Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  Disappointed and frustrated, Lincoln made up his mind that very evening to go ahead with a proclamation of emancipation. His thinking on this question had come a long way since his denial the previous September (to Orville Browning) that he had any constitutional power to do so. Lincoln may have been influenced by a pamphlet titled The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery, first published in the spring of 1862. Its author was William Whiting, a Boston abolitionist and one of the leading lawyers in New England. Whiting’s pamphlet went through seven editions in little more than a year. On the strength of it he was appointed solicitor of the War Department. Lincoln’s own legal mind grasped Whiting’s argument that the laws of war “give the President full belligerent rights” as commander in chief to seize enemy property (in this case slaves) being used to wage war against the United States. “This right of seizure and condemnation is harsh,” wrote Whiting, “as all the proceedings of war are harsh, in the extreme, but is nevertheless lawful.” And once the slaves were “seized,” the government surely would never allow them to be reenslaved.48

  The day after his frustrating session with border-state representatives, Lincoln shared a carriage with Secretaries Seward and Welles on their way to a funeral for Secretary Stanton’s infant son. The president startled his seatmates with an announcement of his intention to issue an emancipation edict. As Welles later recounted the conversation, Lincoln said that this matter had “occupied his mind and thoughts by day and night” for several weeks even as he spent many hours in the War Department telegraph office trying to manage his generals in Virginia. According to Welles, Lincoln said that an emancipation policy had been “forced on him by the rebels.” They “had made war upon the government…and it was our duty to avail ourselves of every necessary measure to maintain the Union.” The border states “would do nothing” on their own; perhaps it was unrealistic to have expected them to give up slavery while the Rebels retained it. Therefore “the blow must fall first and foremost” on the enemy. Emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Union. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be for us or against us…. We wanted the army to strike more vigorous blows. The administration must set the army an example and strike at the heart of the rebellion.”49

  Nine days later Lincoln called the full cabinet together to announce his decision. Congress had just passed the Second Confiscation Act, which included a provision to free the slaves of owners who had engaged in rebellion. Lincoln considered this measure unworkable, however, and also believed that his more sweeping proclamation freeing all slaves in areas at war with the United States rested on the surer foundation of his war powers as commander in chief.

  Most cabinet members expressed varying degrees of qualified support for a proclamation. Montgomery Blair, however, opposed it. He said the Democrats would capitalize on the unpopularity of such a measure in the border states and parts of the North to gain control of the House in the fall elections. Seward said that he approved of the proclamation but opposed its issuance during this time of public discouragement after the Seven Days’. He advised Lincoln to postpone it “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.” Otherwise the world might view it as an incitement for slave insurrections, “as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help…our last shriek, on the retreat.”50

  The wisdom of this advice “struck me with very great force,” Lincoln said later.51 So he put the proclamation away to wait for a military victory. It would prove to be a long, dismal wait.

  5

  DESTROY THE REBEL ARMY, IF POSSIBLE

  COMMANDER IN CHIEF Lincoln had high hopes for Henry W. Halleck as general-in-chief. Halleck was the apparent organizer of major Union victories in the West. As the president pondered what to do with McClellan and the Army of the Potomac after the Seven Days’, he pressed Halleck to put Buell and Grant in charge in the West and to get to Washington as soon as possible. “I am very anxious—almost impatient—to have you here,” Lincoln telegraphed Halleck on July 14. Orville Browning, who saw the president often during these dispiriting July days, wrote in his diary that he “looked weary, care-worn and troubled.” Browning tried to cheer him up. Lincoln “held me by the hand, pressed it, and said in a very tender and touching tone—‘Browning I must die some time.’…There was a cadence of deep sadness in his voice. We parted both of us I believe with tears in our eyes.”1

  Halleck finally arrived on July 23 and met with Lincoln, Stanton, and Generals Pope and Burnside. “Old Brains” looked less like a fighting general than any of them. Lincoln, however, discounted the paunchy figure, fishlike eyes, irritable personality, and off-putting mannerism of constantly scratching his elbows that caused others to dislike Halleck. The president wanted his new general-in-chief to make decisions, give orders, take actions to relieve Lincoln of the everyday supervision of military events. The day after Halleck arrived, Lincoln sent him to visit McClellan and to decide (a) whether to keep him in command; and (b) whether to withdraw the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula or to reinforce it to renew the campaign from there.

  Accompanied by Burnside and Meigs, Halleck held intensive discussions with McClellan. Give me 30,000 more men, said McClellan, and I will resume the offensive even though Lee has 200,000. Halleck said that he could scrape together no more than 20,000. If that was not enough the Army of the Potomac would have to be withdrawn to combine with Pope’s army along the Rappahannock. McClellan agreed to 20,000. As soon as Halleck got back to Washington, however, he received a telegram from McClellan asking in effect for 50,000. That was the final straw. Both Lincoln and Halleck were already inclined toward withdrawal. Now McClellan had been hoist with his own petard. If Lee really did have 200,000 men holding a position between McClellan’s 90,000 and Pope’s 40,000, Halleck pointed out, the Confederates could use their interior lines to strike McClellan and Pope in turn with superior numbers. Thus it was imperative to combine the two Union armies to shield Washington.2

  After returning to the capital Montgomery Meigs made his own calculations of probable Confederate numbers in the Army of Northern Virginia. He came up with an estimate of 105,000 men (which was in fact about 30,000 too high).3 Meigs had great credibility with Lincoln. His estimate further undermined McClellan’s credibility. After a conversation with Lincoln on July 25, Orville Browning wrote in his diary that the president “was satisfied McClellan would not fight and that he had told Halleck so…. If by magic he could reinforce McClellan with 100,000 men today he would be in ecstacy over it…and tell him that he would go to Richmond tomorrow, but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”4

  Sometime between July 23 and 27 Lincoln offered command of the Army of the Potomac to Burnside, whose success in North Carolina had impressed the president. Lincoln took a risk with this offer. McClellan had a powerful constituency in the army and the polity that would resent—perhaps even resist—his removal from command. Most of the corps and division commanders were McClellan men. Northern Democrats embraced McClellan, and even many non-Democratic readers of newspapers like the New York Herald believed that the general was more sinned against than sinning. In any case Burnside declined the offer and urged the president to give McClellan another chance. The two generals were close friends at this time. They addressed each other as “Dear Burn” and “Dear Mac.” Burnside genuinely believed that he was unqualified to command so large a force as the Army of the Potomac, which was McClellan’s creation and was still fiercely loyal to him.5

  McClellan bitterly protested the order to withdraw from the Peninsula. To give up his own campaign in order to reinforce Pope added insult to injury in McClellan’s eyes. When Pope had taken command of the Army of Virginia, he had
issued a bombastic address to his troops. “I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” Here in the East, Pope continued, he had heard too much about holding strong positions and securing lines of retreat. “Let us discard such ideas” and instead “study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves.”6

  McClellan rightly read these words as an indictment of himself and of his army. Whether consciously or subconsciously, he was not likely to exert himself to reinforce Pope. That attitude soon bore bitter fruit. In early August, General Lee concluded that McClellan’s inactive army posed little danger, so he shifted twenty-four thousand troops under Jackson to confront Pope along the Rappahannock. Rumor magnified this force—Jackson’s reputation was worth several divisions. On August 9 near Culpeper, the Confederates clashed with part of Pope’s army commanded by Jackson’s old victim in the Shenandoah Valley, Nathaniel Banks. The Rebels again defeated Banks in the Battle of Cedar Mountain. McClellan learned of this outcome with satisfaction. He predicted that Pope “will be badly thrashed within two days…very badly whipped he will be & ought to be—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Then “they will be very glad to turn over the redemption of their affairs to me. I won’t undertake it unless I have full and entire control.”7

  These words help explain why McClellan seemed to be in no hurry to obey orders to reinforce his despised rival. He received these orders from Halleck on August 3. The first units did not leave until August 14. The last troops finally embarked at Fort Monroe for Washington on September 3. “I cannot get General McClellan to do what I wish,” complained Halleck.8 Lincoln was not surprised; he had been having the same problem for the past year. McClellan himself left the Peninsula on August 23, uncertain whether he or Pope would command the united armies. “I don’t see how I can remain in the service if placed under Pope—it would be too great a disgrace,” he wrote to his wife. But if “Pope is beaten,” which McClellan expected, “they may want me to save Washn. again.” Once they “suffer a terrible defeat” and Pope is “disposed of…I know that with God’s help I can save them.”9

  AS GENERAL-IN-CHIEF, Halleck was also having trouble getting Gen. Don Carlos Buell to do what he—and Lincoln—wished. Buell had several things in common with McClellan. He was a Democrat who did not believe in a hard war against Southern civilians or against slavery. He was an efficient organizer and disciplinarian whose Army of the Ohio was a fine body of troops. Like McClellan, Buell preferred a strategy of maneuver and siege to one of all-out battle. “The object is,” he had written in December 1861, “not to fight great battles, and storm impregnable fortifications, but by demonstrations and maneuvering to prevent the enemy from concentrating his scattered forces.”10 But Buell lacked McClellan’s charisma. While he commanded the loyalty of his men, he did not command their affection.

  Before going to Washington, Halleck had ordered Buell to move east along the Memphis and Charleston Railroad to capture Chattanooga and drive the enemy out of East Tennessee. Buell’s snail’s-pace advance illustrated the problems of railroad logistics in enemy territory swarming with guerrillas and vulnerable to cavalry raids. The general’s belief in a “soft” war prevented him from dealing harshly with the civilian population that sheltered guerrillas who destroyed bridges and tore up rails in his rear. Buell refused to subsist his army on the country it marched through. In three weeks he had advanced only ninety miles from Corinth and was still less than halfway to Chattanooga. On July 8 Lincoln warned Buell (through Halleck) that “your progress is not satisfactory and that you should move more rapidly. The long time taken by you to reach Chattanooga will enable the enemy to anticipate you by concentrating a large force to meet you.”11

  Buell responded that “the dissatisfaction of the President pains me exceedingly.” He tried to explain his logistical problems, but having had a bellyful of excuses from McClellan, Lincoln was in no mood to hear them from Buell. The president had approved Pope’s hard-war orders in Virginia; he suggested that Buell try the same approach in Tennessee and northern Alabama. But Buell continued to dawdle along at four or five miles a day until enemy cavalry raids on his communications almost stopped him altogether. As Lincoln had predicted, the Confederate Army of Tennessee, now commanded by Gen. Braxton Bragg, reached Chattanooga and fortified its defenses before Buell got close.

  Through Halleck, who was now in Washington, Lincoln in mid-August again expressed himself “greatly dissatisfied” with the “want of energy and activity” in Buell’s operations. The president wanted to replace Buell, but Halleck persuaded him to give the general one more chance. Nevertheless Halleck reflected the mood in the White House when he informed an officer in Buell’s department that unless that general “does something very soon” he would be removed. “The Government seems determined to apply the guillotine to all unsuccessful generals” (figuratively, one hopes). “Perhaps with us now, as in the French Revolution, some harsh measures are required.”12

  Buell found himself forced to “do something very soon,” but not what Lincoln had hoped. In late August the Confederates launched a two-pronged invasion from Chattanooga through East Tennessee into Kentucky. Instead of liberating East Tennessee, Buell was compelled to backtrack northward in a race to defend Nashville and then to prevent the enemy from “liberating” Kentucky. Two garrisons of newly recruited Union troops defending Munfordville, Tennessee, and Richmond, Kentucky, were gobbled up by the invading Confederate armies—a total of almost eight thousand Northern captives.

  Once again Lincoln haunted the telegraph office sending and reading dispatches to and from Buell’s army and other Union officers in Kentucky.13 The president’s hope that he could let Halleck run the war while he attended to other duties had not lasted long. It was Halleck, however, who reported Lincoln’s sentiments in a telegram to Buell on September 20: “The immobility of your army is most surprising. Bragg in the last two months has marched four times the distance you have.”14 Four days later Lincoln gave up on Buell and ordered him to turn over his command to George Thomas. When the courier carrying this order gave it to Buell in Louisville, the general promptly obeyed it. But Thomas protested that Buell was about to attack Bragg, and asked that the order be suspended. Lincoln complied. With this new lease on his command, Buell moved out and stopped the Confederate invasion at the Battle of Perryville on October 8.15

  Buell’s problems were far from over, however. From Washington came a continuing shower of telegrams ordering him not to let the retreating enemy get away without further damage. Buell’s command still hung by a thread.

  SO DID MCCLELLAN’S during those tense months from August to October 1862. Having detected the start of the Army of the Potomac’s departure from his front in mid-August, Robert E. Lee also moved north with most of his army to attack Pope before McClellan’s troops could reinforce him. Demoralization in the North encouraged Southern hopes. From Washington on August 27 Lt. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., of the First Massachusetts Cavalry wrote to his father, the U.S. minister to Britain: “The air of this city seems thick with treachery; our army seems in danger of utter demoralization and I have not since the war began felt such a tug on my nerves…. Everything is ripe for a terrible panic.”16

  Stonewall Jackson’s foot cavalry logged fifty miles in a two-day march around Pope’s right flank to destroy his supply base at Manassas on August 27. Part of the Army of the Potomac had joined Pope by then, and McClellan was at Alexandria, charged with the task of forwarding additional reinforcements to Pope as they arrived. From Pope’s headquarters on August 28 poured a series of confusing orders to his own Army of Virginia and to four divisions of the Army of the Potomac (plus two from Burnside’s army that had been transferred from North Carolina). If and when united, these reinforcements would give Pope some seventy-five thousand men (to Lee’s fifty thousand). But these Union troops from three different armies had never fought together
before, and the jealousies among some of their generals did not augur well. McClellan’s opinion of Pope was scarcely a secret, nor was that of Gen. Fitz-John Porter, McClellan’s protégé and commander of two Army of the Potomac divisions that had joined the Army of Virginia. “Pope is a fool,” wrote Porter, and the administration that had appointed him was no better. In a sentence that could be construed as treasonable, he added: “Would that this army was in Washington to rid us of incumbents ruining our country.”17

  On August 29 Pope launched piecemeal attacks on Jackson’s corps holding a position next to the Bull Run battlefield of the previous year. For two days Halleck had been sending repeated telegrams to McClellan ordering him to push forward William B. Franklin’s and Edwin V. Sumner’s corps to help Pope. Back from McClellan came as many telegrams explaining why “neither Franklin’s nor Sumner’s corps is now in condition to move and fight a battle”—because their artillery and cavalry had not arrived. Pope did not need cavalry and had enough artillery, said Halleck; what he needed was the infantry of these two veteran corps. “There must be no further delay in moving Franklin’s corps toward Manassas,” Halleck wired McClellan on the evening of August 28. McClellan replied that Franklin would march in the morning. But the next day he halted Franklin six miles out, in direct disobedience of Halleck’s orders and within hearing of Pope’s battle.18

  The general-in-chief, exhausted from sleepless nights dealing not only with this crisis but also with the simultaneous Confederate invasion of Kentucky, could not budge McClellan. Lincoln was present with Halleck in the telegraph office much of the time. He witnessed what amounted almost to a nervous breakdown by Halleck under the stress. The president later told John Hay that Halleck “broke down—nerve and pluck all gone—and has ever since evaded all possible responsibility—little more than a first-rate clerk.”19 What Lincoln probably did not know was that Halleck suffered severely from hemorrhoids, which grew even more painful under stress, and that he was taking opium to ease the pain.20 The general-in-chief’s incapacity forced Lincoln once again to take on the responsibilities of that position.