The Confederacy’s long-term prospects were also being eroded by the North’s increasing financial strength. Lincoln had put it simply: “I must have money.” Expanding on the theme, he added, “The result of this war is a question of resources. That side will win in the end where the money holds out longest.”
Accordingly, the House of Representatives was hard at work on developing a massive system of taxes to pay for a protracted war if necessary. Under their plan, a new commissioner of internal revenue would be appointed, and virtually every money stream in the Union would be tapped—starting with income, which had never been taxed before. Sales taxes were instituted: two cents per pound on sugar, a penny per pound on coffee, ten cents per gallon on coal oil, fifty cents per clock, ten cents per pound on cheap cigars and twenty cents per pound on good ones—on and on went the list, page after page of levies covering rail fares, steamboat tickets, stock transactions, and newspaper advertisements. “Nearly every class will probably find something to complain of,” one newspaper allowed.
The North’s ability to collect so much revenue from so many new taxes suggested its enormous economic advantage. In 1860, the eleven states that formed the Confederacy had just 10 percent of the nation’s industrial capacity. The North, by contrast, had not only a legion of thriving industries, but also nine of the ten largest cities, and two thirds of all railroad tracks. Meanwhile, the manufacturing capacity of many of the Southern states was shrinking. Between 1840 and 1860, Virginia lost one third of its manufacturing jobs; on the eve of the war, it employed approximately the same number of factory workers as the tiny state of Rhode Island.
As spring began arriving across the South, Union forces continued to rally. Troops and gunboats under the command of Brigadier General John Pope raced down the Mississippi and laid siege to the Confederate town of New Madrid, Missouri. A force led by former speaker of the house Nathaniel Banks—one of Lincoln’s purely political appointees—started up the Shenandoah Valley from Harpers Ferry toward Winchester, Virginia. Brigadier General Samuel Curtis, a former congressman with West Point training, led some 12,000 bluecoats into northwest Arkansas, where they confronted a larger Rebel force under Earl Van Dorn at a place called Pea Ridge, near Fayetteville. When the battle commenced on March 7, a cold, wet Friday, the Rebels got the early advantage, but Curtis skillfully divided his army to scatter first one wing of the Confederate force, then the other. It was the biggest battle of the war fought west of the Mississippi, and Curtis’s victory effectively ended the danger that the Rebels might peel Missouri away from the Union.
Outside Washington, Joseph E. Johnston weighed the acres of blue spread out around the capital and concluded that he must fall back toward Richmond or risk being cut off by a flanking maneuver. In early March, he very quietly abandoned fortifications that the Rebels had occupied since the battle of Bull Run the previous summer. The Union high command in Washington would not notice his departure for several days, but here, as elsewhere, the South was falling back. Alarmed, the Confederate Congress passed a law requiring military authorities to burn cotton and tobacco rather than let it fall into the hands of advancing Federal troops.
So much had happened so quickly. Now, with the breeze finally at his back, Lincoln concluded that the time had come to raise the stakes against slavery.
* * *
He had broached the idea gingerly in his message to Congress in December: the federal government should offer to buy freedom for the slaves. Explaining his reasoning to the abolitionist Moncure Conway, Lincoln said that slavery “was the disease of the entire nation,” and that Northerners “should be ready and eager to share largely the pecuniary losses to which the South would be subjected if emancipation should occur.… All must share the suffering of its removal.”
Having slipped this proposal into public view, he began mentioning it in meetings with various influential visitors. As he told one caller: “American slavery is no small affair, and it cannot be done away with at once.… It belongs to our politics, to our industries, to our commerce, and to our religion. Every portion of our territory in some form or other has contributed to the growth and the increase of slavery.… It is wrong, a great evil indeed, but the South is no more responsible for the wrong done to the African race than is the North.” To another visitor, he put it this way: “Slavery existed … by the act of the North as of the South; and in any scheme to get rid of it, the North, as well as the South, was morally bound to do its full and equal share.”
The details of such a scheme had been taking shape in Lincoln’s mind for years. Once he became president, he enlisted Congressman George Fisher, of Delaware, to help investigate the idea. The results were not entirely encouraging, but by March Lincoln concluded that military successes had made him strong enough to give the plan a big, formal push. He proposed that Congress issue a joint resolution offering to “co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.”
Like the hanging of Captain Gordon—who had been executed on February 21—this proposal represented a profound change in the federal government’s stance toward slavery. But Lincoln played down that fact; rather than promote emancipation as a moral imperative or a social revolution, he framed it as part of the war effort. Knowing that Confederate leaders nursed hopes of attracting the border states to join their side, he reasoned that he might be able to dash their dreams by persuading those states to give up on slavery. “To deprive them of this hope, substantially ends the rebellion,” Lincoln asserted. He also took a moderate position on the pace of this proposed change, writing: “In my judgment, gradual, and not sudden emancipation, is better for all.”
His moderate approach led the abolitionist senator Thaddeus Stevens to gripe that Lincoln was serving up “diluted, milk-and-water-gruel,” but the president’s mild tone did not deceive Stevens’s colleague Charles Sumner. Sumner immediately recognized that any vote for emancipation, in the present context, would start a chain of dominoes falling. “The proposition of the Pres[ident] is an epoch,” the senator wrote hastily, “& I hope it will commence the end.” The antislavery Daily National Republican agreed. “The great, transcendent fact is, that for the first time in two generations we have a recommendation from the presidential chair of the abolition of slavery,” the newspaper exulted.
Compensated emancipation, freely chosen by the states, was for Lincoln a way around the most difficult problem he faced in regard to slavery: the Supreme Court. With the appointment of Justice Swayne, Lincoln was beginning to remake the panel, but for now it was still Roger Taney’s court. On March 17, the Chief Justice marked his eighty-sixth birthday in a glum mood. A week later, when the court adjourned, he asked his fellow justices to pay him a visit before they left town. One by one, they called at his Capitol Hill home and found Taney emotional as he said goodbye until the fall. “He had a presentiment that he should die very soon,” Attorney General Bates recorded in his diary. But the author of the Dred Scott decision wasn’t dead yet.
Lincoln studied the reaction to his proposal very closely. When The New York Times fretted that the cost of compensating slave states would be prohibitive in light of “the coming terror of war taxation,” he fired off a handwritten letter to the editor, Henry Raymond, marked “private.” “Have you noticed the facts that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?” Lincoln asked. “That eighty-seven days’ cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense?” Raymond quickly apologized, praising Lincoln’s proposal as “a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy.”
* * *
Following the fiasco with McClellan’s canal boats, Lincoln told Sumner, during one of the senator’s frequent visits, that he intended “to talk plainly” to his general i
n chief, who nevertheless managed to avoid the president after returning to Washington from the upper Potomac. (He later complained that Secretary of War Stanton had kept him away from Lincoln.) Instead, the general busied himself with details of a possible mission to clear the Confederate batteries that blocked river traffic into Washington. The long debate over McClellan’s plan to assault Richmond via the Chesapeake Bay was bending in McClellan’s favor, but the Rebel guns prevented the necessary troopships from reaching his army at the Alexandria docks. McClellan did not yet realize that the Rebels were retreating.
When asked about the failed mission to restore the Harpers Ferry railroad bridge, McClellan overflowed with excuses; he compiled them all into a memo for the War Department in which he pronounced himself “well satisfied with what had been accomplished” on the seemingly feckless expedition. Stanton, however, had already decided that the “damned fizzle” was yet another indication that McClellan “doesn’t intend to do anything” to fight the Rebels.
McClellan had greeted Stanton’s appointment as “a most unexpected piece of good fortune,” but in just two months, their relationship had become poisonous. From his earliest days on the job, Stanton had been hearing “at intervals from a variety of sources” that McClellan was secretly conspiring to lose the war. People whispered that he was a member of a shadowy pro-Confederate group known as the Knights of the Golden Circle. Founded in 1854 by a doctor in Cincinnati, the Knights originally sought to create slave colonies in Mexico and the Caribbean. The colonies would eventually become new states, thus ensuring that proslavery votes would continue to dominate the U.S. Senate. Little came of these half-baked plans, but, with the outbreak of war, the Knights suddenly took on a dark power in the imaginations of suspicious Unionists. They saw the group as a nest of treasonous conspirators at a time when treason and conspiracy were dangerously real. Stanton put enough stock in the rumors about McClellan that, as he confessed to a friend, they “caused great solicitude in my mind.” He discussed his concerns with Lincoln, who by now had not spoken with McClellan for more than two weeks, since before the death of his son. The president summoned McClellan to the White House early on March 8, a beautiful spring Saturday.
In the streets of Washington, all signs pointed to some great drama about to unfold. The photographers’ shops along Pennsylvania Avenue were packed with men having pictures taken as mementoes for their families and friends; one shop was mounting some two thousand portraits per day. Columns of troops began marching from the hills north of the city and crossing into Virginia over the Long Bridge, their regimental bands playing brightly. Soldiers shouted their farewells to friends they had made and lovers they had wooed during their months in camp, and these sounds mixed with the creaking of wagon wheels and the braying of army mules. Adventurers, journalists, and other thrill seekers from around the world crowded the capital; one diarist described “an immense throng” and went on: “The City seems to be entirely full. The prospect now is that there will be a desperate battle near here soon. McClellan is well-prepared and has an immense army near here all ready and anxious for a fight.”
But was that true? The president needed to know.
Behind closed doors with the general, Lincoln launched into the plain talk he had mentioned to Sumner. No matter what McClellan might think, the president was emphatically not “well satisfied” with the results of the canal boat mission. McClellan laid out his excuses; later, he claimed that Lincoln found them persuasive. Perhaps so. But more important was the real reason why Lincoln had called Little Mac to his office: he needed to make sure the young general understood that excuses were no longer enough. McClellan always had excuses. Taken one by one they might each seem persuasive, but compounded over month after month, the litany had severely undermined his credibility. McClellan’s enemies no longer trusted his good faith, if they ever had, and this failure of the canal boats now fed suspicions about the general’s true intentions. As McClellan later recalled the conversation, Lincoln connected the fiasco at Harpers Ferry to what he called “a very ugly matter,” namely, the growing belief that the real motive behind the general’s plan to take the Army of the Potomac down the bay was a “traitorous” plot to leave Washington wide open to attack.
When he heard the word “traitor,” McClellan exploded, completely missing the fact that Lincoln was trying to help him. He leaped to his feet with tears in his eyes and demanded, in salty terms, a retraction of a charge that Lincoln was merely reporting. Like the president, McClellan—the man who had bragged “I can do it all”—was suffering from exhaustion; as he struggled to keep up with the details of running his own army while supervising the war as a whole, his nerves had become badly frayed. A few days earlier, he had confessed in a private letter that he felt pushed to his limits. “The abolitionists are doing their best to displace me,” he wrote. “You have no idea of the undying hate with which they pressure me.… I sometimes become quite angry.”
Lincoln tried to calm his general in chief, apologizing for the misunderstanding and assuring McClellan that he was only trying to make him aware of the deteriorating political situation. The president explained to McClellan that he needed to be more careful, and he also needed some real success on the battlefield—now. Nothing less would silence his detractors. But with his fine-tuned sense of honor offended, the general would have none of it. He repeated that he could not have his name spoken in the same sentence with that horrible word.
Then McClellan had an idea. He was meeting that morning with the senior generals of the Army of the Potomac. He offered to poll them as to the wisdom of his current strategy. Surely Lincoln would trust them, wouldn’t he? So it was that, a short time later, McClellan sent the generals from his headquarters across Lafayette Square to report their conclusions to Lincoln and Stanton.
The people on the sidewalks watching this bustle of braid and brass buttons could hardly have imagined the dysfunction behind it. The secretary of war feared that the general in chief was secretly conspiring with the enemy, so the outraged general in chief was parading his subordinates before the president as character witnesses. The vote of the generals was eight to four in favor of McClellan’s proposed plan to sail down the coast and attack Richmond, over Lincoln’s preferred approach of attacking the Rebels at Manassas, where they were still believed to be entrenched. A fuming Stanton cross-examined the division commanders, ultimately concluding that they were “afraid to fight.” Lincoln professed not to care about which strategy the generals pursued, as long as the army got moving. “All I ask is for you to just pitch in,” he exhorted the group.
But he did care. Months later, he was still telling friends “that his opinion always had been that the great fight should have been at Manassas,” but that he gave in because the majority of the generals opposed him. After the awkward meeting broke up, Lincoln issued two orders, both of which indicated his continuing lack of trust in McClellan’s judgment. The first directed the overworked general to reorganize his army into four corps under the leadership of his four most senior generals. As it happened, all of these men were skeptical to one degree or another of McClellan and his plans. Whether they had earned Lincoln’s confidence by their years of experience, or by their independence from McClellan, the effect was the same: the president would not allow Little Mac to promote his friends and favorites. Lincoln’s second order was even more pointed. He set a hard deadline: the Army of the Potomac was to begin executing McClellan’s plan within the next ten days—but not before the new corps commanders agreed that the capital was completely safe.
No doubt Lincoln believed that by appointing these seasoned generals as auditors of McClellan’s movements he was protecting both his general in chief and his administration against suspicions of perfidy or incompetence. But the effect of his two orders was to launch the Union’s vast military campaign under a cloud of mistrust and miscommunication.
* * *
While the generals were meeting with Lincoln, a strange and fear
some craft was slowly steaming north from Norfolk toward Hampton Roads, looking, in the words of one observer, “like a house submerged to the eaves, borne onward by a flood.” It was the Confederate ship Virginia, once known as USS Merrimack, a 275-foot, forty-gun wooden frigate that had been, for a short time, the U.S. Navy’s finest warship.
When Rebel guns fired on Fort Sumter, the Merrimack was docked in the navy yard at Norfolk for repairs. Rather than allow the ship to fall into Confederate hands, the officer in charge of the yard ordered her burned and sunk. But soon the Rebels raised the hulk. Great hopes were pinned on the restoration project: scrap iron was salvaged from ships and railroads around the Confederacy and sent to the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, where it was recycled into armor plates. The plates were then bolted to pine timbers two feet thick, backed by another four inches of solid oak. Fashioned into a sloping structure with firing ports for four guns on each side and pivot guns fore and aft, the iron cladding and heavy timbers made the formidable craft as unwieldy as it was impervious. A fifteen-hundred-pound iron ram, attached to the prow just below the waterline, completed the rechristened ship’s menacing array.
Admirals the world over had known for several years that the long age of wooden warships was coming to an end. The first armored ship in the world, La Gloire, was built by the French in 1858, and the British quickly followed with HMS Warrior and the recently completed Ironside. Those ships had not been battle tested, however, so this was the day and the place that would usher in the modern age of naval warfare.
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