Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Bottom Is Out of the Tub

  “The Prest. is an excellent man, and, in the main wise,” Attorney General Bates recorded in his final diary entry of 1861; “but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear he, has not the power to command.” That judgment by one of the most cautious and conservative members of the Lincoln administration represented a widely held opinion. Nearly everybody thought the President was honest and well meaning, and almost everyone who met him liked him. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, who visited the White House with Senator Sumner in January 1862, was not put off by Lincoln’s homely appearance and his awkward movements and gestures; he found the President a “frank, sincere, well-meaning man, with a lawyer’s habit of mind,... correct enough, not vulgar, as described, but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness.” But few thought he was up to his job.

  He seemed unable to make things go right. With the surrender of Mason and Slidell the United States suffered a humiliating, if necessary, reverse in foreign affairs. Huge armies, raised at immense expense, lay idle in winter quarters. As the costs of the war mounted, the Treasury lived on credit, and banks throughout the country had to suspend specie payments. In the Northwest farmers were suffering as laborers went off to the army, and there was no market for farm produce because the Mississippi River was closed. “The people are being bled and as they believe to no purpose and will not long submit to it,” warned one Illinois Cassandra.

  So desperate did things look in early January that Lincoln for the first time thought that the Confederates might be successful, and he spoke “of the bare possibility of our being two nations.”

  I

  At the heart of the problems was the failure of the armies to advance and win victories. Lincoln’s general-in-chief was still recovering from typhoid fever and unable to work. When the Committee on the Conduct of the War met with the President on January 6, its members were appalled to learn that neither he nor anybody else knew McClellan’s plans. Lincoln told the congressmen that he “did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan.”

  As pressure grew for action and McClellan was still incapacitated, the President tried to exercise the functions of the general-in-chief himself. He knew that McClellan had talked of a joint movement on the part of the armies west of the Appalachians, to be coordinated with an advance by the Army of the Potomac, and he wired Buell and Halleck to go ahead—only to learn that they knew nothing about the plan. Directing the two generals to get “in communication and concert at once,” he urged Halleck to make a real or feigned attack on Columbus, in western Kentucky, while Buell advanced on Bowling Green, in the south central part of that state. Lincoln hoped that Buell would eventually push into eastern Tennessee, where the Union army could cut the major east-west rail line of the Confederacy, the “great artery of the enemies’ communication.” More important, it could liberate the thousands of strongly Unionist inhabitants of eastern Tennessee, whom the President considered “the most valuable stake we have in the South.”

  Both generals failed him. Lincoln was still too insecure to play the role of military commander. He offered “views” he hoped would be “respectfully considered” rather than orders, and the generals felt free to dispute or ignore them. Since the roads into eastern Tennessee were very bad in winter, Buell told the President he would prefer to go to Nashville—which, as Lincoln had pointed out, had no strategic value. Halleck responded that Buell’s plans did not make much military sense; anyway, he could not spare troops from his widely scattered command for an attack on Columbus. Sadly the President sent the correspondence over to the War Department with the endorsement: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”

  With a growing sense of desperation Lincoln began to think of leading one of the armies into battle himself. After all, the Constitution made him commander-in-chief. He borrowed from the Library of Congress Henry W. Halleck’s Elements of Military Art and Science, a standard text, and several other books on military strategy and began studying them. He conferred frequently with military commanders in the vicinity of Washington, and he assiduously read the reports from others who were in the field. At times he convinced himself that he could do a better job.

  But he knew he was no military man and that this was all fantasy that helped him escape his real problems. On January 10, visiting Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, he summed up the difficulties he faced: “The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub.” “What shall I do?” he asked.

  Meigs advised him to call on some of the senior division commanders of the Army of the Potomac for advice. That evening Lincoln invited General McDowell and General William B. Franklin to the White House, where they met with him, Seward, Chase, and Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson. To this informal council of war the President poured out his problems. He must talk to somebody, he said, because something had to be done. If General McClellan was not going to use the Army of the Potomac, the President continued, “he would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.” The generals gave different advice. McDowell urged another forward movement against Manassas, the scene of his defeat, while Franklin, who knew something of McClellan’s wishes, talked of moving the army down the Potomac to the York River, so as to advance on Richmond from the east. The President asked the two generals to learn more about the actual state of the army and to come back the next day.

  When the informal council of war reassembled, the commanders agreed that a move on Manassas was the best operation at this time, but Meigs and Montgomery Blair, who had joined the group, vigorously opposed this strategy because it would certainly lead to another Bull Run. Unsure how to resolve the conflict, Lincoln again adjourned the meeting.

  On January 13, McClellan rose from his sickbed to join in the discussion. Clearly regarding these meetings as a conspiracy against him, the general-in-chief was sullen and uncommunicative. When Lincoln again rehearsed the urgent reasons for actions and asked what could be done, McClellan replied scornfully that “the case was so clear a blind man could see it”—and then diverted the conversation to his perpetual fear that the Confederate forces outnumbered his own. Eventually Chase asked him directly what he intended to do with his army and when he intended to move. The general sat silent. When Meigs whispered to him that the President had a right to know his intentions, McClellan responded in a voice inaudible to the rest of the group: “If I tell him my plans they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret.” After further urging he said that “he was very unwilling to develop his plans,” because he believed that in military matters the fewer persons who knew them the better, but “that he would tell them if he was ordered to do so.” All that Lincoln could get from him was a pledge that he did have a specific time in mind for an advance, though he was unwilling to divulge it. With that the President declared he was satisfied.

  He was not, in fact, at all satisfied. His unhappiness grew when he discovered, a few days after these meetings, that a planned expedition to seize the mouth of the Mississippi River would be indefinitely delayed because army authorities had failed to prepare the necessary beds (or racks) for the mortars the ships were to carry. Exasperated, he told Gustavus Fox that he now believed “he must take these army matters into his own hands.”

  II

  Persistent sniping from members of his own party in Congress made the President’s burdens all the harder to bear. There was a growing lack of harmony among Republicans in Congress. On economic issues Republican legislators divided along sectional lines, with Easterners opposing Westerners on such issues as a land-grant college system, the chartering of a Pacific railroad, a proposed increase in the tariff, and the creation of an internal revenue system that would, for the first time since 18
17, levy taxes on domestic producers and consumers. Lincoln was personally involved in few of these questions. What he called his “political education” as a Whig made him averse to trying to lead the Congress in such matters and reluctant to veto measures with which he disagreed.

  But he was deeply involved in questions relating to the prosecution of the war, the future of the rebellious states, and the status of slavery, on which Republican congressmen also differed. Factional lines were not yet clear. At one end of the spectrum were the self-styled Radicals, who believed that vigorous prosecution of the war required confiscation of Southern property and the emancipation of slaves. At the other end, a less clearly defined group of Moderates (who sometimes referred to themselves as Conservatives) wanted the war to be conducted without destroying the property or social fabric of the South.

  Neither group accepted Lincoln’s view that the prosecution of the war was primarily a function of the Chief Executive, and neither was firmly committed to supporting the President and his policies. A Radical like Wade denounced Lincoln for incompetence and imbecility—but so did a Moderate like Senator William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, who lamented that “no man can be found who is equal to this crisis in any branch of the government” and added sarcastically, “If the President had his wife’s will and would use it rightly, our affairs would look much better.”

  Republican congressmen were critical of the President partly because their party had never before been in power and they were not used to the responsibility of constructive leadership. The party’s spokesmen had made their reputations by denouncing Presidents Pierce and Buchanan; the habit was hard to break. Many of the congressional leaders, especially in the Senate, were insiders with long experience in Washington, and they looked on Lincoln as an outsider. Responsible only to their local constituents, Republican senators and representatives had difficulty recognizing Lincoln’s precarious position: as a minority President he had to receive support from Democrats as well as Republicans, border-state men as well as Northerners, Westerners as well as Easterners.

  Consequently most Republican congressmen were indifferent to the President and his wishes. Now that the patronage had been distributed, they had little to expect from the Chief Executive. Lincoln did not make a practice of using the civilian and military appointments at his disposal to punish his enemies. Nor did he have the time or inclination to stroke inflated congressional egos. Legislators concluded that he was a well-meaning but incompetent President destined to serve only one term, who could be safely ignored.

  A few of Lincoln’s Republican critics were unwilling to maintain even a façade of good relations with the White House. These “Jacobins” were few in number, but because of their seniority they held some of the most important committee chairmanships. In the Senate, Wade, Chandler, and Trumbull were the most conspicuous of these anti-Lincoln Radicals, and James W. Grimes of Iowa and Morton S. Wilkinson of Minnesota often joined in attacking the administration. In public these Republican leaders generally maintained an attitude of unctuous deference to the President. In a compliment meant to kill, Wade referred to Lincoln in a Senate speech as “this mild, equitable, just man,” so gentle that he exhibited “a toleration and mildness towards... traitors.” But in private conversation Wade was ferociously hostile. When the Committee on the Conduct of the War met with Lincoln on December 31, Wade said bluntly, “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.” At times the Jacobins went out of their way to insult the President. Invited to attend a White House ball, Wade returned the card with the note: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”

  In part, the Jacobins’ vindictive hostility to Lincoln stemmed from disappointment. Wade never got over his failure to receive the Republican nomination in 1860. Trumbull felt slighted in the distribution of patronage and angrily vowed never again to enter the White House while Lincoln was President. But personality conflicts were more important. Lincoln’s flexibility and pragmatism fundamentally offended doctrinaires immovably committed to a fixed position. His gaily announced motto was “My policy is to have no policy.” Even Chase, a member of his own cabinet, called this an “idiotic notion,” while to Wade and Grimes it showed that the President had no principles. Humorless and literal-minded, Lincoln’s Republican critics found his pragmatism either cowardly or frivolous, and they were unable to see that behind his adaptability as to means lay a firm commitment to ends, such as the preservation of the Union and the spread of liberty.

  Hating no man himself, Lincoln found the ferocity of these Jacobins puzzling. It was not what he expected from men whose records as leaders of the antislavery cause he had studied and admired. He told John Hay that the persistent opposition of Senator Grimes was one of his greatest disappointments as President. “Before I came here,” Lincoln said, “I certainly expected to rely upon Grimes more than any other one man in the Senate. I like him very much. He is a great strong fellow. He is a valuable friend a dangerous enemy.... But he got wrong against me, I do not clearly know how, and has always been cool and almost hostile to me.”

  He failed to realize that there was a temperamental incompatibility between himself and these anti-Lincoln Radicals. The fault was not all theirs. If the Jacobins were overbearing, Lincoln was often evasive and elusive. He made few attempts to reveal his motives or explain his plans to these serious, self-important men accustomed to deference. Lincoln was not a modest man and, as John Hay astutely observed, he quite inadvertently exhibited toward these critics an “intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority” that mortally offended them.

  III

  Toward the end of January 1862 military affairs took a turn for the better. When Lincoln finally got rid of Cameron, he moved quickly to replace him with Edwin M. Stanton. The appointment was a surprising one. In view of Lincoln’s well-known unwillingness to cherish grudges, it was not important that Stanton was the lawyer who had snubbed him in the McCormick reaper case, but Stanton’s lifelong record as a Democrat might have counted against him. He had been Attorney General in the last days of the Buchanan regime and had done something to give backbone to that feeble regime and to make possible a peaceful transfer of power to the Lincoln administration. Since the outbreak of the war, Stanton in his private correspondence had unsparingly criticized “the imbecility of this administration,” but he had maintained a discreet silence in public and served as a confidential legal adviser to Cameron. Always opposed to slavery, Stanton was secretly the author of the passage in Cameron’s report that called for freeing and arming the slaves; he was thus responsible for the firing of the man whom he succeeded.

  That double role was not surprising to anyone who knew Stanton well. Gideon Welles concluded that the new Secretary of War was “arrogant and domineering toward those in subordinate positions” but “a sycophant and intriguer in his conduct and language with those whom he fears.” He managed to ingratiate himself with everybody whose support he needed. McClellan endorsed him, as did the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Fierce Unionists like Joseph Holt praised him as “the soul of honor, of courage, and of loyalty,” and so did Fernando Wood, the New York mayor who flirted with secession. Cameron recommended Stanton as his replacement. Miraculously, so did both Seward and Chase, permanent antagonists in the cabinet.

  Stanton was neither amiable nor altogether stable, but Lincoln found him indispensable. A short, stocky figure, fifty-seven years old, the new Secretary of War was highly intelligent and fiercely honest. In the War Department he worked standing behind a long, high desk, which he moved into a room open to the public, where he excoriated shoddy contractors and blasted military officers angling for promotion. His extraordinary energy reminded Lincoln of an old Methodist preacher whose parishioners wanted to put bricks in hi
s pockets to hold him down. “We may be obliged to serve Stanton the same way,” Lincoln told Congressman Dawes, “but I guess we’ll just let him jump a while first.”

  The President and his new War Secretary developed an excellent working relationship, which eventually became a warm friendship. The President knew that Stanton was imperious and hot-tempered and that he sometimes made decisions that appeared arbitrary. But he tried not to interfere. “Of course,” he wrote to a friend who complained of Stanton’s brusqueness, “I can over rule his decision if I will, but I cannot well administer the War Department independent of the Secretary of War.” There developed a sort of tacit division of labor between the two men. Lincoln himself explained the system: “I want to oblige everybody when I can; and Stanton and I have an understanding that if I send an order to him which cannot be consistently granted, he is to refuse it. This he sometimes does.” Occasionally the President pretended that the Secretary of War exerted a veto over his actions. Referring to the censorship of newspapers, a job he entrusted to Stanton, Lincoln once explained why he refused to make a public speech: “The Secretary of War, you know, holds a pretty tight rein on the Press, so that they shall not tell more than they ought to, and I’m afraid that if I blab too much he might draw a tight rein on me.” But that, of course, was a joke. When Stanton turned down a request Lincoln thought important, the President overruled him with “Let it be done.”