When the triumphant trio returned to Washington, reporters noted that Stanton was “conveyed home seriously ill.” Physicians feared at first that he was suffering from one of the bouts of vertigo that immobilized him for days at a time. He soon recovered, however, and enjoyed the sweetness of victory in what the Civil War historian Shelby Foote has called “one of the strangest small-scale campaigns in American military history.”
Unusually buoyant, Chase expressed greater admiration for the president than he ever had before or ever would again. “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President,” Chase wrote, “for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the Merrimac, as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The whole coast is now virtually ours.”
Not surprisingly, McClellan refused to credit the president for the return of Norfolk to the Union. “Norfolk is in our possession,” he flatly declared to his wife; “the result of my movements.”
THE DAY AFTER Lincoln’s triumphant return, Navy Secretary Welles invited Seward, Bates, and their families to join him and his wife for a six-day cruise along the coast of Virginia, now cleared of rebel forces and the menacing Merrimac. “We had two pilots and thirteen sailors,” Fred Seward informed his mother. “Wormley and his cook and waiters, two howitzers, and two dozen muskets, coal and provisions for a week, field glasses and maps.” The armed navy steamer took them to Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard, where they viewed the ruins of the Merrimac. They proceeded up York River to McClellan’s new headquarters at West Point, thirty miles from Richmond. The cabinet colleagues enjoyed an easy camaraderie as the steamer moved from one river to the next. They consumed hearty meals, sang patriotic songs to the music of a navy band, and joked with one another. When Seward discovered that rats had eaten a tie and socks belonging to Bates, he composed a humorous poem, complete with sketches, to commemorate the occasion.
By day, they went ashore and wandered through the seaboard towns now in possession of the Union armies. “Virginia is sad to look upon,” Seward wrote to his wife, “not merely the rebellion, but society itself, is falling into ruin. Slaves are deserting the homes intrusted to them by their masters, who have gone into the Southern armies or are fleeing before ours. There is universal stagnation, and sullenness prevails everywhere.” Like Lincoln, Seward was always sensitive to the devastation of war. Despite his satisfaction at the recent Union successes that had subdued this part of Virginia, he was disquieted by the bleakness he encountered. “We saw war, not in its holiday garb,” he told Fanny, “but in its stern and fearful aspect. We saw the desolation that follows, and the terror that precedes its march.”
The steamer reached McClellan’s camp at about 3 p.m. on May 13. Approaching the shore, Fred Seward was amazed to find that “a clearing in the woods” had been “suddenly transformed into a great city of a hundred thousand people, by the advent of McClellan’s Army and its supporting fleet.” McClellan escorted the party ashore, where they reviewed thousands of his troops and discussed the general’s plans.
Though McClellan considered such visits “a nuisance,” he convinced his official guests that, if properly reinforced, he would soon prevail in a decisive fight “this side of Richmond,” which would be “one of the great historic battles of the world.” McClellan’s high-spirited, well-disciplined troops and the gigantic size of the operation were impressive to all. “At night,” Fred Seward observed, “the long lines of lights on the shore, the shipping and bustle in the river made it almost impossible to believe we were not in the harbor of Philadelphia or New York.”
After the meeting with McClellan, Seward advised Lincoln by telegraph that McDowell’s forces should be sent to the York River to reinforce McClellan “as soon as possible.” Lincoln and Stanton agreed. McDowell was ordered to move his entire force from the vicinity of Washington to the peninsula. For weeks, McClellan’s Democratic supporters had publicly criticized the president and secretary of war for retaining McDowell’s force out of irrational fear for Washington. Yet now that McClellan stood to have his demands met, he told Lincoln that he wouldn’t receive McDowell’s men unless it was clear that he would have absolute authority over them. McClellan considered McDowell a radical on the issue of slavery and despised him personally, calling him an “animal” in a letter to his wife. Lincoln assured McClellan by telegraph that he was in command.
The day after Lincoln ordered McDowell to prepare for the move south, he made an impromptu visit, accompanied by Stanton and Dahlgren, to McDowell’s headquarters at Fredericksburg. The trip was arranged so suddenly that Captain Dahlgren had no chance to bring food or beds aboard the steamboat that was to carry them to Aquia Landing. Despite the makeshift accomodations, Lincoln relaxed at once, reading aloud from the works of a contemporary poet, Fitz-Greene Halleck, then considered “the American Byron.” Lincoln chose that night to read Marco Bozzaris, a lengthy poem celebrating the death of a Greek hero in the war against Turkey. Lincoln was drawn to the poet’s vision of a lasting greatness, of deeds that would resound throughout history. Because of such achievements in life, both Greece, in which “there is no prouder grave,” and the mother “who gave thee birth,” can speak “of thy doom without a sigh”:
For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’s;
One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.
When Lincoln and his party reached Aquia Creek shortly after dawn, they were driven to McDowell’s camp in what Dahlgren described as “a common baggage car, with camp-stools for the party.” McDowell was eager to show the little group his army’s accomplishments in having rebuilt bridges and repaired telegraph lines, creating a direct link between Washington and Fredericksburg. The general was particularly proud of a new trestle bridge that spanned a creek and deep ravine at a height of a hundred feet. Though “there was nothing but a single plank for us to walk on,” Dahlgren recalled, Lincoln impulsively said: “Let us walk over.” So the president, followed by McDowell, and then poor Stanton, understandably fearful of heights, and finally Dahlgren, began the hazardous journey. “About half-way,” Dahlgren wrote, “the Secretary said he was dizzy and feared he would fall. So he stopped, unable to proceed. I managed to step by him, and took his hand, thus leading him over, when in fact my own head was somewhat confused by the giddy height.”
After breakfast, the president and McDowell mounted horses and spent the day inspecting the troops. Enduring a hot sun without the protection of a hat, Lincoln reviewed “one division after another, all in fine order, the men cheering tremendously.” After a simple meal, the presidential party returned to Aquia Creek, departing for Washington sometime after 10 p.m. Lincoln “was in good spirits,” according to Dahlgren. Once again, he read poetry aloud, and they all retired to their makeshift beds. Before falling asleep, Stanton confided to Dahlgren that “he did not think much of McDowell!”
Troublesome news reached Washington the following day that General Stonewall Jackson had been sent to attack Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley, hoping to prevent McDowell from moving south. The goal was realized. After Jackson attacked Front Royal, forcing General Banks to hastily retreat north to Winchester, the president telegraphed McClellan: “I have been compelled to suspend Gen. McDowell’s movement to join you.” He followed up with a telegram explaining that with Jackson chasing Banks farther and farther north, Washington was again endangered. “Stripped bare, as we are here, it will be all we can do to prevent [the enemy] crossing the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, or above…. If McDowell’s force was now beyond our reach, we should be utterly helpless.” Moreover, while Jackson and his forces made their way north, Lincoln reasoned, Richmond must be vulnerable. “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of Washington. Let me hear from you instantly.”
McClellan replied at 5 p.m.: “Independently of it the time is very near when I shall attack Richmon
d.” He then haughtily informed his wife that he had “just finished [his] reply to his Excellency,” and complained, “it is perfectly sickening to deal with such people & you may rest assured that I will lose as little time as possible in breaking off all connection with them—I get more sick of them every day—for every day brings with it only additional proofs of their hypocrisy, knavery & folly.”
James McPherson concludes that “Lincoln’s diversion of McDowell’s corps to chase Jackson was probably a strategic error—perhaps even the colossal blunder that McClellan considered it.” For as soon as Jackson had managed to divert the Union forces bound for Richmond, he turned back southward to join in the defense of the Confederate capital. Still, McPherson adds, “even if McDowell’s corps had joined McClellan as planned, the latter’s previous record offered little reason to believe that he would have moved with speed and boldness to capture Richmond.”
In the end, though McClellan had advanced to a position only four miles from Richmond by the end of May, he still refused to take the initiative, and his troops were surprised by a Confederate attack at Fair Oaks. Though the battle was inconclusive and the rebels suffered heavier losses than the Union, McClellan was so devastated by the toll of nearly five thousand Union dead and wounded that he lost whatever momentum he had created. “McClellan keeps sending word that he will attack Richmond very soon,—but every day brings some new excuse,” reported Christopher Wolcott, Stanton’s brother-in-law, now assistant secretary of war. The rain, a legitimate excuse during the first ten days of June, had stopped five days earlier. Nevertheless, Wolcott noted, “he has not stirred.”
McClellan’s catalogue of gripes and concerns was endless. There were bridges to be built, bad roads, regiments to be reorganized. When Lincoln eventually ordered McDowell to reinforce him, the general continued to protest that “if I cannot fully control all his [McDowell’s] troops I want none of them, but would prefer to fight the battle with what I have and let others be responsible for the results.” Finally, he confided in his wife, “utmost prudence” was essential. “I must not unnecessarily risk my life—for the fate of my army depends upon me & they all know it.”
McClellan’s chronic delays allowed General Lee to take the initiative once again. During the last week in June, the Confederates launched a brutal attack on Union forces that became known as the Seven Days Battles. The bloody series of engagements on the plains and in the swamps and forests surrounding the Chickahominy River left 1,734 Federals dead, 8,066 wounded, and 6,055 missing or captured. At the end of the first day’s fighting, McClellan telegraphed Stanton to warn that he was up against “vastly superior odds.” He calculated that the rebels had 200,000 troops when in fact they had fewer than half that figure. He would carry on without the reinforcements he had repeatedly requested, but, he continued, if his “great inferiority in numbers” caused “a disaster the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest where it belongs.” Irked, Lincoln replied that McClellan’s talk of responsibility “pains me very much. I give you all I can…while you continue, ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would.”
As the fighting intensified in the days that followed, neither McClellan nor Lincoln was able to sleep. Success alternated between the two forces during the first two days. Then, on June 27, the Confederates scored a critical victory at Gaines’ Mill, forcing McClellan to retreat. “I now know the full history of the day,” McClellan telegraphed Stanton shortly after midnight. “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this.” The president “is wrong in regarding me as ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak. I merely intimated a truth which to-day has been too plainly proved.” Finally, he vindictively added: “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.” When the supervisor of telegrams at the War Department read this defiant message, he was so appalled by the insubordinate tone and the extraordinary charge against the government that he directed his staff to strike the last sentence before relaying it to Stanton.
Even the revised telegram conveyed the accusation that would be leveled by McClellan and his supporters for years to come: victory would have been achieved but for the government’s failure to reinforce an overpowered McClellan. Even after the defeat at Gaines’ Mill, however, McClellan’s troops remained a strong and resilient force. In the days that followed, they fought hard and well, inflicting more than five thousand casualties at Malvern Hill while suffering only half that number. In truth, McClellan was psychologically defeated. “He was simply out-generaled,” Christopher Wolcott concluded. Instead of counterattacking, he continued to retreat from Richmond until his exhausted troops reached a safe position eight miles down the James at Harrison’s Landing. Equally depleted, Lee’s troops returned to Richmond, and the Peninsula Campaign came to an end. The Confederates had successfully secured their capital and gained an important strategic victory. It would take nearly three more years and hundreds of thousands more deaths for the Union forces to come as close to Richmond as they had been in May and June 1862.
CHAPTER 17
“WE ARE IN THE DEPTHS”
THE DEFEAT ON THE Peninsula devastated Northern morale. “We are in the depths just now,” George Templeton Strong admitted on July 14, 1862, “permeated by disgust, saturated with gloomy thinking.” In Washington, columnist Cara Kasson observed the frustration written on every face, manifesting an anxiety greater than the aftermath of Bull Run, “for the present repulse is more momentous.” Count Gurowski agreed, calling the Fourth of July holiday “the gloomiest since the birth of this republic. Never was the country so low.” Even the normally stoical John Nicolay confided to his fiancée, Therena, that “the past has been a very blue week…. I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began.”
For the irrepressibly optimistic Seward, who had fervently hoped the capture of Richmond might signal an end to the war, the turn of events was shattering. “It is a startling sight to see the mind of a great people, saddened, angered, soured, all at once,” he confided to Fanny, who was in Auburn with her mother for the summer. “If I should let a shade of this popular despondency fall upon a dispatch, or even rest upon my own countenance,” he realized, “there would be black despair throughout the whole country.” He begged her for letters detailing daily life at home—the flowers in bloom and the hatching of eggs—anything but war and defeat. “They bring no alarm, no remonstrances, no complaints, and no reproaches,” he explained. “They are the only letters which come to me, free from excitement…. Write to me then cheerfully, as you are wont to do, of boys and girls and dogs and horses, and birds that sing, and stars that shine and never weep, and be blessed for all your days, for thus helping to sustain a spirit.”
Chase was equally shaken and despondent. “Since the rebellion broke out I have never been so sad,” he told a friend. “We ought [to have] won a victory and taken Richmond.” Furthermore, Kate, who had gone to Ohio to visit her grandmother, was not in Washington to console him. “The house seemed very dull after you were gone,” he told her in one of many long letters cataloguing the events of that summer. He described his sojourn to see General McDowell, who had been knocked unconscious by a bad fall from his horse; told her of an unusual cabinet meeting, a pleasant dinner party at Seward’s with the Stantons and the Welles, a meeting with Jay Cooke, and a visit from Bishop McIlvaine. He queried her about her summer clothes, her lace veil, and a diamond she had ordered. In addition to commonplace matters, he provided her with confidential military intelligence about the Peninsula Campaign, delineating the flow of the Chickahominy and the position of the various divisions so she could visualize the course of the battle.
Kate was thrilled by her father’s lengthy epistles, which she interpreted as “a mark of love and confidence.” Her appreciation, he replied, was “more than ample reward for
the time & trouble of writing.” She must trust that she would always have his love and that he would continue to “confide greatly in [her] on many points.” He was pleased, as well, with the quality of her letters, which finally seemed to meet his exacting standards. “All your letters have come and all have been good—some very good.”
However, Kate’s letters that summer concealed her unhappiness over the troubled course of her romance with William Sprague. The young couple had been close to an engagement before Sprague received some nasty letters retelling and likely embellishing the story of Kate’s dalliance with the young married man in Columbus who had become obsessed with her when she was sixteen. Though Sprague was guilty of far greater indiscretions himself, having fathered a child during his twenties, it seems he was so taken aback by the rumors of Kate’s behavior that he broke off the relationship. “Then came the blank,” he later recalled. “Wherever there is day there must be night. In some countries the day is almost constant, but the night cometh. So with us it came.”
Kate, unaccustomed to defeat and ignorant of Sprague’s reasons for ending the courtship, was plunged into dejection. Sensing that something was wrong, Chase told Kate that if anything disappointed him, it was her failure to disclose her deepest personal concerns, to confide in him as he confided in her. “My confidence will be entire when you entirely give me yours and when I…am made by your acts & words to feel that nothing is held back from me which a father should know of the thoughts, sentiments & acts of a daughter. Cannot this entire confidence be given me? You will, I am sure be happier and so will I.”
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