Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  40. Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 1st sess., 222–23.

  41. The relevant correspondence can be found in Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 1 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 70–74; Lincoln’s comment was quoted in Montgomery Blair to Benjamin Butler, May 29, 1861, in Jessie A. Marshall, ed., Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler During the Civil War, 5 vols. (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 1:116.

  42. U.S. Statutes at Large, 12:319.

  43. Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1:477–78, entry of July 8, 1861.

  44. Lincoln to Frémont, Sept. 2, 1861, Basler, Collected Works, 4:506.

  45. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 123, diary entry of Dec. 9, 1863. See also Basler, Collected Works, 4:515, 519–20.

  46. Browning to Lincoln, Sept. 17, 1861, Lincoln Papers; Lincoln to Browning, Sept. 22, 1861, Basler, Collected Works, 4:531–32.

  47. “Memorandum of a Plan of Campaign,” c. Oct. 1, 1861, Basler, Collected Works, 4:544–45.

  48. Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chap. 3.

  49. O.R. 4:342, 355–56, 358–59; 7:457–58, 530–31.

  50. O.R. 7:531. Emphasis in original.

  51. Lincoln to Buell, Jan. 6, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:91.

  52. Lincoln to Buell, Jan. 7, 1862, Lincoln to Halleck, Jan. 7, 1862, ibid., 91–92.

  53. O.R. 7:532–33; Basler, Collected Works, 5:95; “General M. C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 26 (1921), 292, 302, diary entry of Jan. 10, 1862.

  CHAPTER 3: YOU MUST ACT

  1. O.R., series 3, vol. 1, p. 500; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 5:254–55); draft of an order to Butler, Sept. 10, 1861, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 4:515.

  2. Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works: Supplement 2 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 39.

  3. “General M. C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 26 (1921), 292, 302, diary entry of Jan. 10.

  4. Howard K. Beale, ed., The Diary of Edward Bates 1859–1866 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), 218, 220, entries of Dec. 31, 1861, and Jan. 3, 1862. See also ibid., 200, 224, 228, entries of Nov. 1, 1861, Jan. 10 and Feb. 3, 1862.

  5. Virginia Woodbury Fox diary, entry of Jan. 26, 1862, quoted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 331.

  6. Minutes of the meeting written by McDowell, in William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac (New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1866), 80.

  7. Ibid., 79–85; “Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” 292–93, 303, diary entry of Jan. 11.

  8. Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988), 142–44; Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1:525, entry of Jan. 18, 1862.

  9. Nicolay memorandum dated Oct. 2, 1861, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 59.

  10. Basler, Collected Works, 5:96–97; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 410–13.

  11. McClellan to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Jan. 18, 1862, Barlow Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Stanton to Charles A. Dana, Jan. 24, 1862, in A. Howard Meneely, The War Department, 1861 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), 318n. Emphasis in original.

  12. Basler, Collected Works, 5:111–12, 115.

  13. Pease and Randall, Diary of Browning, 1:523, entry of Jan. 12, 1862; Halleck to Lincoln, Jan. 6, 1862, O.R. 7:532–33.

  14. Lincoln to Buell, copy to Halleck, Jan. 13, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:98–99.

  15. Henry A. Wise to Foote, Feb. 10, 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, 22:549.

  16. Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1949–59), 3:261; O.R. 7:627, 637.

  17. O.R. 7:676, 679–80, 682; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28 vols. to date (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–), 4:319n., 331, 353.

  18. Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 176–79; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 122–27; Lorenzo Thomas to Halleck, March 10, 1862, Halleck to Thomas, March 15, 1862, O.R. 7:683–84; Halleck to Grant, March 13, 1862, Simon, Papers of Grant, 4:354–55.

  19. The entire exchange between Lincoln and McClellan is in Basler, Collected Works, 5:118–25. See also Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence 1860–1865 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 162–71.

  20. Burlingame, With Lincoln in the White House, 72; Nicolay’s journal entry of Feb. 27, 1862.

  21. Ibid.

  22. McClellan to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Nov. 8, 1861, Barlow Papers.

  23. Several versions of this anecdote exist; this one is from Helen Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary: A Biography of John G. Nicolay (New York: Longman’s, Green, 1949), 149, evidently based on recollections by her father, who may have been present at the meeting. See also Bruce Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (Lawrence, Kans.: Kansas University Press, 1998), 113.

  24. Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 60–61. See also Russell H. Beatie, Army of the Potomac, vol. 2, McClellan Takes Command, September 1861–February 1862 (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2004), 206, 329; and William Skelton, “Officers and Politicians: The Origins of Army Politics in the United States before the Civil War,” Armed Forces and Society 6 (1979), 22–48, esp. 48n.52.

  25. James J. Campbell to his wife, March 4, 1862, in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76.

  26. William A. Croffut, ed., Fifty Years in Camp and Field: The Diary of Ethan Allen Hitchcock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 438–40, diary entries of March 15, 17, 1862.

  27. George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story (New York: Charles L. Webster and Co., 1887), 195; Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 4–5. McClellan’s account is the only source for the substance of Lincoln’s remarks. The meeting on March 7 did take place, however.

  28. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 67.

  29. Basler, Collected Works, 5:149–51, 155.

  30. McClellan to Barlow, March 16, 1862, Barlow Papers.

  31. Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Symbol, Sword, and Shield: Defending Washington During the Civil War (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 109.

  32. Basler, Collected Works, 5:157.

  33. The letters and memorandums about this matter are in O.R. 11, iii:57–62.

  34. Sumner to John A. Andrew, May 28, 1862, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, 2 vols. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 2:115; Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, April 3, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:179. 35. McClellan to Ellen, April 6, 11, 27, Sears, Civil War Papers, 230, 235, 250; McClellan Papers, Library of Congress (for more of April 27 letter).

  36. O.R. 11, iii:71; Lincoln t
o McClellan, April 9, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:184.

  37. Lincoln to McClellan, April 6, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:182; McClellan to Ellen, April 8, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 234.

  38. Pease and Randall, Diary of Browning, 1:537, entry of April 2, 1862; Basler, Collected Works, 5:185.

  39. O.R. 11, i:364–67, 372–73; McClellan to Ellen, April 18, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 240.

  40. Johnston to Robert E. Lee, April 22, 1862, O.R. 11, iii:455–56.

  41. Ibid., 10, i:98–100.

  42. Brooks D. Simpson, “Alexander McClure on Lincoln and Grant: A Questionable Account,” Lincoln Herald 95 (1993), 83–86.

  43. Washburne to Grant, Jan. 22, 1864, Simon, Papers of Grant, 9:522n.

  44. Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 15.

  45. U.S. Statutes at Large, 12:354, 376–78.

  46. Basler, Collected Works, 3:92, 2:255.

  47. Ibid., 7:281.

  48. Ibid., 5:48–49.

  49. Ibid., 5:29–30; H. Clay Reed, “Lincoln’s Compensated Emancipation Plan and Its Relation to Delaware,” Delaware Notes, 7th series (1931), 27–78, quotation on p. 51.

  50. Basler, Collected Works, 5:144–46, 152–53, 160–61.

  51. Memorandum of the meeting written by Representative John W. Crisfield of Maryland, in Charles M. Segal, ed., Conversations with Lincoln (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), 164–68.

  52. Lincoln to Chase, May 17, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:219.

  53. Ibid., 5:222–24. The sentence about a tendency to a total disruption of society in the South was deleted from the final version of Lincoln’s order.

  54. New York Herald, April 30, 1862; New York Times, April 9, 1862.

  55. Mary Jones to Charles C. Jones, Jr., Feb. 21, 1862; Charles C. Jones, Jr., to Mary Jones, March 18, 1862, in Robert Manson Mayers, ed., Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 852, 863; William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 3:291, entry of April 30, 1862.

  56. Lincoln to Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, May 7, 10, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:207, 209; William Keeler to his wife, May 9, 1862, in Robert W. Daly, ed., Aboard the USS Monitor, 1862: The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1964), 113, 115.

  57. Salmon P. Chase to Janet Chase, May 11, 1862, in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 3, Correspondence, 1858–March 1863 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996), 193–97, quotation from 197.

  58. Pease and Randall, Diary of Browning, 1:545, entry of May 14, 1862.

  59. Francis A. Donaldson to Jacob Donaldson, May 25, 1862, in J. Gregory Acken, ed., Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998), 85; Kerry A. Trask, Fire Within: A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), 111; Harold Earl Hammond, ed., Diary of a Union Lady, 1861–1865 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1962), 127; diary entry by Maria Lydig Daly, May 11, 1862, quoting Ellen McClellan.

  60. Helen Keary to her mother, May 7, 1862, in Edward A. Pollard, Southern History of the War, 2 vols. (New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1866), 1:381–82n.

  61. Charles Minor Blackford to his wife, April 30, 1862, in Charles M. Blackford III, ed., Letters from Lee’s Army (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 83.

  CHAPTER 4: A QUESTION OF LEGS

  1. McClellan to Lincoln, May 14, 1862, O.R. 11, i:26–27; Lincoln to McDowell, May 17, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 5:219.

  2. O.R., series 3, vol. 2, pp. 69–70, 72, 85, 86.

  3. McClellan to Lincoln, May 23, 1862, O.R. 11, iii:32; McClellan to Ellen, May 25, 1862, in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 275.

  4. McClellan to Lincoln, May 21, 1862, O.R. 11, i:28.

  5. Lincoln to Frémont, May 24, 1862 (two telegrams), Frémont to Lincoln, May 24, Basler, Collected Works, 5:230–31.

  6. Lincoln to McDowell, May 24, 1862 (two telegrams), May 28, McDowell to Stanton, May 24, McDowell to Lincoln, May 24, Basler, Collected Works, 5:232–33, 246.

  7. McDowell to Shields, May 29, 1862 (two telegrams), O.R. 12, iii:278–79.

  8. Basler, Collected Works, 5:243, 247, 250, 251; O.R. 12, i:644.

  9. O.R. 12, i:651.

  10. Report dated June 13, 1862, ibid., 12, i:685.

  11. Lincoln to Frémont, June 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:264, 267–68, 269, 270–71, 273–74.

  12. O.R. 12, iii:437–38.

  13. Kevin Dougherty with J. Michael Moore, The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: A Military Analysis (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 44–45.

  14. Lincoln to Halleck, June 4, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:259; Stanton to Halleck, June 2, 11, 1862, O.R. 10, ii:242; 16, ii:8.

  15. McClellan to Ellen, June 2, 23, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 288, 306.

  16. McClellan to Stanton, June 25, 1862, O.R. 11, i:51; Lincoln to McClellan, June 26, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:26; McClellan to Ellen, June 22, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 305.

  17. Basler, Collected Works, 5:284, 312–13. Scott’s memorandum dated June 24 and supposedly summarizing the matters he discussed with Lincoln is vague and uninformative. It does not mention the possible appointments of Pope and Halleck. Ibid., 284n.

  18. McClellan to Stanton, June 27, 1862, O.R. 11, iii:266.

  19. McClellan to Stanton, June 28, 1862, O.R. 11, i:61; David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office (New York: Century Co., 1907), 108–10.

  20. New York World, July 7, 1862; Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1862; Illinois State Register, July 3, 1862.

  21. Adam Gurowski, Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1862), 235, entry of July 4, 1862; Lincoln quoted by Henry C. Deming, in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 136–37.

  22. Lincoln to McClellan, July 1, 2, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:298, 301.

  23. Ibid., 288, 303; O.R. 11, iii:290–91.

  24. O.R. 11, iii:271; Basler, Collected Works, 5:295, 300–301, 305, 308.

  25. Meigs diary, entries of July 4 and 5, 1862, quoted in T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 130; Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 191, entry of April 28, 1864.

  26. Basler, Collected Works, 5:291–92, 293–94, 296–97.

  27. Ibid., 309–12; John G. Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 13, 1862, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 85.

  28. McClellan to Ellen, July 10, 17, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 348, 362.

  29. McClellan to Samuel L. M. Barlow, July 23, 1862; McClellan to Ellen, July 20, 1862, ibid., 368, 369.

  30. McClellan to Barlow, July 23, 1862, ibid., 370.

  31. McClellan to Ellen, July 13, 22, 1862, ibid., 354, 368.

  32. New York Herald, July 7, 15, 1862.

  33. Oliver W. Norton to family, July 9, 1862, in Oliver Willcox Norton, Army Letters 1861–1865 (Chicago: O. L. Deming, 1903), 98; letter of Edward G. Abbott, July 12, in “Letters from the Harvard Regiments,” ed. Anthony J. Milano, Civil War: The Magazine of the Civil War Society 13, p. 44, from the research notes of John Hennessy, used with permission.

  34. Basler, Collected Works, 5:358–59. Emphasis in original.

  35. John Sherman to William T. Sherman, Aug. 24, 1862, in G
eorge Winston Smith and Charles Judah, eds., Life in the North During the Civil War (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1966), 99.

  36. John Beatty, Memoirs of a Volunteer 1861–1863, ed. Harvey S. Ford (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1946), 118, diary entry of July 18, 1862; Illinois officer quoted in Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 294.

  37. Charles Brewster to Mary Brewster, May 18, June 21, 1862, in David W. Blight, ed., When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 133, 152; Halleck to Grant, Aug. 2, 1862, O.R. 17, ii:150.