When Lincoln walked into the regular Tuesday cabinet meeting, he found the members buzzing with conversation. After Pope’s predictions of a Union victory, the Northern press criticized the leadership of “boastful Pope;” of McClellan, for failing to come to Pope’s aid; and of the president, who, as commander in chief, allowed this debacle to develop on his watch. The Southern press and people were ecstatic.
Secretary of the Navy Welles captured the mood of the meeting and of the president. “There was a more disturbed and desponding feeling than I have ever witnessed in council; the President was greatly distressed.” Attorney General Bates recorded in his diary that the president was deeply discouraged after early predictions of victory had turned into reports of a disastrous defeat. Bates wrote that Lincoln “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.”
Lincoln then stunned the members of his cabinet by informing them that he had decided to place McClellan in charge of an army that would fold in the Army of the Potomac and Pope’s Army of Virginia. Secretary of War Stanton, who had prepared a petition already signed by several members of the cabinet, became indignant. Chase argued that McClellan’s “experience as a military commander had been little else than a series of failures.” Particularly upset with McClellan’s failure to come to Pope’s aid, Chase believed this “rendered him unworthy of trust.”
Later that day, Lincoln’s decision to reappoint McClellan was validated, if not by the cabinet, then by the soldiers. On a cold and rainy afternoon, as discouraged soldiers straggled back into Washington, they were met by a lone officer on a black horse, dressed in full military uniform, wearing a general’s yellow sash and dress sword. Brigadier General Jacob Cox saw McClellan first.
“Well, General,” McClellan said, “I am in command again.”
What followed would be talked about for years to come. As McClellan rode forward toward the soldiers, he saluted them with his cap, and they, suddenly encouraged, broke out in shouts and cheers “with wild delight.” The word spread along the columns of soldiers, “Little Mac is back!”
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AS JULY TURNED INTO AUGUST, and then into September, Lincoln waited for the military victory that would allow him to announce his Emancipation Proclamation. For months now, the most furious assault on Lincoln came not from Confederate troops besieging Washington, but from radical Republican senators assailing his leadership. Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, along with Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, gave Lincoln no respite. Lincoln told a visitor that he would look out the White House window and see them coming, singly, as a pair, or all together to attack him for not making a more frontal assault on slavery. In these dire days, Lincoln often found refuge in his bottomless barrel of humor. He told a friend that the visits of these three reminded him of the boy in Sunday school, who, when asked to read from the Bible the story of the three men in the fiery furnace, struggled over the difficult names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The boy read on, mortified, until he looked down the page and saw their names coming again. This time, in agony, he cried out, “Look! Look there! Here comes them same three damn fellers again!”
Lincoln used this time to refine his thinking about emancipation. Sometime in early August, he telegraphed his old friend Leonard Swett in Bloomington, Illinois, asking him to come to Washington immediately. Lincoln ushered the tall, dark-eyed Swett into the cabinet room, where he pulled out several letters from a drawer in his desk. He first read one from William Lloyd Garrison, the New England abolitionist, then one by Garrett Davis, state senator from the border state of Kentucky, followed by one or two more letters about emancipation.
Without commenting on the quite different opinions, Lincoln began to debate the issue. First, he took one side, often using phrases from the letters but adding his own arguments. Then he argued the other side. Swett, who had traveled the Eighth Judicial Circuit with Lincoln, had observed this pattern in countless courtrooms. Lincoln could “state the case of his adversary better and more forcibly than his opponent could state it himself.” Lincoln went on for more than an hour with his one-man debate. Swett became impressed that Lincoln’s “manner did not indicate that he wished to impress his views upon the hearer, but rather to weight and examine them for his own enlightenment in the presence of the hearer.” Swett, so trusted by Lincoln, believed he was privileged to be “a witness of the President’s mental operations.”
When Lincoln finished, he asked for no comment from Swett. He thanked him for coming, wished him a pleasant trip home, and sent greetings to “mutual friends.” So evenhanded was Lincoln’s debate that Swett predicted to his wife, “He will issue no proclamation emancipating negroes.”
STILL WRESTLING OVER HOW TO PROCLAIM emancipation, Lincoln sent word to the black leadership in Washington that he wished to speak with them. On the afternoon of August 14, 1862, an American president did something that no one could remember: He welcomed to the White House a committee of five black leaders. The group did not include national figures such as Frederick Douglass. Lincoln told them that money “had been appropriated by Congress, and placed at his disposition” for the purpose of colonization. Lincoln asked, “Why should they leave the country?” He then answered his own question. “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss.” Lincoln went on to clarify what he meant. “This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.”
Lincoln acknowledged that his guests were free men, probably free their whole lives. “Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” He went on to discuss how racial equality did not exist in the United States. “I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you.” With this comment, Lincoln uncharacteristically made an assumption he did not test. He then talked about the evil of slavery, for both blacks and whites. His conclusion: “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Lincoln hoped these leaders would be the vanguard of a colonization project in Central America. He said he understood that of all the blacks in America these men had made the most of their opportunities, but he urged them to avoid “a selfish view of the case.” If they took the lead, he was confident others would follow. He concluded by asking them to study his proposal. “Take your full time—no hurry at all.” Lincoln, believing he was taking the lead in appealing to black leaders to think of their future, seemed to be closing the door to a future in the United States precisely at the moment he was revising his Emancipation Proclamation.
This episode is puzzling. Lincoln did not convene a dialogue. He did not say, “This I believe,” but rather offered his comments as the accepted thinking about race of the day. It has been suggested that Lincoln’s continuing remarks about colonization right up to the moment of his announcement of emancipation were calculated to make this bitter pill easier to swallow for moderates, if not conservatives. But there is no doubt that Lincoln had hit a low point in his public speech about slavery and race just as he was about to reach for the higher ground of emancipation.
Lincoln’s comments infuriated Frederick Douglass. In the September issue of Douglass’ Monthly, the abolitionist editor printed the full text of Lincoln’s remarks and offered his most abrasive criticism yet of the president. “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer.” He lambasted Lincoln’s “contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass was at pains to point out that Lincoln, “elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters … is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principles of justice and h
umanity.”
BY 1862, LINCOLN HAD BECOME accustomed to ministers and church officials coming to Washington to offer their advice on the management of the war. On September 13, he welcomed two Chicago ministers, William W. Patton and John Dempster, to the Red Room, one of three public parlors on the first floor of the White House. Mary Lincoln had installed a new red carpet in the room, which the Lincolns used as a family parlor and a place to entertain friends. The ministers from Lincoln’s home state represented a “meeting of Christians of all denominations” that had gathered in Bryan Hall in Chicago on September 7 to express their support for emancipation. They came to lobby Lincoln and present him with memorials in English and German.
Lincoln used this occasion to both affirm and question his visitors on the use and misuse of religion. Lincoln spoke of the dilemma he wrestled with day and night, and then spoke of his own desire.
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter.
Even as Lincoln was increasingly pondering the meaning and purpose of God in the war, he was growing impatient with religious people who came to him regularly to express their certainty that God was on the side of the North: “And if I can learn what it is I will do it!” Lincoln underlined his affirmation and then put an exclamation point to underscore his conviction.
Lincoln had been receiving a good deal of mail from church organizations regarding emancipation. He told the ministers from Illinois and others, “The subject is difficult, and good men do not agree.” He then asked, “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!” He continued, “Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?” After his long disquisition on slavery, Lincoln concluded, “I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, day and night, more than any other.”
Some have commented that Lincoln toyed with these and other petitioners in this time period, fully aware that he intended to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. A better explanation may be, like Lincoln’s conversation with Leonard Swett, that he was still mulling over all sides of the issue, as much for his own ears as for the ears of his listeners. As people came to him with their certainties, he responded with his ambiguities. Yet for Lincoln, ambiguity did not mean inaction.
WITH BOTH THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERATE armies exhausted from the second battle of Bull Run, most were resting and resupplying their troops. This wasn’t the case for Robert E. Lee. Lee sensed this was the moment not to retreat, but to advance. Fresh from summer victories on the Virginia peninsula, and now at Bull Run, he nonetheless believed the South could never defeat the North in a long, drawn-out war, because it would always be outpaced in men and industrial resources. He understood that the Union’s momentary weakness was probably his best opportunity. An insatiable reader of newspapers, Lee read of the despair on the Northern home front and the low morale of Union troops. Back home, it was as if the Richmond Dispatch and Lee were reading each other’s minds. The Dispatch wrote on August 29, 1862, “Now is the time to strike the telling and decisive blows … and to bring the war to a close.”
Lee gambled he could invade Maryland and catch McClellan’s Army of the Potomac by surprise. He believed that in Maryland, a Union state but with slaves making up 35 percent of the population, he would find citizens ready to rally to the Confederate cause. His men would be able to live off the produce of friendly farmers. On the night of September 4, 1862, under the cover of darkness, Lee and his troops crossed the Potomac just forty miles upriver from Washington.
When word of Lee’s movements reached Maryland and Pennsylvania, the state leaders panicked. Lee was on Union soil. Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin telegraphed Lincoln on September 11, insisting the Confederate army numbered 120,000 men. He requested 80,000 federal troops to protect Philadelphia and Harrisburg. Curtin and McClellan rivaled each other in their estimates, for McClellan estimated that Lee’s army was 110,000 men. In fact, Lee’s army actually numbered 55,000 men. Losing stragglers by the mile, by the time it would finally engage Union troops, it would be down to 45,000 men.
If Governor Curtin saw Lee’s march northward as a danger, Lincoln saw it as an opportunity. Contrary to his leading generals, Lincoln had long believed that the best Union military strategy was not to attack cities or occupy territories but to defeat armies. He now thought that Lee’s army, stretched long and thin, in unfamiliar territory without its usual base of supplies, was vulnerable. On September 7, 1862, McClellan’s army moved north from Washington, while apprehension riveted the North.
Once in Maryland, the two armies experienced a surprising reversal of fortunes. The Confederate army, expecting that they would be treated as liberators, arrived looking more like beggars. The populace treated them coolly. The Union army began their march with depressed morale due to their recent defeats, but once in Maryland “the friendly, almost tumultuous welcome they received … boosted their spirits.” As the soldiers passed by farms, the daughters of the farmers greeted them at the roadside with buckets of cold water. In small villages and towns, and finally in Frederick, where McClellan had set up his field headquarters, they were welcomed by hundreds and often thousands of grateful citizens.
As McClellan’s reports were sparse in coming in, Lincoln worried in the War Department’s telegraph office. He considered traveling up to Frederick, but General in Chief Halleck talked him out it, even going so far as writing down his advice so that it would be part of the official record. He and other military leaders feared that Lincoln could be intercepted by Confederate cavalry.
On the morning of September 13, 1862, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the Twenty-seventh Indiana Infantry was relaxing in a field near Frederick when he found a copy of Lee’s Special Order Number 191, dated September 9, wrapped in an envelope around three cigars. One of nine copies of Lee’s order, this particular one had been mislaid by a never-to-be-identified Confederate courier. Delighted, McClellan telegraphed Lincoln, “I have the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.” The plans in McClellan’s hands told him that Lee had adopted the risky strategy of dividing his army into four or five parts, sending several detachments to capture Harpers Ferry and leaving his other divisions positioned several miles from one another.
McClellan waited six hours before issuing his own orders to his commanders. If McClellan had acted within the first hours, he might have exploited these gaps, but he moved warily and lost his advantage.
Within two days, Lee realized that McClellan had his orders and immediately began to reassemble his army. By hard marching and riding, they quickly reached the east side of Antietam Creek near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.
All through the day of September 14, 1862, Lincoln, Halleck, and Stanton waited apprehensively for any news. Halleck was suffering from hemorrhoids so painful that he could not even stand. A conventional medical treatment at the time was an opium suppository. This condition contributed to his lethargy, and his overall health was breaking down in the midst of this military crisis. For Lincoln, it seemed like Halleck was falling apart before his eyes in Washington, and he was not at all sure what McClellan was doing in Maryland.
At 9:40 p.m., Lincoln and Halleck received a telegram from McClellan: “It has been a glorious victory.” By eight the next morning, McClellan wired that the enemy had “disappeared during
the night.” Later in the day, McClellan, euphoric with the prospect of victory over a retreating Confederate army, wired that the enemy is “in a perfect panic,” and that “Genl. Lee is reported wounded.”
Lincoln immediately wrote back to McClellan, “God bless you, and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if possible.” Fifteen minutes later, departing from his usual skepticism about McClellan’s predictions, Lincoln sent an ecstatic telegram to his old friend Jesse Dubois, Illinois state auditor, in Springfield. “I now consider it safe to say that General McClellan has gained a great victory over the great rebel army in Maryland. He is now pursuing the flying foe.” Lincoln’s words traveled faster and farther than he may have thought possible, for at midnight he received a telegram from Illinois governor Richard Yates, “Your dispatch to Col. Dubois has filled our people with the wildest joy. Salutes are being fired & our citizens are relieved from a fearful state of suspense.” But McClellan, with his characteristic hyperbole, had once again misjudged the situation.
Lee was not retreating. Instead, the Confederate general was positioning his forces on a row of hills and ridges that ran through the rural countryside of pasture and farmland between Sharpsburg and Antietam Creek. Lee invited McClellan to attack his smaller but battle-tested veteran army.
McClellan spent much of September 16, 1862, planning his attack, which only allowed more time for Lee to consolidate his forces. In the late afternoon, he finally sent “Fighting Joe” Hooker across Antietam Creek to attack the Confederate left. He ordered Ambrose Burnside to also cross Antietam Creek and attack the Confederate right. These opening maneuvers were probing skirmishes for the fight everyone knew was coming the next day.
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