CHAPTER THIRTEEN
An Instrument in God’s Hands
Whenever Lincoln’s plans were frustrated, he reverted to the fatalism that had characterized his outlook since he was a youth. A delegation of Quakers known as Progressive Friends who visited him on June 20,1862, urging a proclamation to emancipate the slaves, found him in such a mood. At first he bandied words with them. Since he, as President, could not require obedience to the Constitution in the Southern states, could he be more effective in enforcing an emancipation proclamation? “If a decree of emancipation could abolish Slavery,” he argued, “John Brown would have done the work effectually.” Then, turning serious, he acknowledged to his visitors that he was “deeply sensible of his need of Divine assistance” in the troubles he and the country faced. He had sometimes thought that “perhaps he might be an instrument in God’s hands of accomplishing a great work and he certainly was not unwilling to be,” he told the memorialists. But he warned them: “Perhaps ... God’s way of accomplishing the end [of slavery] ... may be different from theirs.”
I
By the summer of 1862, Lincoln felt especially in need of divine help. Everything, it seemed, was going wrong, and his hope for bringing a speedy end to the war was dashed. In the West the Union drive to open the Mississippi River valley stalled after the capture of Corinth, Mississippi, and the key city of Vicksburg remained in Confederate hands. In Tennessee, Buell ignored the President’s orders to advance into the mountainous regions, and so failed to liberate the desperate Unionists of Appalachia. Federal amphibious operations along the coasts and on the waterways, which had resulted in the seizure of New Orleans, the sea islands of South Carolina, and Cape Hatteras, seemed barren of results—except for endless bickering among factions of liberated Louisiana Unionists who demanded the President’s attention. And—most important of all—the news from McClellan and the Army of the Potomac was discouraging.
The lack of military success blocked Lincoln’s plan to unite all the moderate elements in the country in a just, harmonious restoration of the Union. If there were any loyal elements in the Confederacy, they gave no evidence of hearing his promises speedily to restore their states to their place in the Union. In the North the growing body of antislavery opinion chafed at the President’s slowness to act against slavery and complained that he was under the control of the proslavery border states. At the same time, his plan for gradual, compensated emancipation in the border slave states went nowhere; representatives of those states could not see why as loyal supporters of the Union they should bear the burden of emancipation, while the peculiar institution was left intact in the Confederacy. Though Congress gave token support, in the amount of half a million dollars, for the President’s scheme to colonize the freed African-Americans outside the United States, nobody, other than Lincoln himself, had much faith in this project.
Only McClellan’s campaign on the Peninsula could break the stalemate, but Lincoln failed to reinforce the Army of the Potomac just as it came within sight of Richmond. He had promised to send McDowell’s corps overland to assist McClellan’s army, but when it was about to start, he diverted it to the Shenandoah Valley, where Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson had begun a brilliant campaign designed to relieve the pressure on Richmond. Out-marching, outmaneuvering, and outfighting the Union forces in the valley commanded by Frémont, N. P. Banks, and James Shields (Lincoln’s old Illinois rival), Jackson moved north toward Harpers Ferry, and there were reports that Union soldiers were “running and flinging away their arms, routed and demoralized,” in “another Bull Run.” Some feared that Jackson might cross the Potomac and threaten Washington itself. Even Lincoln at one point believed the Confederates were planning to take the national capital, and he wrote McClellan: “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of Washington.”
That was, however, an uncharacteristic note. Most of the time Lincoln saw Jackson’s campaign as an opportunity to cut off a Confederate army from its base and force it to surrender. He anticipated that Jackson, after pursuing Banks almost to Harpers Ferry, would have to turn south, and he hoped to trap him on the way back. It was for this reason, much more than for a fear for Washington’s safety, that he rushed McDowell’s force to the Shenandoah Valley, where it was supposed to cooperate with Frémont’s army. Lacking a general-in-chief or a chief of staff, he and Stanton took over the day-by-day—and sometimes the hour-by-hour—management of the Union armies that were trying to trap Jackson. The President gave specific, even minutely detailed, orders to McDowell, to Banks, to Rufus Saxton the commander at Harpers Ferry, to Frémont.
But his plan failed. Jackson’s men retreated faster than McDowell’s men could come up. Catching the Confederates was “a question of legs,” Lincoln saw, and he urged McDowell, “Put in all the speed you can.” Frémont was of no help because he advanced by a route different from the one Lincoln had ordered him to take and spent eight days covering seventy miles—while Jackson’s men marched fifty miles in two days. Lincoln’s strategy was too ambitious. To trap the Confederates in the Valley would have required the close coordination of three separate armies approaching from different directions—Frémont from the west, Banks from the north, and McDowell from the east—and the timing needed to be perfect to catch the elusive Jackson. Lincoln did not have the experience or the technical knowledge to issue orders that were precise, unambiguous, and authoritative. It was deflating to realize, after his heady experience at Norfolk, that he was a political, not a military, leader.
Jackson’s exploits in the Shenandoah served their intended purpose of distracting Lincoln’s attention from the major fighting on the Peninsula. Slowly and methodically McClellan advanced toward Richmond at the rate of about two miles a day, constantly complaining that he was facing overwhelming odds, that he was handicapped by heavy rains and impassable roads, and, most of all, that he needed reinforcements. On May 31 the Confederate army, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston, launched an attack on the Army of the Potomac, while it was divided by the Chickahominy River. All Lincoln could do from Washington was to send encouragement to McClellan: “Stand well on your guard—hold all your ground, or yield any only, inch by inch and in good order.” Though welcome, the advice was not needed, and the army fought fiercely in this battle of Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) and on the second day forced the Confederates back on the defenses of Richmond. In the struggle Johnston was wounded, and Robert E. Lee became the new commander of the Southern army.
With 5,000 casualties, McClellan cried out for more men, and Lincoln did his best to supply his needs. He ordered McCall’s division of McDowell’s corps to go at once to the Peninsula, gave McClellan control over the forces at Fort Monroe (up to this point commanded by General Wool, who was replaced), and ordered Burnside to make available any troops from his North Carolina expedition that could be useful. But plans to send on the rest of McDowell’s corps failed. Shields’s division, as the President explained to McClellan, “got so terribly out of shape” chasing Jackson in the Valley that it was “out at elbows, and out at toes” and was not able to move.
With an army of 130,000 men McClellan prepared to advance on Richmond as soon as the rains ended and the roads permitted the passage of artillery. On June 18, when Lincoln gently asked when he planned to attack so that he “could better dispose of things,” the general responded, “After tomorrow we shall fight the rebel Army as soon as Providence will permit.” In private, he resented what he considered prodding by the President, and he believed the report of Allan Pinkerton, his chief intelligence gatherer, that “Honest A has again fallen into the hands of my enemies and is no longer a cordial friend of mine!” To newspaper reporters at army headquarters he spoke of the overwhelming superiority of the Confederate army and complained publicly of the way he had been treated by the administration. General Fitz-John Porter, one of McClellan’s favorite aides, helped spread the view that the administration was ignoring all cal
ls to strengthen the Army of the Potomac. He urged the editor of the New York World to raise the question: “Does the President (controlled by an incompetent Secy) design to cause defeat here for the purpose of prolonging the war?”
On June 25, before McClellan could launch his proposed assault on Richmond, the Confederates ripped into his army. He had completely misjudged the character of the new Confederate commander, considering Lee “too cautious and weak under grave responsibility—personally brave and energetic ... yet... wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility and ... likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” In a series of hard-fought engagements known as the Seven Days’ battles (June 25-July 1), the Confederates forced the Army of the Potomac to retreat back across the Chickahominy and down the Peninsula to take refuge under the protection of federal gunboats on the James River.
While the Army of the Potomac was engaged in desperate fighting on the Peninsula, Lincoln slipped out of Washington and went to West Point, where General Scott was spending the summer. Old and infirm, the general was still thought to have a good head for military matters, and he was perhaps the only commander on whom Lincoln could rely for disinterested advice. The immediate problem the two men discussed was whether McDowell’s corps, now stationed at Fredericksburg to protect the capital, should join McClellan’s army on the Peninsula. No notes were made of his conversations with Scott, but afterward the general prepared a memorandum for the President that implicitly criticized his recent attempt to coordinate the forces in the Valley against Jackson and recommended that McDowell’s corps be sent by water to reinforce McClellan. The old general reminded the President: “The defeat of the rebels, at Richmond, or their forced retreat, thence,... would be a virtual end of the rebellion.”
Learning of the surprise visit, a small crowd greeted the President at Jersey City on his return the next day and trapped him into making a few remarks. His trip “did not have the importance which has been attached to it,” Lincoln assured them. Indeed, so far as McClellan’s campaign on the Peninsula was concerned, it had no consequences at all. Nothing that Scott told him changed his mind, and he returned to Washington with more doubts than ever about the value of military expertise. He did not send McDowell’s corps to join McClellan. Instead, on the day he got back from West Point, he ordered the consolidation of all the federal forces in northern Virginia, including Frémont’s and Banks’s forces as well as McDowell’s, into the new Army of Virginia, and he appointed John Pope to command it. In a huff, Frémont declined to serve under Pope, whom he outranked, and went on inactive duty.
Behind Lincoln’s decision was his growing belief that McClellan, for all his undoubted gifts as an organizer, would never fight a decisive battle to take Richmond. With painful anxiety he continued to read the telegraphic dispatches from McClellan’s headquarters, with their repeated excuses for not advancing and their constant complaints. The weather, wrote the general, was impossible; rains made mud bogs of the roads and repeatedly washed out all his bridges. Wryly Lincoln observed that the weather did little to restrict the movement of the Confederates, and he judged that McClellan believed, contrary to the Scriptures, that the rain fell more upon the just than the unjust. Still accepting the information supplied by the detective Allan Pinkerton, the general repeatedly lamented his great inferiority in numbers, claiming that he was facing 200,000 men in the Confederate armies; but Lincoln and Stanton had more realistic estimates of enemy strength, compiled by Generals Wool and Meigs, showing the Confederates much inferior to Union forces. Over and over, McClellan asked for—indeed, demanded—reinforcements, and Lincoln patiently explained that all the forces at his disposal were already committed. But occasionally McClellan’s demands became too importunate, and the President’s temper snapped. He rejected the general’s demand for 50,000 additional troops as “simply absurd.”
McClellan bitterly protested “that the Gov[ernmen]t has not sustained this Army,” and both he and General Randolph B. Marcy, his chief of staff, spoke ominously about the possibility of capitulation. “If I save this Army now,” McClellan concluded a message to Stanton on June 28, “I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this army.” These final sentences were so mutinous that the supervisor of the telegraph deleted them from the copies shown to the President and the Secretary of War, and they were not published until months later.
II
During this anxious period Lincoln worried incessantly. Stanton reported that he was “very tired.” He had lost weight because he felt under too much pressure to eat meals at normal hours. “Well, I cannot take my vittles regular,” he explained to Dr. Henry W. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission. “I kind o’ just browze round.” Mary Lincoln reported that her husband was getting very little sleep at night. He looked so “weary, care-worn and troubled” that Browning feared his health was suffering. When he told the President of his anxiety, Lincoln held him by the hand, “pressed it, and said in a very tender and touching tone—’Browning I must die sometime.’”
But in public the President tried to present an air of calm. “Maintain your ground if you can,” he instructed McClellan, “but save the Army at all events, even if you fall back to Fortress-Monroe. We still have strength enough in the country, and will bring it out.” New troops were needed, but Lincoln felt that “a general panic and stampede” would follow a massive call for more men. Consequently he deputized Seward to go to meet with several Union governors in New York and urge them to supply more troops. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful,” he pledged, “or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.” On reflection, Seward concluded that such a bleak message would be unsettling to the country and that it would be better to induce the governors to petition the President to enlist more men. Probably nobody was taken in by the ruse, but the governors’ memorial gave Lincoln the occasion to call up 300,000 additional men “so as to bring this unnecessary and injurious civil war to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion.”
By this time Lincoln had decided that the kind of warfare McClellan believed in would never defeat the Confederacy. He had arrived at this conclusion slowly, but for some time his dissatisfaction had been growing. Back in June, for example, he had overruled the general after a doctor protested that because of McClellan’s orders Union soldiers were not allowed to use the White House estate owned by Mrs. Robert E. Lee, the healthiest and best hospital location on the Peninsula. The physician asked the President, “Are our brave soldiers to die off like rotten sheep there because General McClellan chooses to protect the grounds of a rebel?” “McClellan has made this promise,” Lincoln told the doctor, “but I think it is wrong.... He does not want to break the promise he has made, and (with emphasis) I will break it for him.”
McClellan, who had never understood or fully trusted Lincoln, was aware of the President’s dissatisfaction. It was easy to deduce Lincoln’s growing impatience from his dispatches to the general. Many of them, though couched in friendly, reasonable language, were perhaps written less with the hope of influencing McClellan than with an eye to establishing a record to show that the President had done everything possible to assist an insatiably demanding commander.
At any rate, in early July Lincoln decided to visit McClellan’s headquarters at Harrison’s Landing and to inspect the Army of the Potomac himself. The evening he arrived, he reviewed the troops, and thousands of muskets flashed in the moonlight as the President rode along the lines. “Long and hearty was the applause and welcome which greeted him,” one lieutenant recorded in his diary. “His presence after the late disaster... seemed to infuse new ardor into the dispirited army.” The dispirited commander of that army did not share their enthusiasm. McClellan claimed that the soldiers did not welcome the President and that he “had to order the men to cheer and they did it very feebly.” Lincoln, the general wrote his wife, is “‘an old stick’�
��and of pretty poor timber at that.”
Shortly after Lincoln reached the army, McClellan handed him a confidential letter in which he outlined his “general views concerning the existing state of the rebellion,” admitting that his ideas did “not strictly relate to the situation of this Army or strictly come within the scope of my official duties.” His theme was that the war against the Confederates “should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization.” That meant there must be no confiscation of rebel property, which was part of the stringent measure then being debated in Congress, and, especially, no “forcible abolition of slavery.” To carry out this “constitutional and conservative” policy, the President needed to name a commander-in-chief of the army. “I do not ask that place for myself,” McClellan concluded modestly. “I am willing to serve you in such position as you may assign me and I will do so as faithfully as ever subordinate served superior.”
The letter was couched in respectful language, and there was nothing insubordinate about it. McClellan had earlier requested the President’s permission to present his general ideas about the conflict and Lincoln said he would welcome his “views as to [the] present state of Military affairs throughout the whole country.” Nor was the Harrison’s Landing letter an unreasonable or extreme document, as some of McClellan’s detractors later claimed. McClellan even argued that, while avoiding general emancipation of the slaves, the federal government had a right to order, with appropriate compensation for owners, the manumission of “all the slaves within a particular state,” such as Missouri or Maryland. But what it did make clear was McClellan’s view that the war should continue to be waged between professional armies, with minimal disruption of civilian life.
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