Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

About 6 p.m. [after] pushing out about twenty pieces of artillery from their front, followed by four lines of solid infantry colors flying, as if on parade, [the Confederates] advanced at a run with terrifying yells, heard all above the crash of musketry and roar of artillery. We now opened on them with terrible effects.… Several times our infantry withheld their fire until the Rebel column, which rushed through the storm of canister and grape, [came] close up to the artillery. Our men then poured a single crashing volley of musketry and charged the enemy with the bayonet with cheers. [We] thus captured many prisoners and colors and drove the remainder in confusion from the field. These would rally under cover of the woods and charge again, but only to be met with the same murderous volleys of shot, shell, and bullets, leaving piles of dead and dying on the plateau along our front. Hundreds of poor maimed wretches were continually crawling on hands and knees across the open, many of whom were killed before they regained shelter in the woods. The Rebel cavalry were seen driving the remnants of regiments out of the woods into the open ground, and were shooting all those who did not keep in line and “face the music.” As the charging columns came up to within 150 yards of our artillery, whole ranks went down at once, battle flags rose and disappeared. Officers on horseback threw their sword arm in the air and [tumbled] to the ground. Riderless horses were running in every direction, while officers on foot were far in advance of their commands, shouting and yelling like madmen.

  The week’s carnage was hideous: some 20,000 Confederates dead, wounded, or missing, plus 16,000 more from the Union. As at Shiloh, the Rebels gave everything they had, yet failed to break a Union army. But where Grant had beheld disaster and seen through it to victory, McClellan looked on a golden opportunity and saw only defeat. Despite the chaos of battle, he should have been able to discern that Lee had hit the Union right with the majority of his force and thus left only a thin line between the bulk of the Federal army and the streets of Richmond. Now, the Rebels were divided by the river and vulnerable on one wing. With the chance to deliver a devastating blow to the Confederacy directly before him, though, the Young Napoleon lacked the nerve to attack.

  The critical moment occurred on June 27, the second day of fighting for Porter’s V Corps. A terrible bloodletting at Gaines’ Mill left Lee’s shock force decimated. Near the end of the day, the Rebels finally broke Porter’s line, but the Federals fell back safely south of the Chickahominy and destroyed the bridge. Now the time was ripe for a counterattack: the Union troops all together faced Lee’s thin line, while the bulk of the Rebel force was stranded on the opposite bank. McClellan, however, could think only of defensive maneuvers and the nearness of disaster. He would not go forward; he would fall back to a new base of operations.

  Even as he made the decision, McClellan knew his critics would call it a retreat. And although he was not a general who led from the front—indeed, he spent most of the Seven Days far from any battlefield—he latched onto the idea that he might die in the next day, leaving his side of this history unrecorded. Shortly after midnight, he took up his pen to defend himself and indict his superiors.

  “Had I (20,000) twenty thousand or even (10,000) ten thousand fresh troops to use tomorrow I could take Richmond,” he informed Washington. “But I have not a man in reserve.” This wasn’t true: most of his force was fairly fresh, having seen only jabs and feints by the 25,000 Rebels on the Union left. But McClellan and the rest of the Federal high command were convinced that those 25,000 were actually 100,000, poised to crush the Union army come morning. “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this.”

  The general might have stopped there, but as he wrote he grew angrier and more self-righteous. Letting slip the hatred he had accumulated over six long months, he accused Stanton and Lincoln of “needlessly sacrific[ing]” the brave men of his army. He knew this was grossly insubordinate and tried halfheartedly to excuse himself: “I feel too earnestly tonight—I have seen too many dead & wounded comrades to feel otherwise.” But if he was to die with his men in the morning, he would not go out on an apologetic note. “The Government has not sustained this army,” he wrote. Then he closed with a paragraph so outrageous that the officer in charge of the telegraph took it on himself to delete it before carrying the message to Stanton. “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.”

  “They will never forgive me for that,” McClellan later told his wife. “I knew it when I wrote it; but as I thought it possible that it might be the last I ever wrote, it seemed better to have it exactly true.”

  * * *

  McClellan’s salvo landed some one hundred miles to the north in a capital once again nearly mad with speculation, half-truths, and whole lies. “The city here is wild with rumors and suspense,” Nicolay wrote on June 29. He described huge crowds, starved for information, gathered on Newspaper Row, across Fourteenth Street from Willard’s. There, the papers maintained a large bulletin board on the sidewalk to feed the maw between editions, but the gruel was often thin. “This morning … several persons reached the city who left Fortress Monroe yesterday, and of course brought with them all the rumors prevailing there. These have been caught up here and repeated with their usual additions and embellishments,” Nicolay explained. “Some enterprising newsgatherer has collated these, sifted an intelligent report out of them as nearly as he could, and posted it up on the bulletin board.”

  Lincoln, however, was able to draw several clear conclusions about events on the peninsula. First, his commanding general was almost completely unbalanced. Accustomed to hyperbole and melodrama from McClellan, the president now was dealing with something like hysteria. “The evident panic and mental perturbation which pierced through [the telegram’s] incoherence filled the President with such dismay that its mutinous insolence was overlooked,” Lincoln’s secretaries reported. “He could only wonder what terrible catastrophe … could have wrung such a terrible outcry as this from the general.” Lincoln did his best to calm McClellan. “Save your Army at all events,” he wired back. “Will send reinforcements,” he added, although of course fresh troops could not arrive in time.

  Where McClellan pronounced the battle “lost,” Lincoln offered a less dire interpretation: “If you have had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington. We protected Washington, and the enemy concentrated on you; had we stripped Washington, he would have been upon us.… It is the nature of the case,” he concluded, “and neither you or the government is to blame.” Sensing that McClellan exaggerated the danger, Lincoln wasn’t surprised the next day when a reporter from the Baltimore American stopped by the White House with an eyewitness account of Porter’s orderly crossing of the Chickahominy. “On the whole,” Lincoln said, “I think we had the better of it up to that point.”

  The second conclusion settled over him as it became apparent that McClellan would decline to advance on Richmond: the end of the war was not at hand. The Rebels in Virginia were just as determined as the troops who had stoked the inferno at Shiloh. In fact, as far as Lincoln and his advisers knew, they might be the very same men. That was a key to the problem: the Confederates still controlled enough of the Southern interior to allow troops to move back and forth from west to east. As long as the Confederacy could shift its limited manpower along compact interior lines, the South would have the means to resist. Furthermore, if McClellan was correct and the Rebels from Corinth had shifted to Richmond, then the Army of the Potomac would have to be reinforced. But this presented a familiar dilemma: Lincoln felt he couldn’t send the necessary divisions from Washington, because once the Federals embarked on their boats, Lee’s Rebels might well board trains to Manassas and then sack the capital—which would almost certainly invite a foreign intervention to end the conflict.

  Another possibility, stripping Union troops from the West to reinforce McCl
ellan, was equally unappealing, since it would give Jefferson Davis the option of sacrificing Richmond in exchange for the richer prizes of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. Lincoln resolved that the proper strategy was, as Scott had said a few days earlier at West Point, “to hold what we have in the West, open the Mississippi, and take Chattanooga & East Tennessee,” while at the same time trying to maintain “a reasonable force” around Washington and reinforce McClellan with new troops.

  Executing this strategy would mean reopening the recruiting offices. But how could he do that? His mail was already full of vitriolic criticism; the newspapers were crowded with second-guessing. To call now for fresh troops would be such a sign of weakness and miscalculation that, as the president confessed to Seward, “I fear a general panic and stampede would follow.”

  Lincoln was at a crossroads. His original theory of the war—that it could be won in short order as the rebellion broke from within—was wrong. He now faced a stark choice: he could either surrender to the Southern insurrection or ask the North for a commitment far greater than he or anyone else could have imagined when the conflict began. And once enlistment resumed, it wouldn’t end until the war was won.

  At this critical moment, Lincoln briefly turned away from the crisis on the peninsula to do a favor for one of Mary’s cousins. The cousin’s son, Quintin Campbell, was a first-year student at West Point and hated it. Lincoln had never met the boy, but Mary asked him to send a letter of encouragement, which he did on June 28. It was one of the president’s small masterpieces, a fine example of the precision his writing had attained under the time pressures imposed by the war. And though it was addressed to the cadet, the message can also be read, under the circumstances, as Lincoln’s attempt to bolster his own resolve:

  Your good mother tells me you are feeling very badly in your new situation. Allow me to assure you it is a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better—quite happy—if you will only stick to the resolution you have taken.… I am older than you, have felt badly myself, and know, what I tell you is true. Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.

  That same day, Lincoln told Seward: “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or the Congress or the country forsakes me.” Seward in turn carried this message to New York, where he met with Northern governors to arrange the call for troops. All feared the political price Lincoln would pay for requesting more men, and together they hit on the idea of having the governors take the first step by offering to raise new regiments.

  This transparently political strategy may not have made many voters feel better. But it’s likely that Lincoln felt a bit less lonely when, on July 1, he issued a call for 300,000 men. In a reassuring telegram to McClellan, the president wrote: “We still have strength enough in the country, and will bring it out.”

  * * *

  Lincoln’s third conclusion in those last days of June followed from the second. If the war was to go on, he must play all the cards in his hand—including military emancipation of the enemy’s slaves. During the tense days during and after the week of the Seven Days battles, when communications with the peninsula were spotty and Seward’s mission to the governors required careful attention, Lincoln spent long hours in the telegraph office at the War Department, monitoring traffic. One morning, he asked Major Thomas Eckert, chief of the telegraph staff, for some paper and set to work slowly and methodically on what was clearly an important document.

  “He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper, but he did not write much at once,” Eckert recalled. After a few words, he would pause and stare out the window again, often watching the spiders that worked in a large web beyond the glass. “And when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two, and then sit quiet for a few minutes.” Stopping to read fresh dispatches and trade jokes with the young wire operators, Lincoln never finished so much as one full page on any day. At the end of each day, as he rose to leave, he would ask Eckert to store the papers, which the major could see were speckled with question marks. Come morning, Lincoln resumed his work, painstakingly revising the lines he had written the day before. There was no margin for error.

  8

  JULY

  While his men were preparing to kill and die in the suffocating heat at Malvern Hill, George McClellan took a boat ride down the James River to survey Berkeley Plantation, the ancestral home of the venerable Harrison family of Virginia, which had already given the nation one president and in time would give another. Little Mac’s absence on the morning of July 1 was taken in stride: “The Army of the Potomac has fought so many battles without General McClellan’s supervision or assistance, that he is not missed when the fighting commences!” one soldier on the headquarters staff remarked.

  At the plantation shipyard, known as Harrison’s Landing, McClellan found an imposing redbrick mansion rising above the river, and a long pier stretching to meet steamboat traffic. By some accounts the house was the oldest three-story brick residence in Virginia, built in 1726 by slaves belonging to Benjamin Harrison IV on land settled by colonists not long after Jamestown. The house had been standing half a century when Harrison’s son signed the Declaration of Independence; the arched interior doorways were a modernizing update designed by a family friend, Thomas Jefferson. McClellan now chose this cradle of the endangered Republic in which to bivouac his army. With the landing as his base, the river as his supply line, and a fleet of Union gunboats to scare away the Rebels, the general felt confident that he could safely await the reinforcements he meant to demand from the scoundrels in Washington. While he waited, he would make preparations to renew his discombobulated campaign.

  After surveying the plantation, McClellan ordered his battle captains to fight at Malvern Hill until dark, then give up the bloody ground for a six-mile retreat to Berkeley. That night, the army trudged down the river valley through heavy rain, and the next day Union signalmen waved flags on the rooftop of the mansion while surgeons sawed off limbs on the lawn. Exhausted soldiers pitched their tents—if they still had them after a week of night marches—in the low, muddy fields.

  Many of McClellan’s men were baffled and frustrated by the experience of winning battles but losing ground, especially when that ground was littered with their wounded comrades, abandoned to the enemy. In a proclamation marking the Fourth of July, the general tried to explain that their retreat was actually a military triumph. “Attacked by vastly superior forces, and without hope of reinforcements, you have succeeded in changing your base of operations by a flank movement, always regarded as the most hazardous of military expedients,” he congratulated them. From Washington, Lincoln encouraged this optimistic view, wiring McClellan to let him know that a smuggled copy of a Richmond newspaper praised the Union movement as “a masterpiece of strategy.” In truth, however, no one was happy about the loss of so many men and supplies and guns on a grueling march to this place that, however historic, was roughly fifteen miles farther away from Richmond than where the army had begun. Lincoln, for one, felt worse than ever before. “When the Peninsular campaign terminated suddenly at Harrison’s Landing, I was as nearly inconsolable as I could be and live,” he later recalled.

  Judged calmly and soberly, the army’s new location was at least as good as the abandoned position on the outskirts of Richmond, and probably better. Harrison’s Landing solved the problem of the confounded Chickahominy, and supply lines were simpler. Indeed, McClellan likely would have chosen this as a base of operations at the beginning of his campaign had it not been for the ironclad Virginia menacing the waterway. Now clear, the James River allowed the navy to add its guns to McClellan’s arsenal; the river also offered the option of trying to strangle Richmond by cutting its railroad link to the deep South.

  But it was difficult to remain calm
and sober when the violence of the Seven Days battles was so brutally tangible, both in Virginia and in Washington. In the capital, evidence of the bloodshed was everywhere one looked. Nearly every church had been converted into a hospital for wounded troops arriving by boat, and each new train coming into Washington station disgorged more parents and wives and siblings in search of lost soldiers. The city’s muggy air reeked of infection and death; routine scenes were tinted with gore. A passenger riding on a train from Washington to New York shared a compartment with three officers from the peninsula: “One shot through the leg below the knee, and one through the arm, and one through the neck.” As these bandaged gentlemen loudly described the fighting and criticized the administration, a man boarded at Baltimore whose only son had been killed in the fighting. He had tried to go south for the remains, and was returning home empty-handed and hysterical with grief. As the first passenger described the scene: “He would quote scripture, smite his fists together, roll up his sleeves, cry & laugh a sort of laugh that made me feel worse than his crying.”

  Faced with such a grim harvest, spirits sank and fear took hold. “I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began,” wrote Nicolay. “I am utterly amazed to find so little real faith and courage under difficulties among public leaders and men of intelligence. The average public mind is becoming alarmingly sensational. A single reverse or piece of accidental ill-luck is enough to throw them all into the horrors of despair.” Montgomery Meigs panicked one night after reading a pessimistic dispatch from McClellan’s new base. He raced from the War Department through the dark night to the Soldiers’ Home and rattled the door of the president’s cottage. When Lincoln woke, the general urged him to order an immediate retreat. Burn the supplies, slaughter the mules and horses, and pack the army onto boats, he pleaded. Lincoln calmed Meigs and sent him home.