“Give him enough now!” a voice roared.
But Lincoln had spoken his piece. Closing abruptly, he announced: “I stand here, as justice requires me to do, to take upon myself what has been charged on the Secretary of War.” As the audience called for him to speak longer—shouting “No! No! No!”—he finished by saying: “I have talked longer than I expected to do, and now I avail myself of my privilege of saying no more.”
The president sat down again to polite applause from an audience that one reporter described as “greatly disappointed.”
Salmon Chase, however, was impressed. Perhaps the boisterous crowd had wanted a different sort of speech, but the important thing was the way they responded to Lincoln. “He was received with the most uproarious enthusiasm,” the secretary confided to his diary. “His frank, genial, generous face and direct simplicity of bearing, took all hearts.” No other politician would have given that speech at that moment, but Lincoln’s address succeeded, in the opinion of his rival, because he delivered it with “his usual originality and sagacity.”
* * *
The new general in chief, Henry Halleck, arrived in Washington to discover that he had a large and rapidly growing mess on his hands—a mess produced by the former Union commander in the West, one Henry Halleck. His decision to disperse his grand army after capturing Corinth had scattered a henhouse’s worth of vexatious chickens, and now they were all coming home to roost.
Because Halleck had not pressed on to Vicksburg, the Mississippi was once again blocked. A Rebel ironclad, the Arkansas, lurked under the bluff-top guns, and together these obstacles made the river impassable. Moreover, Halleck’s decision to let the Confederate army retreat to Tupelo had given the irritable and aggressive Braxton Bragg enough time to organize a leisurely tour of the Deep South for his roughly 60,000 men. As July turned to August, the Rebels rode the railroad down to Mobile, Alabama. They then caught a northbound line to Montgomery, switched trains for the leg to Atlanta, and finally took a ride through the leafy mountains of north Georgia to Chattanooga.
The Federal force under Don Carlos Buell, meanwhile, was biding its time on the west bank of the Tennessee River, waiting for supplies with which to finish a bridge. Buell had no idea how long his army would have to wait, because he was so deep in hostile territory that supplies were arriving only sporadically. Buell’s assignment from Halleck—to repair the Memphis & Charleston Railroad and keep it open from Corinth to Chattanooga—proved impossible. Rebel cavalrymen, assisted by local guerrillas, were regularly tearing up tracks and capturing supply wagons, stunting Buell’s progress. Nevertheless, the general held stubbornly to a McClellan-like belief that he should protect the private property of Southern civilians. Even when Rebel raiders interrupted his convoys, Buell prohibited foraging for food, so his troops often went hungry. Instead of a strike force into eastern Tennessee, Buell’s Army of the Ohio was a stranded, underfed, and tediously overworked gang of tracklayers on a rail line that disappeared almost as quickly as it was replaced.
Ulysses Grant, meanwhile, had command of his old Army of the Tennessee, but he could not do a thing with it. “The remainder of the magnificent army of 120,000 men which entered Corinth on the 30th of May had now become so scattered that I was put entirely on the defensive in a territory whose population was hostile to the Union,” Grant lamented. This was, he later recalled, “the most anxious period of the war, to me.” Wishing that he could have marched on Vicksburg weeks earlier, Grant was instead reduced to the life of a bureaucrat, albeit a bureaucrat surrounded by armed enemies. Living in a big house outside Corinth with his wife and children, the general went to work each morning trying to implement flawed policies handed down from headquarters.
The worst of these, in early August, was the directive from Washington to reopen the cotton trade. For months, the Lincoln administration had been promising England and France that they would soon get cotton for their mills. When these promises were first made, Lincoln and Seward believed that most people in the South were the victims of rabble-rousers and would welcome the chance to return to normal commerce with their Northern countrymen. Now that idea met its test. Orders came down from Washington to “let trade follow the flag” in large parts of Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where the Union had nominal control. Grant was instructed to establish points on the rivers and railroads where plantation owners could exchange baled cotton for gold.
The initiative was an immediate disaster. Grant’s soldiers were furious to find themselves standing guard as sharp Northern traders passed bags of precious metal to Southerners who, the soldiers understood, used the money to resupply the enemy. In short order, guns and ammunition were making their way south from Cincinnati, paid for by Confederate agents. Other forbidden commodities also rode the southbound rivers: medicine and shoes and, especially, salt. The Rebels lacked many things, but they were starved for salt, essential for curing bacon, ham, and beef. Without it, meat quickly spoiled in a soldier’s knapsack. Braxton Bragg’s army, chugging toward Chattanooga, was powered by bacon salted with cotton money.
Grant lodged a respectful protest with Salmon Chase, whose Treasury Department was in charge of renewing trade. He explained that salt, flour, liquor, and other contraband was moving south in amounts too large to be meant for personal use. The only people gaining from this commerce were “greedy traders” and “our enemies south of our lines.” And if Chase or anyone in Washington believed that the cotton trade would make friends for the Union in the occupied South, they were deluded, Grant warned.
In fact, the administration was already aware of the folly of the new policy. Lincoln’s problem was that he had no good alternative: “England [wants] us to permit her to get $50,000,000 worth of Cotton from the South,” he explained to Orville Browning. But “we [can] not let the cotton out without letting its value in.”
Worse, this was precisely the wrong time to be letting money into the Confederacy, because the North’s economic advantages were starting to pinch, hard. With the Union blockade tightening, Rebel finances were in a tailspin. The enormous wealth of the Southern planters, their land and slaves, could not easily be converted into cash. Cut off from credit markets, Richmond was compelled to pay for its war by printing money, and now inflation had begun to run rampant. In June 1862, a Confederate dollar was buying half as much as it had in January; by the end of the year it would be worth less than 20 cents. Prices were even higher for certain scarce staples. Salt for civilian use, which cost $2 per bag before the war, had rocketed in some parts of the Confederacy to $60 per bag. Spiraling prices weakened the Rebel armies as soldiers deserted in droves to scratch up a living for their families, who would soon be facing winter. Lincoln faced a version of this problem—“Give your paper mill another turn,” he once advised a disgusted Chase when money was running short—but the North’s gold and silver mines, its abundant harvests, and its generally healthy market for government bonds all helped to ease the bite of inflation.
With so much snarled and snagged, Halleck did what every other Washington official did when things bogged down: he sent urgent telegrams. By August, Buell was fed up, and when Halleck made the mistake of threatening to fire him for failing to reach Chattanooga, Buell answered: Please do. Halleck had no choice but to back off, at least for the moment, because by now Bragg had beaten Buell to the goal, arriving in eastern Tennessee in early August. Suddenly the military situation looked completely different. Opening railroads and guarding cities did not seem so important when a Confederate army stood poised to invade the lightly manned midsection of Tennessee, with the all-important prize of Kentucky just beyond.
* * *
The queen of England, still deep in mourning nearly eight months after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, decided to seek consolation among her family and friends on the Continent. To Lord Russell, her foreign minister, fell the tasks of arranging the trip and serving as Her Majesty’s companion. This proved a small stroke of luck f
or Lincoln and his administration, because it meant that nothing would happen to alter British foreign policy until Russell and the queen returned to England. But change was brewing. On August 6, as Russell prepared to embark on the long holiday, he conferred with Palmerston on the situation in America, and the two men found they were both inclining toward a European intervention. They agreed to call a special cabinet meeting in September to move the idea forward.
Apprised of the looming threat, Seward rattled all the swords in his armory. He reminded American envoys that England and France were not dependent only on cotton; they also needed gold from America’s western mountains and wheat from its prairies. Would they risk bread for cotton? And would they chance a war with the United States by trying to break the blockade, given that “the construction of iron-clad ships is going on” in American shipyards “on a scale and with a vigor that promises as complete a naval defense as any other nation possesses?” Bluster, however, was not the weapon to stave off Europe. As Charles Francis Adams reminded Seward in a reply, “It is impossible to overestimate the degree of influence that attaches to the operations of the war”—a fancy way of saying that the best diplomacy would be a winning Northern army.
Lincoln pinned his hopes for a decisive victory on the strutting figure of John Pope, who began pushing his new Army of Virginia southward from Manassas along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, meeting little resistance. By early August, Pope had crossed the Rappahannock and was heading for Gordonsville, where he could cut the east–west rail line running to Richmond. Strengthened by a corps of the Army of the Potomac under Burnside, the slow-moving Union force numbered some 50,000 men. They gathered to the west of Richmond; to the east of the city lay the rest of McClellan’s army, still on the peninsula. If combined, Pope’s and McClellan’s troops would outnumber Lee’s army by about 50 percent.
The trick would be just that: combining them. It could not be done directly, because Lee stood between the two forces. Instead, McClellan’s troops were to be taken off the peninsula by boat and delivered to points north, including Alexandria, scene of their glorious departure in March. From there, they would make their way overland to join Pope. Many in McClellan’s army, especially the senior officers loyal to Little Mac, were unhappy with this plan, for when the linkage was complete George McClellan could wind up a man without an army. Not surprisingly, the general and his men were slow in leaving their base at Harrison’s Landing. Ordered off the peninsula on August 3, McClellan did not start boarding troops onto ships until August 14, and he did not set off for Alexandria himself until August 24.
The Federal armies now faced a period of extreme peril. As long as McClellan stood within easy marching distance of Richmond, Lee was limited in the amount of muscle he could throw at Pope. But once the evacuation began, a window of opportunity opened for the Rebels. “Now I am to have a sweat of five or six days,” Lincoln fretted as McClellan’s move began. “The Confederates will strive to gather on Pope before McClellan can get around.” Halleck reported being “so uneasy” during this vulnerable period that he “could hardly sleep.”
Anxiety was the appropriate emotion, because Robert E. Lee was not a man to miss such a chance. First he sent Stonewall Jackson and General A. P. Hill to probe the front of Pope’s advance, leading to a poorly fought battle at Cedar Mountain near Culpeper on August 9. Then, when he was sure McClellan was leaving, Lee added more troops, under General James Longstreet. By mid-August, two large forces of roughly equal strength faced each other just south of the Rappahannock, not far from a place called Chancellorsville.
But Lee wasn’t interested in smashing Pope head-on. His men were in need of food and ammunition, which he knew to be heaped in vast quantities behind Pope’s army. He wanted to capture the Manassas supply depot more than he wanted to fight the Army of Virginia. Besides, he had bigger fish to fry beyond Manassas. Like Bragg gazing across Tennessee toward Kentucky, Lee looked north past Pope toward Maryland, another slave state in need of liberation from the tyranny of the Lincoln government. So instead of attacking Pope, Lee directed Longstreet to flex and glare at the Union general long enough to distract him, while Jackson slipped into his beloved Shenandoah Valley and began to move unnoticed behind the mountains and around Pope’s right. Then, when Jackson reappeared behind the Union army, Longstreet was to follow Jackson and disappear into the valley as well.
* * *
Rarely had tension and torpor kept such close company in the capital. Compared with previous months, August seemed almost sleepy. Congress was gone; the armies were reorganizing. A heat wave settled over Washington like a sweat-soaked quilt: on the north porch of Gideon Welles’s house the thermometer registered 100 degrees on Friday, August 8. Two days later, a hint of breeze was worth a diary notation. John Dahlgren devised a bit of relief for the president at the navy yard. After showing Lincoln the latest innovations in rifled cannon and shells, he called for a yacht and took the presidential party for a ride on the Potomac to cool off in the evening air.
Yet underneath the apparent inactivity seethed a volcano. American history was coming to its greatest crisis, the moment when the nation would survive or expire. The Rebels were preparing to enter the border states; the European powers were preparing to throw their weight on the side of the rebellion; and Lincoln was preparing to expand the war into something much larger than he had imagined necessary. A second American Revolution, as the historian James McPherson has rightly put it, would test the unity of the North as it had never been tested before.
As long as this volcano rumbled unseen, Lincoln was forced to live an uncomfortable lie. His mind was made up in favor of emancipation, but he had to pretend otherwise until the moment was right for the announcement. Looking back on this period, the president’s secretaries described a leader oscillating between misery and anger as the public badgered him over his seeming fecklessness. Lincoln “grew sensitive and even irritable,” wrote Nicolay and Hay. “Could no one exercise patience but himself?… Why must they push him to the wall?” The long wait for a victory with which to frame the proclamation was perhaps the most delicate interval of his presidency, the aides wrote: “At no time were political questions so critical.” Lincoln “was compelled to keep up an appearance of indecision which only brought upon him a greater flood” of demands for an answer. “During no part of his Administration were his acts and words so persistently misconstrued”—acts and words designed only to “curb and restrain the impatience of zealots from either faction.”
No criticism landed more loudly than a letter published on August 20, by the editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley. Claiming to speak on behalf of twenty million Northerners, Greeley denounced Lincoln’s failure to take decisive action to free the slaves living within the Confederacy: “The Union cause has suffered and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery,” Greeley boomed. Lincoln’s excessive concern for the opinions of “certain fossil politicians hailing from the border slave states” was “perilous and probably disastrous.” Worse, Lincoln was allowing his generals to ignore the Confiscation Act, and as a result, slaves who sought refuge with Federal forces were being turned away to be “butchered or reenslaved.” Was Lincoln prepared to bear the blame for this “through future History and at the bar of God?”
Greeley’s scathing attack filled two long, densely packed columns of type, with scarcely a word to suggest that Lincoln might face some difficulties. According to Greeley, the path ahead was clear: the president merely needed to stop disregarding his legal obligations. “The triumph of the Union is indispensable not only to the existence of our country, but to the well-being of mankind,” Greeley concluded; and addressing the president directly: “I entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.”
Lincoln may have felt blindsided: only a week earlier, he had given Greeley’s second in command, Sidney Howard Gay, a personal interview at the White House. But it was not Greeley’s way to be
moved by such favors. A mercurial, passionate man given to wild swings of judgment and mood, he divided the world’s questions into two categories, simple or hopeless, and nothing was gray but the newsprint. These qualities made for strong admirers and even stronger critics; Greeley was unquestionably among the most widely read writers in America.
Lincoln judged that he should respond somehow to Greeley’s charges. He could have brushed them away simply by announcing the administration’s decision to enlist and train the former slaves at Port Royal—not just as army laborers, but as armed soldiers ready to defend the cotton plantations under Federal control. This important step would have delighted the abolitionists, but at the moment they were not Lincoln’s most irksome constituency, so he preferred to keep silent about it. He instead used Greeley’s letter as a chance to appeal to Northern moderates, crafting a calculated reply designed to pave the way for his emancipation proclamation.
Playing off Greeley’s bluster, Lincoln struck a cautious and disciplined tone in his response. He explained that his original promise remained: “I would save the Union.” This polestar—which had such widespread, bipartisan support at the outset of the war—still guided his decisions, even as he moved closer to grasping the nettle of slavery. But some people, he wrote, wished to preserve only the old “Union as it was,” with slavery intact: “I do not agree with them.” Other people wished to save the Union only if in the process slavery was abolished. “I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” Realizing that readers might interpret this as a statement of moral ambivalence, Lincoln warned that nothing he was saying changed his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere would be free.” His policies, however, were designed to achieve the one goal that bound the North together through this unprecedented turmoil. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
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