A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  As the army grew exponentially, Cameron became a tense, perplexed executive who lost command of his own department. Disdaining the use of a clerk or secretary, Cameron seemed to run his growing department with records he kept in his head or his pockets.

  Lincoln’s leadership style was to offer his colleagues both support and the benefit of the doubt. But by the summer of 1861, Lincoln was hearing grumblings about Cameron and his department from many quarters. He understood that Cameron had many critics for his past actions, but Lincoln was interested only in the present. The president wanted to weigh, not count, the criticism.

  Lincoln took his time when it came to people. By the end of 1861, he decided not to simply fire Cameron, but to find another position for him that would save his dignity. Lincoln wrote a brief letter to Cameron on January 11, 1862, informing him that he was nominating him to be minister to Russia. The letter did not include any recognition of Cameron’s service as secretary of war. Cameron, expressing his feelings to Chase, his closest cabinet colleague, said he “was quite offended, supposing the letter intended as a dismissal, and therefore discourteous.” When Cameron expressed his feelings to Lincoln, he wrote a second letter, which shifted the initiative “to gratify your wish” and to express “my personal regard for you, and my confidence in your ability, patriotism, and fidelity to public trust.”

  Did Lincoln take too long to remove Cameron? The critics had been nipping at Cameron’s heels since the summer. Lincoln’s loyalty was a strong character trait that sometimes overrode his judgment. The president refused to discuss his criticisms of Cameron’s shortcomings, and now he gave the secretary of war a second letter that could be released to the public. Cameron went to Russia, retaining a deep appreciation for Lincoln.

  FOR LINCOLN, the last day of 1861, the coda to a dispiriting fall, symbolized all that was going wrong. The year ended with the central actors he was attempting to direct either unwilling or incapable of receiving direction. George McClellan, his main commander in the East, was temporarily offstage with typhoid fever. On December 31, Lincoln wired his two key commanders in the West, Henry W. Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, encouraging them to act in a “simultaneous movement” to support Unionists in Kentucky and eastern Tennessee. Halleck’s reply was not encouraging. “I have never received a word from General Buell.” Halleck said he was “not ready to cooperate” with Buell and that “too much haste will ruin everything.”

  On New Year’s Eve, Lincoln received a visit from the entire Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The committee, not including members who were familiar with military matters, was eager to strike a blow that would win the war in one grand battle. They looked down their political noses at West Point–trained professional soldiers. At the outset of the meeting, Ohio senator Benjamin Wade aggressively attacked General McClellan. Lincoln was placed in a difficult position. He wanted to be receptive to influential members of Congress, but he was determined to defend McClellan. As Lincoln tried to be a mediator, Wade raged, “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.” Wade had succinctly named the two problems confronting Lincoln at the beginning of 1862.

  Attorney General Edward Bates, who had grown quite fond of the president, confided to his diary, “For some months past (and lately more pressingly) I have urged upon the President to have some military organization about his own person.” Bates believed that if Lincoln had more and better assistants, and was better organized himself, he would be in a better position to command. “I insisted that being ‘Commander in chief by law, he must command—especially in a war as this. The Nation requires it, and History will hold him responsible.” Bates went on to complain of McClellan that he “is very reticent. Nobody knows his plans.” Finally, after an unusually long entry, Bates concluded, “The Prest. is an excellent man, and in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear he, has not the power to command.”

  THE NEW YEAR did not bring any better news. On January 6, 1862, General Halleck wrote the president explaining that because of the state of affairs in Missouri he could not comply with Lincoln’s request to cooperate with Buell by ordering a force to Columbus, Kentucky. Four days later, Lincoln passed along the letter to Cameron, writing on it, “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everything else, nothing can be done.”

  On Friday morning, January 10, 1862, knowing that a recovering McClellan was carrying on business from his bed, Lincoln decided to call on the general. The mild weather of the abnormally lengthy fall of 1861 had given way to 1862’s snows. The temperatures were not very cold, though, so Lincoln walked through a gloomy fog to McClellan’s home. When he arrived he was told that the general could not see him.

  Montgomery Meigs, a civil engineer, served as quartermaster general of the Union army. He earned Lincoln’s respect for his management of the logistical necessities of equipping a huge new volunteer army

  A troubled Lincoln then walked to the office of Montgomery C. Meigs, quartermaster general of the army, in the brick Winder Building, which housed the headquarters of the army and navy. Lincoln pulled up a chair before the open fire.

  In 1860, Meigs had been a Douglas Democrat, not a Lincoln man. Standing an inch and a half over six feet, Meigs went to Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, to hear what this new president stood for. He was surprised. As Meigs wrote to his brother, John, that evening, “I feared until last night that some weak shilly shally policy would prevail that we had a chief with no character a buffoon.” Meigs told his brother he believed he spoke for many, for he now recognized that Lincoln’s inaugural address “put into every patriotic heart new strength and hope.”

  Lincoln came to Meigs’s office that day, as he had on a number of previous days, because he had found new strength and hope in this career West Point professional who had almost single-handedly put in place, after the disastrous summer of 1861, an extensive system of communications, purchases, and transportation to provision an army growing to a million and a half men. Lincoln was both growing in wisdom and suffering some of his most virulent criticism. In the midst of dealing with McClellan and Cameron, he appreciated the opportunity to unburden himself with a military man who talked less and acted more. Lincoln mournfully asked the trusted Meigs a question he had been asking himself for some time. “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and tells he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever.” Lincoln was despondent. “The bottom is out of the tub. What shall we do?”

  Francis Carpenter’s famous painting, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, grew out of his work in the White House in 1864, where he studied and sketched Lincoln for nearly seven months.

  CHAPTER 20

  We Are Coming, Father Abraham January 1862–July 1862

  I EXPECT TO MAINTAIN THIS CONTEST UNTIL SUCCESSFUL, OR TILL I DIE, OR AM CONQUERED, OR MY TERM EXPIRES OR CONGRESS OR THE COUNTRY FORSAKES ME.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO WILLIAM H. SEWARD

  June 28, 1862

  RESIDENT LINCOLN S CHOICE FOR A NEW SECRETARY OF WAR TOOK everyone by surprise: Edwin M. Stanton, the combative lawyer who seven years earlier had scorned Lincoln at the “Reaper” trial in Cincinnati.

  Lincoln does not tell us why or how he made this decision, but it may be possible to tease it out. To be sure, Stanton received several recommendations, notably from Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who had persuaded the outgoing secretary of war, Simon Cameron, to join him in doing so. True, Lincoln had already appointed Republican rivals Seward, Chase, Bates, and Cameron to the cabinet, but the choice of Stanton, a Democrat, struck political observers as even more startling. Actually, the fact that Stanton was a Democrat may have worked in his favor. By January 1862, Lincoln believed that having a Democratic Unionist in his cabinet could help him persuade other Democrats to support the war more enthusiastically. Lincoln’s dec
ision to appoint Stanton would prove to be a turning point in the prosecution of the war.

  Edwin Stanton was born in 1814 in Steubenville, Ohio, and attended Kenyon College, where he was a classmate of Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s legal colleague from Bloomington, Illinois. Admitted to the bar in 1836, Stanton moved to Pittsburgh in 1847, where he established an impressive reputation trying cases before the federal courts. The upwardly mobile Stanton settled in Washington in 1856 so that he could practice regularly before the Supreme Court. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Stanton earned fifty thousand dollars a year.

  Outwardly successful and gifted with talent and energy, Stanton had a combative manner in pleading cases that may have been due in part to the losses he suffered as a young man, which friends say darkened his personality. His daughter Lucy died in 1841 at one and a half, and his lovely wife, Mary Lamson, died suddenly in 1844, after only seven years of marriage. For the next decade, Stanton buried his grief in his work, establishing a reputation for legal skill and an obstreperous spirit. In 1856, he married Ellen Hutchinson, sixteen years younger, opening a new chapter in his life.

  As an antislavery Democrat living in Washington, Stanton had watched President Buchanan stumble as secessionist drums grew noisier in the South. On December 20, 1860, the same day that the U.S. flag was lowered in South Carolina, Stanton accepted an appointment as attorney general in Buchanan’s lame-duck cabinet, hoping he could make a difference in preserving the Union.

  As a part of the president’s inner circle, Stanton concluded that Buchanan’s White House was adrift in its policy toward the South. At this critical moment of transition, Stanton reached out to Republicans behind President Buchanan’s back as a way to prevent the nation from sliding into collapse. Stanton met almost daily with soon-to-be secretary of state William Seward to keep him abreast of the Buchanan administration’s actions and inactions.

  When Lincoln finally arrived in Washington in late February 1861, Stanton welcomed the new Republican administration, but he did not have much hope for the Lincoln he remembered from Cincinnati. He attended Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, writing to a friend the same day, “The inauguration is over and whether for good or evil Abraham Lincoln is President of the United States.” Stanton would go on to watch the first year of the Lincoln administration with a critical eye.

  When George McClellan came to Washington in the summer of 1861 as the savior-general, he and Edwin Stanton, both Democrats, were brought together by mutual friends. A fruitful relationship developed. A few days before being appointed secretary of war, Stanton met with McClellan and promised his support. McClellan, who was increasingly distancing himself from Lincoln, believed he now had an ally in the administration.

  Lincoln appointed Edwin M. Stanton, the lawyer who had humiliated him in the famous “Reaper Case” in Cincinnati in 1855, to be his new secretary of war in January 1862.

  Stanton made a good first impression on many people in his initial months on the job. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War met with him on his first day in office. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio wrote, “The political horizon has brightened” since Stanton had assumed his new position. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote in his diary, “The new Secy of War is a man of mind and action. He is well recd. by all.” Joshua Speed, who traveled up from Kentucky to procure arms for his state, wrote Joseph Holt, the last secretary of war in the Buchanan administration, that Stanton “accomplished in a few days what heretofore would have taken as many weeks.” Speed believed Stanton would “infuse into the whole army an energy & activity which we have not seen heretofore.” George Templeton Strong, as treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an agency of the government that coordinated relief efforts in army camps, traveled from New York to visit with War Department officials at the end of January. Upon meeting Stanton, Strong was impressed. He was sure Stanton was worth “a wagon load of Camerons.” But Strong, who knew his way around Washington, confided to his diary, “He is the most popular man in Washington now, but will it last?”

  The president was also impressed by what he saw and heard in Stan-ton’s first weeks. When Lincoln wandered over to the telegraph office in the War Department in the evening, he saw that Stanton, in his private office on the second floor that overlooked the White House, worked many nights until 10 p.m. Lincoln knew that Stanton was strong-minded, and could at any moment unleash his fiery temper, but Lincoln was never defensive around people who knew more than he did and were proficient at getting the job done. Lincoln told Massachusetts congressman Henry L. Dawes that Stanton’s energy reminded him of an old Methodist preacher in the West who would become so energetic in the pulpit that a number of parishioners decided to put bricks in his pockets in order to hold him down. “We may be obliged to serve Stanton the same way,” Lincoln drawled, “but I guess we’ll just let him jump a while first.”

  Stanton quickly assumed total control of his department. He was everywhere, and he seemed to know everything. He would brook no interference from “Premier” Seward, who outranked him, and treated almost everyone else, including Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, as beneath him. Treasury Secretary Chase predicted in his diary that the new secretary of war “would be master of his Department, and yield to no one save the President.” The developing relationship between Lincoln and Stanton would become one of the most intriguing inner stories of the war.

  In the first months of 1862, the president became visibly energized by Stanton’s presence. He walked over to the telegraph office at the War Department more frequently. Stanton, whose honeymoon in office was quickly over because of his bearish manner that terrified many around him, treated the president with respect, even deference. Welles sized up Stanton as a person who was “fond of power and its exercise,” but this quality never put Lincoln off. Lincoln had observed that Simon Cameron liked to exercise power, too, but often for his own self-aggrandizement. Lincoln saw in Stanton what many others did not. He came to admire his intellect and energy, despite what Gideon Welles called Stanton’s “imperious nature,” because Lincoln understood that Stanton offered enormous gifts in the service of the army and the Union.

  “ALL QUIET ON THE POTOMAC” read the military news bulletins McClellan issued with monotonous predictability from his headquarters in the winter of 1861–62. Politicians in Washington, now that the Thirty-seventh Congress was in session, regularly derided McClellan and his announcement as nothing more than procrastination. All the while, Lincoln was waiting for General McClellan to lead his troops into battle.

  On January 12, 1862, Illinois senator Orville Browning stopped by the White House. Browning sensed that Lincoln was caught up in his studies of military theory and wanted to talk at length about military strategy. He told Browning he believed the Union armies “should threaten all [the Confederate] positions at the same time with superior force, and if they weakened one to strengthen another seize and hold the one weakened.” Discouraged with his generals, Lincoln told Browning he “was thinking of taking the field himself.”

  Finally, Lincoln could wait no longer. On January 27, 1862, he issued the President’s General Order Number One. He ordered army and navy forces to prepare to move by February 22 against “the insurgent forces.” This order, which Lincoln talked through with his new secretary of war, was a bold and curious document. Why February 22? Lincoln never said, but the president, with a penchant for precedents, probably chose it because it was George Washington’s birthday. Lincoln’s order was ridiculed by his detractors in Congress for its grand simplicity, but no one could miss its larger point—as commander in chief he was ordering McClellan to prepare to march in less than one month.

  Four days later, Lincoln followed up his take-charge posture by issuing the President’s Special War Order Number One. This brief order demonstrated Lincoln’s ability to perform a political high-wire act. On the one hand, Lincoln stated that an “immediate object” should be the “seizing and occupying” of Manassas Junction. At the sa
me time, he deferred “all details to be in the discretion of the general-in-chief.” He concluded this second order insisting, once again, that the expedition should move “before, or on, the 22nd of February next.”

  This time, General McClellan rushed to the White House to object. He asked the president if he could present an alternative plan to Secretary of War Stanton. Lincoln accepted, probably believing that he might at last be able to coax from McClellan an actual battle plan in writing. On February 3, 1862, McClellan presented Stanton a detailed twenty-two-page report that included both his plan and his objections to the president’s.

  McClellan’s plan called for transporting troops by water down the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay to little Urbana, Virginia, a tobacco port on the south side of the Rappahannock River. From this base he would advance the nearly sixty miles to Richmond. McClellan’s intention was to draw the Confederate forces under Joseph Johnston away from a defensive line around Manassas in a march to protect Richmond. McClellan wrote that his advance “affords the shortest possible land routes to Richmond, & strikes directly at the heart of the enemy’s power in the East.” With Richmond won, McClellan envisioned a large circle under Union command, from Ambrose Burnside in North Carolina to Don Carlos Buell in Tennessee to Henry Halleck on the Mississippi.