A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  Lincoln also appointed political generals for his own larger national policy. To lead the Union as a president elected by less than half of the electorate, he understood his need to court and include the opposition Democratic Party. An important way to do so was to appoint Democrats as political generals. In the first years of the Civil War, Lincoln accepted the appointments of Butler, John A. Logan, John A. McCler-nand, and Daniel E. Sickles: all Democrats. These and other Democratic leaders represented constituencies in sections or states, such as southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where the war was not popular.

  As commander in chief, Lincoln quickly understood that a mass mobilization of troops was almost totally dependent on the efforts of state and local politicians. He knew he was riding a teeter-totter between professional and political soldiers and he needed to give equal weight to both sides to keep the army in balance. As the war moved forward, he believed the qualifications of soldiers would be quickly judged and won by their conduct on the battlefield.

  LINCOLN SOON BECAME a frequent caller at George McClellan’s headquarters, in a capacious home at Jackson Square on Pennsylvania Avenue at Nineteenth Street, two blocks from the War Department. McClellan set up the first floor for staff offices and a telegraph office and used the second floor for his living quarters. He convened staff meetings in the morning and rode to the various troop encampments in the afternoon. On two occasions, he made surveillances from Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s hydrogen balloon.

  Lincoln came calling to seek military news and talk strategy, while usually finding time to tell a few humorous stories. McClellan came to resent these visits as bothersome and the president as an annoyance. Like so many others, McClellan underestimated the man behind the droll stories: Lincoln, in fact, used these visits to size up his young general.

  Less than two weeks into his new command, McClellan became convinced that his army would soon be under siege. On August 8, 1861, McClellan wrote a pessimistic memorandum, officially to General in Chief Scott, but he had aide Thomas M. Key deliver a copy on the same day to the president—without Scott’s knowledge. McClellan portrayed a dire military landscape that, without ever saying so directly, cast aspersions on Scott’s leadership. Citing “information from spies, letters and telegrams”—never identified—he wrote that the Confederacy was sending massive reinforcements because “the enemy intend attacking our positions on the other side of the river as well as to cross the Potomac North of us.” How large was this force? “I am induced to believe that the enemy has at least one hundred thousand men in front of us.” (Their actual numbers were closer to forty thousand.) After inflating the enemy’s strength, Little Mac deflated the capacity of the army he had inherited: “I feel confident that our present army in this vicinity is entirely insufficient for the emergency; and it is deficient in all the arms of service—Infantry—Artillery and cavalry.” A pattern of alarm and exaggeration was being set in motion. McClellan would defend himself by saying he was holding fast to his “one safe rule of war”—always be ready for the worst.

  McClellan’s memo infuriated Scott. The aged general, feeling the brunt of the tactics of America’s Young Napoleon, wrote Secretary of War Cameron on August 9, 1861, and asked him to put him on the list for retirement. However, Scott wanted to hang on long enough to be sure that the young upstart McClellan would not be his successor. He hoped to anoint General Henry Halleck, the writer and editor of books on military theory that Lincoln had begun to read, to take his place.

  Lincoln, ever the mediator, immediately sprang into action. First he walked over to McClellan’s headquarters to both confront and counsel his young general. After reproving McClellan for the content and tone of the letter to his superior, Lincoln asked him to retract the letter by the end of the day. In McClellan’s new letter he wrote, “I yield to your request, and withdraw the letter referred to.” Later, Lincoln walked over to Scott’s headquarters, showed him McClellan’s second letter, and asked the general to withdraw his resignation. Scott thanked Lincoln for his “patriotic purpose of healing differences,” but declined to withdraw his resignation. He told the president that he could not overlook or forgive his “ambitious junior” for his disrespect and for going around him directly to the president “without resort to or consultation with me, the nominal General-in-Chief of the Army.”

  “The Presdt is an idiot,” wrote McClellan to his wife, Ellen, on the evening of August 16, 1861. If McClellan had publicly agreed to a truce, in his private letters to his wife he saw demons and adversaries everywhere—“wretched politicians” he called them. “Seward is the meanest of them all.” “Welles is weaker than the most garrulous old woman.” As for Lincoln, “The Presdt is nothing more than a well meaning baboon.”

  Over the next months, Lincoln would spend far more time with McClellan than any of his generals. It was as if he saw potential greatness in this young man and hoped he could nurture his abilities. Lincoln encouraged him and tried to reason with him. McClellan, for his part, was never able to take advantage of the leadership and insight that the president was only too willing to offer. After a tea at the White House, he told Ellen, “I found ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!”

  On September 27, 1861, the simmering dispute between McClellan and Scott boiled over when Scott complained he was the last to know of McClellan’s plans, and yet civilians in the administration always seemed to know. Finally, Lincoln had had enough. He wanted Scott respected for his long service to the country, but recognized that McClellan represented the future. On October 18, Lincoln accepted the old general’s resignation, effective October 31. On the morning of November 1, Lincoln appointed McClellan general in chief of the army, the nation’s top military post. That evening, Lincoln walked to McClellan’s home to promise his full support. “Draw on me for all the sense I have, and all the information,” he told his new general. “In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the army will entail a vast labor upon you.”

  “I can do it all,” McClellan replied.

  THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1861, Lincoln became increasingly concerned that the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri would join with the eleven states of the Confederacy. With their agricultural, industrial, and military resources, the fifteen states would become a much more potent adversary.

  Lincoln was convinced he didn’t need to worry about Delaware, with its less than two thousand slaves. Actually, the tiny state was really two Delawares, a northern, Republican, antislavery Delaware, and a southern, Democratic, pro-slavery Delaware. Seventy-five percent of Delaware’s slaves lived in the Nanticoke River basin in the far southwestern corner of the state. Despite this division, most residents of this small state believed it would be suicide not to stay within the Union. Besides, Delawareans were proud of their heritage as the first state to enter the Union. When Georgia first approached the state to secede, the Delaware legislature answered back, “As Delaware was the first state to adopt, so will she be the last to abandon the Federal Constitution.”

  Maryland, which was smaller in population than the states of Kentucky and Missouri, posed large strategic problems because of its location. It not only surrounded the capital on three sides, but on and over its land passed key railroad and telegraph communications to the North and West. Union sentiment abounded among the small farmers of western Maryland while the eastern shore and southern Maryland supported slavery and often secession. Baltimore was a tinderbox where both sides vied for power.

  The phrase “an iron hand in a velvet glove” was probably coined by Napoleon, but it became Lincoln’s method of dealing with Maryland. He had seen the problems firsthand earlier that spring when the troops of the Sixth Massachusetts Militia were attacked as they traveled through Baltimore. From this episode, Lincoln had learned that he needed to work hard to cultivate and support Unionist sentiment in the border states. He could sometimes do this best by not overrea
cting to secessionist threats, which only played into the hands of Confederate sympathizers. He had gone to the limits of his iron hand with his suspension of habeas corpus, but he believed this strong action was necessary to keep open communications to and from the capital. Backward glances at Lincoln’s controversial suspension of habeas corpus have often overshadowed what many of Lincoln’s contemporaries saw as the president’s quite limited actions in Maryland. While members of his own Republican Party demanded that Maryland be made to pay for its secessionist sympathizers and Baltimore “plug uglies,” Lincoln believed that to err on the side of conciliation was the best path forward in the vol a tile state. When Postmaster General Montgomery Blair reported to Lincoln that “our office holders have been quietly installed in Baltimore,” Hay reported that the president responded “that if quiet was kept in Baltimore a little longer Maryland might be considered the first of the redeemed.”

  Lincoln’s hopes were to be realized in the fall elections. Helped by Union soldiers who traveled home to vote and by the presence of Union troops on guard in the state, Augustus W. Bradford, an earnest Unionist, was elected governor, ensuring that Maryland would remain within the Union ranks.

  “I HOPE TO HAVE GOD ON MY SIDE, but I must have Kentucky.” Lincoln was reported to have offered this observation early in the Civil War. If Maryland was the capital’s contentious neighbor, Kentucky was the keystone in the bridge of four border states that spanned from East to West.

  All Kentuckians knew that the state had given birth to two sons who were now presidents. Jefferson Davis was born in 1808 in Christian County a year before Lincoln. As a boy, Lincoln moved with his family to the free state of Indiana; Davis moved to the slave state of Mississippi. In the election of 1860, of the four border states, Lincoln did the worst in his home state, receiving only 1,364 votes in Kentucky. Despite the election result, Lincoln believed that as a native son he knew this border state better than the other three.

  Lincoln understood that connections of family, commerce, and slavery moved Kentucky on the currents of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers toward the South. But Lincoln also believed that the long Whig tradition exemplified by Henry Clay, the political hero of his youth, would continue to hold the state within the Union. On June 14, 1861, as a monument to Clay was dedicated in the Lexington cemetery, spectators placed a flagstaff in the extended right hand of the statue and “the Stars and Stripes were unfurled amid hearty cheers.”

  Kentucky was strategically valuable as a safeguard between the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and the Confederate state of Tennessee. Furthermore, whoever controlled Kentucky’s natural boundaries of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, as well as the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers within the state, would immediately secure huge military advantages. Through the years, Lincoln had stayed in touch with Kentucky by subscribing to Lexington’s polar opposite newspapers, the now Unionist Observer and the secessionist-leaning Statesman. Lincoln also hoped to rely on his old friend Joshua Speed, his influential brother, James Speed, seventy-four-year-old senator John Crittenden, and Presbyterian minister and politician Robert J. Breckin-ridge for information and counsel.

  Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Beriah Magoffin, wanted secession. He had replied angrily to Lincoln’s call for troops, but was outvoted and outmaneuvered, and was out of office by August. While the state House of Representatives proclaimed a policy of “neutrality,” each side, Unionists and pro-Confederates, hoped to tip the balance in their direction.

  Lincoln was careful not to awaken any more hostility against the Union. The president spoke with Kentucky senator Garrett Davis, a strong opponent of secession, and told him that “he contemplated no military operations that would make it necessary to move any troops over her territories.” Aware of the chorus of Republican senators and newspaper editors calling for forceful action, Lincoln believed that respect for Kentucky’s public stance of neutrality in the short term was the best strategy for winning his native state to the Union side in the long term. He did this by his public commands not to recruit volunteers or to move troops against Kentucky unless attacked.

  Behind Lincoln’s public posture, however, he appointed Major General Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter and a native Kentuckian, to the command of the new Department of Kentucky, its headquarters located in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River. Lincoln also agreed to permit William Nelson, a former navy officer, to smuggle five thousand rifles into the state. A delighted Joshua Speed wrote Lincoln on May 27, 1861, “We have beaten them at their own game.” What Speed meant was that Governor Magoffin had secretly borrowed money to procure guns from New Orleans, but what arrived were out-of-date flintlocks. By contrast, Speed told Lincoln, “The distribution of the small number received has had a most salutary influence. … Giving strength and confidence to our friends.”

  Lincoln’s stealth and patience paid off as Confederate military leaders grew impatient. Alarmed at what they believed were imminent Union military moves into the state, Confederate forces under impulsive general Gideon Pillow violated Kentucky’s neutrality by seizing Columbus in the western tip of the state on September 4, 1861. Pillow and his superior, General Leonidas Polk, a former Episcopal bishop, believed that from this base they could control river traffic on the Mississippi. That decision triggered a countermove by Union forces under the command of a little-known brigadier general from Illinois named Ulysses S. Grant. On September 6, Grant occupied Paducah, Kentucky, giving the Union control of the mouth of the Tennessee River, which flowed into the Ohio. From that point forward, though still officially neutral, Kentucky was on the side of the Union.

  OF ALL THE BORDER STATES, Lincoln was least familiar with Missouri. It would become his greatest challenge. Missouri’s threat to the Union was geographic. If in Confederate control, it could bar river traffic on the middle length of the “Father of Waters,” the Mississippi. Missouri had been the staging ground for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806 and for the Pony Express in 1860, which would carry Lincoln’s inaugural address to California in March 1861. Under the stars and bars, Missouri could become the staging ground for incursions into southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, as well as cut off communications with the West.

  As in Kentucky, the outbreak of the Civil War found a Southern sympathizer occupying the governor’s office. Claiborne Jackson, a conservative Douglas Democrat, called for a special convention to vote on secession, but the delegates voted resolutely to stay within the Union.

  The secessionists coveted the St. Louis Arsenal with its sixty thousand stand of arms and other military supplies. When Governor Jackson directed the mobilization of several hundred soldiers in the state militia, Union Captain Nathaniel Lyon, a fiery antislavery Republican from New England, confronted the militia on May 10, 1861. Fighting spilled into the streets of St. Louis, resulting in twenty-eight deaths and seventy-five injuries. The next two months witnessed continued skirmishing, not simply between Union and Confederate troops, but within the Union ranks, between military leaders General William S. Harney, commander of the Department of the West, and Lyon, as well as between political leaders Congressman Frank Blair, Jr., and Attorney General Edward Bates.

  Lincoln, still relying on the advice of the Blair family, decided to make a fresh start in Missouri by appointing General John C. Frémont to head the Department of the West. Frémont, now forty-eight, handsome, with graying hair and piercing eyes, was the first Republican candidate for president in 1856. He met with Lincoln at the White House before heading west and reported that Lincoln told him, “I have given you carte blanche; you must use your own judgment and do the best you can.” Frémont arrived at his headquarters in St. Louis on July 25, 1861, just after the Union was defeated at Bull Run.

  General Frémont did not get off to a good start. He rented an opulent mansion on Chouteau Avenue for six thousand dollars a year. He made himself largely inaccessible, surrounding himself with Hungarian and Italian guards in sh
owy uniforms at the gates, while citizens and soldiers sought, often in vain, to see him. While Frémont remained in St. Louis, the impetuous Lyon picked a fight at Wilson’s Creek, ten miles south of Springfield, Missouri, and a long 215 miles from his supplies in St. Louis, against a Confederate force that outnumbered him two to one. Lyon was killed in battle, the first Union general to die in the Civil War. Frémont’s initial supporters, the Blairs, and Hamilton R. Gamble, a Lincoln loyalist who led the provisional state government as governor, wondered aloud why the aloof Frémont did not reinforce Lyon.

  Confederate forces, encouraged by their victory at Wilson’s Creek, continued to wreak havoc across the Missouri countryside. Desperate, Frémont declared martial law, pushing aside Governor Gamble. Acting solely on his own authority, he issued a proclamation on August 30, 1861, that freed the slaves belonging to all rebels in the state. Frémont, by his action, was expanding the purpose of the war to include the liberation of slaves. Frémont, in far-off Missouri, suddenly had Lincoln’s undivided attention.

  Alarmed, the president wrote Frémont at once. “I think there is great danger that the closing paragraph, in relation to the confiscation of property, and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” Lincoln asked, not ordered, Frémont to “modify” the paragraph. Lincoln saw that the measure about slaves could quickly undo everything that he had been attempting to accomplish in Kentucky and Maryland. He told Frémont that no commander, no matter how high his rank, could set national policy in the guise of military action. Lincoln reserved to himself this right. Though Lincoln was obviously upset, his conclusion was remarkably evenhanded in dealing with the senior military officer. “This letter is written in a spirit of caution and not of censure.”