in the House and Senate “which gave expression to the common sentiment in the country,” that the war was not being waged “for the purpose of interfering with the rights of established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union.” The resolution passed in the House on July 22 and in the Senate on July 25. After the defeat at Bull Run, even most of those who wanted the war to be about ending slavery voted for this resolution.

  “Today will be known as black monday.” Diarist George Templeton Strong in New York City captured the mood in the North. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped by secessionists.” After such a defeat, charges and allegations were leveled at the military. General Mc
Dowell, who had not counted on the arrival of Confederate reinforcements, became the initial focus of the criticism. A teetotaler, McDowell was even accused of being drunk in battle. But quickly the censure targeted his boss, General in Chief Winfield Scott. He may have been a hero of the Mexican War, but public opinion said he was far past his prime and ought to retire.

  Two days later, Lincoln found himself in conversation with four Illinois congressmen and Scott when the old general exclaimed, “Sir, I am the greatest coward in America! I will prove it. I have fought this battle, sir, against my judgment; I think the President of the United States ought to remove me for doing it.”

  Lincoln, taken aback, replied, “Your conversation seems to imply that I forced you to fight this battle.”

  Lincoln’s remark seemed to throw Scott off balance. He responded, “I have never served a President who has been kinder to me than you have been.”

  As accusations swirled in Congress, the press, and the public, Lincoln refused to indulge in any finger pointing. If there would be any responsibility for defeat, he would bear it upon his broad shoulders. He knew it was not a time for looking backward but forward. Lincoln had learned some valuable lessons and he was preparing to act upon them. After the disastrous defeat at Bull Run, Lincoln knew he needed to find military leadership he could rely upon. In the late summer and fall of 1861, this was his most urgent priority.

  This photograph perhaps taken by Mathew Brady toward the end of 1861, may have captured Lincoln in a candid moment. The photographer, sensing he had caught Lincoln deep in reverie, asked him to retain this reflective pose.