Stanton

by Benjamin P. Thomas

  McClellan informed Stanton that he had given Lincoln his views on general policy. “You and I during the last summer so often talked over the whole subject,” he wrote the Secretary, “that I have only expressed the opinions then agreed upon between us.”

  Whatever opinions on these matters Stanton may once have expressed to McClellan, he no longer agreed with him on the advisability of waging a “soft” war. From the time he became Secretary of War his purpose had been to put new drive into the war effort, to smash the enemy decisively and as quickly as possible. To that end Stanton had come to favor the use of any and every instrument and resource available to the government—and the amazing thing about it was that McClellan was ignorant of any change in Stanton’s views and never realized that war can alter purposes and goals, that this war was assuming a revolutionary character.

  It may be another instance of Stanton’s trying to be all things to all men. But it seems more likely, as the two men had not discussed matters with each other for a year, that McClellan, righteous in his own conceits, had been too obtuse to perceive Stanton’s sensitivity to the changing nature of the war, and the fact that his own military failures made a mockery of his propensity to direct political policies. McClellan’s relationship with Stanton had long since reached that point of no return where the two men distrusted each other’s motives as well as conclusions.

  For Stanton, personal tragedy wiped from his mind for the moment the developing impasse with McClellan. Little James Hutchison Stanton died, not quite nine months old. Lincoln returned to Washington in time to attend the funeral along with most of the cabinet.1 The child’s death came just as Stanton, sick with grief and fatigue, became the target for the most powerful attack he had yet known, unleashed by the stunning news of McClellan’s retreat from Richmond. The public denounced Stanton and praised McClellan for the latter’s defeats; the Secretary was condemned publicly as being worthy of death, and ordnance man Balch commented that if Stanton should “venture” where McClellan’s men could lay hands on him, he “would be badly abused.”

  Much of the antipathy toward Stanton was spontaneous and genuine. But some substantial part of the growing anti-Stanton sentiment that marked the spring and summer months of 1862 was manufactured to increase newspaper circulation and—the goal of the Blair tribe—to divide conservative Republicans from their radical party brethren and thus expand Blairite influence.

  The New York World was the mainspring of the attack on Stanton. Its able publisher, Manton Marble, was a partisan Democrat, heartily Unionist, and wholly dedicated to increasing the circulation of his newspaper. An anti-Stanton stand, he and his associate Barlow had decided, was good for the country and for the World. His correspondents on the Peninsula, favored by McClellan and angry at Stanton’s press restrictions, sent Marble the kind of dispatches he wanted.2

  Stanton could not win a popularity contest against the dashing and idolized McClellan. But what he most worried about was that Lincoln might succumb to the pressure and bring McClellan into the cabinet in his place, as a uniformed Secretary of War. Actually, McClellan, believing that it was his destiny to save the Union, had this in mind.

  To Stanton, he was a wrecker instead of a savior, unless kept in check. So the Secretary fought back. Wolcott temporarily blunted the World’s thrusts by warning Barlow that if they continued, Congress might turn the local customhouse “inside out.” Stanton, Wolcott wrote, “cared not much for the pounding you gave him. He is a lawyer and a hard-hitter too … the World’s abuse of Stanton has been a frightful error—a dreadful waste of opportunity and material. As to the man himself, he is as honorable & honest as you or I.” It meant the final severance of Stanton’s friendship with Barlow and his conservative associates.

  But newer friends proved their worth. Chandler came to his defense in the Senate, and in a terrific blast denounced McClellan’s Democratic supporters as disloyal partisans. Although Stanton had restrained Chandler from attacking McClellan a few weeks earlier, he now endorsed his remarks, and repeated their theme in articles, sent out under pseudonyms, which Woodman planted in New England and Ohio Valley newspapers. Stanton was ready to bring his covert opposition to McClellan out into the light of day.3

  By the end of July, the counterattack was succeeding. Many men found in Lincoln’s support of Stanton adequate reason to sustain the Secretary. “Public opinion is fast turning,” George Bancroft estimated, adding that the whole Yorktown campaign exhibited McClellan’s incapacity and Lincoln’s “successive, hasty, & contradictory acts of interference.” Interior Secretary Smith wrote to Stanton that at last the attacks on him were beginning to recoil upon their authors, the friends of McClellan.

  It was sweet news to Stanton. He replied to Smith that “the dogs that have been yelping at my heels, finding how useless it is, appear to be giving up the hunt and contenting themselves with an occasional snarl.”4 But the yelping and snarling never entirely ceased.

  A major item of controversy, even to this day, was what Lincoln called “the curious mystery” of the number of troops that had been sent to McClellan. He had planned to operate with about 150,000 men. The diversion of Blenker’s division and the withholding of McDowell’s contingent left him with only 93,000, he said. Deducting men on leave and unfit for field duty left him, McClellan claimed, with only 70,000 effectives at the beginning of the campaign.

  On the other hand, McClellan’s own returns showed 158,419 troops under his command on April 1, including those of Blenker and McDowell, and 156,838 under his command on June 20, just before the Seven Days’ battle, so that all but 1,581 of the troops withheld from him, as well as his losses up to the latter date, had been made up. Probably the largest number of effectives that he could send into battle was around 100,000. The Confederates at the peak of their strength could muster 85,000.

  In the beginning McClellan had overwhelming superiority of numbers. But he failed to utilize that superiority when, instead of attacking, he put Yorktown under siege. Later, according to accepted military theory, he lacked the numerical superiority necessary for successful offensive operations. So did Lee. But Lee took the offensive anyway—with a large measure of success. McClellan’s trouble was not lack of troops; it was overcaution, and lack of any real will to fight.

  Lincoln went into this matter of numbers when on August 6 he finally chose to speak out in Stanton’s defense. The President said he never liked to say anything in public unless he could produce some good by it. “The only thing I think of just now not likely to be better said by someone else, is a matter in which we have heard some other persons blamed for what I did myself.” There were cries of “What is it?” and Lincoln explained that there had been a widespread attempt to involve Stanton and McClellan in a quarrel. From his own observation, “these gentlemen are not nearly so deep in the quarrel as some pretending to be their friends.” McClellan naturally wanted to be successful, Lincoln said. So did the Secretary of War. But both the Secretary and the President must fail if their generals failed. They both wanted McClellan to succeed.

  “Sometimes we have a dispute about how many men Gen. McClellan has had,” Lincoln added, “and those who would disparage him say that he has had a very large number, and those who would disparage the Secretary of War insist that Gen. McClellan has had a very small number. The basis for this is, there is always a wide difference, and on this occasion, perhaps, a wider one between the grand total on McClellan’s rolls and the men actually fit for duty; and those who would disparage him talk of the grand total on paper, and those who would disparage the Secretary of War talk of those present fit for duty.… And I say here, as far as I know, the Secretary of War has withheld no one thing at any time in my power to give him … and I stand here, as justice requires me to do, to take upon myself what has been charged on the Secretary of War, as withholding from him.”5

  The failures and frustrations of the Valley and Peninsular campaigns convinced Lincoln that he must shake up the Union high command.
Running the show himself had proved too much of a weight and exposed him to criticisms almost beyond enduring. A military expert was needed in Washington who would command as well as counsel, obey as well as fight. Lincoln required a top general who had the respect of the Army’s bestarred echelon and who would be willing to serve as a buffer for the President by accepting the onus of unpopular decisions.

  Hitchcock had rarely been available even to offer advice recently, much less to provide for the other needs Lincoln felt. The old officer was physically ill and disgusted at the inside workings of government, and he decided to resign. He had come to detest Stanton, even though the Secretary had never been offensive to him and despite the fact that Stanton and he had always agreed on strategy. Hitchcock and Stanton were two of the very few persons in the government who knew that Lincoln had been the final arbiter in policy disputes.

  Stanton pressed him to stay, or at most to take a leave of absence. The Secretary correctly anticipated that the military man whom Lincoln chose to replace Hitchcock would stand close to the President, where Stanton had made a place for himself up to this time. Stanton never interfered, however, as Lincoln searched for the right man.

  First the President offered Burnside the command of the Army of the Potomac, but he refused to supersede McClellan. Then, on July 11, Lincoln summoned Halleck to Washington. He ordered him to take command of the land forces of the United States with the title of General in Chief. Stanton felt about Halleck the same lack of enthusiasm that Wolcott manifested. Writing to Pamphila, Wolcott stated that Halleck “isn’t by any means my pattern of a man,” but it was a forward step in securing unity of military command and action, “substantially degrades McClellan into a mere subordinate,” and might keep Lincoln from future interferences in policy.6

  Halleck arrived on July 22, and high government officials and fellow officers scrutinized him closely. His uniform fit tightly across an ample paunch. A crescent of thin gray whiskers fringed his flabby cheeks and dimpled chin. His eyes bulged out beneath a high, wide brow that made his sobriquet, “Old Brains,” deriving from his authorship of books on law and war, seem strikingly appropriate.

  Forty-seven years old when he assumed the Union high command, Halleck had won a Phi Beta Kappa key at Union College before enrolling at West Point. His military service in the Mexican War had been limited to minor operations in California. Resigning from the Army in 1854, he had become director and superintendent of the New Almaden quicksilver mine, in which capacity he had run afoul of Stanton.

  Coming back into the Army in 1861, Halleck had done an efficient job of military administration while commanding in the West. But he lacked dash and magnetism. The important victories in his department had been won by his subordinates; when he took the field in person, he had been painfully overcautious. A planner and co-ordinator rather than a field commander, he shared Hitchcock’s opinion that the Union armies were operating on too many fronts. And yet, after taking Corinth, he had dispersed his troops throughout the Southwest, instead of finishing the all-important work of clearing the Mississippi River. But whatever Halleck’s deficiencies, no general had shown to better advantage for the job of supreme command behind the lines.

  And so men who had been disappointed in the Union’s failures thus far looked hopefully to Halleck to alter things. If he or Stanton was nervous about encountering the other in person once again—Sam Ward gossiped to Seward that “it must be delightful for him [Halleck] to meet Mr. Stanton on an intimate footing after the latter’s published report … that Halleck the lawyer had perjured himself in the New Almaden case!”—neither man exhibited it on the day after Halleck’s arrival, when Lincoln, Stanton, Halleck, Pope, and Burnside held a long consultation. Lincoln told Halleck his opinion of McClellan. As a result, the command of the Army of the Potomac was again offered to Burnside. When he declined it a second time, Lincoln and some members of the cabinet, including Stanton, urged Halleck to remove McClellan anyway. He shied away from this step. “They want me to do what they are afraid to attempt,” Halleck wrote to his wife. But he was more afraid than they.

  Detested by the antislavery radicals, McClellan had become the idol of the Northern Democrats, and his soldiers worshipped him in spite of his recent defeats. True, Lincoln and most of his cabinet members considered McClellan a failure and thought the time had come to remove him. But for Lincoln or Stanton to initiate such action would give rise to a charge of partisan prejudice which might turn the Union Democrats against the war and arouse the ire of the Army. If Halleck shouldered that responsibility, McClellan’s removal could be defended as a nonpartisan act of military necessity.

  Though Halleck soon found that McClellan, furious at Halleck’s ascent over him, was uncontrollable, he also suspected that radical pressure on the administration was the reason behind the desire to dismiss McClellan. Abhorring abolitionism himself, he hoped it would never be necessary to yield to the radicals and put McClellan on the shelf, and he persisted in the hope that “Mac” under his direction would improve in obedience and effectiveness. Yet when this hope proved illusory, Halleck failed Lincoln’s need by evading the right decision to remove the cocky young commander.7

  After a number of consultations, Halleck offered McClellan a choice of renewing his campaign against Richmond with 20,000 new troops or calling it off once and for all. McClellan said he wanted to attack but would need more men. No one was satisfied. McClellan complained to his wife that Halleck “has done me no good yet,” and repeated gossip that the new general in chief praised him to friends but told enemies that he was too dilatory.

  After returning to the capital from these consultations at McClellan’s headquarters, Halleck was still reluctant to displease McClellan, but that general’s own report had given him an exaggerated notion of Lee’s strength. As he now considered it hazardous to keep the Union armies separated, Halleck, on August 3, ordered McClellan to move his army to Aquia Creek within supporting distance of Pope, whose troops were now at Culpeper. McClellan insisted that the fate of the Union must be decided on the James and found one excuse after another for delaying the embarkation. Halleck began to suffer from the heat and the labor, and more responsibility than he cared to assume. “I am almost broken down,” he wrote to his wife, “… I can’t get General McClellan to do what I wish.”

  Still avoiding decision, Halleck sent Burnside to the Peninsula to hurry the troop movement to the north, but Stanton guessed that the real purpose of Burnside’s assignment was to keep McClellan under control. Stanton revealed his own diminished role in affairs, which Halleck’s arrival had initiated. He now had to ask Chase, whom he had criticized before for trying to meddle in War Department matters, to find out from Halleck what Burnside’s orders were—a humiliating request for this Secretary of War to make, who had boasted that he would suffer no interference in the conduct of his office from President, generals, or other cabinet officers.

  This isolation from intimate participation in command decisions was a foretaste of what Stanton was to suffer in the next few weeks. From being Lincoln’s close adviser during the period of amateur control of the armies, he now found himself demoted to virtual exclusion from the inner councils. Now top-level military matters were in Halleck’s hands, and ordnance officer Balch, a confidant of the Secretary, wrote that Stanton “has at last found out that he can’t quite manage the war.”

  But Stanton was not the sort of man to be pushed aside for long. Questions of strategy and slavery soon combined to return him to the control center around Lincoln, but for a time Halleck was to be the more vital partner in that ring.8

  Prompted by Stanton, and evidently with Lincoln’s acquiescence, Pope had issued a series of orders renouncing McClellan’s policy of “gentlemanly war.” His commanders were instructed to arrest all disloyal persons both male and female found within their lines and have them swear allegiance to the government or betake themselves South on penalty of being treated as spies. Bushwackers were to be shot without ci
vil process, and his army was to live off the country, “not wasting force and energy” in protecting the private property of persons hostile to the government. Pope later claimed that Stanton wrote this pronouncement; and indeed it was in the spirit of the Secretary’s answer to a journalist’s query concerning the disposition of captured rebel guerrillas: “Let them swing.”

  There can be no doubt that Pope’s proclamation was an invitation for some Union soldiers to make free with the property, and in some instances with the persons, of Southern civilians. McClellan, accustomed to more traditional and restrained policies, complained that the order aggravated the problem of maintaining discipline and invited countermeasures by the outraged South. But it must also be said that, even before this, many individual soldiers and whole units of the eastern commands had behaved toward enemy civilians as Pope now permitted officially. On the other hand, Pope’s order was rarely if ever carried out to the permissible limits of conduct. And across the mountains, where West Point’s concepts of restrained war never rooted as strongly as they did along the Atlantic seaboard, the assumptions underlying Pope’s order were in far more general practice than they were in the Army of the Potomac.

  Harshness and cruelty could not be kept out of this war. To be sure, the Union government should never have approved any excesses that its soldiers committed, and Stanton and Pope erred seriously by weakening the moral position of the government. But neither man created the hatreds that were growing between the Yankee soldier and the white man of the South. The Union trooper distrusted all white residents in occupied territory. He thought of them as the source of the guerrillas, the snipers, and the informers for the Confederate Army which made his life wretched and unsure. To him, Pope’s order made sense.9