The information Lincoln wormed out of Pinkerton convinced the President that Antietam had not been a great victory but a lost opportunity, squandered by the high command of the Army of the Potomac. While he did not get any evidence from Pinkerton that McClellan was disloyal, his suspicions grew as the detective ingenuously poured out a story of wasted chances. He came to suspect that the leaders of the Army of the Potomac had only a halfhearted commitment to crushing the Confederacy.
There was little reliable evidence to justify this belief, but in these days after the battle of Antietam and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was in a highly anxious state, and he magnified barroom boasting and military gossip about the need for a dictator into a real threat. He resolved to end it. Just a few days after his interview with Pinkerton, the President learned that Major John J. Key, of Halleck’s staff, had been reported as saying that the Union army had not “bagged” the Confederates after Antietam because “that is not the game.” “The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other,” Key went on, “that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.”
Summoning Key to the White House on September 27, the President held an impromptu court-martial, heard the evidence against the major, ruled that it was “wholly inadmissible for any gentleman holding a military commission from the United States to utter such sentiments,” and ordered him dismissed “forthwith” from the army. If there ever had been a “game” among Union men not to take advantage of victories over the Confederates, the President stated grimly, “it was his object to break up that game.”
Lincoln terminated Key’s promising military career with reluctance, but he thought it necessary to give “an example and a warning” to “a class of officers in the army, not very inconsiderable in numbers.” He feared Key’s silly, treasonable remarks were “staff talk and I wanted an example.” In all probability he knew that John J. Key’s brother was Thomas M. Key, acting judge advocate on McClellan’s staff and one of the general’s most trusted political advisers.
Lincoln’s suspicion that McClellan was disloyal had no basis, but he was correct in thinking that the general did not approve of his policies. McClellan was opposed to both the Emancipation Proclamation, which he privately labeled “infamous,” and the suspension of habeas corpus. He asked William H. Aspinwall, a political adviser in New York, what he ought to say about these measures, which meant “inaugurating servile war, emancipating the slaves, and at one stroke of the pen changing our free institutions into a despotism.” Aspinwall replied that the general was under no obligation to make any public statement, since he was under oath to obey his commander-in-chief. When the Blair family reminded him of what had happened to John Key, McClellan gave up any plan of public opposition to the proclamations.
Determined to test the stories about disloyalty in McClellan’s entourage, the President, with almost no notice, slipped out of Washington on October 1 to visit the sites of the recent battles and to inspect the army. He was late in arriving at the headquarters of McClellan’s army, and some soldiers were disappointed to see the President of the United States driving up in “a common ambulance, with his long legs doubled up so that his knees almost struck his chin, and grinning out of the windows like a baboon.” “Mr. Lincoln,” concluded one, “not only is the ugliest man I ever saw, but the most uncouth and gawky in his manners and appearance.” Taking the President out to the Antietam battlefield, McClellan tried to explain what had taken place on September 17, but Lincoln turned away abruptly and returned to camp. He spent the night in a tent adjacent to McClellan’s.
At daybreak the next day the President woke up O. M. Hatch, a Springfield neighbor who accompanied him on this trip, and walked with him to a high point from which almost the entire army camp could be seen. Leaning toward his friend, Lincoln almost whispered: “Hatch—Hatch, what is all this?” “Why, Mr. Lincoln,” replied Hatch, “this is the Army of the Potomac.” After a moment’s pause the President straightened up and said in a louder voice: “No, Hatch, no. This is General McClellan’s body-guard.”
Later Lincoln, mounted on a spirited coal black horse, reviewed the troops, but they received from him none of the cordial greetings and salutes to which they were accustomed. Instead, he rode the lines at a quick trot, apparently taking little notice of the men and offering, one disgruntled officer related, “not a word of approval, not even a smile of approbation.” After the review of Burnside’s corps, ambulances took him and his party the two or three miles to Fitz-John Porter’s corps, and along the way he asked Ward Hill Lamon to sing his favorite “little sad song,” a ballad called “Twenty Years Ago.” Afterward, to break the gloomy mood, Lamon also sang “two or three little comic things,” including a piece called “Picayune Butler.” The episode was one Lincoln came to regret, for opponents later charged that he had desecrated the battlefield by singing ribald songs over the graves of the Union dead.
During the visit Lincoln managed to conceal his negative view of McClellan, and the general hid his low opinion of the President. McClellan reported to his wife that the President was “very kind personally” and “very affable,” and that he said “he was convinced I was the best general in the country.” Shortly afterward McClellan attempted to reciprocate the compliment by issuing a general order to his troops, announcing, for the first time, that the President had issued an Emancipation Proclamation and that it was the duty of good soldiers to obey their country’s laws. He took care to see that a copy of this document reached the President himself.
Lincoln returned to Washington generally pleased with his visit. “I am now stronger with the Army of the Potomac than McClellan,” he told a friend. The troops that had been most resentful when he named Pope to command recognized that he had tried to rectify his mistake by restoring McClellan to command. During the recent campaign they saw that the President and the War Department gave McClellan everything that he asked for, but he had thrown away his chance to win a decisive battle and had lost the opportunity to push Lee’s army into the Potomac. “The supremacy of the civil power has been restored,” he rejoiced, “and the Executive is again master of the situation.”
Now confident that he could remove McClellan without causing a mutiny, the President nevertheless delayed. While at Antietam he had warned the general against “over-cautiousness,” and he thought he had McClellan’s promise to pursue Lee’s army into Virginia. He wanted to give the general one more chance. Lincoln, as Nicolay noted scornfully, habitually indulged McClellan “in his whims and complaints and shortcomings as a mother would indulge her baby.”
But McClellan began giving arguments why he could not advance. He exhausted the President’s patience with plaintive reports that his troops were worn out and his supplies depleted. Exasperated, Lincoln noted that McClellan delayed for nineteen days before putting a man across the Potomac and that it took nine more days to bring the whole army across. While his huge army lay quietly north of the Potomac, “Jeb” Stuart led a daring Confederate cavalry raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania, where he destroyed military stores, machine shops, and trains at Chambersburg, and returned almost unscathed. The raid had no special military importance, but because it occurred just a few days before the elections, it was especially vexatious and embarrassing. Lincoln, as Nicolay reported, “well-nigh lost his temper over it,” but once again he restrained himself.
In the months after Antietam and Perryville the President exhibited a growing mastery of military affairs. Getting little help from Halleck, who responded to inquiries by scratching his elbows and taking all sides of every question, Lincoln had to apply his good common sense to the problems of the army. On his trip to Antietam he had been impressed by the number of stragglers from the Union army, and he began making notes on the enormous number of soldiers who were absent from their regiments. Some were deserters, but more had furloughs. “You won’t find a city..., a town, or a village,
where soldiers and officers on furlough are not plenty as blackberries,“he complained to some visitors in early November. “To fill up the army is like undertaking to shovel fleas. You take up a shovelful”—and he made a comical gesture—“but before you can dump them anywhere they are gone.”
The root of this problem, he began to realize, was that neither the generals nor the people had recognized that they were at war and that it would take hard, tough fighting to win it. “They have got the idea into their heads that we are going to get out of this fix, somehow, by strategy!” he exclaimed. “That’s the word—strategy! General McClellan thinks he is going to whip the rebels by strategy; and the army has got the same notion.” It was to this belief in strategy that he attributed both Buell’s leisurely pursuit of Bragg into Tennessee after the battle of Perryville and McClellan’s slowness to move against Lee after Antietam.
Leaving Halleck to urge Buell on, Lincoln devoted himself to getting McClellan to move, and he began sending the general pointed, short messages that amounted, as Nicolay said, to “poking sharp sticks under little Mac’s ribs.” Resenting “the mean and dirty character of the dispatches” he received from Washington, McClellan told his wife, “There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’”
The breaking point came in late October. Facing a bitterly contested election, the Republican governors and representatives from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois demanded that Lincoln remove Buell, whose Army of the Ohio was largely recruited from those states. When that general, oblivious to political reality and apparently indifferent to the wishes of his military superiors in Washington, announced that he was not going into eastern Tennessee, where Unionists were clamoring for protection, but was going to make his winter quarters in the comfortable city of Nashville, even the President could no longer defend him. On October 24, Buell was relieved, and a few days later Rosecrans took command of his troops, reorganized as the Army of the Cumberland.
At almost the same time, McClellan informed the President that the Army of the Potomac could not pursue Lee because his cavalry horses were “absolutely broken down from fatigue and want of flesh.” Lincoln’s temper snapped. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” he shot back. In a subsequent message he attempted to tone down his language and said he certainly intended “no injustice,” but the fate of McClellan had been decided. He told Francis P. Blair, Sr., that “he had tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.”
Telling Secretary Chase that it was “inexpedient” to remove the general before the elections, the President bided his time, but on November 5 he directed Halleck to relieve McClellan and entrusted the command of the Army of the Potomac to Ambrose E. Burnside.
IV
Naming Rosecrans and Burnside was a shrewd move. Burnside, in particular, was a happy choice. In addition to having some military reputation from his expedition against Roanoke Island, he looked like a great commander. His sturdy figure, his commanding presence, and even his elaborate side-whiskers gave an impression of manly competence. Generally considered a protégé of McClellan, he would be less objectionable to that general’s admirers than almost any other possible commander. Yet McClellan’s enemies were aware that their friendship had recently cooled, since McClellan spoke slightingly of Burnside’s slowness to advance at Antietam.
Known to be generally in favor of the President’s policies, Rosecrans and Burnside were politically neutral. Unlike McClellan, they were not Democratic partisans, nor were they aligned with either the Moderate or the Radical faction of the Republican party. In the past, Republican Moderates had supported commanders like McClellan and Buell, practitioners of limited war, waged by professionals, with minimal impact on civilians. The Radicals—and more particularly the vocal ultra-Radical Jacobins—looked to military leaders like Joseph Hooker, who promised to bring the war to the people of the Confederacy and to revolutionize Southern society. Belonging to neither group, Lincoln tried to stake out the central ground for his own.
Whether the appointments of Burnside and Rosecrans were a shrewd military move was open to question. Burnside himself said that he was not capable of leading the Army of the Potomac, and Rosecrans had hitherto displayed no talent for a large command. But for the moment, most were willing to give the new commanders a fair trial, and the President gained a little time to attend to some of the numerous other duties of his office, necessarily neglected during the previous months of crisis.
He continued to work long hours, rising early, often after a sleepless night, to go to his White House office before his breakfast, which consisted of a cup of coffee and an egg. Returning to his desk after breakfast, he examined papers and signed commissions for another hour or so. There were always routine matters to be handled, like the required congratulations to Frederick Grand Duke of Baden, on the announcement of the marriage of Her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess Leopoldine of Baden to His Most Serene Highness the Prince Hermann of Hohenloe Langenburg. Of course, the State Department drafted these messages, but the President had to sign them. In the course of a morning he efficiently handled many requests by briefly endorsing the papers: “Submitted to Gen. Halleck, asking as favorable consideration as may be consistent,” or, to Secretary Caleb B. Smith, “Let the appointment be made, as within recommend[ed],” or “Sec. of War, please make such response to this as may seem proper.”
At ten o’clock his office hours for petitioners and visitors began. A visitor, C. Van Santvoord, made notes on those who called on the President in a single morning: One “dapper, smooth-faced, boyish-looking little person” whispered a request, apparently for a clerkship, until the President dismissed him with an emphatic “Yes, yes, I know all about it, and will give it proper attention.” A lieutenant asked to be appointed to head a colored regiment, though the decision to employ blacks in the army had not yet been made, but Lincoln saw that he really was only asking to be promoted to colonel and cut him off. Then “a sturdy, honest-looking German soldier,” who had lost a leg and hobbled in on crutches, asked the President for a job in Washington, but he had no papers or credentials to show how he had lost his leg. “How am I to know that you lost it in battle, or did not lose it by a trap after getting into somebody’s orchard?” Lincoln asked with a droll smile. Then, relenting, he gave the young man a card to present to a local quartermaster.
The next visitor got a less kindly reception. Apparently he wanted to use the President’s name in connection with a business project, pleading that he was too old and obscure to start up on his own. “No!” exclaimed Lincoln indignantly. “Do you take the President of the United States to be a commission broker? You have come to the wrong place, and for you and every one who comes for such purposes, there is the door!”
After that, a “white-haired, gentlemanly-looking person” and his “very pretty and prepossessing” daughter asked simply to pay their respects, and the President greeted them cordially in his “frank, bland, and familiar manner.” Next a Scottish visitor reported that his countrymen hoped the President would stand firmly behind his Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln pledged: “God helping me, I trust to prove true to a principle which I feel to be right.”
His final caller of the morning, a rough Western countryman, had come by “to see the President, and have the honor of shaking hands with him.” Eyeing his tall visitor, Lincoln engaged in a little exercise that he always found amusing and challenged the man to compare heights with him. When the countryman proved a shade taller than six foot four inches, Lincoln congratulated him and could not resist the inevitable pun: “You actually stand higher to-day than your President.”
On the day when Van Santvoord was an observer, the President ended his open office hours at noon, but on most days after a brief lunch—when he remembered to eat anything—he continued to receive petitioners in the afternoons. Though his secretaries fretted that he was w
asting his time in these interviews, Lincoln felt he gained much from what he called his “public opinion baths.” These visits—random, sporadic, and inconsequential as they often proved to be—offered the President an opportunity, in these days before scientific public opinion polling, to get some idea of how ordinary people felt about him and his administration.
Customarily the President’s open office hours were suspended on two afternoons each week for cabinet meetings. Occasionally, when he could spare the time, he went for a horseback ride in the afternoon, and from time to time Mrs. Lincoln, concerned about her husband’s health, insisted that he come on a carriage ride with her, usually to visit the army camps around Washington or the soldiers’ hospitals. Then after dinner, when Lincoln absently ate whatever was put in front of him and drank no wine, he frequently returned to his White House office, sometimes working three or four more hours. When important military movements were under way, he would often wrap his long gray shawl about his shoulders and walk over to the telegraphic office in the War Department, usually without escort or guard. There he would read the latest dispatches from the armies and talk and banter with the telegraph operators. Often it was near midnight before he got back to the living quarters of the White House. “I consider myself fortunate,” Mary Lincoln lamented, “if at eleven o’clock, I once more find myself, in my pleasant room and very especially, if my tired and weary Husband, is there, resting in the lounge to receive me—to chat over the occurrences of the day.”
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