Panic breeds where the unknown meets the unexpected. After the string of triumphs earlier in the year, few in the North had expected anything like the repeated strikes by the elusive Stonewall Jackson, or the violent blow of Lee’s Seven Days hammer. The rebellion was supposed to be weak and the end near; now, a victory that had been thought imminent was suddenly feared impossible. Mary Lincoln’s handler, Benjamin French, looked back through his journal after the Seven Days to see just “how long we have all been expecting that Richmond would be taken!” The sharp counterthrust of the Rebels had shattered that confidence, he wrote, “and I now almost despair of our ever taking Richmond.”
The irresistible impulse, given such a shocking reversal, was to assign blame. What had been whispered was now shouted: Democrats accused the administration of deliberately sabotaging McClellan’s plans. Talk of a coup to install McClellan as military dictator reemerged from the Washington shadows. Republicans, for their part, charged McClellan with near treasonous pampering of the enemy and demanded his replacement. While Lincoln stood at the vanishing center and struggled to hold things together, his Union coalition was being ripped apart.
* * *
No one was more aware than Lincoln of his precarious position. Around this time, the president received a delegation of prominent New England abolitionists, who admonished him to take a stronger stand against slavery. A long pause followed; then Lincoln surprised his visitors by asking whether they recalled “that a few years ago Blondin walked across a tightrope stretched over the falls of Niagara.”
Of course they remembered. Lincoln was referring to a series of dazzling and well-publicized stunts by the tightrope walker Jean-François Gravelet, known as the Great Blondin. In 1859, Gravelet made a series of crossings over the roaring water: he pushed a wheelbarrow, stopped to cook an omelet, even carried his manager on his back. Lincoln had visited Niagara Falls in 1848 and the experience left an indelible impression; now the image of a man making his way along a three-inch rope above that sublime and terrifying force struck home for him.
One of the visitors later recalled the president’s words: “Suppose,” Lincoln said, “that all the material values in this great country of ours, from the Atlantic to the Pacific—its wealth, its prosperity, its achievements in the present and its hopes for the future—could all have been concentrated, and given to Blondin to carry over that awful crossing and that their preservation should have depended upon his ability to somehow get them across to the other side.” And suppose “you had been standing upon the shore as he was going over, as he was carefully feeling his way along and balancing his pole with all his most delicate skill over the thundering cataract. Would you have shouted at him, ‘Blondin, a step to the right!’ ‘Blondin, a step to the left!’ Or would you have stood there speechless, and held your breath and prayed to the Almighty to guide and help him safely through the trial?”
But even some who claimed to be the president’s friends seemed determined to tip him from his tightrope. The wealthy young governor of Rhode Island, William Sprague, insisted on planning a trip to Mississippi to extend a personal plea to Halleck to rush east with 50,000 men to reinforce McClellan. Could Lincoln give him a letter of introduction to the general? Although the president hoped Halleck might be able to spare McClellan a division, to pull so many of the Union’s troops from the West would have been madness. As Lincoln explained to a newsman, “We had better put Richmond off six months than have any backward movement in the West.” Given the chance, the Confederates would immediately retake Tennessee and northern Mississippi, and Kentucky and Missouri would unquestionably be at risk. Moreover, “the closing of the [Mississippi] river would have a bad moral effect” on U.S. efforts in England and France. Lincoln therefore had to find a way to indulge the influential Sprague without seeming to offer his stamp of approval; his resulting letter to Halleck was a pretzel of diplomatic contortions.
About the same time, an important associate from Illinois, the congressman-turned-general John McClernand, was cooking up a plan to detach his own large force from the western army to save the day on the peninsula. Lincoln could not afford to alienate McClernand, whose political support he needed in the upcoming congressional elections. Again he was forced to appear to accommodate a friend’s ambitions while keeping those ambitions focused in the West.
Lincoln’s most pressing task—the next step over the abyss—was to figure out just how bad things were. In this McClellan was no help. Though the general prided himself on his cool rationality, his messages from Harrison’s Landing continued to border on the delusional. His calls for reinforcements seemed to pull numbers from thin air. To John Dix at Fort Monroe, Little Mac wrote that “even a thousand fresh men would do much,” and the next day he thanked Lincoln in advance for “every thousand men you send.” At the same time, however, he was asking the War Department for “fifty thousand,” and, two days later, “100,000 men.” A scant nine months had passed since McClellan blithely advised Lincoln that the whole state of Tennessee could be cleared of Rebels and kept secure with only 20,000 troops plus local volunteers. Now he was calling for an extra 100,000 to take a single city in Virginia.
Lincoln tried to inject a note of reality: “It is impossible to re-inforce you for your present emergency,” he cabled McClellan as the Seven Days battles raged. “If we had a million of men we could not get them to you in time. We have not the men to send.” The next day, he tried again: “Allow me to reason with you a moment. When you ask for fifty thousand men to be promptly sent you, you surely labor under some gross mistake of fact.… I have not, outside of your Army, seventy-five thousand men East of the mountains. Thus, the idea of sending you fifty thousand, or any other considerable force promptly, is simply absurd.”
McClellan, however, was past the point of believing what Lincoln was telling him. Still more troubling were his wild mood swings. Two messages sent just an hour apart on Independence Day must have left the president wondering whether McClellan was losing his sanity. The first, written about noon, was an unnerving description of an army at risk of destruction: “The enemy may attack us in vast numbers and if so our front will be the scene of a desperate battle which if lost will be decisive. Our Army is fearfully weakened. Our communications by the James river are not secure.” That was soon followed by another telegram so completely different in tone and attitude that it was as if General Hyde had wakened to find himself General Jekyll: “Bands playing, salutes being fired & all things looking bright,” McClellan chirped. Only thirty-six hours later, he was General Hyde again, warning his wife that he expected the next morning to bring a battle that would “determine the fate of the country.”
Pressing his case, McClellan sent his chief of staff, Randolph Marcy, to Washington to plead for more men. Marcy infuriated Lincoln by saying that the army might have to “capitulate” unless it received massive reinforcements. Scolded by the president for his defeatist language, Marcy explained he was only speaking of hypothetical possibilities.
* * *
With such unreliable sources, Lincoln decided he must see McClellan’s army for himself. On July 7, he boarded the steamer Ariel at the navy yard, bound for the James River. After setting off, Lincoln realized that he had neglected a promise to send his son some money, so the presidential yacht paused at Fort Monroe the next morning to drop off an urgent wire to Nicolay: “Please borrow and send Bob Two hundred and Eighty (280) dollars.” Upriver at Harrison’s Landing, the president’s ship was met by an exuberant McClellan, who hurried the length of the thousand-foot pier despite the sweltering heat.
The general was disappointed to find that Lincoln was all business. In a series of methodical meetings with McClellan and the corps commanders, the president brusquely read out a series of questions and jotted down each man’s answers. Lincoln wanted to know how many troops were in camp and how many had been lost in the fighting. What were the sanitary conditions and where was the enemy? And finally, if a decision was made to eva
cuate the Army of the Potomac, could the evacuation be done safely?
McClellan had hoped to have a philosophical discussion with Lincoln about grand strategy and national policy. Before the Seven Days battles erupted, he had been preparing a sweeping statement on “the present state of Military affairs throughout the whole country.” The congressional debates over Lyman Trumbull’s Confiscation Act clearly alarmed McClellan, and he was worried that the president would give in to abolitionist pressure. Now that “this rebellion has assumed the character of a War,” McClellan wrote, “it should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization.” In the general’s view, these principles required strict protection of private property, including slaves. And although he agreed with Lincoln that there would be occasions when the friction of war would likely break the chains binding slaves in one place or another, as a rule “military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude.”
The letter went on. An emancipation policy, McClellan maintained, would damage foreign relations and, quite possibly, offend the Almighty. Without a doubt, emancipation would cause mass desertions as large numbers of Union soldiers went home in disgust: “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.”
McClellan believed that his letter held the keys to victory, and he presented it to Lincoln during their time together at Harrison’s Landing. As McClellan watched expectantly, the president read the missive in silence. Lincoln betrayed no emotion, even when, like Seward the year before, McClellan closed his essay by suggesting that the president find someone else to shoulder his own responsibilities. “You will require a Commander in Chief of the Army,” he wrote, as if unaware that this was Lincoln’s own constitutional duty. Unpersuasively, he added: “I do not ask that place for myself.”
The president finished the letter and put it aside without a word. McClellan was irritated; writing to his wife, he declared that he “did not like the Pres[ident]’s manner—it seemed that of a man about to do something of which he was much ashamed.” Lincoln, he groused, “really seems quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question & the magnitude of the crisis.”
But Lincoln had not come to Harrison’s Landing for more unsolicited advice. He didn’t need McClellan shouting from shore, “A step to the right!” Instead, he found what he was seeking during a moonlit ride along robust lines of fit and cheering Union soldiers. His inspection of the troops persuaded him that McClellan’s frantic warnings about losing the whole army—and the fevered news accounts spun from such poor material—bore no relation to reality. “He came home in better spirits than he went in,” Nicolay reported, “having found the army in better condition and more of it than he expected.” Whether the men hailed Lincoln with enthusiasm because they loved him, as some reported, or because McClellan ordered them to, mattered much less than this: they were present for duty and able to shoulder their guns.
The information Lincoln drew from his interviews with the corps commanders confirmed this impression. From them, the president learned that the Army of the Potomac numbered some 80,000 healthy soldiers, and that the Confederates were in no position to attack. The only dispute among the top generals concerned the dangers of leaving the peninsula. Sumner, Heintzelman, and Porter pronounced the idea of pulling out “ruinous.” “I think we give up the cause if we do it,” said Sumner. “Impossible,” said Porter, adding: “Move the Army [and] ruin the country.” Erasmus Keyes was less categorical—“It could be done quickly,” he allowed—while William Franklin was all for it: “I think we could, and think we better.”
* * *
McClellan’s step backward on the peninsula left Lincoln once again in need of a success, something to check the downward spiral of morale. The man of the western frontier looked for that success in his favorite direction. Ever since the Confederates fell back from Nashville, Senator Andrew Johnson had been working as military governor of Tennessee to reconstruct that gateway to Dixie as a loyal state. A tailor from the Smoky Mountains village of Greeneville, Tennessee, Johnson was one of the true patriots of the Union, an ornery Democrat who refused to join the Confederacy even as all the other senators from rebellious states went with the South. As Tennessee’s appointed governor, Johnson had his work cut out for him: despite repeated efforts, the Union still had not established control of large parts of his state. But with the capture of Memphis in the west, he began to hope that the winds might be shifting in his favor. Halleck had ordered a fresh effort to expel the Rebels from eastern Tennessee. Accordingly, Don Carlos Buell was moving slowly along the torn-up railroad from Corinth toward Chattanooga.
Needing some good news to pull out of his hat, Lincoln immediately thought of Johnson and Tennessee. “My Dear Sir,” he cabled the governor on July 3. “You are aware we have called for a big levy of new troops. If we can get a fair share of them in Tennessee I shall value it more highly than a like number from most anywhere else, because of the face of the thing.” The sight of loyal men from Tennessee answering the summons to fight for the Union—what Lincoln called “the face of the thing”—would be a clear sign of progress; even better would be an election in which Tennessee voters expressed a desire to return to the fold. “If we could, somehow,” Lincoln ventured, “get a vote of the people of Tennessee and have it result properly, it would be worth more to us than a battle gained.”
Johnson’s answer was only partly encouraging. He could raise the troops, he said confidently, but he could not deliver a pro-Union vote until the loyal population in eastern Tennessee was free to cast their ballots without fear. The next day, as if to prove Johnson’s point, Colonel John Hunt Morgan of the Confederate States Army ordered two regiments of cavalrymen into their saddles in Knoxville, the heart of eastern Tennessee, to begin a monthlong raid in Tennessee and Kentucky. Lincoln returned from Harrison’s Landing to a depressing telegram from Johnson, who was “in trouble and great anxiety” about Morgan’s raid. Union garrisons in Kentucky were calling on Johnson for help, but when the governor tried to send troops, he ran into a stout barricade erected by Buell’s staff.
This was a classic clash of military versus civilian. Both claimed superiority; neither would back down. It didn’t help that the two men involved despised each other. Johnson had been complaining to Lincoln about Buell for months, and he wouldn’t be satisfied until Buell was fired. Well aware of the governor’s efforts, Buell’s friends tried to undermine the meddlesome tailor. When Lincoln learned that Buell’s man in Nashville had actually arrested a fellow Union officer simply for following one of Governor Johnson’s orders, the president’s mood sank. Confederate raiders were galloping through Kentucky, taking Union prisoners and posting handbills that called for citizens to rise up for Southern freedom, and meanwhile Lincoln’s men were squabbling. Where the president had looked for success, he found only another headache.
Nor was there much good news from the recruiting offices. On the theory that a speedy infusion of soldiers on the peninsula might yet embolden McClellan to capture Richmond, Lincoln cajoled the Union governors who had agreed to a new levy: “The quicker you send [troops], the fewer you will have to send.” But the governors weren’t getting the rousing results they had enjoyed in 1861. Volunteers were no longer springing up in multitudes just because a brass band played in a town square. Men needed time, after Gaines’ Mill and Shiloh, to decide whether to join. At the very moment when the president needed an immediate boost, enlistments slowed.
Frustrated, Lincoln began to mull the complicated math of McClellan’s army. He had long felt that one reason Little Mac was so hungry for new troops was that the Army of the Potomac leaked deserters like sand through a sieve. He asked the War Department to tell him the total number of men assigned to the general, and when the records were checked the answer came back: more than 160,000. By the end of his visit to Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln had determined that McClellan’s current strength on
the peninsula was 86,500, “leaving 73,500 to be accounted for.” Allowing for death by disease and casualties of battle, Lincoln reduced that number to about “45,000 of [the] Army still alive, and not with it.” Further, he wrote, “I believe half, or two thirds of them are fit for duty.” In other words, between 20,000 and 30,000 men were unaccounted for while their general insisted on reinforcements.
Once again the president chose to challenge McClellan. In a tough cable, he shared his calculations with the general and put two blunt questions to him: “If I am right, and you had these men with you, you could go into Richmond in the next three days. How can they be got to you? And how can they be prevented from getting away in such numbers in the future?” After some introductory bluster, the general grudgingly replied that he was probably short by some 20,000 deserters.
* * *
The tightrope was wearing thin. When Charles Sumner suggested that Lincoln make the Fourth of July “more sacred and historic than ever” by issuing “an edict of Emancipation,” Lincoln revealed that his old concerns still gnawed at him. “I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and three more states would rise” in rebellion, he said. But the pressure from the abolitionists remained relentless. In a message to Adams in London, Seward wrote that they seemed just as determined as the Rebels to stir up the worst possible result: a murderous insurrection by the slaves.
Searching for the middle, Lincoln decided to try one last time to talk the border states into voluntary, gradual emancipation, with payment for slave owners. On July 12, he again invited the delegations from the loyal slave states to the White House, and this time he read aloud from a carefully written appeal. “I intend no reproach or complaint when I assure you that in my opinion, if you all had voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipation message of last March, the war would now be substantially ended,” he began. Once the rebellious states knew for sure that the border states would never join the Confederacy, they would almost certainly give up. Meanwhile, the luxury of wishing change away was over, for “if the war continue long, as it must, [slavery] in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incident of the war. It will be gone,” he warned, “and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.”
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