Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The green Pennsylvania volunteers who made the last charge into the smoky twilight that day went just as bravely as the combat veterans who made the first. Thousands of dead and wounded lay on the ground before the marching troops. Using the corpses of their comrades as shelter from the Rebel fire, a number of injured soldiers reached up to grab at the legs of the advancing men, trying to hold them back. But the novice bluecoats shook loose and pushed ahead.

  After they, too, fell short of the stone barrier, night finally ended the fighting. Bitter cold settled over the field, and wounded men clung to one another for warmth. Burial crews would later find bodies pasted to the earth by frozen gore.

  * * *

  “What will the country say?” Lincoln asked in anguish as the awful dimensions of the Federal debacle at Fredericksburg became clear. Some 13,000 Union troops were dead, wounded, or missing—the equivalent of another Antietam—compared with 5,000 from Lee’s army. Also gone were the remnants of morale. Burnside, in an almost suicidal gesture, called for his old IX Corps to form up on December 14 for yet another assault on the murderous heights, promising to lead this one himself. He gave up the idea only after the entire high command of the army told him it was madness. By now the general had completely lost the confidence of his officers; in the ranks, soldiers were stunned and sickened by the waste. Even the government’s reliable boosters at Harper’s Weekly recoiled from the “imbecility, treachery, failure, [and] privation” that seemed to culminate in this battle, warning that the public “cannot be expected to suffer that such massacres as this … shall be repeated.” As the reactions poured in, Lincoln groaned: “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”

  But as the peerless Bruce Catton has noted, this senseless disaster revealed a critical truth about the Union’s soldiers and gave an augury of the war’s eventual outcome. What was important about Fredericksburg, the historian wrote, “was not, after all, the fact that a stupid general ordered” the assaults, “but the fact that the army which had to make them had never once faltered.” In the stirring sight of those seemingly endless ranks of hopeless men bearing polished rifles, Catton saw the “burnished rows of steel” prophesied by Julia Ward Howe, infused with their fiery gospel of freedom and borne by an army that had “lost all its morale but which somehow kept coming on.”

  Soon after the fighting ended, Lincoln began to see the battle in much the same way. He had spoken of the army’s need to engage in “hard desperate fighting,” and no battle could ever be harder or more desperate than this one. Now, safely back on the north side of the Rappahannock, the Army of the Potomac still numbered more than 100,000 strong. It would grow even larger, and endure many more losses, before the war was won.

  Pondering the lopsided tally at Fredericksburg, Lincoln realized that he had just glimpsed the horrific mathematical essence of the Civil War. As long as the Union armies were willing, somehow, to keep coming on, to keep marching and fighting and dying, they would inevitably prevail. As he put it: “If the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone, and peace would be won.… No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered.”

  * * *

  On December 17, as details from Fredericksburg made headlines across the North, Lincoln was abruptly drawn into a hard, desperate battle of his own. Into his office that day walked Senator Preston King of New York and Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward. King handed the president a sheet of paper. Lincoln scanned it in pained confusion: it was a letter of resignation written by Seward’s father, the secretary of state. The younger Seward added that he, of course, was also stepping down.

  “What does this mean?” the president asked. King painted the background.

  The previous day, the Republican caucus of the Senate had gathered for a secret meeting, the purpose of which was to discuss the lack of progress in the war. The latest defeat on the battlefield had come as a bitter blow, and now the senators devised a plan to attack the man they blamed for it: William Seward. In the view of the Senate majority, Seward was soft on slavery, a friend of compromise, the protector of halfhearted warriors like McClellan and Halleck, and, worst of all, Lincoln’s closest adviser. Some believed the secretary of state was actually pulling the strings of a puppet president. Supporting evidence for these views was thin, but then as now, truth in Washington was more a matter of belief than fact.

  The trouble had started even before Lincoln’s inauguration. Two years earlier, Seward had led a failed effort to solve the secession crisis by compromise, and that attempt left him a marked man in a time when compromise was equated with capitulation. When he then worked his way into a closer relationship with Lincoln than the other cabinet secretaries enjoyed, the result was jealousy, especially on the part of Seward’s longtime rival Chase. The almost daily meetings between Lincoln and Seward became a convenient explanation for all the president’s perceived faults and failures—especially his choice of Democrats to lead armies and what Republican abolitionists saw as his foot-dragging on slavery. Many in Lincoln’s party felt that Seward’s influence was too great and all wrong, and now it was finally time to stop him.

  At the caucus meeting, Morton Wilkinson of Minnesota, still angry over Lincoln’s refusal to execute all the Sioux prisoners, led off the attack. As Orville Browning recorded it, Wilkinson “denounced the President and Mr Seward [and] said our cause was lost and the country ruined.” Ben Wade went next, with “a long speech in which he declared that the Senate should go in a body and demand of the President the dismissal of Mr Seward.” And not only that: Wade also called for a Republican general in chief, who should be given “absolute and despotic powers.” William Fessenden of Maine was more temperate, but he too wanted Seward’s head. Citing an unnamed member of the cabinet as his source of information, Fessenden claimed that “there was a back stairs & malign influence which controlled the President, and overruled all the decisions of the Cabinet.” Pressed to identify his source, Fessenden demurred, but Browning wrote that he recognized that distinctive phrase—“back stairs & malign”—and was convinced that it was pure Chase.

  James Grimes of Iowa moved that the caucus make a formal demand. A few senators objected, Browning among them. Given the long hours he had spent with Lincoln urging his own conservative policies, Browning would have been in a good position to knock down the theory that Seward alone poured such ideas into the president’s ear. But Browning didn’t offer a defense of Lincoln; instead, he protested that the indictment of Seward contained “no evidence the charges were true,” and warned that a call for his resignation could provoke a “war between Congress and the President” at a time when unity was essential. The senators decided to adjourn overnight and reflect on the matter, but the next day many of them were even angrier than before. One group proposed that they demand not only Seward’s resignation but also Lincoln’s.

  Ultimately, the majority voted to moderate the wording of their indictment of the secretary, but the result left the meaning clear. Afterward, Preston King took it on himself to warn his friend Seward about the impending crisis. “They may do as they please about me,” Seward replied, “but they shall not put the President in a false position on my account.” He wrote out his resignation on the spot, instructed his son to do the same, and asked King to join Frederick in delivering the papers to Lincoln.

  A year earlier, of course, a similar ill wind had blown down from Capitol Hill. When Congress convened the previous December, all the frustrations over the administration’s perceived bungling found expression in the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Now Congress was once again returning from a recess that coincided with dark days for the Republic: the ignominious retreat from the peninsula, the shameful episode at Manassas, McClellan’s ret
urn to command and subsequent failure to pursue Lee after Antietam. The senators had watched all this from afar, sharing gossip and gripes by mail, but unable to do more than grumble. Much of what they heard came directly or indirectly from inside the cabinet, which had never entirely healed from the failed attempt in August to force Lincoln to fire McClellan. The ringleaders of that effort—Chase, Stanton, and Smith—all faulted Seward for the government’s troubles. But among Lincoln’s advisers, Chase was believed to be the prime source of the anti-Seward gospel.

  This was almost certainly correct. Browning characterized the leaders of the Senate revolt as “the partizans of Mr. Chase,” adding, “I had reason to believe that he had set them on.” Canny Thomas Ewing “had no doubt Chase was at the bottom of the mischief.” One of the disgruntled senators, Charles Sumner, had confided in a letter from Boston that “Chase writes me from Washington,” and then delivered a litany of criticisms that could have come almost verbatim from Chase’s diary. “A wise, courageous & humane” president would have made the war into an antislavery crusade from the beginning, “[and] have ended it by now,” Sumner wrote. “But with Lincoln as Pres[ident] & Seward as Secretary this was impossible.” Sumner was convinced that Seward had always opposed emancipation and that the secretary believed “that by some patch-work this great question could be avoided.”

  What happened a year earlier now happened again: the pent-up recriminations of Congress demanded an outlet. But because this explosion was so destructive and irregular, it was far more dangerous than the creation of the joint committee. Oversight committees are standard features of Congress, and they are charged, at least partly, with finding facts. This demand for Seward’s head, by contrast, was little more than a witch hunt. The president knew perfectly well that Seward wasn’t secretly running the government. Moreover, he was adamant that Congress should not dictate to him who would serve in the cabinet. In Lincoln’s view, the move against Seward was a fatal step beyond the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent.

  * * *

  Immediately after receiving Seward’s resignation, Lincoln strode across the street to his house, where he found his friend putting a brave face on the situation. It would be a relief to retire to private life, Seward said. “Ah, yes, Governor,” Lincoln replied, “that will do very well for you, but I am like the starling in Sterne’s story: ‘I can’t get out.’” (The story of the starling appears in a work by the English writer Laurence Sterne that describes a dawn of conscience as the narrator suddenly realizes the evil of slavery. The plaintive call of a caged bird sounds like someone crying “I can’t get out!” Hearing this, the narrator pours out an epiphany in which he compares slavery to “a bitter draught” and cries, “Though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.”)

  During his conversation with Seward, Lincoln made no promises about how he would respond to the senators’ demand. Gideon Welles would later speculate that Seward was disappointed when Lincoln did not reject the resignation out of hand and “refuse to parley with the committee.” But the president could not afford to draw battle lines inside the Union coalition. He needed the abolitionist wing as much as he needed the conservatives, so his task was to defuse the Senate challenge, not defy it.

  The first step was to understand what was behind it. Needing to hear for himself what the senators from his party were so upset about, Lincoln arranged to host a delegation from the caucus at seven P.M. the next day, December 18. The wait was agony. He had nowhere to turn; as John Hay put it: “He had & could have no adviser” on such a delicate and secret matter, and “must work it out by himself.”

  When Browning—who would not be part of the Senate delegation—called at the White House shortly before the meeting, he found the president extremely agitated. “What do these men want?” Lincoln demanded.

  “I hardly know, Mr. President,” Browning answered. “But they are exceedingly violent towards the administration, and what we did yesterday”—issuing the Republican caucus’s resolution—“was the gentlest thing that could be done.”

  Lincoln then answered his own question. “They wish to get rid of me,” he said, “and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.”

  “Some of them do,” Browning replied. But he urged Lincoln not to give in to them, saying that to lose his steady hand at this point would “bring upon us certain and inevitable ruin.”

  “We are now on the brink of destruction,” the president agreed.

  As Lincoln had often said, the key to victory was a united North; now the anti-Seward senators were threatening to sabotage that fragile unity. If they were allowed to blow up the cabinet, they would destroy the tenuous balance between radical and conservative Unionists and make a bad joke of Lincoln’s claim to be the man holding the elements together. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us,” the president told his friend, “and I can hardly see a ray of hope.”

  Browning couldn’t resist telling Lincoln that he should have “crushed the ultra[s] … last summer.” But the president did not rise to the bait. Instead he fumed that the case against Seward was founded on “a lie, an absurd lie.” Then he sent Browning away, saying the delegation would be up shortly. “Since I heard last night of the proceedings of the caucus,” he added, “I have been more distressed than by any event of my life.”

  * * *

  Lincoln may have felt that he was in “a worse place than Hell,” but as the nine Republican senators took their seats the president greeted them “with his usual urbanity,” one participant noted. The venerable Jacob Collamer of Vermont, the delegation’s chairman, stood up again with the caucus resolution in his hands and began to read. The toned-down text was gassy and general, calling for “a vigorous and successful prosecution of the war” by a president working in harness with his cabinet, sharing “combined wisdom and deliberation.” It went on like that for four paragraphs. The elder statesman then sat down quietly and invited his fellow senators to speak if they wished.

  Ben Wade certainly wished. Fulminating about election losses in the West, he blamed Lincoln for “plac[ing] the direction of our military affairs in the hands of bitter and malignant Democrats.” Lincoln had heard this many times from Wade; he made no reply.

  Grimes finally got to the point: the senators felt an “entire want of confidence in Secretary Seward.” Fessenden concurred. The cabinet, he said, was unable to shape events because Seward “exerted an injurious influence”; this was especially troubling because Seward “was not in accord with the majority.” Seward pampered Democrats in high commands, while the administration left abolitionist heroes like John Frémont and David Hunter disgraced and abandoned. And what was the result? McClellan was now busy attacking the government, spreading his lies that the president and his advisers had sabotaged the Peninsula Campaign.

  The mention of McClellan and his complaints got Lincoln riled up. Seizing a stack of papers, he began pulling letters from the pile that he had sent to McClellan and then reading them aloud one by one. The recitation went on for thirty minutes until Lincoln felt he had proved his case, which was that “McClellan … had been sustained by the government to the utmost of its power.” Finally he put the letters back on his desk and was quiet again.

  Sumner now turned to the topic of Seward’s extensive diplomatic correspondence, which had been published earlier in December. Sumner had been reading the papers closely, and he didn’t like what he had found. One short letter was particularly galling. It was a dispatch from Seward to Adams, dated July 5 and marked “Confidential.” A vivid example of Seward’s love for overstatement and shock, the document seemed designed to sharpen the anger of his enemies. The timing was unfortunate as well: the letter was written just as Washington was filling with wounded veterans of the Seven Days battles and Congress was aflame with passionate debate over Lyman Trumbull’s confiscation bill. Seward, the pragmatist, was in a mood to blame the administration’s troubles on hard-li
ners of all stripes. One side pushed secession and the other pushed immediate emancipation; as Seward wrote, “it seems as if the extreme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents were acting in concert together” to ignite violent slave uprisings.

  Sumner seethed: to his mind, this official letter placed “the Confederates and the majority of Congress upon the same levels.” Nothing could more clearly demonstrate Seward’s unacceptable views. Lincoln was at a loss to answer this charge. He explained that he and Seward normally discussed all dispatches before they were sent, but he couldn’t recall discussing this one. Pointedly, the president did not defend the decision to write or send the letter, much less to publish it for the world to read.

  This colloquy with the senators went on for three long hours, though the tone remained civil throughout. Lincoln struck at least one senator as “cheerful” and “pleased with the interview.” Afterward, the president boiled the session down to one pithy remark. As Bates recorded it, Lincoln said that “while they believed in [Lincoln’s] honesty, they seemed to think that when he had in him any good purposes, Mr. S[eward] contrived to suck them out of him unperceived.”

  Overnight, Lincoln sifted through the shards of his situation. He now knew the extent of the complaints against Seward, and he knew most of them weren’t true. They were based, as Fessenden had put it, on “common rumor.” And the president had a pretty good guess where the rumors were coming from. The difficult question was this: without further inflaming the situation, how could he prove to the senators that the gossip and complaints of Salmon Chase were not to be trusted?

  * * *

  Gideon Welles had barely shrugged off his overcoat at the Navy Department the next morning when a message arrived from John Nicolay announcing an emergency cabinet meeting at half-past ten. Normally, the call to council would come from the office of the secretary of state, but by now the rumor of Seward’s resignation was spreading. At the appointed hour, Lincoln convened the group—with Seward conspicuously absent—by admonishing everyone to keep secret what he was about to say. He then recounted the story thus far: the efforts by the Republican caucus to oust the secretary of state; Seward’s shock and resignation; the long and “animated” meeting with the Senate delegation the night before. The president told his colleagues that he had explained to the senators how much their resolution “grieved him,” particularly because it was based on assumptions that weren’t true. The senators had asserted that the cabinet was rife with dissent and division; no, he had told them, the cabinet, which had been carefully chosen to balance the diverse political voices of the Union coalition, had in fact “gone on harmoniously.” Of course its members had their differences, but “there had never been serious disagreements.” Moreover, Lincoln had assured the senators, the cabinet had “sustained and consoled” him through all his burdens and toils, with “mutual and unselfish confidence and zeal.”