Throughout Jackson’s Valley campaign McClellan was optimistic about capturing Richmond, though he failed to seize the opportunity that the diversion of rebel troops to Jackson offered him. New rumors of a Confederate build-up plunged him into uncertainty and dejection. Estimating Lee’s strength at 200,000 when it was really 85,000, he wrote to Stanton on June 25 that if the forthcoming battle resulted in disaster, “the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders; it must rest where it belongs.” Stanton showed this dispatch to Lincoln, who answered it himself. McClellan’s tone pained him very much, he said. “I give you all I can, and act on the presumption that you will do the best you can with what you have.” It was ungenerous of McClellan to presume that Lincoln had more men to send; “I have omitted and shall omit no opportunity to send you reinforcements whenever I possibly can.”
Lincoln was convinced by the ineffectual effort to trap Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley that he had committed a grave error in dividing Virginia into so many different commands. He and Stanton visited McDowell at Manassas on June 19 and 20, to seek his advice and to comfort him, for he had been badly injured and his spirit had been crushed by McClellan’s public contumely. They returned to Washington agreed that McDowell was not the man for a top command. Still determined to achieve greater unity of organization for the Union’s forces in northern Virginia, Lincoln instructed Stanton to summon General John Pope to Washington. Then, belatedly recognizing the desirability of seeking disinterested professional advice, Lincoln at Stanton’s suggestion slipped off to see Winfield Scott at West Point. Hitchcock was not now available; that veteran had put himself under a doctor’s care in New York.
News of the President’s trip leaked out and gave rise to new rumors that Stanton was on his way out of the cabinet. McClellan’s supporters were jubilant. General Patrick confided to his diary the fervent hope that “Stanton is doomed!” Barlow, a bitter enemy of the Secretary since falling afoul of Stanton’s security apparatus, spread the word that he was insane.
Stanton’s friends hurried to press him to stay. In a speech in Jersey City on his way back to Washington, Lincoln assured the country that Stanton would stay on and that he was not “making or unmaking any General.” He added jokingly that Stanton held a tight rein on the press, “and I am afraid if I blab too much he might draw a tight rein on me.”12
Pope arrived in Washington while Lincoln was visiting Scott. The dark, handsome, bearded general had performed creditably under Halleck. He knew Lincoln personally; his Illinois friends had been pulling wires to get him an important command. Reporting to Stanton, Pope found a short, stout, disheveled man, whose long beard was turning gray and who “had the appearance of a man who had lost much sleep and was tired both in body and in mind.” The Secretay informed him that the government planned to combine the forces of McDowell, Banks, and Frémont into a new army with Pope in command. It would demonstrate in the direction of Charlottesville and Gordonsville, thereby drawing off part of the force that was opposing McClellan at Richmond.
Either Stanton had misunderstood Lincoln’s purposes or the President had decided to give Pope a greater opportunity than merely defending Washington. For the June 26 order creating the Army of Virginia with Pope at the head stated that he was to help capture Richmond, while screening the capital. Lincoln and Stanton evidently contemplated a pincers movement; McClellan coming at Richmond from the east and Pope from the west.
Stanton quickly discerned some striking differences between Pope and McClellan. If “Little Mac” overestimated dangers, Pope disregarded real threats. McClellan sheathed his thunderbolts in flannel; Pope proposed to unleash them raw. Boasting that in his western command he had been accustomed to seeing the backs of the enemy, Pope wanted his new soldiers to forget all about lines of retreat and to prepare to attack. His brave words were soon to be tested.
On the same day Lincoln’s order set up Pope’s new command, Lee made his first stab at McClellan. The Army of the Potomac was split astride the rain-swollen Chickahominy River, Fitz-John Porter’s command on the north bank and the other corps south of the stream. Porter’s flaming batteries repulsed Lee’s thrust near Mechanicsville, and McClellan claimed a great and complete victory.
But Lee was only beginning his main drive. He unleashed it the next day, aimed at McClellan’s base at White House Landing, throwing 55,000 troops in a vicious attack against the 35,000 of Porter’s corps. Only fragmentary information reached Washington throughout the long, tense day.13
The Army of the Potomac had fought well and had suffered no loss of morale on this first day of decision. A determined drive south of the river, where the rebel forces were weak, might have taken the troops straight into Richmond. But McClellan, severely shaken by the reverses of the day, lacked the nerve to launch a counterattack. Shortly after midnight, he wired hysterically to Stanton: “I feel too earnestly tonight. I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the government has not sustained this army. If you do not do so now the game is lost.
“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.”
The telegrapher on duty at the war office stiffened with shock at the words and summoned Sanford, military supervisor of telegrams, to read the message. Sanford’s eyes widened in amazement. Before taking the dispatch to Stanton, he ordered it recopied with the last two sentences deleted. But even without its censored passages, the telegram contained a nasty charge and an insubordinate spirit. Stanton, not knowing of the change in its text, showed the message to Lincoln, and remarked: “You know, Mr. President, that all I have done was by your authority.” Lincoln nodded in agreement. Notwithstanding, they set to work to aid the embattled commander. Stanton ordered Burnside at Roanoke Island, Hunter at Hilton Head, and Halleck to detach troops from their commands and rush them to McClellan. Lincoln instructed McClellan: “Save your army at all events. We send reinforcements as fast as we can.”
Holding off the enemy by day, McClellan retreated by night. At sundown on June 30, after a series of sharp engagements, his weary, battered regiments were forming at Malvern Hill, a strong position near the James River, where gunboats could support them. Stanton’s quartermaster and ordnance bureaus had already provided an enormous amount of stores at Harrisons Landing, where McClellan had established a new base, to replace the matériel burned in the retreat. The general’s mood was still bitter. “If none of us escape,” he wired Stanton, “we shall at least have done honor to our country.” And he asked for more gunboats.14
McClellan’s predicament again pointed up the magnitude of Stanton’s error in stopping recruiting back in April. The Confederacy had faced up to the need for new troops and was getting them by conscription. Stanton’s appeal to the loyal governors during Jackson’s campaign in the Valley and the subsequent reopening of the recruiting offices had brought only a trickle of enlistments. Now more troops were urgently needed. But to call for them by presidential proclamation might cause the people to fly into panic, fearing that the situation was more desperate than it actually was. Lincoln, Stanton, and Seward decided to have Seward go secretly to New York City to consult with Governor Morgan, of New York, Governor Andrew Curtin, of Pennsylvania, Thurlow Weed, and members of the Union Defense Committee.
Seward worked out a scheme whereby the governors petitioned Lincoln to call for more troops—the number finally agreed on was 300,000—and Stanton helped to smooth out the complex problem of the federal government’s contribution to each state’s bounty payment. The War Department fixed the state quotas and issued formal orders for raising the troops, but the recruiting and management of the new contingents until they were mustered into service were left to the governors, as had been the case under previous calls.15
This intense backstage maneuvering succeeded in securing reinforcements without seriously dampening the public spirit of the North. Meanwhile, news came that McC
lellan’s artillery, lined up hub to hub on Malvern Hill, had blasted Lee’s attack to bits. McClellan wired that 50,000 fresh troops would enable him to regain the offensive, and that the arrival of even a few thousand men immediately would revive the morale of his weary troops. Stanton replied that 5,000 soldiers from McDowell’s corps were already on their way and that 25,000 from Halleck’s army should arrive within two weeks. Lincoln wired the state governors that he would need only half the troops he had called for, if he could have them at once, and that with them he could substantially end the war within two weeks. “But time is everything.… The quicker you send, the fewer you will have to send. Time is everything.”
One governor after another responded that recruiting was terribly difficult, chiefly because of the length of time the men would be required to serve. To meet this emergency, Congress, at Stanton’s instigation, empowered the President to call out the militia for nine months’ service and to apportion quotas to the states, making all men from eighteen to forty-five liable to militia duty and providing that if the enforcement machinery in any state proved inadequate or broke down, the President might do whatever might be necessary to make the act effective. It became law on July 17. At the same time, Stanton authorized four northwestern governors to draw on the War Department for funds for encouraging enlistments by using speakers or any other means the state officials felt useful; he had earlier stopped all requests for leaves of absence from officers.
Under the pressure of unceasing work and strain, Stanton’s health again grew uncertain and his temper became shorter. He could find no time to relax; he had been looking forward to spending the Fourth of July boating on the Potomac with Meigs and their families, but he spent the national anniversary instead with McClellan’s chief of staff, General Marcy, who told him that unless McClellan was generously reinforced, he might be obliged to capitulate if Lee should launch a new assault. Stanton, alarmed, told Lincoln what Marcy had said. Lincoln sent for Marcy and put him on the carpet. The word “capitulate” must never be used in connection with the Army of the Potomac, he declared. Marcy stuttered a retraction; Stanton must have misunderstood him—which was untrue, for Marcy had said the same things to others as well. After his interview with Lincoln and Stanton, Marcy wrote to McClellan: “The President and Secretary speak very kindly of you and find no fault.”
But whatever Stanton may have told Marcy, he was finding plenty of fault. In his first and last recourse to nepotism, Stanton had recently brought his brother-in-law, Wolcott, into the War Department as an assistant secretary to replace Scott, who had returned to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Wolcott wrote to Pamphila that everyone except Lincoln thought McClellan should be removed. “Edwin urges his dismissal,” Wolcott stated, “but does not insist upon it and so nothing is done.” Stanton told his friend Israel D. Andrews that it was only Lincoln’s insistence on pacifying the conservatives that kept McClellan in the Army.16
Stanton planned to have another talk with Marcy before the officer returned to the Army of the Potomac. Summoning Marcy, Stanton entrusted him with a letter to McClellan telling of the mortal illness of his child. In this letter Stanton swore to McClellan that “there is no cause in my heart or conduct for the cloud that wicked men have raised between us for their own base and selfish purposes. No man had ever a truer friend than I have been to you and shall continue to be.” Stanton assured McClellan of his continuing official support and personal friendship.
Could Stanton have deliberately played the hypocrite at such a solemn moment, when he was moved by the loftiest feelings with the hand of death on his child? The presence of death always upset him, and often caused him to act impulsively. Now, in a highly emotional state, perhaps he regretted the hard things he had said against McClellan, and took this means of making atonement.
Acknowledging Stanton’s letter, McClellan expressed sympathy in the illness of his child and then reviewed their past relations. When Stanton took over the War Department, McClellan had regarded him as his friend and counselor, he wrote. But soon thereafter Stanton had acted in a manner “deeply offensive to my feelings and calculated to affect me injuriously in public estimation.” Stanton’s supposed part in withholding reinforcements had induced the general to believe that “your mind was warped by a bitter personal prejudice against me.” Now Stanton’s kind letter caused him to think he had been wrong, he wrote, and that he had misconstrued Stanton’s motives. With a feeling of relief, he now stood ready to act with the same cordial confidence that had once marked their relationship.
If Stanton was playing the hypocrite, however, McClellan was matching him card for card. On the day he wrote to Stanton, McClellan advised his wife that his reply to Stanton had been diplomatic; but “if you read it carefully you will see that it is bitter enough—politely expressed, but containing more than is on the surface.” Actually, McClellan wrote, Stanton “is the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard or read of”; if Stanton had lived during Jesus’ lifetime, Judas Iscariot would have “remained a respected member of the fraternity of the Apostles” and would have been shocked at Stanton. “I may do the man injustice,” McClellan mused in a rare moment of self-doubt; “God grant that I may be wrong—for I hate to think that humanity can sink so low—but my opinion is just as I have told you.”17 The Union high command was in a perilous state with two such suspicious, sensitive individuals obliged to work with each other.
1 Tucker to Stanton, April 16, and Hitchcock to same, April 19, 1862, Stanton MSS; Davis to Holt, April 28, 1862, Holt Papers, LC; Holt to Davis, May 3, 1862, owned by Willard L. King. Other data in Lincoln, Works, V, 203–4; Balch to wife, July 16, 1862, UCB; Ward to Seward, April 9, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.
2 Flower, Stanton, 156; Dix to Stanton, May 5, 1862, Stanton MSS; O.R., IX, 392.
3 Gen. E. L. Viele, “A Trip with Lincoln, Chase, and Stanton,” Scribners Monthly, XVI, 814–22; W. E. Baringer, “On Enemy Soil,” ALQ, VII, 4–26; Cannon, op. cit., 153–66. See also Stanton to Ellen, May 8, 1862, Stanton MSS; Chase, Diary, 84–5; O.R., XI, pt. 3, 153, 164, 176; Fox, Correspondence, I, 273–4; Goldsborough to wife, June 13, 1862, Goldsborough Papers, DU.
4 Dahlgren, op. cit., 368–70; CCW, III, 428; O.R., XI, pt. 1, 28, 97–8; McClellan, Own Story, 345–6.
5 Upton, op. cit., 293–5; Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, I, 210–3; O.R., XII, pt. 1, 629; pt. 3, 219, 226, 228, 241.
6 Samuel Hooper to Woodman, June 5, and Curtis to same, June 6, 1862, Woodman Papers, MHS; and see “From the Papers of Horatio Woodman,” MHS Proceedings, LVI, 232–5; Dawes to wife, May 29, 1862, Dawes Papers, LC; Advertiser, May 28, Transcript, June 2, and Herald, June 10, 1862.
7 Sumner to Andrew, May 28, Aug. 14, 1862, Andrew Papers, MHS; Hitchcock to Henry Hitchcock, May 30, 1862, Hitchcock Papers, MoHS; to Winfield Scott, May 28, 1862, Hitchcock Papers, LC.
8 O.R., ser. 3, II, 68–70, 85–114, 206–7; Hooper to Andrew, May 28, 1862, Andrew Papers, MHS; Pearson op. cit., II, 17–22.
9 O.R., ser. 3, II, 28–9, 109; and see Wilson, “Edwin M. Stanton,” loc. cit., 239; Shannon, op. cit., 261, 265.
10 To Andrew, May 28, and Sumner to same, April 22, 1862, Andrew Papers, MHS; and see Gorham, Stanton, I, 426–32.
11 June 12, 1862, ms “Extracts from Letters to Wife,” McClellan Papers, LC, is far fuller than the printed portion in Own Story, 402, and see ibid., 387–9, 399–400; O.R., XI, pt. 3, 216, 219.
12 Lincoln, Works, V, 284, 286; July 5, 1862, Patrick ms diary, LC; “Woodman Letters,” MHS Proceedings, LVIII, 322–3; Woodman to E. L. Stanton, Jan. 9, 1870, Stanton MSS; O.R., LI, pt. 1, 79; McClellan, Own Story, 392–3; Barlow to J. T. Doyle, Letterbook VII, 955, Barlow Papers, HL.
13 O.R., XI, pt. 3, 266, 435; Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (eds.), Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884–7), II, 449–50 (hereafter cited as Battles and Leaders).
14 O.R., IX, 404–7; pt. 3, 271, 280, 290–1; XV, pt. 2, 74–5; Lincoln, Works, V, 289; Halleck to wif
e, July 5, 1862, in Collector, XXI, 39; Bates, op. cit., 109–11; Browning, Diary, I, 558; McClellan, Own Story, 424–5.
15 William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), 198–200 (hereafter cited as Hesseltine, War Governors); Lincoln, Works, V, 302; telegrams, June 30, July 1, 1862, Seward Papers, UR; O.R., XI, pt. 3, 276–7.
16 Lincoln, Works, V, 304; Wolcott MS, 181, 184–5; Browning, Diary, I, 558–60; Andrews to Andrew, July 3, 4, 1862, Andrew Papers, MHS; Stanton to Meigs, July 4, 1862, Meigs Papers, LC; O.R., II, 213; XI, pt. 3, 281, 294.
17 July 13, 18, 1862, ms “Extracts from Letters to Wife,” McClellan Papers, LC; Gen. Henry M. Naglee, Testimony: McClellan vs. Lincoln (n.p., 1864); McClellan, Own Story, 475–8; O.R., XI, pt. 3, 298; and see McClellan to Barlow, July 15, 1862, Barlow Papers, HL.
CHAPTER X
RELENTLESSLY AND WITHOUT REMORSE
UNSURE of what to do and whom to trust, Lincoln left for Harrisons Landing to appraise the condition of McClellan’s army for himself. The general brashly handed him a letter of advice on political matters. Admitting that he was transcending the scope of his official duties, he asserted that his views amounted to convictions and he felt obliged to speak out. First of all, the war should be conducted on the highest Christian principles. Lincoln must adopt a conservative policy and assure the people of the South that they would not be subjugated. “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery,” the general warned, “will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” McClellan suggested that a general in chief be appointed to command the armies on all fronts. “I am willing to serve in such position as you may assign me,” he added.
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