Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  While McClellan dithered, 1,800 Confederate cavalry under Jeb Stuart once again rode a circle around the Army of the Potomac. Nicolay observed that Stuart’s joyride was “a little thing, accomplishing not much actual harm, and yet infinitely vexatious and mischievous. The President has well-nigh lost his temper over it.”86 With some asperity, Lincoln remarked to McClellan that “Stuart’s cavalry outmarched ours, having certainly done more marked service on the Peninsula, and everywhere since.”87

  The Congress and cabinet shared Lincoln’s impatience with McClellan. “His slow trench digging defensive tactics will not do,” Caleb B. Smith wrote in late September. “He has already done more to give strength & vigor to the rebellion than Jeff Davis.” The quasi-victory at Antietam “is fruitless except of slaughter to our troops.” Little Mac’s failure to capture even one gun or one wagon from the retreating Lee was, Smith believed, “proof of either treachery or imbecility.”88 Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler confided that he was “becoming discouraged and disheartened” by the “unaccountable delay in the movement of the Army.” He told his wife that “[s]omething must be done or we are lost.”89 The public, too, was growing disenchanted. “We hate & abhor this milk & water course at Washington,” groused a constituent of Chandler. “It invites attack & sustains our domestic enemies.”90

  On October 13, the president bluntly criticized McClellan for his timidity. “You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness. Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” To McClellan’s insistence that he needed to repair the rail line from Harper’s Ferry before he could move against Lee’s army at Winchester, Lincoln replied: “I certainly should be pleased for you to have the advantage of the Railroad from Harper’s Ferry to Winchester, but it wastes all the remainder of autumn to give it to you; and, in fact ignores the question of time, which can not, and must not be ignored.”

  McClellan feared that while his army moved toward Winchester, the Confederates might attack Pennsylvania. To alleviate this anxiety, Lincoln pointed out that if Lee “does so in full force, he gives up his communications to you absolutely, and you have nothing to do but to follow, and ruin him; if he does so with less than full force, fall upon, and beat what is left behind all the easier.” The Army of the Potomac, Lincoln noted, was closer to Richmond than was the Army of Northern Virginia. “Why can you not reach there before him, unless you admit that he is more than your equal on a march. His route is the arc of a circle, while yours is the chord. The roads are as good on yours as on his.” If Lee moved toward the Confederate capital, Lincoln suggested that McClellan “press closely to him, fight him if a favorable opportunity should present, and, at least, try to beat him to Richmond on the inside track. I say ‘try’; if we never try, we shall never succeed.”

  If Lee stayed put at Winchester, Lincoln recommended, the Army of the Potomac should “fight him there, on the idea that if we can not beat him when he bears the wastage of coming to us, we never can when we bear the wastage of going to him. This proposition is a simple truth, and is too important to be lost sight of for a moment. In coming to us, he tenders us an advantage which we should not waive. We should not so operate as to merely drive him away. As we must beat him somewhere, or fail finally, we can do it, if at all, easier near to us, than far away. If we can not beat the enemy where he now is, we never can, he again being within the entrenchments of Richmond.” After describing how the Union army could be easily supplied as it moved toward the Confederate capital, the president assured McClellan that his long letter was “in no sense an order.”91

  Lincoln feared that this admonition would have little effect, even though it implicitly gave McClellan only one last chance to redeem himself. In private, the president expressed doubt that Little Mac “would move after all” and added that “he’d got tired of his excuses” and “he’d remove him at once but for the election.”92 The general reluctantly abandoned his own intention to postpone serious action till the spring. Still he dawdled. On October 21, Halleck told him that the president “does not expect impossibilities, but he is very anxious that all this good weather should not be wasted in inactivity.”93 To a congressman who asked when the Army of the Potomac would advance, Lincoln replied: “Gen. McClellan knows I wish him to move on at the first practicable moment. When he will do so you know as well as I!”94

  Treasury Secretary Chase was also anxious, for McClellan’s inactivity made it difficult to raise money. Exasperated, Chase urged Jay Cooke, his chief bond salesman, to inform Lincoln that the Young Napoleon must be replaced if government loans were to be taken. In late October, Cooke visited the president at the Soldiers’ Home. “I told him of my struggles to maintain the credit of the Nation and to provide, from popular sales, for the enormous daily demands for cash,” Cooke recalled. He explained “that in spite of every effort, the gloom was increasing and the sales declining, and that the people and myself felt that unless McClellan was sent away very soon, no one could foretell the future.” Lincoln’s response indicated, as Cooke remembered, “that my request was appreciated.”95

  As Lincoln struggled to decide whether to fire McClellan, a sympathetic observer thought that the president “might be likened to a boy carrying a basket of eggs. Couldn’t let go his basket to unbutton his breeches—was in great distress from a necessity to urinate—and stood crying ‘What shall I do?’ ”96

  On October 26, Nicolay wrote that Lincoln “keeps poking sharp sticks under little Mac’s ribs, and has screwed up his courage to the point of beginning to cross the river today.”97 McClellan took more than a week to get his army over the Potomac. Intemperately he complained to his wife: “If you could know the mean & dirty character of the dispatches I receive you would boil over with anger—when it is possible to misunderstand, & when it is not possible, whenever there is a chance of a wretched innuendo—there it comes. But the good of the country requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually & morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’ ”98

  As McClellan moved south at a leisurely pace, Lee swiftly retreated toward Richmond. On November 4, the Confederates were positioned athwart the Union army’s line of advance. Finally, out of all patience with the Young Napoleon, Lincoln fired him. He had been tempted to do so earlier, but told a friend that “there was a question about the effect of [McClellan’s] removal before the election.”99 He said he wished not “to estrange the affections of the Democratic party,” nor did he want to make the general a martyr.100 By early November, Nicolay reported, Lincoln’s “patience is at last completely exhausted with McClellan’s inaction and never-ending excuses.” The president “has been exceedingly reluctant” to dismiss the general, for in many ways he thought Little Mac “a very superior and efficient officer. This with the high personal regard for him, has led him to indulge him in his whims and complaints and shortcomings as a mother would indulge her baby. He is constitutionally too slow, and has fitly been dubbed the great American tortoise.”101 (McClellan was also known as the “Great Do-nothing,” the “peatland turtle,” and “Fabius McClellan Cunctator.”)102

  To Francis P. Blair, Lincoln explained that he “had tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.” He added: “I said I would remove him if he let Lee’s army get away from him, and I must do so. He has got the ‘slows,’ Mr. Blair.” Moreover, McClellan’s subordinate generals had lost confidence in him.103 Similarly, Lincoln told Orville H. Browning that he had “coaxed, urged, & ordered” McClellan to move aggressively, “but all would not do. At the expiration of two weeks after a peremptory order to that effect, he had only 3/4 of his army across the River, and was six days doing that, whereas the rebel army had effected a crossing in one day.”104 The president offered another account to John Hay: “After
the battle of Antietam, I went up to the field to try to get him to move & came back thinking he would move at once. But when I got home he began to argue why he ought not to move. I peremptorily ordered him to advance. It was 19 days before he put a man over the river. It was 9 days longer before he got his army across and then he stopped again, delaying on little pretexts of wanting this and that. I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy. I saw how he could intercept the enemy on the way to Richmond. I determined to make that the test. If he let them get away I would remove him. He did so & I relieved him.”105 Lincoln’s suspicion that McClellan “did not want to hurt the enemy” is easy to understand, given the general’s timidity, but it was unjustified; McClellan desired military success but lacked the boldness to achieve it. Lincoln’s good friend Anson G. Henry astutely judged that if McClellan had carried out the plan contained in the president’s long October 13 letter, the general could have won a significant victory and “would have been a great Hero, for Mr Lincoln would have never claimed the Glory.”106

  Lincoln’s futile efforts to spur McClellan into action reminded him of a story: “I was not more successful than the blacksmith in our town, in my boyhood days, when he tried to put to a useful purpose a big piece of wrought-iron that was in the shop. He heated it, put it on the anvil, and said: ‘I’m going to make a sledge-hammer out of you.’ After a while he stopped hammering it, looked at it, and remarked: ‘Guess I’ve drawed you out a little too fine for a sledge-hammer; reckon I’d better make a clevis of you.’ He stuck it in the fire, blew the bellows, got up a good heat, then began shaping the iron again on the anvil. Pretty soon he stopped, sized it up with his eye, and said: ‘Guess I’ve drawed you out too thin for a clevis; suppose I better make a clevis-bolt of you.’ He put it in the fire, bore down still harder on the bellows, drew out the iron, and went to work at it once more on the anvil. In a few minutes he stopped, took a look, and exclaimed: ‘Well, now I’ve got you down a leetle too thin even to make a clevis-bolt out of you.’ Then he rammed it in the fire again, threw his whole weight on the bellows, got up a white heat on the iron, jerked it out, carried it in the tongs to the water-barrel, held it over the barrel, and cried: ‘I’ve tried to make a sledge-hammer of you, and failed; I’ve tried to make a clevis of you, and failed; I’ve tried to make a clevis-bolt of you, and failed; now, darn you, I’m going to make a fizzle of you’; and with that he soused it in the water and let it fizz.”107

  McClellan’s chief engineer, John G. Barnard, agreed with Lincoln about the general. “If you were to ‘count noses’ among the officers of the A[rmy of the] P[otomac] whose opinions are worth any thing,” Barnard told a senator in January 1863, “I believe you would find that most think and express the opinion that he made the most stupendous failure. He showed himself incapable in the outset of appreciating & grasping his position by utterly failing to do anything—permitting the Potomac to be blockaded in face of his 25000 men—Norfolk to be kept—until he lost the essential requisite to success—the confidence of the Administration and of the Country.” Barnard judged that “[h]istory records few such opportunities of greatness offered—and so stupendously … lost.”108 Halleck insisted that by November the removal of McClellan had become “a matter of absolute necessity. In a few weeks more, he would have broken down the government.”109 A judicious biographer of McClellan deemed him “in-arguably the worst” of the many generals who headed the Army of the Potomac.110

  Lincoln’s dismissal of the general came as a pleasant surprise to some. A Washington correspondent astutely remarked that “it required immense courage on his part to do it. It may not seem so to a quiet, stay-at-home body, far from the centre of political and military movements, but here no intelligent man could fail to perceive that it required great moral courage in the President,” for McClellan had many powerful friends and admirers.111

  McClellan’s dismissal was in part a response to the elections. Lincoln sensibly interpreted the negative results as the voters’ demand for a more aggressive pursuit of victory. On November 13, he told Zachariah Chandler that the “war shall henceforth be prosecuted with tremendous energy. The country could afford to wait no longer. The government must and shall prosecute the war to a conclusion.”112 Twelve days later, however, Chandler’s colleague Lyman Trumbull spoke with Lincoln for an hour and came away skeptical. “Mr. Lincoln’s intentions as you and I both know,” Trumbull told William Butler, “have always been right, but he has lacked the will to carry them out. I think he means to act, with more vigor hereafter, but whether he will be able to do so as at present surrounded is perhaps doubtful.” When the Illinois senator speculated that Grant would “clean out the South West if let alone from Washington,” the president “replied that he would be let alone except to be urged forward.” The same policy would apply to William S. Rosecrans.113

  (By the fall of 1862, Lincoln had concluded that Trumbull was not his friend. In 1861, the senator had criticized him for not having “confidence in himself and the will necessary in this great emergency.”114 Many years later Trumbull rendered a similar judgment: “as President during a great civil war he lacked executive ability, and that resolution and prompt action essential to bring it to a speedy and successful close.”115 Trumbull, who evidently was jealous of Lincoln’s success, fought against the assertion that the president, rather than Congress, had the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. In debates over the Second Confiscation Act, Trumbull had virtually accused Lincoln of acting tyrannically. In reply, Senator James Dixon of Connecticut declared: “The Senator from Illinois has, at last, unmasked himself as an opponent of this Administration. … I have thought for some time that he was an opponent of the Administration.”)116

  Abolitionists and Radicals cheered the president for dismissing McClellan. Elizur Wright found it hard to express “the sense of relief, not to say joy, it gives me to see the government at last beginning to displace commanders that have used, and nearly used up, our armies helping the rebels,” and Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton thought that McClellan’s removal “has taken a load off the heart of the nation, and the pulse once again beats high.”117 Reflecting on Republican losses at the polls, Horace White said that since “the effect of the election has been to rid the country of that moral & military incubus Geo[rge] B. McClellan I will not regret it.”118

  McClellan was not the only important general lacking boldness; Don Carlos Buell, like the Young Napoleon, had a case of the “slows” and favored a “soft war” policy. He thought like a hidebound adjutant general rather than an aggressive field commander. When Confederates under Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky in the summer of 1862, Buell forsook his Chattanooga campaign in order to defend Louisville and Cincinnati. Panicky Ohio Republicans implored Lincoln to send reinforcements to protect the Queen City. “I have no regiments to put there. The fact is I do not carry any regiments in my trouser pocket,” he impatiently snapped.119

  Much to the dismay of the North, Bragg captured 8,000 Union troops at two garrisons. Moreover, Buell had come within 10 miles of Bragg’s army at Munfordsville, Kentucky, but failed to attack. Disenchanted with Buell, Lincoln on September 24 decided to replace him with George H. Thomas, who had won the battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky, in January. Kentucky Congressmen John J. Crittenden and Charles A. Wickliffe, who were grateful to Buell for saving Louisville, protested. Thomas, however, refused the offer, maintaining that Buell was closing in on the enemy and should not be removed. An embarrassed Lincoln suspended the order while intimating that Buell “must win his spurs if he would continue to wear them.”120

  Goaded by the president, Buell stepped up his pursuit of Bragg and fought him at Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8. When the Rebels withdrew into Tennessee, Buell failed to chase them vigorously and instead returned to Nashville. He could not follow the Confederates, he said, because they had entered an area where it would difficult to supply his army. Remarking on Buell’s inertia, Nicolay sarcastically
observed that it “is rather a good thing to be a Major General and in command of a Department. One can take things so leisurely!”121 In the same vein, Chase remarked that the planet earth was “a body of considerable magnitude—but moves faster than Gen. Buell.”122

  The exasperated president, always eager to aid the Unionists of East Tennessee, had Halleck order Buell to move against Chattanooga once again: “You say it is the heart of the enemy’s resources; make it the heart of yours. … [Y]our army must enter East Tennessee this fall, and … it ought to move there while the roads are passable. Once between the enemy and Nashville there will be no serious difficulty in reopening your communications with that place. He [the president] does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives, and fight as he fights, unless we admit the inferiority of our troops and of our generals.”123 Lincoln, mystified by the general’s failure to move, “was down on Buell as worse than a slow man.”124

  When Buell contended that his troops were not as highly motivated as the enemy’s, the president on October 24 replaced him with hard-drinking, hot-tempered, excitable William S. (“Old Rosy”) Rosecrans of Ohio, much to the delight of the Western governors who had been clamoring for Buell’s dismissal. Though the industrious Rosecrans had recently shown vigor in battles at Iuka and Corinth, Mississippi, it is hard to understand why Lincoln did not try once again to appoint George H. Thomas to replace Buell. Thomas outranked Rosecrans and was a far more gifted general, and Stanton recommended him. The war secretary’s advice was outweighed by that of Halleck and Chase, a fellow Ohioan.

  Reflecting Lincoln’s view, the general-in-chief told Rosecrans that the “time has now come when we must apply the sterner rules of war, whenever such application becomes necessary, to enable us to support our armies and to move them rapidly upon the enemy. You will not hesitate to do this in all cases where the exigencies of the war require it. … Neither the country nor the Government will much longer put up with the inactivity of some of our armies and generals.”125