Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  Lincoln was upset by this contretemps between his two top commanders. With skill and sensitivity he intervened to smooth over the quarrel—for the time being, at least. He persuaded Scott to stay on and persuaded McClellan to withdraw the offending memorandum. In what passed for an apology, McClellan promised Lincoln to “abstain from any word or act that could give offense to General Scott or embarrass the president.” He also offered his “most profound assurances of respect for General Scott and yourself.”18

  At this very time, however, McClellan was writing privately that the Confederate army in his front now numbered 150,000 men. “I am here in a terrible place,” he fumed. “The enemy have 3 to 4 times my force…. Genl Scott is the most dangerous antagonist I have…a perfect imbecile…. He will not comprehend the danger & is either a traitor or an incompetent…. The president is an idiot, the old General is in his dotage—they cannot or will not see the true state of affairs.”19

  McClellan’s chronic overestimation of enemy numbers is often attributed to Allen Pinkerton, the Chicago detective whom McClellan summoned to Washington in August 1861 to head his intelligence service. But the general was making these grossly inflated estimates before Pinkerton submitted his first reports at the end of August. Thereafter Pinkerton did deserve part of the blame. His method of counting enemy regiments without recognizing that the effective strength of such units rarely equaled more than half of their paper strength doubled the estimate of the actual numbers of enemy troops ready to fight.

  However, Pinkerton, who was well aware of McClellan’s own beliefs in this regard, told his chief what he wanted to hear. The real problem lay in McClellan’s personality and the position in which he found himself. The son of an eminent Philadelphia physician, McClellan had been educated in private schools and entered West Point by special permission at the age of fifteen. Graduating second in his class of 1846, he earned two brevet promotions in the Mexican War and won plum assignments in the regular army during the 1850s. Promotion was slow, however, and McClellan resigned from the army in 1857 and served with a large salary as superintendent of two Midwestern railroads during the next four years. He returned to the army when the war began in 1861, and at the age of thirty-four became its second-ranking general, behind only the seventy-five-year-old Scott. Having known nothing but success in his meteoric career, McClellan came to Washington as the Young Napoleon destined by God to save the country. These high expectations paralyzed him. Failure was unthinkable. Never having experienced failure, he feared the unknown. To move against the enemy was to risk failure. So McClellan manufactured phantom enemies to justify his demands for more troops, to explain his inaction against the actual enemy, and to blame others for that inaction.

  Blaming Lincoln and Scott was not enough to absolve McClellan of the heavy weight of responsibility. He convinced himself that several cabinet members were also against him. The cabinet, he wrote his wife, contained some of the “greatest geese…I have ever seen.” Seward was “a meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was “weaker than the most garrulous old woman,” while Lincoln was “nothing more than a well meaning baboon.”20

  Given these convictions, it is not surprising that McClellan’s relations with Scott—not to mention with the administration—remained strained. As summer turned into autumn, several Republican leaders and broad segments of the Northern press grew restless as McClellan continued to train his expanding army and to hold impressive reviews but did nothing to advance against the main Confederate army. Nor did he prevent the enemy from establishing batteries on the Potomac below Washington to blockade the river. McClellan declined to cooperate with the navy in an expedition to capture these batteries and end what had become a national humiliation. When Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox informed Lincoln of McClellan’s failure to provide troops for this purpose the president, according to Fox, “manifested more feeling and disappointment than I have ever seen him exhibit.”21

  McClellan refused to divert any of his troops because he feared an invasion of Maryland by an enemy force he now estimated at 170,000 (more than three times their actual numbers). The general’s intelligence sources indicated that the invasion would be timed to coincide with a secessionist riot in Baltimore and the scheduled meeting of the legislature in Frederick on September 17. The legislature would then vote to secede and join the Confederacy. Swayed by this intelligence, Lincoln approved a plan to prevent the legislature from meeting and to arrest suspected pro-Confederate legislators along with other likeminded public officials—including the mayor of Baltimore. These arrests, said McClellan, “will go far toward breaking the backbone of the rebellion.”22

  The operation went like clockwork. At least twenty-seven members of the Maryland legislature plus several other officials were arrested and subsequently detained at Fort McHenry for periods ranging from two to fourteen months. When pressed to explain the grounds for these arrests, Lincoln issued a statement that “at the proper time they will be made public…. In no case has an arrest been made on mere suspicion, or through personal or partisan animosities, but in all cases the Government is in possession of tangible and unmistakable evidence…[of] complicity with those in armed rebellion against the Government.”23

  But neither Lincoln nor anyone else ever publicly presented evidence of this complicity. There was no riot in Baltimore and no Confederate invasion of Maryland in 1861. Northern Democrats made the administration’s “arbitrary arrests” of war opponents a major political issue. When McClellan ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864, he was forced to explain his leading role in this affair. He did not apologize. The intelligence on which the operation was based “seemed at the time to be thoroughly reliable. The danger was great—in a military point of view we were not prepared to resist an invasion of Maryland—the only chance was to nip the whole affair in the bud—which was promptly done.”24

  McClellan did act promptly in this operation against supposed (and unarmed) Rebel sympathizers in Maryland. Leading Republicans wondered why he continued to delay operations against genuine armed Rebels in Virginia. In early October the radical Republican senator Benjamin Wade wrote to his equally radical colleague Zachariah Chandler: “The present state of things must not be suffered to continue…. We have vast armies in the field maintained at prodigious and almost ruinous expense. Yet they are suffered to do nothing with the power in our hands to crush the rebellion…. We are in danger of having our army set into winter quarters with the capitol in a state of siege for another year.” McClellan met with the senators and told them that he wanted to advance, but Scott, still enamored of his Anaconda Plan, held him back. They went to Lincoln and pressed him to force Scott out. The president had Scott’s earlier request for retirement on his desk. The general-in-chief renewed the request, citing continuing deterioration of his health.25

  McClellan was pulling every string he could find to get himself appointed Scott’s successor. But the old general wanted that job to go to Henry W. Halleck, author and translator of books on military strategy, who had resigned from the army in the 1850s to pursue a more rewarding civilian career in California as an expert in mining law. Nicknamed “Old Brains” because of his high, domed forehead and his reputedly powerful intellect, Halleck returned to the army in August with a commission as major general in the regular army (ranking just behind McClellan and Frémont). Scott hoped that Halleck could get to Washington from California in time for Lincoln to appoint him rather than McClellan as Scott’s successor.

  But it was not to be. On October 18 Lincoln and the cabinet decided to accept Scott’s request to retire. McClellan learned of this decision from one of his sources in the cabinet—probably Montgomery Blair, but perhaps Treasury Secretary Chase, a McClellan supporter at this time. The general wrote to his wife on October 19: “It seems to be pretty well settled that I will be Comdr in Chf within a week. Genl Scott proposed to retire in favor of Halleck. The Presdt and Cabin
et have determined to accept his retirement, but not in favor of Halleck,” who was at sea and would not arrive for several weeks.26

  On November 1 McClellan achieved his goal. Scott retired and at the age of thirty-four McClellan became the youngest general-in-chief of United States armies in history—as well as field commander of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln expressed some concern that “this vast increase in responsibilities…will entail a vast labor upon you.” “I can do it all,” McClellan replied.27

  Having convinced Republican senators—and perhaps Lincoln—that it was only Scott’s inertia that had kept him on a leash, McClellan now faced expectations that he would advance. But in conversations with the president he immediately began backtracking. In his mind the Confederate forces in Virginia outnumbered his by almost two to one (in reality it was the reverse). He reminded Lincoln of what had happened at Bull Run in July, when the Union army fought a battle before it was trained and disciplined. Probably feeling responsible for having pushed the army into that battle, Lincoln was inclined to defer to McClellan’s professional opinion.

  The disastrous outcome of a reconnaissance in force toward Leesburg on October 21, when several Union regiments were ambushed at Ball’s Bluff and Lincoln’s friend Col. Edward Baker was killed, lent legitimacy to McClellan’s counsel of caution. “Dont let them hurry me,” the general urged Lincoln. “You shall have your own way in the matter,” the president assured him. But he also warned McClellan that the pressure for the army to do something more than dress parades and reviews was “a reality and should be taken into account. At the same time General you must not fight till you are ready.”28

  McClellan proved to have a tin ear about the ever-present “reality,” which the president could not ignore. But the general heard loud and clear Lincoln’s injunction not to fight until he was ready. The problem was that he was perpetually almost but not quite ready to move. The enemy always outnumbered him, and his own army always lacked something. In response to Lincoln’s request, the new general-in-chief prepared a memorandum explaining his plans. His paper stated that “winter is approaching so rapidly” that unless the Army of the Potomac could be increased from its current effective strength of 134,000 men to 208,000, the only alternative to taking the field “with forces greatly inferior” to the enemy was “to go into winter quarters.”29 Since Lincoln was well aware that the army could not be increased by that much before the end of the year (if ever), his shoulders must have slumped when he read these words. They slumped more as week after week of unusually mild and dry weather slipped by in November and December with no advance in Virginia and no significant military success elsewhere except the capture of Port Royal Bay in South Carolina and the adjacent sea islands by a navy-army task force.

  Lincoln began dropping by McClellan’s headquarters near the White House almost daily to consult with him. The general grew to resent these visits as a waste of time or an unwanted form of pressure. More than once he hid himself away “to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt etc.”30 On the evening of November 13 Lincoln and Seward, along with the president’s secretary John Hay, called unannounced on McClellan at home but learned that he was at a wedding. When the general returned an hour later, the porter told him that Lincoln was waiting to see him. McClellan said nothing and went upstairs. The president, secretary of state, and Hay waited another half hour before a servant deigned to tell them that the general had gone to bed.

  Hay was furious at “this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes.” But as they walked back to the White House, Lincoln told him that it was “better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” Significantly, however, from then on Lincoln almost always summoned McClellan to his office when he wanted to talk with the general. After one such occasion four days later McClellan wrote to his wife that at the White House “I found ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs!”31

  About December 1, despairing of any initiative by McClellan, Lincoln drafted a proposal for half of the Army of the Potomac to make a feint toward Centreville to hold the enemy in place while the other half moved in two columns south along the Potomac—one by road and the other by water—to turn the Confederate flank. The moving columns would push up the Occoquan Valley in the enemy’s rear to destroy the railroad supplying the Confederate army at Manassas and trap that army between the converging Union forces. This proposal reflected the crash course of reading on military history and strategy that Lincoln had recently begun. It was a bold and well-conceived strategic plan that threatened Confederate communications while protecting those of Union forces, and avoided a frontal assault on Confederate defenses, which McClellan claimed were impregnable.32

  Lincoln’s proposed move was precisely what Confederate commander Joseph E. Johnston most feared. A week earlier Johnston had informed Jefferson Davis that his forces were “too weak to observe the Occoquan and prevent the landing of a Federal army on the shores of the Potomac.” The enemy’s “great advantage over us,” wrote Johnston, was his ability “to move on the water while we struggle through deep mud…. The enemy’s new base would be far better than his present one, for from it he could easily cut our communications…and seriously threaten our right.”33 But McClellan did not see it that way. The enemy’s greatly superior numbers (of which Lincoln had grown skeptical) would enable Johnston to detach his mobile reserves to defeat the flanking force, said McClellan. Besides, he told Lincoln, “I have now my mind actively turned toward another plan of campaign that I do not think at all anticipated by the enemy nor by many of our own people.”34

  Lincoln would have to wait almost two months to learn what “plan of campaign” McClellan had in mind. The weather finally turned bad and the army went into winter quarters. A few days before Christmas, McClellan fell ill with typhoid fever. During this time Lincoln was preoccupied with the diplomatic crisis over the seizure of Confederate envoys James Mason and John Slidell from the British passenger ship Trent. Fears of a war with Britain dried up the sale of bonds to finance the war against the Confederacy. To defuse the crisis Lincoln and the cabinet decided on Christmas Day to release Mason and Slidell. This decision proceeded from a vital principle of national strategy: One war at a time. The release of the Confederate envoys improved Anglo-American relations and disappointed Confederate hopes for an Anglo-American war that might assure their independence. But it also left a sour taste in the mouths of many Northerners. And the whole affair deepened Lincoln’s despondency at the end of 1861, unrelieved by military success in any theater except the capture of Port Royal.

  NEXT TO MCCLELLAN, Gen. John C. Frémont caused Lincoln more headaches than anyone else in the second half of 1861. Famed as the “Pathfinder of the West,” Frémont had led two major explorations into western territories as a topographical engineer in the army during the 1830s and 1840s. He had taken part in the California Bear Flag revolution against Mexican rule and had served as acting governor and a senator from that state. Frémont had been the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate, and he retained widespread support in the party, especially among radicals. Because of his military reputation and political prominence, Lincoln appointed him commander of the Department of the West (mainly Missouri). Frémont’s mission was to secure the state for the Union and then to launch a campaign down the Mississippi River. The Blair family had played a major part in persuading Lincoln to give Frémont this important command. Frank Blair, Jr., now a colonel, was Frémont’s main ally in Missouri.

  But from almost the moment Frémont arrived at St. Louis on July 25, things began to go wrong. Guerrilla warfare plagued all parts of the state. Two Confederate armies were gathering on the southern border for an invasion. A Rebel force of six thousand crossed the Mississippi from Tennessee, occupied New Madrid, and threatened the Union base at Cairo, Illinois. Frémont reinforced Cairo, which left him with no troops to reinforce Nathaniel Lyon’s small army i
n southwest Missouri. The Confederates defeated that army and killed Lyon at Wilson’s Creek on August 10, then moved north and laid siege to Independence. The reinforcements Frémont sent to that post were too few and too late. The garrison surrendered on September 20. In two months Frémont had lost a substantial part of Missouri.

  And that was not the worst of his perceived deficiencies. Frémont faced complex administrative problems without much help from Washington, a thousand miles away. War contracts had to be negotiated; supplies, arms, horses, and wagons had to be obtained in a hurry; gunboats for the river navy had to be built; new recruits had to be organized and trained; transport bottlenecks had to be overcome; and quarreling Unionists had to be kept in line. Frémont turned out to be a terrible administrator. Contractors cheated him. Many of his subordinates were corrupt. Reports of graft found their way to Washington. Frémont had a proconsular personality and an outsize ego. He surrounded himself with a large staff of German and Hungarian soldiers of fortune in gaudy uniforms who turned away many people who had legitimate business with the general.

  Frank Blair lost faith in Frémont and wrote a critical letter to his brother Montgomery recommending his removal from command.35 Montgomery showed the letter to Lincoln. When Frémont learned of this letter he had Frank Blair arrested for insubordination. That was his worst mistake. It was said of the Blairs that when they went in for a fight they went in for a funeral. Lincoln dispatched a succession of high-level delegations to Missouri to sort out the mess: Gen. David Hunter, Secretary of War Cameron, Quartermaster General Meigs, Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, and Montgomery Blair. All sent or brought back devastating reports.36 The House Committee on Contracts also investigated Frémont’s department. Elihu Washburne, a member of the committee who was close to Lincoln, wrote the president on October 21 that “the disclosure of corruption extravagance and peculation are utterly astounding. We think the evidence will satisfy the public that a most formidable conspiracy has existed here to plunder the Government and that high officials have been prominently engaged in it.”37