Though Lincoln said he was writing “in a spirit of caution and not of censure,” Frémont took his letter as an undeserved rebuke. He, after all, was on the scene; he had to deal with the vindictiveness of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri; he had to defend the state when Washington conspicuously neglected to provide the men, the equipment, and even the food he needed to sustain his army. Very angry, he permitted his redoubtable wife, Jessie, the daughter of the celebrated Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, to go to Washington and present his case in person to the President.
Mrs. Frémont arrived on September 10 and immediately asked the President to set a time for an interview. He replied tersely, “Now, at once.” Though it was nine o’clock in the evening and she was tired and dusty from traveling all day, she went immediately to the White House. She did not find Lincoln hospitable. He received her in the Red Room, standing, and he did not offer her a seat. When she presented a letter from her husband explaining his position, Lincoln, as she remembered it, “smiled with an expression that was not agreeable” and read it without comment. Attempting to make Frémont’s views clearer, she went on to talk about the need to strike a blow against slavery that would enlist British sentiment on the Union side. The President cut her off with “You are quite a female politician.” Then, in a voice that she found both hard and “repelling,” he told her, “It was a war for a great national idea, the Union, and... General Frémont should not have dragged the Negro into it.”
The next day the President, taking note of Frémont’s unwillingness to modify his proclamation on his own, “very cheerfully” ordered him to change it so as “to conform to, and not to transcend,” the provisions of the Confiscation Act. Some of Lincoln’s advisers feared that Frémont would disobey the President’s order and “set up on his own.” But Lincoln would not permit civilian authority to be overruled by the military, and he would not allow sensitive questions concerning slavery and emancipation to be decided by anyone but the President himself.
That was not the end of the Frémont problem. The general, who had made his reputation as a pathmarker of the Western trails to California, was never able to find his way across the Missouri political terrain. He quarreled with everybody. He scorned the duly elected, if ineffectual, governor of Missouri, Hamilton R. Gamble, who promptly went to Washington with complaints about military incompetence in St. Louis. He quarreled with his subordinates. He made the serious mistake of quarreling with the Blair family, which had originally sponsored his appointment as commander of the Department of the West, and eventually he even ordered the arrest of Frank Blair. “He is losing the confidence of men near him, whose support any man in his position must have to be successful,” Lincoln observed. “His cardinal mistake is that he isolates himself, and allows nobody to see him; and by which he does not know what is going on in the very matter he is dealing with.”
To ineptness, charges of fraud and corruption in the Department of the West were added, though nobody accused Frémont of using his command for personal gain. The Blairs exerted incessant pressure on the President to remove the general, but Lincoln was always reluctant to dismiss subordinates, however incompetent, and told Montgomery Blair that it was not “quite fair to squander Frémont until he has another chance.” The very negative report that Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas submitted in October decided the issue. Frémont was relieved from command on November 2.
The Frémont imbroglio caused an immense turmoil throughout the Union. In the border slave states, just as Lincoln predicted, Frémont’s proclamation dealt a heavy blow to Unionist sentiment. “That foolish proclamation,” Joshua Speed promptly warned the President from Kentucky, “will crush out any vestage [sic] of a union party in the state.” “I am now fully satisfied,” he wrote a few days later, “that we could stand several defeats like that at Bulls run [sic], better than we can this... foolish act of a military popinjay.” Robert Anderson, now in command of the Department of Kentucky, warned that if the proclamation “is not immediately disavowed, and annulled, Kentucky will be lost to the Union.” Frémont’s decree came at the worst possible time, when the legislature was about to abandon the policy of neutrality for Kentucky. The legislature would not budge until the proclamation was modified, and there was danger that Union volunteers in Kentucky would desert to the Confederacy. By overruling the most offensive parts of Frémont’s edict, Lincoln saved the state for the Union. As one Kentucky Unionist wrote, “The President handled that matter with an honesty of purpose, and a good sense that I have never seen surpassed.”
In the North the reaction was exactly the opposite. Frémont’s order aroused a public that was already tired of war and demanded decisive steps to end it. All the major newspapers approved it—not merely the staunchly Republican journals like the New York Tribune, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, but also independent conservative papers like Washington’s National Intelligencer and the Democratic Boston Post and Chicago Times. Even a cautious conservative like Browning wrote the President: “Fremont’s proclamation was necessary and will do good. It has the full approval of all loyal citizens of the West and the North West.”
From Iowa came a report that failure to sustain Frémont was causing “extreme dissatisfaction” and would end volunteering in the Northwest. “It would have been difficult to have devised a plan to more effectually dispirit the People of this section than your order,” a Wisconsin voter wrote the President. “My own indignation is too deep for words,” raged Horace White of the Chicago Tribune. “Our President has broken his own neck if he has not destroyed his country.” Benjamin Wade sneered that Lincoln’s conduct was all that could be expected “of one, born of ‘poor white trash’ and educated in a slave State.” Ironically Wade added, “I shall expect to find in his annual message, a recommendation to Congress, to give each rebel, who shall serve during the war, a hundred and sixty acres of land.” Even Herndon, Lincoln’s own law partner, thought the President had behaved shamefully. “Does he suppose he can crush—squelch out this huge rebellion by pop guns filled with rose water,” he gibed. “He ought to hang somebody and get up a name for will or decision—for character. Let him hang some Child or woman, if he has not Courage to hang a man.”
Sorely beset, Lincoln laid out his reasons for overruling Frémont’s proclamation in a long, careful letter to Browning. If the general’s order had been allowed to stand, he explained, Kentucky would probably have seceded. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” he went on. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.” He also offered an even more cogent reason, which he knew would appeal to men like Browning who loved the Constitution and respected the rule of law. “Genl. Fremont’s proclamation, as to confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political,” he wrote, “and not within the range of military law, or necessity.” It was, in fact, simply dictatorship, because it assumed “that the general may do anything he pleases.” Far from saving the government, such reckless action meant the surrender of the government. “Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”
VII
As indisputable evidence of Frémont’s military incompetence and fiscal extravagance surfaced, support for the general waned, and criticism of the slow pace of the war effort focused on General McClellan, who only in July had been hailed as the defender of Washington and the savior of his country. At first everybody admired the thirty-four-year-old general. Handsome, with blue eyes and reddish brown hair, he gave an impression of strength and vigor. “He has brains,” Browning thought, “looks as if he ought to have courage, and I think, is altogether more than an ordinary man.” Everybody else thought so, too. “By s
ome strange operation of magic,” the young general wrote his wife, “I seem to have become the power of the land.” When he visited the Senate, the members vied to shake his hand. “They give me my way in everything, full swing and unbounded confidence.”
There was only admiration for the way McClellan reorganized the forces around Washington. A skilled engineer, he developed a ring of fortifications to protect the city from surprise attacks. Replacing the useless ninety-day soldiers who had formed McDowell’s force (most of their terms were about to expire) with three-year volunteers, he began rigorously training his men and kept a close eye on them as they performed close-order drills, did target practice, and engaged in practice maneuvers. Dashing about on a magnificent horse, he seemed omnipresent, and no detail of his soldiers’ life was too small to escape his notice. The men under his command—after August 15 called “the Army of the Potomac”—loved him as they loved no other commander throughout the war.
Along with his other talents, McClellan had an excellent sense of public relations, and he made a practice of inviting the President, the Secretary of War, other members of the cabinet, and senators to be present when he staged a review of the troops. The contrast between the general and his commander-in-chief as they rode down the lines struck some observers as ludicrous. McClellan was superb in full-dress uniform, while Lincoln, wearing his customary stovepipe hat, looked, according to one observer, “like a scare-crow on horseback.” Though amused, the soldiers were in good spirits and they gave resounding cheers to a President who had not received much applause in recent months.
But by fall McClellan’s honeymoon ended. Critics began to complain that he was not taking advantage of the fine weather to launch an offensive against the Confederates, still lodged at Manassas. Horace Greeley again demanded that the army march onward to Richmond. Senator Chandler, originally one of McClellan’s strongest backers, lost faith in the general; he lamented that “Fremont[’]s operations were bad enough in all conscience, but as compared with McLellan[’]s they were splendid,” and he blamed the general’s failure on a “timid vacil[l]ating and inefficient” administration. Wade was even more intemperate, simultaneously denouncing “Old Abe” and General McClellan. He raged that the general was stripping the West of men and putting them in the Army of the Potomac so “that Mr Lincoln and his Cabinet may breathe freely and eat their dinners in peace, and that Mrs Lincoln may without interruption, pursue her French and dancing.”
Abetted by Senator Trumbull, Wade and Chandler began worrying Lincoln into forcing McClellan to fight. Wade went so far as to say that he preferred an unsuccessful battle to further delay, because “a defeat could be easily repaired, by the swarming recruits.” These critics were so persistent and vehement in their campaign against McClellan that John Hay labeled them “Jacobins,” after the most extreme radicals of the French Revolution, and the name stuck. Lincoln told the general not to fight until he was ready, but he felt obliged to warn him that Wade voiced a widely held feeling of impatience, which he said was a reality that had to be taken into account. McClellan listened, but evidently he did not hear.
On October 21, McClellan’s critics were infuriated when, after long inaction, an element of his army ventured across the Potomac at Ball’s Bluff (or Leesburg), ran into fierce Confederate opposition, and was thrown back with heavy losses. Colonel Edward D. Baker, Lincoln’s longtime friend and a senator from Oregon, was killed. The Lincolns were devastated by the news and received no White House visitors the next day. In Congress grief over the fallen senator exploded into wrath at McClellan for having allowed such an ill-planned, poorly supported expedition. Lawmakers began to harbor a growing suspicion that not merely Baker’s superior officer, Charles P. Stone, but McClellan himself might be disloyal to the Union.
McClellan defended himself by telling his congressional critics that he was hamstrung by the aged and nearly senile General Scott. They then descended on the White House to nag Lincoln into removing General Scott, and on November 1, with a heavy heart, the President accepted Scott’s offer to retire, which had often been tendered. In a statement praising Scott’s long and brilliant career, Lincoln expressed the country’s gratitude for “his faithful devotion to the Constitution, the Union, and the Flag, when assailed by parricidal rebellion.”
That left McClellan in charge, and Lincoln designated him to command the whole army of the United States. He was now in charge not merely of the Army of the Potomac but of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was preparing for a push into Tennessee, and of Henry W. Halleck’s Army of the Missouri, which was to move down the Mississippi River. In giving these increased responsibilities to McClellan, Lincoln said: “Draw on me for all the sense I have, and all the information. In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the Army will entail a vast labor upon you.” Quietly McClellan responded, “I can do it all.”
But the general still failed to launch a campaign, and his relations with both the President and the Congress rapidly deteriorated. After his first few weeks in Washington he concluded that “the Presdt is an idiot,” but he rarely expressed his opinion until after he was placed in command of all the armies. Now he began consorting with Democratic politicians, and he wrote freely to his wife that Lincoln was “nothing more than a well meaning baboon,” while Seward was “a meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy,” Welles was a “garrulous old woman,” Bates “an old fool,” and Cameron a rascal. He grew weary of the President’s constant visits to his headquarters to read the latest military dispatches and discuss projected campaigns. General Samuel P. Heintzelman was present on one such occasion when Lincoln pored over the map of Virginia making strategic suggestions which McClellan obviously thought absurd but which he pretended to listen to deferentially. After the President left, McClellan turned to his subordinate and laughed: “Isn’t he a rare bird?”
Even more taxing were Lincoln’s late-night visits to McClellan’s house to discuss strategy, and the general decided to put an end to them. On the evening of November 13, when Lincoln and Seward, accompanied by John Hay, called on McClellan, he was out, and they decided to stay until he returned. After about an hour he came in and, paying no attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting, went straight upstairs. After another half hour the guests sent up a message that they were still waiting, only to receive the cool message that the general had gone to bed. Hay thought the President should feel greatly offended, but Lincoln said “it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” He paid no more visits to McClellan’s house.
Though Lincoln said that he was willing to hold McClellan’s horse if he would win a victory, he was growing disenchanted with his general-in-chief. In his December message to Congress, after expressing a hope that the country would support McClellan’s exertions, he added a backhanded compliment: “It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones; and the saying is true, if taken to mean ... that an army is better directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones, at variance.”
Congressmen could afford to be less guarded in their language. Senator Chandler bluntly told Lincoln that if McClellan allowed his huge army to go into winter quarters without fighting a battle he “was in favor of sending for Jeff Davis at once.”
VIII
Lincoln’s first State of the Union message, which a clerk read to Congress on December 3, 1861, was a perfunctory document. Cobbling together reports from the various heads of departments, the President made a few interesting recommendations, such as creating a Department of Agriculture (which Congress established the next year). He also urged the recognition of the two black republics of Haiti and Liberia—something inconceivable under previous pro-Southern administrations. It closed with an oddly incongruous disquisition on the relationship between capital and labor in a free society and with the assurance that the struggle in which the Union was engaged was “not altogether for today—it is for
a vast future also.”
One reason the message was so uncommunicative was that the United States was nearing a diplomatic crisis with Great Britain over the Trent affair, which could not be discussed publicly. The President could have summarized the facts succinctly. In October, James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, named ministers plenipotentiary to represent the Confederacy in Great Britain and France, escaped through the blockade to Cuba. There they boarded the British mail packet Trent. Without orders from Washington, Captain Charles Wilkes, who commanded the USS San Jacinto, stopped and searched the vessel and removed the Confederate envoys, who were eventually imprisoned in Fort Warren in Boston harbor. Overwhelming jubilation greeted Wilkes’s act in the North, but abroad it was viewed as a blatant violation of international law and an insult to the British flag. Lincoln had no advance knowledge of Wilkes’s act.
In general, the President had little to do with foreign affairs. With no knowledge of diplomacy and no personal acquaintances or correspondents abroad, he willingly entrusted foreign policy to his Secretary of State. The only interest he showed in selecting American diplomatic representatives was to make sure that various claims for patronage were honored. He rewarded Judd’s services by making him minister to Prussia and showed his gratitude to Carl Schurz by naming him to the court at Madrid, where the German-born former revolutionary met with a chilly reception. Cassius M. Clay was appointed minister to Russia, less perhaps as a reward than as a means for getting a troublemaker out of the country. But generally Lincoln accepted Seward’s recommendations without question. When Charles Francis Adams, Seward’s choice for minister to the Court of St. James’s, came to the White House, Lincoln received his thanks for the appointment coolly: “Very kind of you to say so Mr Adams but you are not my choice. You are Seward’s man.” Then, turning to the Secretary of State, the President said in almost the same breath: “Well Seward, I have settled the Chicago Post Office.”
Lincoln Page 48