Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  In his Second Inaugural Address: CW, Vol. 8, pp. 333–34.

  “Help me dodge”: McClellan to Samuel Barlow, Nov. 8, 1861.

  his oft-spoken view: “Emancipation, for Lincoln, was never a question of the end but of how to construct the means in such a way that the end was not put into jeopardy.” Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, p. 26.

  Lincoln never claimed: RW, p. 336.

  “two of the most truculent”: Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, p. 57.

  “hitch the whole thing”: Ibid., pp. 58–59.

  “Timid, vacillating, & inefficient”: Ibid., p. 67.

  “the gates were thrown open”: New York Times, Jan. 3, 1862.

  Attorney General Bates fretted: Bates diary, Jan. 1, 1862.

  “He goes at it with both hands”: New York Times, June 18, 1861.

  “Anything that kept the people”: Hay, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 331.

  The foundation of political liberty: This theme recurs in many of Lincoln’s speeches. See, for example, CW, Vol. 3, pp. 312–15, from the famous 1858 debates: “No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

  “scorned labour”: Joseph Gillespie, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 183.

  “This is the just”: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 52–53. Lincoln’s economic philosophy is thoroughly examined in Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream.

  “one thing was necessary”: Leonard Swett, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 165.

  the holiday continued: Taft diary, Jan. 1, 1861.

  “the bare possibility”: Dahlgren diary, Jan. 2, 1862.

  boys lost joyfully: Taft diary, Jan. 1, 1862.

  “We have no general”: Bates diary, Dec. 31, 1861.

  “Every war is begun”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 4, pp. 359–60.

  “minority president … majority general”: RW, pp. 360–61.

  “Times are exceedingly dark”: Dawes, quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 215.

  “Forty or fifty”: Taft diary, Jan. 15, 1862.

  Measles: Boyden, Echoes from Hospital and White House: A Record of Mrs. Rebecca R. Pomroy’s Experience in War-Times, pp. 29–35.

  “almost every Street”: Taft diary, Jan. 8, 1862.

  “General McClellan is sick”: CW, Vol. 5, p. 84.

  “There is no arrangement”: ibid.

  “Too much haste”: ibid.

  known as Old Brains: Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of Henry W. Halleck, pp. 42–43.

  Though only a few sentences long: CW, Vol. 5, p. 84.

  “greatest living soldier”: quoted in Peskin, Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms, p. 191.

  “a real or feigned attack”: CW, Vol. 5, p. 84.

  “a perfectly good mood”: ibid., p. 88.

  2: JANUARY

  A cold front swept: Taft diary, Jan. 2, 1862.

  The president was in a low mood: Dahlgren diary, Jan. 2, 1862.

  “very much better”: CW, Vol. 5, p. 88.

  “browsing”: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, Oct. 31, 1861.

  “Not a moment’s time”: McClellan to Henry Halleck, Jan. 3, 1862.

  “condemned by every military authority”: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 87n, 92n, 95n.

  Buell simply disappeared: ibid., p. 92n.

  “Delay is ruining us”: ibid., p. 94.

  “It is exceedingly discouraging”: ibid., p. 95.

  an infuriating telegram from Buell: Miers, Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, Vol. 3, Jan. 6, 1862.

  A light snow: Taft diary, Jan. 4–7, 1862.

  Lincoln did much of his best thinking: Joshua Speed, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 499.

  “When he walked”: Herndon and Weik, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 295.

  “The political consequences”: McClellan to Don Carlos Buell, Jan. 6, 1862.

  “A great deal of discussion”: Chase diary, Jan. 6, 1862.

  “He has got the presidential maggot”: “[Nicolay] Conversation with V. P. Wilson…” in An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, p. 85.

  “He would rather be on the bench”: John D. Martin to Thomas Ewing, Sr., Jan. 22, 1862, Ewing Family Papers, Box 13, No. 4866, Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

  the federal debt: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 6, pp. 227–31.

  “determined to shut his eyes”: RW, p. 216.

  First he defended: Chase diary, Jan. 6, 1862.

  The committee was sent away: ibid.

  “they don’t give me time”: McClellan to Samuel Barlow, Jan. 18, 1862.

  out for a brisk ride: Taft diary, Jan. 8, 1862.

  “You better go”: CW, Vol. 5, p. 94.

  “Nothing but very marked evidences”: Adams to Seward, Dec. 27, 1861.

  “no general in the army”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 6, pp. 113–14.

  Visitors to the White House: Henry C. Whitney, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 405; Browning diary, June 22, 1862.

  “unknown in the art of war”: Seward to Adams, Jan. 31, 1862.

  But to a man who could read them: “In charting the movements of armies, the facts of geography stand first.” Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, p. 8.

  “My distress”: CW, Vol. 5, p. 91.

  “a frontier of rivers”: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, p. 42.

  received a patent: CW, Vol. 2, pp. 32–35.

  “brown water navy”: Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron, pp. 1–21; Stoddard, Lincoln at Work: Sketches from Life, pp. 20–25; Hearn, Ellet’s Brigade: The Strangest Outfit of All.

  Fog lay thick: Taft diary, Jan. 10, 1862.

  Lincoln convened the cabinet again: Bates diary, Jan. 10, 1862.

  Welles echoed the sentiment: Welles diary, p. 61.

  “The people are impatient”: Meigs diary, Jan. 10, 1862, Montgomery C. Meigs Papers, Reel 15, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; see also “Documents: General M. C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 26 (January 1921), p. 292.

  the navy implored Lincoln: Welles diary, p. 60.

  Lincoln had decided to fire Cameron: Barnes, The Life of Thurlow Weed, Vol. 2, pp. 330–31.

  “borrow it”: RW, p. 332.

  “Traitors are under me”: ibid., pp. 254, 322.

  Pretending to be sailors: Taft diary, Jan. 11, 1862.

  an artful pair of letters: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 96–97.

  “a dismissal”: Chase diary, Jan. 12, 1862.

  “bricks in his pocket”: RW, pp. 135–36.

  Stanton was not to be trusted: Welles diary, p. 56.

  “that damned long armed Ape”: See, for example, Donald, Lincoln, pp. 185–87.

  His favorite expression: RW, p. 221.

  “Perhaps I have too little”: ibid., p. 232.

  Hay once scoffed: Hay, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 209.

  “I know more about it”: RW, p. 209.

  The Treasury secretary advised: Chase diary, Jan. 11, 1862.

  For the first time: Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon, p. 140.

  “at least 400,000 Men”: Taft diary, Jan. 12, 1862.

  The lobbies and bars: ibid., Jan. 27, 1862.

  “shabbier and dirtier”: Dicey, Spectator of America, pp. 63–64.

  Lincoln’s secretaries appeared at Willard’s: Ronald A. Rietveld, “The Lincoln White House Community,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 20, no. 2 (Summer 1999), p. 23. Available online at http://quod.lib.unich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0020.204?rgn=main;view-fulltext.

  “holding court among the belles”: Seale, The President’s House: A History, Vol. 1, p. 381.

  Orville Hickman Browning: Donald, “We
Are Lincoln Men,” pp. 101–19; Browning diary, pp. 508–9.

  he startled Browning: Browning diary, Jan. 12, 1862.

  he had received a telegram: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 98–99.

  “I would rather like a regiment”: Quoted in Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. 1, p. 465.

  He had not been there long: Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 1839–1865, p. 188.

  Using Halleck’s feint: ibid.

  Halleck’s view of war: cf. Halleck, Elements of Military Art and Science, especially pp. 38–43.

  “The art of war is simple”: This quote, in nearly identical context, can be found in T. Harry Williams, “The Military Leadership of North and South,” in Donald, Why the North Won, p. 51.

  “I had not uttered”: Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, pp. 189–90.

  “the largest official leak”: Sears, George B. McClellan, pp. 140–42.

  “The streets and crossings are worse”: Taft diary, Jan. 22, 1862.

  “The city was in a fearful condition”: Alexander Williamson, quoted in Seale, The President’s House, Vol. 1, p. 401.

  Chase convened a conference: Chase diary, Jan. 14–20, 1862; Taft diary, Jan. 17, 1862.

  Nicolay estimated: Nicolay to Therena Bates, Jan. 15, 1862.

  an evening at the Washington Theater: Miers, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. 3, Jan. 23, 1862.

  across the ocean in Paris: Dayton to Seward, Jan. 27, 1862.

  An “unscrupulous adventurer”: Stoddard, Lincoln at Work, pp. 47–53.

  “Having gotten on our armor”: The account of the meeting is from William Dayton’s dispatch to Seward, Jan. 27, 1862.

  “something must be done”: ibid.

  “our efforts … are hopeless”: ibid.

  “President’s General War Order No. 1: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 111–12.

  precisely what he was looking for: Smith, Grant, pp. 139–40.

  3: FEBRUARY

  “One section of our country believes”: CW, Vol. 4, pp. 268–69.

  “We didn’t go into the war”: RW, p. 295.

  a new poem: The Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 52 (February 1862), p. 10.

  Samuel Gridley Howe: Tuchinsky, “Samuel Gridley Howe,” in Heidler and Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, pp. 1011–13.

  “like a bloodstained ghost”: Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, pp. 157–61.

  he despised the reformers: Welles diary, Sept. 3, 1862.

  “I will not fight”: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, circa Nov. 14, 1861; see also McClellan to Samuel Barlow, Nov. 8, 1861.

  he knew which side: John Stuart, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 64.

  “a great and crying injustice”: RW, p. 169.

  “Slavery is doomed”: ibid., p. 303.

  “I am naturally anti-slavery”: CW, Vol. 7, pp. 281–83.

  “a party of Methodist parsons”: RW, p. 430.

  the entire country … was complicit: ibid., p. 368.

  Chief Justice Taney: Guelzo, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation (for example, pp. 39, 114) provides several lucid insights into the constitutional snares Taney had laid across the path to emancipation. If freeing the slaves could be construed as a punishment imposed on a class of citizens (i.e., slave owners) without benefit of a trial, emancipation could be classed as a bill of attainder, explicitly forbidden by the Constitution. Freeing slaves by presidential order, meanwhile, could run afoul of Taney’s 1850 opinion in Fleming v. Page.

  “violent and remorseless”: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 48–49.

  Confederate operatives in Europe: Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, p. 66.

  abolitionists began to fear: cf. Sumner to Frances Bird, Feb. 19, 1862.

  “When the hour comes”: RW, pp. 118–19.

  Nathaniel Gordon: The story of Gordon’s crime, trial, and punishment is told in Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader.

  “You do not know how hard”: RW, p. 409.

  “boyish cheerfulness”: Emerson, Essays and Journals, p. 667.

  Finally, an army was moving: Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, p. 190; Smith, Grant, pp. 139–41.

  “Oh, Mr. Emerson!”: Emerson, Essays and Journals, p. 667.

  delight in his own jokes: ibid.

  he had spoken at the Smithsonian: Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, pp. 563–64.

  “I am against capital punishment”: Sumner to Orestes Brownson, Feb. 2, 1862.

  “fidelity and conscientiousness”: Emerson, Essays and Journals, p. 667.

  “If we fail”: Bates diary, Feb. 3, 1862.

  “duty” compelled him: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 128–29.

  doctrine of white supremacy: See, for example, Alexander Stephens’s speech at Savannah, March 21, 1861, excerpted in Stampp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War, pp. 116–17: “Our new Government is founded upon … its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

  “the awful change”: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 128–29.

  Nicolay estimated: Nicolay to Therena Bates, Feb. 2, 1862.

  Mary’s idea was: Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, pp. 95–97.

  What mattered to the cutthroats: Nicolay to Therena Bates, Feb. 2, 1862.

  Determined to show: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, pp. 206–7.

  “Our cat has a long tail”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 101–2. The spelling of Elizabeth Keckly’s surname is a matter of dispute. I have chosen to follow the choice of biographer Jennifer Fleischner in Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave.

  “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware”: quoted in Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 206.

  The Liberator pronounced: quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp. 259–60.

  But as Nicolay acidly observed: Nicolay to Therena Bates, Feb. 6, 1862.

  McClellan … cutting the familiar figure: Dahlgren diary, Feb. 5, 1862.

  “30 days delay”: McClellan to Stanton, Feb. 3, 1862. Stephen W. Sears, editor of The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, argues persuasively that this document, dated Jan. 31, 1862, is misdated and actually was completed on Feb. 3.

  During the awkward pause: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, Vol. 2, pp. 119–20.

  fistfight in the kitchen: Nicolay to Therena Bates, Feb. 6, 1862.

  “the most splendid”: Dahlgren diary, Feb. 5, 1862 (p. 356n).

  “I shall take and destroy”: Grant to Halleck, Feb. 6, 1862.

  not much for hunkering: Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, pp. 196–97.

  Stanton strode into a cabinet meeting: Bates diary, Feb. 14, 1862.

  Lincoln was delighted: ibid.

  mount a siege: Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, p. 204.

  the Rebels were in position: Hurst, Men of Fire: Grant, Forrest, and the Campaign That Decided the Civil War, pp. 262–71.

  constant supply of ammunition: Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, p. 205.

  Grant had a hunch: ibid., p. 196.

  “The one who attacks first”: ibid., p. 205.

  “greatest single supply disaster”: Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, p. 150.

  Since his visit with Emerson: Miers, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. 3, Feb. 7 and 13, 1862.

  “Goethe teaches courage”: Emerson, “Goethe,” in Representative Men: Seven Lectures, p. 275.

  “I cannot speak so confidently”: Nicolay journal, Feb. 17, 1862.

  He proposed an amnesty: CW, Vol. 5, p. 135; see also Dahlgren diary, Feb. 16, 1862.

  “We have unmistakeable evidence”: Seward to Adams, Feb. 5, 1862.

  “Our friends want”: Adams to Seward, Feb. 7, 1862.

  “The great victory at Mill Spring”: Seward to Adams, Feb. 17, 1862.

  A French nobleman: Dahlgren diary, Feb. 21
, 1862.

  “the switch had been turned off”: Dayton to Seward, Feb. 27, 1862.

  They were worried about Willie: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 100–102.

  “absorbed pretty much all”: Nicolay to Therena Bates, Feb. 11, 1862; Nicolay journal, Feb. 18, 1862.

  “He was his father over again”: Randall, Lincoln’s Sons, p. 51.

  “an amiable, good-hearted boy”: Taft diary, Feb. 20, 1862.

  “He never failed to seek me out”: quoted in Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 106–10.

  removed his hat and bowed: ibid.

  “before they have any”: Randall, Lincoln’s Sons, p. 127.

  “the most lovable boy”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 3.

  Willie had a crush: ibid., p. 166.

  “good as pie”: ibid., pp. 31–32.

  “the most indulgent parent”: Joseph Gillespie, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 181.

  “love is the chain”: RW, p. 296.

  They shelled a cabinet meeting: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 101, 104–5; Stoddard, Lincoln’s Third Secretary: The Memoirs of William O. Stoddard, pp. 98–99.

  Recalling the hard labor: John Romine, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 118.

  “let the goat be”: RW, p. 415.

  “sit on his stomach!”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 109–10.

  “I know every step”: RW, p. 185.

  Willie wasting away: cf. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, p. 66.

  “in extremis”: Bates diary, Feb. 18, 1862.

  carved rosewood bed: Seale, The President’s House, Vol. 1, pp. 374–86.

  “If I go he will call for me”: quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 253.

  “my boy is gone”: Nicolay diary, Feb. 20, 1862.

  Pomroy arrived: Boyden, Echoes from Hospital and White House, pp. 52–56.

  “a growing man in religion”: quoted in Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, p. 33.

  “He found difficulty”: RW, p. 137.

  “This is the hardest trial”: Boyden, Echoes from Hospital and White House, pp. 52–56.

  grab a tree: Bates diary, Feb. 24, 1862.

  Before the funeral: French diary, March 2, 1862.

  a simple affair that brought tears: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 106–10.

  Afterward, Lincoln and his oldest son: French diary, March 2, 1862; Boyden, Echoes from Hospital and White House, pp. 56–57.