Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Lincoln’s careful steps toward emancipation were closely observed in the capital. After reflecting on the president’s actions, Charles Sumner assured his abolitionist friends that the end of slavery was not far off. Critical, in his view, was the strategy of turning the war into a cause, for that was the only way to prevent a foreign intervention. “Give us emancipation & the terrible strife will be glorified,” he wrote. In another letter, while praising Lincoln’s “calmness, sagacity & firmness,” Sumner reported with emphatic underlining: “Stanton told me this morning that a decree of emancipation would be issued within two months.”

  * * *

  Sumner wasn’t alone in feeling hopeful. For this brief moment, buoyed by the capture of New Orleans and the movement toward Richmond, something like genuine optimism surged through Washington and the North. It was not the bravado and false hopes so familiar to Unionists, but a well-founded confidence that the United States would soon triumph over the rebellion and embark on a happier future.

  Lightheartedness bloomed in the normally sour and quarrelsome Lincoln cabinet. Jealous, perhaps, of Stanton and Chase after their adventure with Lincoln on the peninsula, Gideon Welles organized his own reconnaissance, with Seward and Bates in tow. Accompanied by friends and family, the three men made a jaunty tour of McClellan’s army (“Such visits are always a nuisance,” huffed Little Mac) and traveled to Norfolk, where the citizens “looked sulky and dogged.” The secretaries sparred and poked fun at one another: Welles teased Seward for being afraid to get too close to the Rebel army, while Seward was delighted when rats raided Bates’s luggage, stealing a tie and a sock. Seward wrote a little poem celebrating the theft, and doodled pictures to illustrate it. All three men joined in making fun of the absent Lincoln’s eccentricities.

  Congress, feeling bullish, looked ahead, not just to the next battle, but to the distant future of a Union that now seemed likely to endure. West of the Mississippi lay millions of acres of new and rich frontier—land that set the fuse on the current conflict. Previous generations of Americans had been able to live with uneasy compromises over slavery, but those compromises broke down when the time came to open the West. As early as 1856, small armies of pro- and antislavery men were waging bloody battles over the fate of slavery in the Kansas Territory. In a sense, the Civil War began on the frontier, so it was appropriate that in the midst of a conflict pitting North against South, Washington never lost sight of the West.

  Three bills before the Congress spoke to the Union’s expansive view. There was the Homestead Act, championed by Speaker of the House Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania; in May, it cleared the Senate by a wide margin, having sailed through the House in February. There was a bill, introduced by Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont, to make large grants of land in the West to every loyal state for the purpose of endowing public colleges. Morrill’s bill moved smoothly through the committee system, meeting scant resistance. And finally, there was the bill to authorize and fund the transcontinental railroad. Ever since gold was discovered in California in 1848, the idea of building a railroad that would extend all the way to the Pacific had been endlessly debated, but the project had always been stymied by regional strife. As secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, Jefferson Davis tried to site the railroad in the South, while the Republican hero Frémont scouted a more northerly route with the support of his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Secession had broken the stalemate; a railroad would be built. A multitude of lobbyists descended and a frantic and often underhanded free-for-all broke out over the contracts to build this colossal infrastructure project; in May, the necessary bill passed the House and moved over to the Senate.

  So many grand designs were launched in these fateful months that they began to overlap and blur. A case in point: In late April and early May, a forward-thinking businessman named A. J. Isacks, a partner in one of the many ventures aiming to cash in on the transcontinental railroad, got to thinking about how, exactly, his firm would do the work, given that no one in it had ever laid an inch of track. As he pondered, it dawned on him that the matter of slavery, which had seemed entirely separate from his business concerns, was in fact quite relevant. Suppose his putative railroad line employed former slaves to build its tracks, he speculated. Contrabands could be hired for “a small amount of money.” And when he said “small,” he meant it: he proposed paying the former slaves perhaps as little as “one dollar per month each,” along with clothing and provisions, “which it is supposed would amount to four or five dollars per month to each person.” Perhaps realizing that $60 a year was not much different from slavery, Isacks added halfheartedly that his company could pay “the remainder in land.” But this notion was little short of fantastical, because even in the West, ex-slaves weren’t likely to be welcome after the war. As Isacks himself allowed: “The greatest objection to the plan would be in permitting them to settle upon the land.”

  Lincoln was keenly aware of this problem of the freed slaves; in fact, he had been thinking about it since he was a young man. In his early twenties, as he put down the roots of his political philosophy, he impressed his neighbors in tiny New Salem, Illinois, by reading a biography of Henry Clay written by the famous Kentucky newspaper editor George Prentice. It was 1831, and the impending presidential election would prove to be a catalyst of the American two-party system. Clay’s attempt to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Andrew Jackson, fell far short, but it further crystallized the Whig vision of an entrepreneurial American system of free enterprise, robust manufacturing, and equal opportunity. The idea of a society by and for self-made men, bootstrappers like himself, inspired the young Lincoln and convinced him that Clay was “my ideal of a great man.”

  In his biography, Prentice devoted careful attention to Clay’s nuanced views on slavery. The Great Compromiser abhorred the institution, Prentice wrote, considering it “a deadly vampyre draining away the life blood of the republic.” But Clay didn’t blame slaveholders for an evil that they themselves did not create. Nor did Clay believe that the Constitution gave power to the federal government to end slavery. Time, plus “stream upon stream of philanthropy,” would gradually emancipate the slaves, Clay asserted. And when that time came, the next step would be to relocate the freed slaves in distant colonies set up to receive them. Clay was a driving force behind the American Colonization Society, which argued that blacks were better off in Africa, where they could “introduce the blessings of civilization into … the darkened moral atmosphere of that ill fated continent.” The colony of Liberia was the society’s most enduring project.

  Lincoln’s own gradualist approach to ending slavery was strongly shaped by the views of his political idol. Through the spring of 1862, Lincoln pressed the advantages of voluntary colonization. If necessary, he suggested, Congress should appropriate money to buy territory for a black colony “in a climate congenial to them,” because white Americans weren’t ready to share their society with large numbers of free blacks. As he explained in a speech long before he became president: “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” But in that same 1854 speech Lincoln acknowledged the monumental difficulties involved in relocating millions of people to adequate homes in a distant colony. Eight years later the idea remained utterly impractical, and despite Lincoln’s appeals, Clay’s prescriptions gained little traction with either Congress or the public.

  * * *

  Just as the Union’s cause seemed to be surging, the rush of events abruptly slowed to a creep, or so it seemed as McClellan drew up his lines within earshot of Richmond’s church bells and Halleck crawled slowly with his massive army toward Beauregard’s Rebels at Corinth. Having urged speed for so many months, Lincoln himself turned suddenly cautious, warning Halleck to “be very sure to sustain no reverse in your Department.”

  Old Brains was very sure indeed, pausing every
thousand yards or so to entrench his 100,000 men. His advance was less an attack than “a siege from start to close,” in the words of Ulysses Grant. The aggressive Grant chafed miserably in the ceremonial position of second in command; while his conduct at Shiloh was under review, he was, as he later reflected, “little more than an observer” to Halleck’s tedious exercise. Ground covered in two days by the raw Rebels attacking Shiloh in early April was a matter of a monthlong journey for the tiptoeing Union forces. John Pope—fresh from his victory at Island No. 10 and advancing on the left wing—couldn’t bear the pace and kept sidling forward to skirmish with the enemy. Each time, Halleck hauled him back.

  Sherman was more contented. His reputation had survived the Shiloh imbroglio; having been promoted to major general for his stalwart conduct at the great battle, Cump was “in high feather” and felt “fully vindicated,” according to his wife; also, he greatly admired Halleck’s skills. The slog to Corinth, in fact, revealed enduring personality signatures in both Sherman and Grant. The high-strung Sherman tended to see worst-case scenarios wherever he looked. On the road to Corinth, he fretted over the catastrophic cost of a defeat at this delicate moment, and he therefore praised Halleck for taking every precaution. Sherman was perhaps too intense for any experience short of pitched battle; gunfire seemed to calm his jitters.

  Grant, on the other hand, was an optimistic sort, whose motor ran only in forward gears. With every trudging step of Halleck’s army, Grant saw the opportunities that might have been: he imagined dashing into Corinth, racing over to Chattanooga, or sweeping down on Vicksburg before the Confederates could fortify the imposing bluffs of that last potential Mississippi River citadel. Grant’s misery over the loss of his combat command caused him to overestimate the likely success of these potential initiatives—none was remotely as easy as he suggested—and he fell into such a funk that he considered quitting the army. On May 11, he wrote to Halleck asking to be given a real command or “to be relieved entirely from further duty.”

  As acting general in chief, Lincoln, too, had perhaps become overconfident about progress in the western theater. After the capture of New Orleans, Farragut had taken his boats unmolested up the Mississippi to demand the surrender of Vicksburg; city officials refused, but many on the Union side considered their defiance a trifling matter. The opening of the great river from top to bottom was generally seen as an accomplished fact, with only a bit of mop-up to do at Memphis and Vicksburg. Lincoln, usually so strategic in his thinking, suffered an unusual lapse of concentration. Instead of pressing his advantage in the West, he put down the whip and left Halleck to his own devices. He continued to pursue his interests in the technology of war, making several trips to the navy yard in May to join Dahlgren in examining the latest artillery innovations. And he enjoyed testing rifles in the company of a young White House secretary, William O. Stoddard. Taking shots at a woodpile south of the mansion one morning, Lincoln remarked: “Our folks are not getting near enough to the enemy to do any good.… We’ve got to get guns that’ll carry further.”

  McClellan and Richmond, not Halleck and Corinth, were the president’s prime focus now. After taking Yorktown, Little Mac was free to move troops and supplies along the York River, speeding his progress despite rain and sloppy roads. As he moved, the general continued his urgent calls for reinforcements, for he imagined the Confederate army to be roughly twice its actual size. “My entire force is undoubtedly considerably inferior to that of the Rebels, who still fight well, but I will do all I can with the force at my disposal,” he wired Stanton at the War Department. To his friend Ambrose Burnside, he put matters more melodramatically. Should he be forced to fight without more troops, McClellan declared, “If I win, the greater the glory. If I lose they”—he meant Lincoln and Stanton—“will be damned forever, both by God and men.”

  The president was not deaf to McClellan’s pleas. In the days following his return from Fort Monroe, Lincoln completed plans to accommodate Little Mac’s pleas, at least partially. The Union now had some 200,000 troops dispersed in a wide arc across Virginia, from Fort Monroe in the east to Franklin in the mountainous west. Roughly half of these men were with McClellan on the peninsula. Another quarter of the force, approximately, was gathering in McDowell’s camps between Washington and Richmond. McClellan was desperate to have McDowell’s troops sent to him by boat as quickly as possible, but Lincoln was still skittish about leaving the path to Washington unmanned. He was reasonably certain, though, that the Rebel striking power was now all south of McDowell’s position, and it seemed that the rumored counterattack of April had evaporated.

  Accordingly, Lincoln decided to order McDowell toward Richmond by the overland route. This way, the Union advance would be akin to a stopper being forced deeper into a bottle; even as McDowell’s troops moved farther into Rebel territory, they would continue to be a protective barrier for Washington. Then, after a march of fifty or sixty miles, McDowell’s left wing would connect with McClellan’s right wing on the doorstep of the Confederate capital.

  There was only one hitch: the Shenandoah Valley. A seeming paradise of rolling fields and low mountains, the valley was, to men who understood it, a nearly perfect maze in which to operate a light, quick force against a larger, lumbering army. Unfortunately for the Union, none of its generals did understand the valley yet; worse, an army in butternut uniforms was just then marching at the top of the valley toward a little town called Staunton with an audacious plan to prevent the launching of McDowell’s men. The lean, tough Rebel troops, many of them barefoot, were led by a lush-bearded man of strange temperament and habits, whose name was Thomas Jonathan Jackson. Ever since he stemmed the Yankee tide at the battle of Manassas, people had called him Stonewall.

  * * *

  The outbreak of war found Stonewall Jackson on the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where he’d come to appreciate the Shenandoah Valley’s strategic advantages through long hours of study in the institute’s map library. A distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, Professor Jackson stood out in Lexington as an odd duck, a religious zealot who habitually sucked on lemons and periodically pumped his left hand violently in the air to regulate his blood flow. “He seems to be cut off from his fellow men and to commune with his own spirit only, or with spirits of which we know not,” one associate wrote of Jackson. The intense focus that made him a notoriously dull teacher also made him an electrifying combat general, the sort of man who could demand far too much from his troops and yet be unshakably confident that they would deliver. Jackson knew a simple truth about men in armies: even more than shoes or food or sleep, they crave victory.

  He also knew, from his map study, that the Shenandoah Valley could be a kind of magic box. Striped north to south by a series of ranges and ridges, the valley allowed an army to be seen one moment and disappear the next, simply by slipping through a gap or pass. It was the perfect place to practice Jackson’s philosophy of war: “Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy.”

  Jackson had given the Union its first lesson in valley warfare in March, when he popped up in Kernstown to attack a Union force preparing to leave the vicinity. This led to Lincoln’s decision to deploy an army under Nathaniel Banks to pacify the valley, and by the first of May, the former speaker of the house felt confident in his success. Jackson’s army, Banks reported, was skedaddling, “bound for Richmond. This is the fact, I have no doubt.”

  In the wake of this apparent good news, Lincoln ordered one of Banks’s divisions, commanded by the Irish politician James Shields, to leave the valley and join McDowell. Jackson promptly reappeared and delivered lesson number two, this time at a railway junction in Staunton, west of Charlottesville. There, he confronted the oncoming army of John Frémont. On May 8, Frémont threw 6,000 men at Jackson’s Rebels, who proceeded to push the Federals backward in an afternoon of hot fighting. Then, once again, Jackson’s army vanished.

  During the following week, as Banks and his army stood
guard in the deceptively quiet valley, Lincoln decided it was finally time to order McDowell forward. Communications between McClellan and Stanton had by now broken down almost entirely, but according to intelligence that McClellan sent to Lincoln, “the enemy were concentrating all their available force”—presumably including Jackson’s troops—around Richmond. At the same time, Lincoln was being assured that Halleck faced a great mass of Rebels at Corinth. With such large concentrations of Confederate troops reported at both places, the threat of a Rebel offensive down the valley seemed minimal.

  On May 17, by secret order, Lincoln directed McDowell to head south and link up with McClellan. But Stonewall Jackson, who was not in Richmond or anywhere near it, had a plan to stop him. The fierce-eyed Jackson put his army in motion—heading north.

  * * *

  If the president felt relatively sanguine about the current progress of the war, he found much to concern him at home. “I feel worried about Mary; her nerves have gone to pieces,” Lincoln confided around this time. “She cannot hide from me that the strain she has been under has been too much for her mental as well as her physical health.” Adding to her grief over Willie’s death and the strain attending her scandalous finances, there came a third blow: Mary received word that her half-brother Samuel Todd had died of wounds suffered while fighting on the Confederate side at Shiloh. Weeks later, she remained so sick with sorrow that she found it impossible to answer a letter of condolence from a Springfield friend.