by Alan Sewell
“They were during the 1812 War,” said Butler. “My father told me that the British-occupied ports in Maine did a land office business with the Redcoats. He said the Portland merchants bought more British war bonds with the profits of their trade than American. They were sorry to see the British leave. They hated President Madison and his party. I think they really would have followed through on their threat to leave the Union if the war hadn’t ended when it did.”
McClellan shook his head and sighed.
“The New Englanders are strange birds. They’re good hearted people with a strong sense of justice. But they do let their heads get turned by crazy ideas. I blame them more than the Southerners for inciting this war. If they hadn’t inflamed the South by financing John Brown’s Raid I doubt that Yancey would have schemed up his raid against the Free States. There wouldn’t have been any Battle of Delphi and no Secession of the North. We would have whitewashed our sectional differences for another generation and by then progress in the development of industry and communications would have made the General Government too strong for any sectional group to overthrow.”
“I am a New Englander born and bred,” replied Butler. “And I know how annoying some of us can be. But we’re Americans. America can’t be America without us.”
“That’s why Douglas and now Davis insist on bringing New England and the other Free States back into the fold,” concurred McClellan. “If they became independent they’d ally with the British Empire. Then we’d have British troops on the Ohio instead of the St. Lawrence and the British fleet based at Boston instead of Halifax. The British are our cousins by blood and sentiment, but it is best that they live in the European House and we live in the American House. I don’t like them even being in the Canadas. North America should be one country under one flag north of the Rio Grande.”
That is why I asked President Davis and the Confederate Union Congress to authorize the building of an ocean-going navy. If we ever have to fight the British, we will not get them out of North America until after we have defeated them at sea.
The steamer docked and McClellan and Butler debarked. Brigadier General Dan Sickles, commanding the military garrison inside the city, had gone in with the troops the day before. McClellan and Butler were directed to the office he had set up at a requisitioned building.
Sickles and McClellan congratulated themselves on the success of the landings. McClellan wanted to know how Confederate authority was being received. “Has there been any trouble from the people?”
“No mass disturbances so far,” answered Sickles, “but plenty of passive resistance. The men have torn down some Confederate Union flags and the women are insulting the soldiers.”
“I’ll soon put a stop to that,” said Butler. “Both the flag and the soldiers will be respected. Where are the Free State elected officials? I want to address them as soon as possible and make it clear that they, as the people’s representatives, will be held responsible for persuading the people to maintain civil order.”
“Unfortunately, Governor Andrew and most of the state legislators are deceased,” said Sickles with a sneer. “They thought they were going to turn the Statehouse into a latter day Alamo. Did you see what the broadsides from our warships did to it? We pulled only a few out alive after the building collapsed, and they won’t be walking any time soon.”
“Damn stupid of them to throw their lives away,” said McClellan, with anguish in his voice. I could have won those peoples’ loyalty if they hadn’t acted so rashly.
“Damn, stupid Rebs is right,” hissed Sickles, a course New York City Democrat with political ambitions. “F---ers thought they were better than the rest of us. Had to have their own country. Well f--- them. They got what they deserved.”
McClellan looked at Butler and raised his eyebrow. If we ever need to crack down on these Rebels we have the man here who’ll do it. We need a few men like him to win this war. Butler nodded, indicating that he had been thinking the same.
“We might as well get Butler quartered in the Governor’s House,” added Sickles. “The late Governor Andrew won’t be needing it any more. I’ll send some men over to kick his damn family out of there and get the place ready for you to move into this evening.”
McClellan put his hand on Sickles’ shoulder. “Don’t be harsh with his family, Dan. Move them out gently, even if it takes until tomorrow evening. When you get them out of there, save a room for me. I want to make my office there too. Oh, and you’d better dismiss Andrew’s staff too. Wouldn’t want the cook to poison us. Call Lawton’s in to cater our meals. They serve an excellent braised lamb. Excellent lobster too. Let’s have dinner there tonight, say at seven?”
Butler and Sickles nodded agreement.
McClellan looked outside. “I want to have a look around town, if you’ll be so kind as to round up a couple men to accompany me. I want to see how Jeb Stuart is doing in organizing his cavalry for the raids on the Springfield and Hartford armories. He’s equipping his men with horses from the city, you know.”
“I’ll go with you,” volunteered Butler. “I want to see for myself how the city is faring under our administration.”
McClellan and Butler set off to the livery yards to find Jeb Stuart. They found him watching in mild amusement as one of his quartermasters haggled for horses.
“We’ll pay in Confederate Union notes,” Stuart’s quartermaster was telling the stables owner. “They’re as good as gold.”
“About as good as the horse dung around here as far as I’m concerned,” answered the livery stable owner, “and I’ve already got more of that than I know what to do with.”
“You’re taking Abe Lincoln’s banknotes, and they’re phony as snake oil,” retorted the quartermaster “If you can take Old Abe’s money you can take ours.”
“Old Abe’s money is like him, honest as the day is long! Your Confederate notes look like they were drawn by a child.”
Jeb could tell that haggling with the man would be futile. He pulled his quartermaster aside. “We don’t have time to argue with these jokers. Tell them we’ll take the horses we need and pay $100 in Confederate Union notes. That’s the deal, no more. Now get those horses!”
“Some of our men are not up to trading with these Yankee Rebels,” Stuart acknowledged to McClellan and Butler. “They’ll have us up to three hundred dollars a horse if I don’t put a lid on it. Well, I’d best keep making the rounds to make sure these Yankee traders don’t bankrupt the Confederate Union by charging us a king’s ransom for their spavined horses.”
25
Cleveland, Ohio, October 17, 1861
“The Confederates are landing at Boston, Portland, and Portsmouth,” reported Secretary of War Simon Cameron. “We’re successfully contesting their landing at Portland, but they are ashore at Boston and Portsmouth. In Boston the Statehouse has been destroyed by Confederate naval bombardment. Governor Andrew and most of the State Legislature were inside at the time. They are presumed dead.”
“My God!” gasped several among Lincoln’s Cabinet and the Executive Committee of Congress. All of the President’s men were here except for Secretary of State Seward who was back in Quebec to resolve some points over integrating the Free States’ trade with the Canadas.
“After landing, the Confederates sent cavalry raiding parties inland to attack the Springfield Armory and the Colt Works at Hartford,” Cameron continued. “Those manufactories have been heavily damaged, if not totally destroyed.”
“Boston occupied. The armories destroyed. Governor John Andrew and the legislators dead,” exclaimed Vice President Hamlin. He lowered his head. “God rest their souls.”
“The Confederates diddled us good out there, didn’t they?” commented Lincoln after a long moment of silence.
“I’m afraid we diddled ourselves,” replied Speaker of the House John Sherman. “We convinced ourselves that after Gettysburg all we had to do was sit back and wait for Horace Greeley to broker a peace on our terms of i
ndependence. We didn’t ask ourselves if it was realistic to believe that the Confederates wanted peace. We should have anticipated that they wouldn’t.”
“How were they able to run their ships past the harbor defenses at Boston and Portsmouth?” asked Senator Charles Sumner.
“As the President said, they ‘diddled’ us,” answered Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. “We’ve been at peace with the British, so we never appropriated the money to strengthen the forts, other than the ones guarding Portland, which is where the Confederates are having their difficulties getting ashore. We garrisoned the forts with second-rate troops and didn’t allocate the funds to train them sufficiently in gunnery, which after all is their purpose. The Confederates led us to believe that they had all their efforts aimed toward Philadelphia. So we put all our eggs in that basket.”
“Hmmm,” said Senator Zach Chandler of Michigan. “But I don’t think we should rush what we have in Philadelphia up to New England just yet. That may be exactly what the Confederates want us to do. They may be trying to divert us to New England before getting on with their main push in Philadelphia.”
“I wouldn’t doubt that for a minute,” agreed Hamlin. “They’re sneaky bastards. We’ve got to make a proportional defense of Philadelphia and New England so that we don’t hand over either place to the Confederates.”
“What I want to know is where they’re getting all their men,” said Thad Stevens rapping his cane on the floor in his style of thoughtful agitation. “How do they manage to field an army in the Northwest, an army around Philadelphia, an army around New York, and still have men left over to field yet another army in New England?”
“I may be able to answer that to your satisfaction,” said Cump Sherman who had been standing by the bookcases, away from the circle of politicians reclining on the chairs and sofas. All eyes turned toward Sherman.
“I was Superintendent of the Louisiana Military academy when their mobilization began. You have to remember that at the commencement of hostilities they had one hundred fifty thousand men under arms in one hundred fifty regiments. Those were the volunteers enrolled in the Southern State militias in preparation for Douglas’ scheme to invade Mexico.”
As he warmed to the subject he became animated. He walked to the center of the parlor and began gesturing emphatically to garner the politicians’ attention.
“McClellan planned a mobilization to augment those forces to five hundred thousand men in sixty days. We’ve learned from the officers we captured on the Wabash that they divided the officer staffs of their original one hundred fifty militia regiments in two, giving them another one hundred fifty skeleton regiments that they filled with an intake of volunteers during the mobilization. That’s how they were able to double their number of militia regiments so quickly.”
“Seems they went about it the right way,” interjected Lincoln. “That’s what I’d do if I wanted to get the largest number of men in the field as quickly as possible.”
“The Confederates also made good use of the Regular Army men who sided with them,” Sherman added. “We’ve learned that instead of keeping them all together, they dispersed them into the officer corps of their ‘National Army.’ They filled out their National Army with another intake of volunteers that may have created as many as two hundred additional regiments. Those are most likely the men they are moving into New England.”
“We need to apply these methods to the raising of our armies,” thundered Thad Stevens with an ear-bursting rap of his cane. “We’re in a race to the death with the Confederates to see who can raise the largest armies and get them into battle. And they’re winning.”
“Pinkerton has been forwarding us their newspapers,” added the Secretary of War. “It’s perhaps the most useful service we pay him for. The Confederate papers show that their national government is coordinating the mobilization of all their resources. They’ve organized their railroads under government receivership for the duration of the war. They’ve chartered every shipping line between New York and New Orleans to move their men up the East Coast and the Mississippi Valley. They started printing paper currency to fund their wartime purchases the same week we did. Their conscription agents have been levying taxes in kind since the commencement of hostilities.”
Cameron looked at the group with an ironic smile. “Some of their papers have started fulminating against the ‘Consolidationist’ tendencies of their national government in taking so much control over the war. So much for their States Rights Mumbo Jumbo.”
Lincoln laughed. “Mumbo Jumbo appears to the common language of the Fuzzy Wuzzies of the Dark Continent and of leaders of the Confederate Union of America!” The Cabinet members and Congressmen laughed too.
“The Confederates are strange birds,” said Hannibal Hamlin. “They talk ‘States Rights’ all the time, then call upon their Federal Government to come up here and search every house to see who’s harboring their runaway slaves. Then they make war on us when we exercise our right to state sovereignty, the very same right that they’ve been championing lo these many years.”
“I know them well,” said Cump. “Jefferson Davis, George Pendleton, McClellan, Lee, Stanton, Braxton Bragg, and Dick Taylor. They are all Whigs-turned-Democrats who share the late Stephen Douglas’ vision of a ‘Confederate Union of Sovereign States.’ That means talking up the theory of States Rights while maintaining the National Authority with an iron hand. It’s what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did to New England with the Embargo. It’s what Andrew Jackson did with South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. Jefferson Davis will follow that tradition of talking ‘States Rights’ while lowering the boom on any state that tries to exercise them!”
“We have two issues to settle here, then,” said Thad Stevens. He stopped tapping his cane. “The first is what to do about getting the Confederates out of New England. That is a question of how to fight a battle. The next, and larger question, is how do we fight the war. We’ve proven we can beat the Confederates on the battlefield. They’re can’t out-fight us, so they’re out-strategizing us by attacking us where we’re defenseless. We’ve got to match their thinking on a strategic level or they will nibble us way to nothing even if we beat them on every battlefield.”
Lincoln stood up and walked to the center of the parlor and stood next to Cump to face the group.
“Thad, you presented these questions exactly as we need to understand them. As my itinerant schoolteacher used to say after each lesson during my ‘schooling by littles:’ Let’s sum it up. We’ve learned that the Confederate Union has mobilized larger armies than we have; that they have mobilized their economy to support those armies; and that they will not be easily discouraged from prosecuting their war against us. We will have to match them in raising armies and getting them into the field.”
“We have the same number of people they do,” replied Hamlin. “If they can put that many men in the field, then so can we.”
“At the moment we are less united than they are, though,” Lincoln reminded them. “We still have many Democratic voters who are not enthusiastic about our cause. We can only hope to win them over little by little. In the meantime we must rely on the voters who cast their ballots for us. We need to get substantially all of the able-bodied among those men into the field if we’re going to fight the Confederates in a fair proportion of numbers.”
“The rally at Columbus helped,” said John Sherman. “It drew enough men into our armies to defeat the Confederates on the Wabash.” He looked at his brother. “And it persuaded Cump to fight for us, which made a difference.”
“Thanks, John, for getting him up here,” acknowledged the President. “God only knows where we’d be if Lee had talked him into fighting for their side.”
“We need to organize more of these rallies with the President and the Heroes of Delphi,” suggested Senator Lyman Trumbull.
“Mr. Hay, talk to the governors about arranging a tour by the Heroes of Delphi accompanied by offic
ials of this administration, possibly including myself,” said Lincoln. “Be sure to include Iowa and Minnesota. We need to be thinking more towards organizing our efforts in the Trans-Mississippi.”
“Excellent,” said Thad Stevens. “Now let’s return to the question of what we are going to do about the Confederates in New England. We have a reserve army in training in Albany. And it would seem that we have a surplus of men in Philadelphia and New York since those fronts are likely to remain quiet now that the Confederates have committed their National Army to New England.”
“What do you think, Cump?” asked the President. “Can we muster enough men from Albany and Philadelphia to drive the Confederates out of New England?”
Cump paced in a circle as he thought through how to explain the situation without appearing either defeatist or raising unrealistic expectations of success.
“Of course that will depend on how many men the Confederates have brought to New England and whether or not they make any mistakes in deploying them. The difficulty is that West Point trains its officers to have an eye for fortifying the best defensive ground. Recent improvements in artillery and rifled muskets have made frontal assaults against fortified positions a difficult proposition. The Confederates understand that and have adjusted their tactics to deception rather than direct attack. I expect that McClellan’s hope is that we will beat our brains out attacking him head-on.
“I think our best strategy now would be to nullify the Confederate hold on New England by evacuating our people out of there. If we get our people out of Boston it won’t be any more valuable to the Confederates than a piece of desert sand on the Llano Estado. Let the Confederates allocate their National Army to holding empty cities in New England. That will take their army out of the war as surely as if we had annihilated it to last man in battle. While their army sits idle we can use ours to strike them elsewhere.”
“We’re conceding Boston and the other New England ports to the enemy without a fight!” exclaimed Senator Sumner, shaking his head. “And we’re asking our people to march out of their homes to God-knows-where? That’s a tall order, even for people who are steadfastly loyal to us.”