Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Lincoln was leaning in this direction by June 1861, despite his earlier assurances that he did not intend to “invade” the South. Just as he had agreed with Montgomery Blair’s advice to provision Fort Sumter and with Frank Blair’s counsel to take a hard line in Missouri, the commander in chief now decided to use the army he had raised to attack the Confederate force defending the key railroad junction at Manassas, Virginia, twenty-five miles from Washington.

  2

  THE BOTTOM IS OUT OF THE TUB

  ON MAY 21, 1861, the provisional Confederate Congress made a political decision that would have profound military consequences. The Southern lawmakers accepted Virginia’s invitation to locate their capital in Richmond, a hundred miles from Washington. This decision made northern Virginia the main theater of the war. Although Richmond would have been a focal point of conflict in any case because of its war industries, the city’s political importance concentrated Confederate strategic thinking on Virginia at the expense of the lower and western Southern states. It also focused Northern attention primarily on Virginia.

  The success of Gen. George B. McClellan’s small army in western Virginia generated pressure for an advance against the larger Confederate army at Manassas. Lincoln’s mailbox was crammed with letters from persons prominent and obscure demanding an offensive. Several state governors met at Cleveland in early May to press the administration for “immediate action.” Acting as spokesman for the group, Wisconsin’s governor Alexander Randall wrote Lincoln: “There is no occasion for the Government to delay, because the States themselves are willing to act vigorously…. There is a spirit evoked by this rebellion among the liberty-loving people of this country that is driving them to action, and if the government will not permit them to act for it, they will act for themselves. It is better for the Government to direct this current than to let it run wild.”1 When the Confederate Congress announced its intention to meet in Richmond on July 20, the Northern press clamored for a campaign to prevent it. FORWARD TO RICHMOND! demanded Horace Greeley’s powerful New York Tribune in every issue beginning on June 26. “The Rebel Congress Must Not be Allowed to Meet There on the 20th of July. BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY.”

  General Scott did not want public opinion to dictate military strategy. But Lincoln could not afford to ignore such pressure in a democratic polity whose zeal was vital for the mass mobilization that had already exceeded the president’s calls for troops. Lincoln’s concern for a national strategy of maximizing public support for the war trumped the narrower concern for a cautious military strategy. By late June some thirty-five thousand Union soldiers were camped across the Potomac from Washington—most of them ninety-day militia whose terms of service would begin to run out in the second half of July. If he did not do something with them soon, they would disappear and any action would be postponed for months until the three-year men could be equipped and trained.

  On June 29 Lincoln called a meeting of what amounted to a high-level war council consisting of his cabinet, General Scott, Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell (who commanded the field army camped near Alexandria), Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, and three other generals. Scott made one more pitch for his Anaconda Plan, but bowed to the inevitable when Lincoln and others insisted on a campaign against the twenty thousand Confederates defending Manassas. One of the ablest officers at the meeting was Meigs, whom Lincoln had appointed quartermaster general over Secretary of War Simon Cameron’s opposition. Another officer, said Cameron, had seniority over the forty-five-year-old Meigs. Lincoln disregarded seniority in favor of talent, which Meigs had in abundance.2 His administrative skills became a key factor in ultimate Union victory. Asked for his opinion at the June 29 meeting, Meigs responded, “I did not think we would ever win the war without beating the rebels. They have come near us…. It was better to whip them here than to go far into an unhealthy country to fight them”—as in Scott’s proposed expedition down the Mississippi.3

  Lincoln agreed. He asked McDowell to present a plan of campaign. The general proposed to feint against the defended bridges and fords along Bull Run west of Manassas, while sending an attack column around the Confederate flank to cross at an undefended ford to make the real attack. It was a good plan—for veteran troops. But McDowell’s civilians in uniform were still raw. He pleaded for more time to train them. More time, however, would melt away the army by expiration of enlistments. And the enemy soldiers were equally raw. “You are green, it is true,” the president acknowledged, “but they are green, also; you are all green alike.”4

  McDowell’s plan depended on a simultaneous advance by a small Union force in the Shenandoah Valley against eleven thousand Confederate troops at Winchester to prevent them from reinforcing the main Confederate army at Manassas. The commander of the fifteen thousand Union militia in the valley was Robert Patterson, a sixty-nine-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. He failed in his mission to pin down the enemy regiments in the valley. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston brought most of them to Manassas, where they evened the numerical odds and played a key part in the battle along the banks of Bull Run on July 21.

  Despite Patterson’s failure, the Union attack on that exceedingly hot Sunday achieved initial success. Telegrams from the Union operator at Fairfax (ten miles from the battlefield) reported that McDowell was driving the enemy. General Scott assured Lincoln that things were going well, and both men went to church. Messages from Fairfax continued to be optimistic until 3:30 P.M., when Lincoln expressed concern about the operator’s report that the sound of the guns seemed to be coming nearer. The president went to Scott’s office and woke the general from his afternoon nap with this news. Scott said the sounds resulted from a variation in wind and atmosphere. According to John Nicolay, who accompanied Lincoln, “the General still expressed his confidence in a successful result, and composed himself for another nap.”5

  Reassured, Lincoln went on his usual afternoon carriage ride—his only form of relaxation. Meanwhile the battle turned against the Union, as the last Confederate brigade from the Shenandoah Valley detrained and spearheaded a counterattack that drove McDowell’s army back in a defeat that turned into a rout. Lincoln received the bad news when he returned from his drive at about six thirty and read a telegram from a captain of engineers: “General McDowell’s army in full retreat through Centreville. The day is lost…. The routed troops will not re-form.”6

  This battle had a powerful psychological impact in both South and North. In the South it produced exultation and overconfidence. A Georgian pronounced Manassas “one of the decisive battles of the world.” It “has secured our independence.” A Mobile newspaper predicted that the Union army would “never again advance beyond cannon shot of Washington.”7

  In the North the news produced panic and despair but also renewed determination. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped,” wrote the prominent New York lawyer George Templeton Strong. In a fit of remorse for his “Forward to Richmond” editorials, Horace Greeley wrote Lincoln: “On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair…. If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels, and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.”8 But at the White House and the neighboring War Department Building, grim determination reigned. Orders went out to strengthen the capital’s defenses and to bring additional three-year regiments to Washington. At 2:00 a.m. on July 22 Lincoln had the adjutant general send a telegram to General McClellan in western Virginia summoning him to Washington, where he would be placed in command of a reorganized army of three-year volunteers newly named the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln stayed up all night receiving reports and jotting notes that he turned into a memorandum outlining near-term strategy for a revitalized prosecution of the war: strengthen the blockade; reorganize and increase the size of the armies at Washington, the Shenandoah Valley, western Virginia, and Missouri and place them under new commanders; and then advance these armies to
capture Manassas, Strasburg in the Shenandoah Valley, Memphis on the Mississippi, and Knoxville in East Tennessee.9

  The day after Bull Run, Lincoln signed a bill for the enlistment of five hundred thousand three-year volunteers (nearly half of this number were already mustered in); three days later Congress passed and the president signed a second bill authorizing another five hundred thousand. Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay acknowledged that the defeat at Bull Run was humiliating. “But the fat is all in the fire now and we shall have to crow small until we can retrieve the disgrace somehow,” Nicolay wrote to his fiancée on July 23. “The preparations for the war will be continued with increased vigor by the government.”10

  THE VAST EXPANSION of the volunteer army required the commissioning of new officers from lieutenants up to major generals. In most regiments the men elected their company officers, and state governors selected the field officers (colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major). The president appointed brigadier and major generals, subject to confirmation by the Senate. At every level this process was as much political as it was military. While some field officers and an occasional company officer had previous military training or experience, most were commissioned from civilian life without such training. It could scarcely have been otherwise when the tiny antebellum army of 16,000 men had grown to a volunteer force of 637,000 by April 1862.

  Two-thirds of the 583 Union generals commissioned during the war had prewar military training and experience. Some of the remaining one-third were promoted on the basis of merit demonstrated in lower ranks during the war. In the first year of the conflict, however, Lincoln appointed several “political generals” whose chief recommendation was their prominence as politicians or as leaders of the German American and Irish American ethnic communities. The rationale for doing so was the same as for the governors who commissioned politicians or other prominent civilians as field officers: to mobilize maximum support and recruitment for this war that was to be fought primarily by citizen soldiers. Some of these political and ethnic generals proved to be incompetent on the battlefield. Professional army officers like Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck deplored the political influences that had placed them in high positions. “It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as [Nathaniel] Banks, [Benjamin] Butler, [John] McClernand, and Lew Wallace,” sighed Halleck, “but it seems impossible to prevent it.”11

  In a narrow military sense Halleck may have been right—though the war also revealed a good many examples of incompetent professionals. But this was another area where considerations of national strategy trumped military strategy. The mass mobilization that brought 637,000 men into the Union army in less than a year could not have taken place without an enormous effort by local and state politicians as well as by prominent ethnic leaders. In New York City, for example, the Tammany Democrat Daniel Sickles raised a brigade and earned a commission as brigadier general. The Irish-born Thomas Meagher helped raise the Irish Brigade and became its commander. The famous German American leader Carl Schurz helped raise several German regiments and eventually became a major general. Lincoln needed the allegiance of prominent Democratic congressmen John McClernand and John Logan in southern Illinois, where support for the war was shaky. These two men “have labored night and day to instruct their fellow citizens in the true nature of the contest,” acknowledged the Republican Chicago Tribune, “and to organize their aroused feelings into effective military strength. They have succeeded nobly.”12 Both eventually achieved the rank of major general of volunteers, and Logan proved to be an outstanding commander.

  Lincoln commissioned several other prominent Democrats in what was a successful effort to mobilize their constituencies for what some perceived as a Republican war. But of course he could not ignore important Republicans who wanted commissions. His own party supplied most of the energy and manpower for the war effort. Lincoln appointed John C. Frémont, who had been the first Republican presidential candidate in 1856, and Nathaniel P. Banks, former Speaker of the House and governor of Massachusetts, as major generals early in the war. Frémont became commander of the Department of the West with headquarters in St. Louis, and Banks replaced the hapless Robert Patterson as commander in western Maryland. Northern state governors, nearly all Republicans, played an essential part in raising and organizing volunteer regiments, and claimed the right to recommend candidates for brigadier generalships. So did key senators and congressmen. Sometimes this system of politicomilitary patronage paid off in a big way. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman might have languished in obscurity had it not been for the initial sponsorship of Grant by Elihu B. Washburne, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, and of Sherman by his brother John, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

  SOME OF THE political generals caused Lincoln nagging problems—Frémont in Missouri and McClernand in the Tennessee-Mississippi theater, for example. But by far the most problematical was a thoroughgoing professional who graduated second in his West Point class and had been a rising star in the antebellum army: George B. McClellan. When he arrived in Washington on July 26, McClellan received a hero’s welcome and excessive praise for his small victories in western Virginia. The press lionized him as “the young Napoleon”; the correspondent of The Times of London described him as “the man on horseback” to save the country; the president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission said that “there is an indefinable air of success about him and something of ‘the man of destiny.’”13

  This adulation surprised McClellan and then went to his head. The day after reaching Washington he wrote to his wife that “I find myself in a new & strange position here—Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.” Three days later he went to Capitol Hill and was “quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received & the respect with which I was treated.” Congress seemed willing to “give me my way in everything.” McClellan developed what can only be called a messiah complex during those first weeks in Washington. “God has placed a great work in my hands,” he wrote. “I was called to it; my previous life seems to have been unwittingly directed to this great end.”14

  Lincoln was far from considering himself God, but on July 27 he did place an important work in McClellan’s hands. The president asked him to present a strategic plan for winning the war. McClellan’s quick response was breathtaking in its grandeur. On August 2 he handed Lincoln a paper outlining a strategy for all theaters of the war from the Atlantic coast to Texas. The main effort would be in Virginia, where McClellan would train and lead an army of 273,000 men supported by a large naval fleet to capture Richmond and then move south to occupy other major cities down to New Orleans. Another army-navy task force would thrust down the Mississippi, while a smaller force would drive southward from Kansas to Texas. Yet another army would move out from Kentucky (once it was firmly in the Union camp) or western Virginia to liberate Unionist East Tennessee and push on to Memphis.15

  Lincoln’s response to this wholly unrealistic plan is unknown. McClellan’s proposed campaigns would require at least five hundred thousand trained soldiers—twice the number of three-year recruits then in their training camps. The plan implied a delay of six or eight months until these troops could be organized, trained, and equipped, and for the huge logistical apparatus required to support them to be put in place. The most immediate consequence of McClellan’s paper, however, was to create a potential conflict with Winfield Scott. McClellan’s strategic outline poached on Scott’s territory as general-in-chief responsible for all theaters of the war. This was probably not Lincoln’s intention—though he had become disillusioned with Scott and had overruled him on both the reprovisioning of Fort Sumter and the advance against Manassas.

  In any case McClellan soon became convinced that God had not only called him to his great work; He had also placed obstacles in his path. The first of them was Scott, whose age, obesity, and infirmities limited his
workday to a few hours, while the energetic and charismatic Young Napoleon put in sixteen-hour days organizing and drilling his new army. McClellan bypassed Scott frequently, communicating directly with the president and members of the cabinet. Serious tensions soon developed between the old and new military titans.

  McClellan’s action that most angered Scott was a memorandum he sent Lincoln on August 8. It highlighted what turned out to be McClellan’s main defect as a military commander—an alarmist tendency to inflate enemy strength and intentions. The Confederate army in his front only twenty miles from Washington, McClellan claimed, had one hundred thousand men (their real numbers were about forty thousand). Reinforcements were passing through Knoxville to join them (not true). Washington was in danger of attack by this huge force. “Our present army in this vicinity is entirely insufficient for the emergency,” McClellan warned, so he advised Scott to order forward all troops scattered in other places within reach of the capital to meet this “imminent danger.”16

  Scott regarded this communication as an insult to his own authority and to his management of the army. He also scoffed at McClellan’s estimate of enemy numbers and his fears of an imminent attack. He called McClellan to his headquarters and apparently dressed him down. At the same time Scott asked to be placed on the retired list because of age and poor health—in effect submitting his resignation.17