Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Congress passed Lincoln’s resolution, with Republicans unanimously in favor and Democrats 85 percent opposed. But the president’s meeting with border-state congressmen on March 10 was discouraging. They complained of federal coercion, bickered about the amount of compensation, questioned the measure’s constitutionality, and predicted racial strife and economic ruin.51 Two months later an action by Gen. David Hunter, commander of Union forces occupying the South Atlantic coast, should have reminded them of Lincoln’s warning. On May 9 Hunter issued an edict declaring free all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln knew nothing of this order until he read it in the newspapers. He promptly rescinded it, telling Secretary of the Treasury Chase (who urged him to let it stand) that “no commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me.”52

  In his rescindment order, however, the president again signaled the border states—and everyone else—with a carrot and a stick. “You can not,” he told border-state representatives, “be blind to the signs of the times.” The changes brought about by compensated, gradual emancipation “would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything,” while “the strong tendency to a total disruption of society in the South” would get even stronger if the war continued. Lincoln also hinted ominously, in his comment on the substance of Hunter’s order, that “whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government, to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself” and not to commanders in the field.53

  IN MAY 1862, however, the chances that a prolonged war would erode slavery appeared remote. The remarkable string of Union victories everywhere but in Virginia encouraged many in the North and discouraged others in the South with the prospect that the war was almost over. After the capture of New Orleans the New York Herald exulted that “we are within a month, or perhaps two weeks, of the end of the war.” Other Northern newspapers echoed this optimism. The capture of Island No. 10 on the Mississippi, declared the New York Times, “must utterly discourage the rebels and show the futility of further resistance to the Government.”54

  Many Rebels were indeed disheartened. A Georgia officer acknowledged that “our recent disasters are appalling…. The valley of the Mississippi is virtually lost, and our entire seacoast and Gulf coast with but few exceptions are completely in the power of the enemy.” The fall of New Orleans profoundly depressed even the firebrand Edmund Ruffin, who had proudly claimed to have fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. “I cannot help admitting,” Ruffin wrote in his diary, “the possibility of the subjugation of the southern states.”55

  Even in Virginia matters were looking up for the Union cause. As McClellan prepared to open his siege guns on Confederate lines at Yorktown, Johnston pulled out on the night of May 3–4 and retreated toward Richmond. McClellan considered his monthlong siege to be a triumph at minimal cost in casualties. Lincoln was not convinced, for the enemy lived to fight another day. By coincidence Lincoln plus Stanton and Chase arrived at Fort Monroe two days after the Confederate evacuation of Yorktown. They had come, in part, to prod McClellan into action. But they did not see the general because he had gone forward to supervise the pursuit after the Confederates had fought a rearguard action at Williamsburg on May 5.

  Norfolk was still in enemy hands, however, and the feared CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack) was still docked there. On May 7 the commander in chief took direct operational control of a drive to capture Norfolk and to push a gunboat fleet up the James River. Lincoln ordered Gen. John Wool, commander at Fort Monroe, to land troops on the south bank of Hampton Roads. The president even personally carried out a reconnaissance to select the best landing spot. On May 9 the Confederates evacuated Norfolk before Northern soldiers could get there. Two days later the Virginia’s crew blew it up to prevent its capture. An officer on the USS Monitor wrote that “it is extremely fortunate that the President came down as he did—he seems to have infused new life into everything.” Nothing was happening, he said, until Lincoln began “stirring up dry bones.”56 Chase was usually sparing of praise for Lincoln (to put it mildly), but on May 11 he wrote to his daughter: “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President; for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the ‘Merrimac’ as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever.”57

  Lincoln was willing to take some of the credit for these events.58 But the Confederates would have abandoned Norfolk anyway to avoid being cut off when Johnston’s army retreated up the Peninsula. As it did so, morale in the South plunged further, and hopes in the North for an imminent victory rose correspondingly. An officer in the Seventy-first Pennsylvania boasted that when the Army of the Potomac attacked Richmond, “we will just go right over the works, for I do not think it possible to stay this enthusiastic army.” A Wisconsin soldier wrote home on May 25 that “the next letter I send you will be mailed from Richmond.” General McClellan’s wife was confident that “the war would be over by the Fourth of July.”59

  Dispirited Confederates were afraid she was right. Jefferson Davis was “greatly depressed in spirits,” according to one observer. The Confederate president’s niece was visiting his household during these tense days. She wrote to her mother in Mississippi: “Oh, mother, Uncle Jeff. is miserable…. Our reverses distressed him so much…. The cause of the Confederacy looks drooping and sinking…. I am ready to sink with despair.”60 A Virginia cavalry captain wrote to his wife that “our cause is hopeless,” but added: “unless some great change takes place.”61

  Great changes were about to take place, most of them in Virginia. They would turn the war around in the short run but ensure the death of both slavery and the Confederacy in the end.

  4

  A QUESTION OF LEGS

  BY THE third week of May 1862 the Army of the Potomac with 105,000 men was closing in on Richmond defended by 60,000 soldiers. Claiming that he faced “perhaps double my numbers,” McClellan continued to clamor for reinforcements. Lincoln responded by ordering McDowell’s corps from Fredericksburg to link up with McClellan’s right flank a few miles northeast of Richmond.1 One division of McDowell’s corps had been drawn from Nathaniel Banks’s small army in the Shenandoah Valley, leaving Banks with only 8,000 men to face Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s 17,000 Confederate troops in the valley.

  Gen. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis’s military adviser, had instructed Jackson to create a diversion in the valley to prevent the very reinforcements that Lincoln ordered. Jackson was just the man for this task. Secretive, crafty, a master of strategic deception and misdirection, an austere Presbyterian in his personal life, a hard fighter and harder disciplinarian as a commander, he pushed his troops into such long and fast marches that they became known as “Jackson’s foot cavalry.” On May 8 Jackson defeated two brigades of Frémont’s army in the western Virginia mountains. The foot cavalry then marched quickly down the valley (northward) toward Banks’s force at Strasburg, swerved suddenly to cross Massanutten Mountain into the Luray Valley, struck Banks’s outpost at Front Royal on May 23, and then routed the retreating Northerners at Winchester on May 25. They fled north across the Potomac River into Maryland, leaving the valley and the south bank of the Potomac wide open to the enemy.

  Alarm bells about the safety of Washington went off in the War Department. Stanton sent out a call for the mobilization of emergency militia.2 And on May 24 Lincoln suspended McDowell’s movement toward McClellan and ordered him instead to send two divisions to the valley. McClellan was outraged. He insisted (correctly) that the purpose of Jackson’s movements “is probably to prevent reinforcements being sent to me.” He vented his spleen in letters to his wife. Lincoln “is terribly scared about Washington,” he wrote. “Heaven help a country governed by such counsels!…It is perfectly sickening to deal with such people…. I get more sick of them
every day—for every day brings with it only additional proof of their hypocrisy, knavery, and folly.”3

  Lincoln was of course concerned about a potential threat to the capital. But that was not his main reason for suspending McDowell’s movement. Rather, he intended to trap Jackson in the valley by having Frémont take up a blocking position to the south and having McDowell hit Jackson in the flank before he could retreat to the safety of the upper valley. Recognizing that Jackson was one of the Confederacy’s most dangerous commanders, Lincoln hoped to snare him and cripple his army. He believed this to be a better strategic use of McDowell’s troops than reinforcing McClellan, who would still maintain that “their numbers [are] greatly exceeding our own.”4 Lincoln no longer took such claims seriously. He was convinced that no matter how many troops McClellan had, he would not attack Richmond but would bring up his heavy artillery and lay siege to it, as he had done at Yorktown.

  So the commander in chief acted as his own general-in-chief. For the next several days—and nights—Lincoln spent most of his time in the War Department telegraph office firing off dispatches to Frémont, McDowell, and other generals. He ordered Frémont to cross the Bull Pasture Mountains with his fifteen thousand men “to move against Jackson at Harrisonburg and operate against the enemy in such a way as to relieve Banks. This movement must be made immediately.” Frémont replied that he would “move as ordered.” Lincoln thanked him and urged that “much—perhaps all—depends upon the celerity with which you can execute it. Put the utmost speed into it. Do not lose a minute.”5

  To McDowell went orders to march two of his divisions to Strasburg in the valley “to capture the forces of Jackson & Ewell, either in cooperation with Gen Fremont” or, if Frémont was delayed (Lincoln’s confidence in him was minimal), “it is believed that the force with which you move will be sufficient to accomplish the object alone.” McDowell obeyed the order, but added a protest that the suspension of his move toward Richmond “is a crushing blow to us.” McDowell told Lincoln that “I am entirely beyond helping distance of General Banks…. I shall gain nothing for you there, and shall lose much for you here.” Lincoln responded that “the change was as painful to me as it can possibly be to you.” But he wanted no excuses for failure; he had had enough of those from McClellan. He did not want to hear any such word as “can’t.” If McDowell marched his men half as fast as Jackson, he could catch that wily general. “Everything now depends on the celerity and vigor of your movement,” Lincoln told McDowell. “It is, for you a question of legs. Put in all the speed you can.”6 McDowell adopted Lincoln’s terminology in telegrams to the commander of his lead division, James Shields (who had almost fought a duel with Lincoln twenty years earlier). “The question now seems to be one of legs—whether we can get to Jackson and Ewell before they can get away,” said McDowell. “We must not disappoint the expectations of the President.”7

  Frémont and Shields failed Lincoln. Instead of marching to Harrisonburg south of Strasburg, Frémont moved to Moorefield, thirty-five miles to its northwest. In reply to a dispatch received from Frémont at Moorefield on May 27, Lincoln demanded: “What does this mean?…You were expressly ordered to march to Harrisonburg.” Frémont offered what to Lincoln surely seemed a lame explanation that the route through Moorefield Valley was easier for his tired, hungry troops than the shorter but rough going over the Bull Pasture Mountains to Harrisonburg. Nothing could be done about it now, so Lincoln ordered Frémont to close on Strasburg immediately to catch Jackson in a vise between Frémont’s fifteen thousand and Shields’s division of ten thousand coming from the east.8 With considerably farther to go, Jackson’s foot cavalry again outmarched the ponderous Yankees and slipped through the trap on May 31.

  Lincoln was disgusted, but he did not give up the effort to get his generals to chase down and attack Jackson, whom they now outnumbered by almost two to one. Stanton wired Frémont and McDowell on June 2: “The President tells me to say to you do not let the enemy escape from you.”9 But the slippery Stonewall outdistanced his pursuers to Port Republic, 135 miles from where he had begun his epic retreat. There he gained control of the bridge over the south fork of the Shenandoah River, which separated the two Union forces. The Confederates repulsed a feeble attack by Frémont on June 8 and then crossed the river to defeat Shields on June 9. Jackson’s storied Shenandoah Valley campaign was over, and he prepared to join the Confederate army facing McClellan at Richmond.

  Perhaps Lincoln had expected too much of his generals. And perhaps he failed to appreciate that logistical problems and frequent rains slowed their movements. But the same rain fell on Confederate troops, whose logistical problems were even more difficult. Then and later Lincoln could not understand why Northern armies could not march as fast as the enemy. General Shields seemed to share Lincoln’s sentiments. In his official report on the campaign, Shields wrote that Lincoln’s “plan for Jackson’s destruction was perfect. The execution of it, from inexplicable causes, was not what was to be expected.”10

  Shields by implication blamed Frémont for the failure. So did Lincoln. Without directly rebuking the general—who still had powerful Republican supporters—the president made clear his disapproval in a series of dispatches to Frémont, which also instructed him to keep a close watch on Jackson to prevent him from doing more mischief.11 On June 26 Lincoln created the Army of Virginia, to be composed of the commands of Frémont, Banks, and the portion of McDowell’s corps that had not already reinforced McClellan. Lincoln called Gen. John Pope from the West, where he had done well, to command this army. Refusing to serve under Pope, who was his junior in rank, Frémont submitted his resignation, which Lincoln promptly accepted.12

  Several historians have echoed McClellan’s criticism of Lincoln’s diversion of McDowell on what they considered a wild-goose chase at the expense of what should have been the primary strategic objective of Richmond. But General Shields was right; there was a real chance to hurt and perhaps even capture Jackson, with incalculable benefits to the Union cause. The conclusion offered by the most recent historian of McClellan’s Peninsula campaign seems sound: “The notion that McDowell’s corps was essential to victory on the peninsula is nonsense. McClellan always greatly overestimated his opponents, and McDowell would not have made a difference…. There is absolutely no reason to think that if [McClellan] had been…given everything he wanted in the Peninsula Campaign it would have made any difference.”13

  WHILE JACKSON WAS making his escape from Lincoln’s trap, important events were taking place in two other theaters. After the Battle of Shiloh, General Halleck had come from his St. Louis headquarters to take command of the combined armies of Grant and Buell as well as that of John Pope after he captured Island No. 10. This force of 110,000 men advanced at a glacial pace to invest the rail junction at Corinth defended by 70,000 Confederates under the command of Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard. Although Halleck had defended Grant from criticism after Shiloh, he still had reservations about Grant and relegated him to the largely meaningless position of second in command. Grant almost resigned, but was talked out of it by his friend Sherman, with whom he had forged a close bond at Shiloh. On the night of May 29–30 the Confederates evacuated Corinth before Halleck could strike. Lincoln was pleased with this almost bloodless victory, even though the enemy lived to fight another day, just as Joseph Johnston’s army did after it had similarly evacuated Yorktown four weeks earlier. Secretary of War Stanton reported the president to be especially “delighted” with Halleck’s plan to send Buell with 30,000 men to capture Chattanooga and “liberate” East Tennessee.14

  As before, however, the commander in chief remained preoccupied with events on McClellan’s front. On May 31 Johnston attacked part of the Army of the Potomac south of the Chickahominy River six miles east of Richmond. In the two-day Battle of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks, the Federals repulsed and punished the attackers. The battle had a profound impact on the opposing commanders. It confirmed McClellan’s belief that the enemy was co
ncentrating all its forces against him; but perhaps more important, he was unnerved by the sight of “mangled corpses” and wounded men on the battlefield. “Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such a cost…. Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me.”15 McClellan’s sentiments did credit to him as a human being and help explain why his soldiers idolized him. But they also reinforced his intention to capture Richmond by maneuver and siege rather than by hard fighting. On the Confederate side, Joseph Johnston was wounded in the Battle of Seven Pines, and Jefferson Davis replaced him with Robert E. Lee. No one knew it yet, but this move ensured that hard fighting would become the norm for the rest of the war.

  Most of a wet June passed as Lee prepared a counteroffensive. Lincoln ordered one of McDowell’s divisions plus some additional regiments to join McClellan, bringing his effective strength to at least 106,000 men. The president also authorized McClellan to call on Gen. Ambrose Burnside for reinforcements from his army in North Carolina. McClellan failed to appreciate these additions. Much of his energy went into a series of telegrams to Washington complaining that he lacked this and that, the roads were too wet to move up his heavy artillery, and he faced 200,000 enemy troops (the maximum number that Lee would be able to bring against him was 92,000). If these “vastly superior” forces overwhelmed him, McClellan told Lincoln and Stanton, “I will in no way be responsible for it, as I have not failed to represent repeatedly the need of reinforcements…. The responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders; it must rest where it belongs.” To this astonishing accusation, Lincoln responded only that it “pains me very much. I give you all I can…while you continue, ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would. I have omitted and shall omit no opportunity to send you reinforcements whenever I possibly can.” McClellan told his wife that “Honest A[be] has again fallen into the hands of my enemies.”16