A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  At half past seven on the morning of March 7, 1862, Lincoln met with McClellan at the White House. After speaking to him about the fiasco with the boats in the canal, he reiterated his concerns about the Urbana plan, which McClellan had yet to implement. The real purpose of Lincoln’s summons was to tell McClellan, more than two weeks after his February 22 deadline, that it was time to start his march to Richmond. He also spoke to McClellan about what he called “an ugly matter.” The president told McClellan that some members of Congress believed that the lengthened march of the Urbana plan was actually a strategy of “giving over to the enemy the capital and the government, thus left defenseless.” McClellan, who had been seated, rose and demanded that the president retract such charges. Lincoln, “much agitated,” disclaimed that these were not his ideas and said “he did not believe a word of it.”

  To set Lincoln’s mind at ease, McClellan said he had convened a meeting with his generals to review the options between his Urbana plan and Lincoln’s plan to march on Manassas. McClellan, a politician as well as a general, already knew what the result of the discussion would be. His generals voted in favor of his plan 8 to 4, with most of the eight being junior officers appointed by McClellan himself.

  Subsequently, the generals reconvened at the White House at the president’s request. Lincoln listened to the account of their meeting and their decision. He told the assembled military group that since he was not a military man he would respect the opinion of the majority. He advised Secretary of War Stanton, “We can do nothing else but accept their plan.”

  Out of respect for the military, Lincoln once again went against his better judgment. But not completely. Without consulting McClellan, on the next day he issued two orders. First, Lincoln commanded that the army be reorganized into four corps with twelve divisions. He appointed four senior generals to lead the new corps. Second, he approved the Urbana plan on the condition that McClellan agree to place “in, and about Washington,” a force that would leave the capital “entirely secure.” McClellan was furious with the first order. He did not disagree with the concept, but he wanted to handpick his own men.

  The next day, March 9, 1862, after all of the debates about Richmond or Manassas, news came that Confederate general Joseph Johnston had evacuated his lines around Manassas and had taken up new defensive positions behind the Rappahannock River. By shifting his line farther to the south, he was now near the position at Urbana where McClellan had intended to begin his advance to Richmond.

  In a show of bravado, McClellan immediately dispatched some of his troops south to Manassas, accompanied by a collection of newspaper reporters. Everyone was astounded by what they found. The configuration of the Confederate defenses had space for at most fifty thousand men, only half of the one hundred thousand troops McClellan had long insisted would face him. They also found that some of the enemy artillery were nothing more than painted black logs—“Quaker guns.” These simple black logs had effectively deceived McClellan’s intelligence service for months. The findings made McClellan look foolish. Never again, so Lincoln and Stanton agreed, would they accept his estimates of the strength of the opposition.

  George McClellan finally began to march his army on March 17, 1862. By the beginning of April, a remarkable sight was taking shape at the upper end of the Virginia peninsula. Near the towns of Hampton and Old Point Comfort, baggage wagons, artillery, and shelter tents arrived daily. On Chesapeake Bay, a massive armada of 405 side-wheel steamers, propeller-driven steamers, brigs, and barges was assembling. The ships ferried thousands of supply wagons and hundreds of ambulances. The armies and navies who fought on this same peninsula eighty years before at the battle for Yorktown in the Revolutionary War would have been amazed at the preparation for a military operation far larger than anything ever seen on the American continent. General George B. McClellan was slowly bringing into formation one hundred thousand soldiers for the long-awaited attack on Richmond.

  McClellan came to the White House on March 31, 1862, to bid good-bye to the president, but really to seek his approval after so much acrimony between them. The next day, McClellan informed the War Department that he was complying with the president’s injunction to ensure that Washington was protected by leaving behind 19,000 troops, augmented by 7,800 at Harpers Ferry and Irvin McDowell’s 30,000 troops in the nearby Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln was aghast. He believed the force was too few and too raw and most of them too distant from the capital. On April 3, Lincoln told Stanton he wanted McDowell’s corps, slated to join the march to Richmond, to stay behind to protect Washington.

  McClellan’s plan to lay siege to Richmond was patterned after the siege of Sevastopol in the final battle of the Crimean War in 1855. Just as England and France brought to bear their industrial might on the Rus sian fortress, he would bring the industrial might of the Union army, including naval power and heavy artillery, to defeat the Confederates in the fortified city.

  McClellan’s forces advanced with little opposition until they approached Yorktown. Along the march he had encountered an elaborate network of trenches, which convinced him he was facing a large enemy force. The visible maneuvers of Confederate major general John B. Magruder’s troops near Yorktown further alarmed McClellan. The Young Napoleon, believing he was outnumbered, decided to dig in and bring up his enormous guns for an assault.

  Lincoln, now visiting the War Department telegraph office at all hours of the day and night, attempted to encourage McClellan to move forward. He wired on April 6, 1862, “You now have over one hundred thousand troops. … I think you better break the enemy’s line from the York-town to the Warwick River at once.” The president, gaining in military knowledge, told McClellan, “They will probably use time as advantageously as you can.”

  McClellan was piqued. He fired off a telegram to Lincoln with the usual litany of complaints—he was outnumbered and the president and Stanton had failed to supply him with enough troops. McClellan later wrote his wife, “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”

  Lincoln, not about to be put off by McClellan, raised his own ongoing concern. “After you left, I ascertained that less than twenty thousand unorganized men, without a single field battery, were all that you designed to be left for the defense of Washington, and Manassas Junction.” McClellan believed his march to Richmond was the best prevention of an attack on Washington. Lincoln’s worry was that, while McClellan was leading his large Union army slowly up the Virginia peninsula to capture a well-defended Richmond, the Confederates could, with a relatively small army, march quickly to capture a thinly defended Washington.

  Lincoln and Stanton were so furious with McClellan’s dithering that they offered the command of the Army of the Potomac to Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. Hitchcock, a curious character with a philosophical mind (he read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in German) had become Stanton’s adviser in February. Now the president and the secretary of war asked him to assume command of the Army of the Potomac. He said he was too old, nearly sixty-four, and turned them down.

  By early May, McClellan finally said he was ready to attack York-town with his heavy guns. Vastly overemphasizing the size of the enemy before him, which probably was only eleven thousand when he first approached Yorktown, his dawdling had allowed the Confederates to concentrate their defense. Lincoln wrote to McClellan, “Your call for Parrott guns from Washington alarms me, chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination. Is anything to be done?”

  McClellan now received a surprise. As he prepared to attack with his guns, to be followed by an infantry assault, Confederate general Joseph Johnston, under the cover of darkness on the night of May 3, 1862, executed a strategic retreat with his troops to help defend Richmond. Just like at Manassas, the overly cautious McClellan found no one to fight. The South laughed that he had been tricked again. The North was not laughing.

  On May 6, 1862, Lincoln, with Stanton and Treasury Secret
ary Chase at his side, decided to travel to Fortress Monroe to discover for himself exactly what General McClellan was or was not doing.

  Two months before, a Confederate ironclad ship, the CSS Virginia, had steamed down the Elizabeth River into Hampton Roads to attack the wooden-sided Union ships set up there. The Virginia had rammed and sunk the twenty-four-gun USS Cumberland and then fired on the fifty-gun frigate USS Congress. The next day, the Union ironclad USS Monitor arrived on the scene. The two slow-moving ships could not damage each other. The dramatic encounter proved in two days the superiority of iron over wood. When Lincoln arrived, the Virginia was still lurking inside the Norfolk harbor. When Lincoln discovered the general had still done nothing to remove the Virginia, he threw his hat to the ground.

  The next day, Lincoln took charge of a plan to capture Norfolk. Soldiers and sailors watched in amazement as Lincoln commandeered a boat to select the best landing site to launch his attack. He ordered gunboats to attack the Confederate shore batteries at Sewall’s Point.

  On May 9, 1862, the Confederates abandoned Norfolk, blowing up the Virginia so that it could not be captured. A soldier aboard one of the navy transports watched Lincoln directing reinforcements to the front. “Abe was rushing about, hollering to someone on the wharf—dressed in a black suit with a very seedy crepe on his hat, and hanging over the railing, he looked like some hoosier just starting for home from California, with store clothes and a biled shirt on.” An officer aboard the Monitor wrote, “It is extremely fortunate that the President came down as he did—he seems to have infused new life into everything.” The president’s action began “stirring up dry bones.” Salmon Chase wrote to his daughter, “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President; for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the ‘Merrimac’ as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The whole coast is now virtually ours.”

  While at Fortress Monroe, Lincoln met Union general Ambrose Burnside, who had come up from North Carolina. On May 11, 1862, Lincoln invited Burnside to sail back with him on the USS Baltimore. Once in Washington, Burnside found himself responding to a whole battery of questions from the president. When the general returned to the Willard Hotel, he offered his initial assessment of the president to members of his staff. “If there is an honest man on the face of the earth, Lincoln is one.”

  Also on May 11, 1862, Lincoln removed McClellan as general in chief, relieving him of his overall command. Lincoln’s rationale was that Little Mac could not do it all. He placed Henry Halleck in charge of the armies in the West, and John C. Frémont in charge of a new Mountain Division, consisting of western Virginia and eastern Tennessee. McClellan retained his command of the Army of the Potomac. Inside the War Department, there was debate about whether Lincoln had gracefully let McClellan down, or challenged him that if he succeeded in taking Richmond his command would be restored.

  Even so, Lincoln’s orders further strengthened his own role as commander in chief. Henceforth, Halleck, Frémont, and McClellan would be equals reporting through Stanton to the president. Lincoln had come to trust Stanton and could work with him in ways he never could with Cameron. The hospitable Lincoln and his demanding secretary of war became a formidable team.

  BY THE MIDDLE OF MAY, under the command of the freshly demoted George McClellan, the Army of the Potomac’s 105,000 men could see the church spires of Richmond as they approached the city’s gates. Sixty thousand Confederate troops defended Richmond, yet McClellan called for reinforcements, complaining he was fighting twice that number. For a while there was a standoff, but on May 31, 1862, Joseph Johnston unleashed an attack on McClellan south of the Chickahominy River. The ensuing battle of Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks, devolved into chaotic skirmishes in confusing terrain. Johnston was severely wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee. Two days of blooding fighting resulted in a tactical draw.

  McClellan was delighted when Lee, Jefferson Davis’s military adviser, replaced the veteran Johnston. McClellan wrote Lincoln, “I prefer Lee to Johnston—the former is too cautious & weak under grave responsibility—personally brave & energetic to a fault, he yet is wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility & is likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” Lincoln likely wondered whether McClellan had misjudged an opponent once again.

  The answer came soon. General Robert E. Lee, whom Lincoln had asked to assume command of the entire Union army at the beginning of the war, was now in charge of the Confederate forces defending Richmond. He quickly proved to be a formidable commander. He directed General Stonewall Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson was a risk taker who could move his often-outnumbered troops to take advantage of an opponent’s weakness.

  Lincoln, sensing the danger of Jackson, implored McClellan to instruct his senior generals to trap the wily Jackson in the valley. At the same time, he sent out his own orders to the division commanders from the telegraph office. But while the Union forces slowly came into position in a pincer move, Jackson’s men stayed steps ahead by marching hard to escape the potential trap. Jackson won small battles at Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, and Port Republic, frustrating the Union forces. He then joined Lee in the defense of Richmond.

  In June, Lee led a counteroffensive, the Seven Days Battles, in which McClellan was forced to retreat from his position four miles east of Richmond. If McClellan thought he knew Lee, the Virginia general clearly remembered McClellan from Mexico. Convinced that McClellan would be tied to his guns, Lee risked leaving only twenty-five thousand troops to defend Richmond, and prepared to attack McClellan north of the Chickahominy. Not successful the first day, he attacked again and again. In a series of six battles in seven days, McClellan’s peninsular campaign came to an end. By July 4, 1862, one year after Lincoln’s special message to Congress, it had become clear to the president and the nation that McClellan’s grand opportunity had been lost. Richmond had survived, and Lee and Jackson and their armies were on the rise.

  Lincoln determined to find out firsthand what went wrong. He arrived by steamer at Fort Harrison, at the eastern tip of the Virginia peninsula, on July 8, 1862. McClellan came on board the steamer Ariel at Harrison’s Landing and handed Lincoln a long letter, resuming a conversation he had started with the president before the Seven Days Battles. Admitting that he was going beyond his duties as an army commander but believing that the war had reached a crucial stage, McClellan wrote, “The Government must determine upon a civil and military policy, covering the whole ground of our national trouble.”

  McClellan’s letter was partly a response to whispers in Washington debating the need for a second Confiscation Act. The first, signed by Lincoln on August 6, 1861, permitted the seizure of any property, including slaves, being used by Confederates to support their insurrection. Lincoln, after negotiating with Congress, had signed it because it did not explicitly free all the slaves. The rumored second act would go further. “It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the [Southern] people,” McClellan lectured. “Neither confiscation of property … or the forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated.”

  Lincoln, who had not met with McClellan in three months, received the letter, thanked him, and said nothing. The next day, discouraged, McClellan wrote his wife, Ellen, of the visit to “His Excellency.” He said he doubted Lincoln “profited” from the call. The president “really seems quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question & the magnitude of the crisis,” he wrote.

  But Lincoln did understand the enormity of the crisis. Whereas he might have agreed with McClellan six months earlier, he had changed his point of view. Three weeks later, Lincoln wrote as much in a letter to Cuthbert Bullitt, a Southern Unionist in New Orleans. He asked a series of rhetorical questions. “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in the future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water?” Lincoln strong
ly implied his answer in asking, “Would you deal lighter blows than heavier ones?” Three days later, in the same spirit, Lincoln wrote August Belmont, a prominent Northern Democrat. “This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.” Lincoln had reached a crucial decision in July 1862, about the nature of the war and new means to win the peace.

  IN EARLY JUNE, Abraham and Mary Lincoln made an unannounced trip from the White House to a residence known as the Soldiers’ Home. Located on shaded hills three miles north of the White House along the road to Silver Spring, Maryland, the Soldiers’ Home was only a half-hour carriage ride from the White House. The seclusion of its three hundred acres was a welcome relief from the frenetic pace, humidity, and stench that constantly enveloped the Executive Mansion in Washington. Abraham and Mary would stay until early November, and would return the following two summers, living there a total of thirteen months, or more than one-quarter of Lincoln’s presidency.

  What came to be called the Soldiers’ Home was built in 1842 by Washington banker George W. Riggs. In 1851, it became an asylum for disabled veterans of previous wars who could not provide for themselves. James Buchanan became the first president to stay at the Soldiers’ Home. He probably suggested it to the Lincolns as a retreat. Both Mary and Abraham visited the Soldiers’ Home separately in the days immediately following the inauguration on March 4, 1861, but the events leading up to Bull Run postponed a move in 1861 to the summer of 1862. In their summers there, the Lincolns may have stayed in more than one of the cottages, including the Riggs family home, a country house with a large porch built in the English Gothic Revival style whose popularity had begun in England in the 1830s.