Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  Three days later Lincoln issued orders replacing Frémont with General Hunter as interim commander of the department.38 The president instructed Hunter to pull back from a dangerously extended position in southern Missouri, where Frémont had led his troops in a desperate effort to keep his command by provoking a battle. The enemy eventually withdrew into Arkansas. When General Halleck finally reached Washington, Lincoln appointed him commander of the renamed Department of Missouri, which stretched as far east as the Cumberland River in Kentucky. Halleck proved to be the right man in the right place. An excellent administrator, he soon brought order out of the organizational chaos in Missouri and consolidated his forces for an effective defense of the state.

  FRÉMONT HAD NOT helped his cause by issuing an order on August 30 that placed Missouri under martial law, proclaimed the death penalty for guerrillas captured behind Union lines, and confiscated the property and freed the slaves of all Confederate sympathizers in the state.39 Lincoln immediately ordered Frémont to execute no one without the president’s consent. But the most controversial part of Frémont’s edict was the liberation of Rebel-owned slaves. For the past five months the administration had been walking a tightrope on the sensitive issue of slavery. Lincoln’s national strategy of maximizing support for the war would be jeopardized by any sign of an antislavery policy. A war to restore the Union united the North; a war against slavery would divide it. Border-state Unionists and Northern Democrats were suspicious of the Republican Party’s designs on slavery. The strategy of conciliation of the presumed silent majority of Unionists in the Confederate states would also be wrecked by the first hint of an emancipation policy. Lincoln had lost some faith in that silent majority. But he very much wanted to keep Democrats and border-state Unionists in his war coalition.

  A majority of congressional Republicans also supported this national strategy in the war’s early months. All but a handful of them voted in July for a resolution sponsored by U.S. Representative John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee (the only senator from a seceded state who remained loyal to the United States). This resolution affirmed that the war was being fought not for the purpose “of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States,” but only “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.”40

  Some cracks in this policy had appeared by the time of Frémont’s edict, however. Abolitionists, black leaders, and many Republicans viewed the war as potentially one against slavery from the beginning. They cheered the action of an unlikely but apparent convert to this position, Gen. Benjamin Butler—a former proslavery Democrat. After securing Baltimore, Butler had been assigned to command the Union toehold in tidewater Virginia at Fort Monroe. There on May 23 three slaves had escaped to Butler’s lines. Their owner was a Confederate colonel, who came to Butler under flag of truce and demanded the return of his property under the Fugitive Slave Law! With as deadpan an expression as possible (given his cocked eye), Butler informed him that since Virginia claimed to have left the United States, the Fugitive Slave Law no longer applied.

  Butler also learned that these slaves had worked for the Confederate army. An astute lawyer, he declared them contraband of war—enemy property subject to seizure. It was an inspired phrase. Northern newspapers picked it up, and it was used thereafter to describe all slaves who came under Union control. Word quickly spread among slaves on the Virginia Peninsula near Butler’s lines, and scores of them began escaping to the Yankees. Butler put many of them to work for his own army, and also received their wives and children—the latter of whom could by no stretch of the imagination be defined as having worked on Confederate fortifications. Butler notified the War Department of his actions and requested approval. The cabinet discussed the matter on May 30. Lincoln joked about “Butler’s fugitive slave law,” and the cabinet fully sanctioned the contraband policy.41

  Only two weeks after passing the Crittenden-Johnson resolution, Congress in effect ratified the contraband policy by enacting (over Democratic and border-state opposition) a Confiscation Act that authorized the seizure of all property used in military aid of the rebellion—including slaves. Lincoln signed the bill without comment.42 The law carefully did not specify the permanent future status of the contrabands, but few expected they would ever be returned to slavery. Lincoln told his diary-keeping confidant, Senator Orville Browning, that “the government neither should nor would send back to bondage such as come to our armies.”43

  Frémont’s blanket order declaring all slaves owned by Confederate activists in Missouri to be free went considerably beyond this policy. It provoked an instant outcry from border-state Unionists, while many Northern Republicans praised it. Fearing the defection of Kentucky, which still sat on the fence of neutrality, Lincoln sent a letter to Frémont by special messenger asking him to modify his order concerning slavery to conform with the more limited terms of the Confiscation Act. As it stood, the order “will alarm our Southern Union friends,” wrote the president, “and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.”44

  Any other general would have treated this request as an order. But not Frémont. Instead he sent his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont (daughter of the famed Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton), to Washington with a letter stating his refusal to modify the emancipation clause without a direct order. Lincoln was understandably angered by this refusal. He could barely hold his temper as the sharp-tongued Jessie gave him the rough side of that tongue. As Lincoln later recalled this confrontation, “She sought an audience with me at midnight and taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarreling with her…. She more than once intimated that if Gen Fremont should conclude to try conclusions with me he could set up for himself.”45

  Mrs. Frémont obviously did not help her husband’s cause. Lincoln publicly ordered the general to modify his edict. Border-state men expressed satisfaction, but the president came in for vigorous criticism from Republicans. This issue produced more letters to Lincoln, pro and con, than any other event of his presidency. One critical letter came from an unexpected source, Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning, who was usually found in the conservative camp. Lincoln felt impelled to write a lengthy reply, which outlined his national strategy at this stage of the war. There was a great deal of credible evidence, the president told Browning, that Kentucky would have gone over to the Confederacy if Frémont’s proclamation had stood. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. 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.”

  Lincoln also raised a constitutional objection to Frémont’s edict. He acknowledged that a general might, on grounds of military necessity, seize enemy property including slaves, “but when the need is past, it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition…. You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary it is itself the surrender of 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?”46

  THE DATE OF this letter to Browning is ironic: September 22, 1861, one year to the day before Lincoln did precisely what he said a general or a president could not do—proclaim slaves in rebellious states “forever free” unless those states returned to the Union within one hundred days. But the war intensified and took on a new character between those two Septembers that changed policies—and constitutional interpretations. Meanwhile, during the remainder of 1861 Lincoln confronted frustrating military delays not only with McClellan in Virginia but also with his commanders in the West.

  When Tennessee seceded, three of the state’s congressmen plus Senator Andrew Johnson remain
ed loyal to the Union and took their seats in the Congress that met at Washington instead of at Richmond. All four were from East Tennessee, a region of mountains and valleys with few slaves. Two-thirds of the voters in East Tennessee had cast their ballots against secession in the referendum held on June 8, 1861. This pattern duplicated events in western Virginia. And perhaps the process of creating a new Union state in western Virginia could be applied in East Tennessee as well. Once Kentucky’s neutrality came to an end in September, Lincoln outlined a plan for Union troops to invade East Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap from Kentucky. Federal agents established contacts with Unionists in East Tennessee to coordinate a local uprising with the invasion.47

  The logistical problems in this region were much greater than those in western Virginia, where two railroads, a navigable river, and a macadamized turnpike could carry soldiers and supplies to the theater of operations. No such routes ran from Union bases in eastern Kentucky 150 miles over the rugged Cumberland Mountains to Knoxville. Nevertheless, in expectation of an invasion the Tennessee Unionists rose in November, attacked Confederate outposts, and burned five bridges on the railroad used by Confederates through the Tennessee Valley. There was no invasion, however, because Gen. William T. Sherman and his successor as commander in the Department of the Ohio, Gen. Don Carlos Buell, had called it off. Confederate troops rounded up scores of Unionists, hanged five of them, and imprisoned the rest.48

  Lincoln was disconsolate at this turn of events. For reasons of both national and military strategy he placed a high priority on liberating East Tennessee: It would strengthen Unionism there and by encouragement perhaps elsewhere; and it would cut the Confederacy’s main east–west railroad from Virginia to Memphis where it ran between Knoxville and Chattanooga. On these matters Lincoln and his new general-in-chief saw eye to eye. McClellan wanted Knoxville occupied to prevent Confederate reinforcements from coming to Virginia on that route and also to threaten the rear of the Confederate army at Manassas.

  McClellan telegraphed Buell repeatedly to urge an advance into East Tennessee; just as often Buell replied to him, and to Lincoln, that logistical difficulties, especially with winter coming on, would make it impossible to march an army on terrible roads through the barren mountains or to keep it supplied even if it could get to Knoxville.49 An advance on Nashville using the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and the Cumberland River, said Buell, was the true line of operations in Tennessee. From his sickbed McClellan dictated a letter to Buell on January 6, 1862: “I was extremely sorry to learn from your telegram to the President that you had from the beginning attached little or no importance to a movement in East Tennessee…. It develops a radical difference between your views and my own, which I regret.”50

  That same day Lincoln also wrote Buell that his dispatch explaining why he could not invade East Tennessee “disappoints and distresses me.” Lincoln said he “would rather have a point on the Railroad south of Cumberland Gap, than Nashville, first, because it cuts a great artery of the enemies’ communication, which Nashville does not, and secondly because it is in the midst of a loyal population, who would rally around it, while Nashville is not.” Lincoln’s great “distress is that our friends in East Tennessee are being hanged and driven to despair, and even now, I fear, are thinking of taking rebel arms for personal protection. In this we lose the most valuable stake we have in the South.”51

  Buell got the message—at least in part. He sent a small army under Gen. George H. Thomas toward East Tennessee. Thomas’s force met and defeated a Confederate army of similar size at Logan’s Crossroads near Mill Springs in southeastern Kentucky on January 19. Despite this victory Thomas could advance no farther over wretched roads in the harsh mountain winter. Lincoln’s cherished dream of liberating East Tennessee would not be fulfilled for another twenty months.

  On January 7 Lincoln sent a telegram to Buell pointedly asking him, since he preferred to advance against Nashville, when he planned to get started. The commander in chief sent an identical telegram to General Halleck, whose forces based at Cairo, Illinois, would have to cooperate with Buell. “Delay is ruining us,” Lincoln told both generals. “It is indispensable for me to have something definite.”52 From Halleck came word that his troops still lacked sufficient arms and equipment and that he knew nothing of Buell’s plans. Lincoln wrote a note on the back of Halleck’s communication: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”52 That same day, January 10, the president dropped in to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs’s office. “General, what shall I do?” asked Lincoln. “The people are impatient; Chase has no money…the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”53

  3

  YOU MUST ACT

  LINCOLN’S PLAINTIVE question to Meigs echoes down the years. It was one of his low points as commander in chief. Two other important campaigns in which Lincoln had played a significant planning role were also hanging fire in January 1862: a joint army-navy effort to make a lodgment on North Carolina’s mainland coast and to control Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds; and an ambitious campaign to capture the South’s largest city and port, New Orleans. The president had ordered Benjamin Butler to raise troops in New England for the New Orleans expedition; he had also authorized Gen. Ambrose Burnside to recruit new regiments for the North Carolina campaign.1 These efforts would bear fruit in important Union victories, but Lincoln could not know that yet. He manifested the same impatience with Burnside he had shown with McClellan, Buell, and Halleck. “It is of great importance you should move as soon as possible,” the president wired Burnside on December 26. “Consumption of time is killing us.”2

  Burnside’s expedition finally sailed on January 11. The previous day Lincoln had begun to carry out the advice Montgomery Meigs offered in response to the president’s lament that the bottom was out of the tub. Meigs urged him to assert his prerogative as commander in chief and set in motion a campaign in Virginia without regard to McClellan, who might not be able to resume duty for weeks.3

  This counsel echoed similar advice from Attorney General Edward Bates, who had also become disillusioned with McClellan. As “‘Commander in chief’ by law,” wrote Bates, the president “must command” rather than continue “this injurious deference to subordinates.”4 The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, created by Congress in December and dominated by radical Republicans, was also pressing Lincoln to prod the army into more vigorous action. Learning at this time that the campaign against New Orleans had been delayed by the army’s failure to get the mortar boats ready, Lincoln told Assistant Navy Secretary Fox that he was convinced “he must take these army matters in his own hands.”5

  So Lincoln walked out of Meigs’s office on that fateful January 10 and summoned several cabinet members plus Gens. Irvin McDowell and William B. Franklin to the White House for an emergency strategy session. The Army of the Potomac’s senior division commander, McDowell was also the choice of the Committee on the Conduct of the War to replace McClellan—despite McDowell’s taint of defeat stemming from Bull Run. Franklin was one of McClellan’s personal friends and protégés. These two seemed an unpromising combination to carry out Lincoln’s insistence on action. Nevertheless the president figuratively knocked their heads together at that January 10 meeting. According to McDowell’s notes, the president said that “if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it.” Lincoln ordered the two generals to come up with a plan and to meet the next day with him and Meigs (who would be responsible for logistics) plus several cabinet members.6

  They came up with two plans. McDowell formulated a short-range flanking movement via the Occoquan Valley similar to Lincoln’s earlier proposal. Franklin sketched out a deep flanking movement down the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay (one hundred miles farther) to operate against Richmond from the east. McClellan had been mulling a similar operation for some time, and Franklin was privy to it—while McDowell and L
incoln obviously were not. Most of those present on January 11 favored McDowell’s plan. But McClellan got wind of the meeting and, largely recovered from his illness, met with the same group on the thirteenth. Sullen and silent during most of the session, McClellan refused to reveal his own plan because, he whispered to Meigs, he feared that the president would leak it! When McClellan assured the group that he actually had a plan and a timetable to carry it out, however, the president once again deferred to him and adjourned the meeting.7

  McClellan’s whispered statement that he feared a leak was a colossal act of hypocrisy. The very next day he had a long interview with a reporter for the New York Herald, the country’s largest newspaper, and outlined his plans in detail. The Herald had influence in Democratic circles, and McClellan wanted to cultivate that influence to offset growing Republican criticisms of his inaction. Lincoln knew none of this, and during the next few days the launching of the Burnside expedition and Gen. George Thomas’s advance toward East Tennessee put the president in a better mood. On January 18 he told Orville Browning that he had “great confidence” in McClellan.8

  During these mid-January days Lincoln also took another decisive action: He replaced Simon Cameron with Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war. This move had been building for a long time. Lincoln had been reluctant to appoint Cameron in the first place. But he felt bound by the pledges of his campaign managers in return for Cameron’s release of his Pennsylvania delegates to Lincoln on the second ballot at the Republican convention in 1860. Cameron was known sardonically as the “Winnebago Chief” because of his alleged cheating of the Winnebago tribe in financial dealings in the 1830s. He had a perhaps exaggerated reputation for corruption in his antebellum career as a businessman and for spoilsmanship as a politician. As secretary of war he turned out to be a slipshod administrator who awarded lucrative contracts to favorite cronies without competitive bidding.