A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

CHAPTER 19

  The Bottom Is Out of the Tub July 1861–January 1862

  THE STRUGGLE OF TODAY, IS NOT ALTOGETHER FOR TODAY—IT IS FOR A VAST FUTURE ALSO.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Annual message to Congress, December 3, 1861

  RTICLE 2, SECTION 2 OF THE CONSTITUTION STATES, THE PRESIDENT shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the service of the United States,” but it does not identify the range or restrictions of the president’s military responsibilities. In the months after Bull Run, Lincoln began to take the role of commander in chief in new, dynamic, and controversial directions. Although he had held the title during the first four and a half months of his presidency, he only truly began to assume the position in the summer and fall of 1861.

  Four of Lincoln’s fifteen predecessors—George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor—came to the presidential office with military experience, each having served as a commanding officer. Presidents James Madison and James Polk, neither of whom had military experience, presided over the nation’s two wars since the War of Independence—the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Both Madison and Polk largely delegated to military leaders the military strategy and operations in each conflict. Lincoln, at the beginning of his presidency, followed this pattern, delegating this function to General in Chief Winfield Scott. After the disaster of Bull Run, he was ready to take up the yet-to-be-defined duties of commander in chief.

  Lincoln came to the presidency keenly aware of his limited military experience. In the Black Hawk War in 1832, he had served for three months as a private and a captain. By contrast, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, had graduated from West Point, commanded a regiment that fought bravely at the battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War, and served with distinction as secretary of war from 1853 to 1857 in the administration of Franklin Pierce.

  Following his inauguration in March, Lincoln’s posture toward Scott and other senior military officers had been initially respectful and deferential. After carefully considering their opinions during the crisis leading up to Fort Sumter, Lincoln took his first steps as commander in chief in questioning some of the assumptions of his military leaders. Three months later, in the run-up to the battle at Bull Run, Lincoln challenged Scott’s Anaconda Plan, and advocated Irvin McDowell’s advance on Bull Run.

  After the humiliating defeat, Lincoln turned his full attention to the military strategy that would carry out his national policy. Although he would, at times, vacillate between deference and decision with his new military leaders, as summer turned into fall he began to assume responsibilities that had never been wielded before by an American president. By early 1862, he would become a hands-on commander in chief.

  “WARS, COMMOTIONS, AND REVOLUTIONS, we thought were for other and less favored lands, but for us an uninterrupted future of peaceful growth.” So spoke Lincoln’s Illinois friend Julian M. Sturtevant, president of Illinois College, in an address to the alumni of Yale College immediately after the defeat at Bull Run. Sturtevant offered a sober warning that Lincoln certainly heard. “These were the delusive daydreams of our national childhood … to be rudely dissolved by the stern, sad realities of experience.”

  Immediately after Bull Run, Lincoln decided to change generals. At 2 a.m. on July 22, 1861, General Lorenzo Thomas sent a telegram to young General George B. McClellan, summoning him from western Virginia to Washington. “Circumstances make your presence here necessary.” McClellan would take the place of McDowell and serve directly under General Scott.

  McClellan was only thirty-four years old when, the next morning at daylight, he rode on horseback sixty miles to Wheeling, Virginia, boarded a train to Pittsburgh, and from there traveled on to Washington. He arrived in the capital late on Friday afternoon, July 26, 1861, as a hero. His only victories up to this point had been in small battles in western Virginia, pushing out Confederate defenders in the state’s northwestern counties. But his conquests helped ignite efforts by Unionists in the area to repeal Virginia’s ordinance of secession and to form their own state of West Virginia. The Union was ready for a hero, and McClellan, with an erect, strong build and a handsome face with gray eyes and dark hair, looked and acted the part.

  This photograph of General George B. McClellan captures the handsome features of the man called “Young Napoleon” who became the first military hero of the Civil War

  The next morning, Lincoln welcomed McClellan to the White House to inspect his new general. Afterward Congress lionized McClellan and he was introduced all around. Lincoln invited him to attend a cabinet meeting in the afternoon. When McClellan told Winfield Scott, who was not invited, of the invitation, the old general became irritated at what he took to be a snub. He detained McClellan so that he missed the cabinet meeting. When McClellan later apologized to Lincoln, the president “seemed more amused than otherwise.” That same evening, McClellan wrote his wife, Ellen Marcy, “I find myself in a new & strange position here—Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.” Three days later he wrote Ellen he was “quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received & the respect with which I was treated.” Members of Congress “tell me that I am held responsible for the fate of the Nation.” McClellan was confident in his ability. “It is an immense task that I have on my hands, but I believe I can accomplish it.”

  George Brinton McClellan was born to a family that traveled in the upper circles of Philadelphia society. A precocious student, George was educated in private schools before entering West Point at age fifteen, the youngest in his class. He graduated in 1846 second in a class of fifty-nine, but believed that it was only an injustice by faculty members that denied him finishing first.

  On September 26, 1846, Second Lieutenant McClellan sailed from New York for Brazos Santiago, Texas, near the mouth of the Rio Grande. He began his service in the Mexican War in the Corps of Engineers, sometimes under the direction of Captain Robert E. Lee. McClellan advanced to first lieutenant, and his abilities and courage in battle marked him for future leadership.

  After the Mexican War, McClellan returned to West Point to administrative and part-time teaching duties for three years. Discouraged by the slow rate of promotions in the peacetime army, he transferred to a position as captain in the newly formed First Cavalry in 1855. Here he undertook a number of assignments, including an entire year in Europe studying the tactics used in the Crimean War. He came back to the United States in April 1856, and set to work writing a report on his findings. Returning with a hundred books and manuals from Europe, fluent in French and German, and teaching himself Russian, McClellan focused in his report on the siege at Sebastopol and concluded with a highly informative manual for American cavalry. He completed his special assignments as a protégé of the activist secretary of war Jefferson Davis.

  McClellan resigned his commission in the army on January 15, 1857, which surprised his army friends. He decided there was a bright future in business, and at age thirty he became the chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad at a beginning salary of $3,000, more than twice his army pay.

  Lincoln first met McClellan through his work for the Illinois Central Railroad. In 1857, the main line of the Illinois Central traversed 704 miles from Chicago to Cairo. By this time McClellan, who had grown up a Whig, had become a conservative Democrat who blamed the “ultras” in both Republican and Democratic parties for the growing sectional conflict. In Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, McClellan actively supported Douglas and invited the Little Giant to make use of his private Illinois Central car for his campaign against Lincoln. Some believe that the first encounters between these two quite different men, in what McClellan described as “out-of-the-way county-seats” in Illinois, sowed the seeds of future difficulties, but neither Lincoln nor McClellan ever offered such a
suggestion.

  AFTER MCCLELLAN ARRIVED in Washington in the summer of 1861, the public was keen to learn more about this new military hero. He proved more than willing to oblige. He visited Mathew Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Avenue and struck a military pose with his right hand pressed into his coat in replication of Napoleon. As small cartes de visite, the photographs were sold across the North. Newspaper correspondent William Russell and others began calling him the “Young Napoleon.”

  “Confidence Renewed” was the title of an August 1, 1861, New York Tribune editorial praising McClellan’s first days on duty. McClellan saw his immediate task as reestablishing order in the capital. He would sometimes spend twelve hours in the saddle, chewing tobacco, rounding up military stragglers, clearing the barrooms, and wanting to see and be seen by both his men and residents. The soldiers started calling him “Little Mac,” and offered a cheer when he approached, to which he would respond by raising and twirling his cap. When he stopped to talk to soldiers, he pledged no more retreats, asking them if they were ready to fight.

  Lincoln was eager to fight, too, and asked McClellan to present a strategic plan to end the Souths insurrection. On August 2, 1861, “Little Mac” submitted his ambitious proposal to the president. He wanted “to move into the heart of the enemy’s country, and crush out this rebellion in its very heart.” Rather than Scott’s slow concentric squeezing of the enemy, McClellan proposed a quick strike by a huge army that would win the war in one climactic battle. “The force I have recommended is large—the expense is great.” Lincoln’s reaction to this plan is not known. McClellan’s plan was long on reach and short on realism, requiring more than double the number of men presently in the ranks.

  AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, Lincoln understood that he faced a steep learning curve. Yet his whole adult life had consisted of self-education, and he welcomed the challenge. Just as he had become a self-taught lawyer in rural Illinois, he now set out to teach himself military theory and strategy.

  A day after Bull Run, Lincoln wrote out the lessons to be learned from defeat, following his lifelong habit of putting his thoughts to paper as a way of guiding himself through a difficult problem. He listed nine action steps, encompassing everything from “making the Blockade effective” in the East to instructing General John C. Frémont to “push forward his organization and operations in the West.” Four days later, Lincoln continued on the same page with two additional items, one for the eastern theater—the need to seize Manassas and Strasburg in Virginia—and one for the western theater—the proposal to move on both Memphis and eastern Tennessee.

  By November John Hay wrote, “The President is himself a man of great aptitude for military studies.” By now Lincoln was so present at the War Department that “many of the orders issuing from the War Department are penned by the hand of the President.” In December, John Nicolay observed that Lincoln “gave himself, night and day, to the study of the military situation. He read a large number of strategical works. He pored over the reports from the various departments and districts of the field of war. He held long conferences with eminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge.” Increasingly, military books piled up on the long cabinet table in his office. One of the books he read was Elements of Military Art and Science by Henry W. Halleck, a general and military theorist.

  “The poor President!” William Howard Russell, the world’s first war correspondent, became aware of Lincoln’s trips to the Library of Congress.

  He is to be pitied … trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare, big guns, the movement of troops, military maps, reconnaissances, occupations, interior and exterior lines, and all the technical details of the art of slaying. He runs from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports, recommendations, sometimes good humoured, never angry, occasionally dejected.

  Russell, who continually undervalued Lincoln’s abilities, believed it was unwise for the president to immerse himself in the details of military theory and strategy. Time would tell who was correct.

  Lincoln understood from the beginning that his role as commander in chief was in service to both his political vision and military realities. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian soldier and educator, wrote in On War (Vom Kriege), “The political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. Therefore, it is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.” Although there is no evidence that Lincoln ever read von Clausewitz, he would nonetheless appropriate the German theorist’s thesis while pursuing his own political objectives.

  Lincoln quickly learned that his own military leaders were often the greatest obstacles to military policy. The professional military leaders, almost all graduates of West Point, were trained for the battlefield. Used to operating within a chain of command that did not include political leaders, and certainly not the president, many did not take kindly to Lincoln’s growing involvement in what they saw as their field of expertise. As Lincoln would become more and more a hands-on commander in chief, tensions with some of his military leaders would grow.

  Lincoln began to insist that he as president was the first and last authority in setting military policy. Critics railed that he was expanding the power of the presidency, some going so far as labeling him a “dictator.” Perhaps the greatest irony, some said, was that thirty years before, a young Lincoln had joined the bitter criticism against “King Andrew” Jackson—calling him a dictator. Now Lincoln had selected the old general’s portrait to hang in his office. But it needs to be remembered that Lincoln followed three weak and ineffectual presidents. The odor of Buchanan’s indecision in the year leading up to the Civil War still stuck in the nostrils of Washington politicians, even in Buchanan’s own Democratic Party.

  THE PROCESS OF RAISING a large army quickly proved to be much more complicated than Lincoln could ever have imagined. Never before had an American general commanded an army larger than the fourteen thousand men Scott had led in the War with Mexico.

  A persistent difficulty in 1861 was not securing the number of recruits—the army was quickly oversubscribed with volunteers—but rather putting in place a workable military organization. A number of problems immediately arose.

  The Constitution spoke about the army and navy of the United States as well as the state militias. Military officers who owed their rank and service to a professional military system of recruitment and review led the army and navy. The militias, on the other hand, were state home guards who often owed their recruitment and review either to the political officers of the respective states or to the person who raised the regiment and served as its commanding officer. To complicate matters, a number of units were ethnic regiments, such as German regiments, which often recruited men from more than one state. The problem, as Lincoln came to understand it, was how to coordinate a national military comprising the regular army and navy plus both state militias and ethnic units into a cohesive fighting force.

  From the vantage point of the professional military, as well as that of Secretary of War Simon Cameron, the various militias too often operated by their own rules under the jurisdiction of local officials. From the point of view of state political officials and the leaders of the militias, the professional army and the Department of War presented needless bureaucratic obstacles to men who simply wanted their opportunity to fight to preserve the Union. The problem was exacerbated when state officials or leaders of regiments went over the heads of Scott and Cameron and made their cases directly to the president. Lincoln was always ready to cut through the red tape to accommodate regiments of all kinds. His typical response was to write Cameron, as he did seven times between May 13 and 26, 1861, with essentially the same message: “If the Secretary of War can accept the Regiments named within, I shall be greatly gratified.”

  In his role as commander in chief, the president had to appoint
generals subject to Senate confirmation. In an extremely politicized era, Lincoln acquiesced to the long traditional practice of appointing well-known politicians as “political generals.” He became amused and sometimes irritated by the process, but believed it was necessary in the beginning months of building up a huge army.

  Lincoln allowed the custom to flourish for several reasons. First, governors and senators used their political influence as a form of military patronage. As a reward for political loyalty, or to accede to the wishes of political blocs of voters, influential leaders recommended men whose résumés consisted not of military experience but of political allegiance. Thus, Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew appointed Benjamin Butler, wealthy lawyer and powerful politician, to the overall command of the four Massachusetts regiments at the beginning of the war.

  In May, Lincoln wrote to calm an irritated New York governor Edwin Morgan, a Republican governor he could not afford to upset. Morgan was angry that the “Union Defense Committee” of the city of New York was raising fourteen regiments “quite independent and irrespective of authority from the Executive of New York.” The governor complained that this action “cannot fail to result in confusion and serious disaster.” Lincoln’s answer was a masterpiece of diplomacy. He distinguished between a substantial wrong and a technical wrong in the question of jurisdiction. In his final sentence to Morgan, Lincoln summed up the attitude he had taken about raising an army. “The enthusiastic uprising of the people in our cause, is our great reliance; and we can not safely give it any check, even though it overflows, and runs in channels not laid down in any chart.”

  Second, the appointment of a wide range of political generals helped foster the political allegiance of German, Irish, Polish, and other ethnic groups. On May 13, 1861, Lincoln wrote to Simon Cameron to recommend Carl Schurz, who had raised four German regiments in New York, for brigadier general. “I am for it, unless there be some valid reason against it.” A number of the ethnic political generals, like Schurz and Franz Sigel, became outstanding recruiters, expanding their ranks to great effect. Sigel was extremely popular with German recruits who proudly shouted, “I fights mit Sigel!”