Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  On June 23 Lincoln made an unannounced trip by special train to West Point to consult Gen. Winfield Scott, who was summering there. What Scott advised is not clear, but it may have included a recommendation to create the Army of Virginia under Pope, which the president did the day after he returned to Washington. Scott also probably renewed his old suggestion to appoint Henry W. Halleck as general-in-chief. Two weeks later the president did just that. A great deal happened during those two weeks that changed the course of the war.17

  WHILE MCCLELLAN BICKERED with Washington, Lee acted. On June 26 he launched his counteroffensive against McClellan’s right flank north of the Chickahominy. The previous day McClellan had probed Confederate lines south of that river in an operation that in retrospect became known as the first of the Seven Days’ battles (June 25–July 1). From June 26 on it was the Army of Northern Virginia that did the attacking—repeatedly, relentlessly, with a courage bordering on recklessness, without regard for heavy casualties that would total about twenty thousand Confederates (and sixteen thousand Federals, of whom six thousand were captured) for the whole Seven Days’.

  Even though only one of the four sizable battles during these days was a Confederate tactical victory (Gaines’ Mill on June 27), McClellan lost his nerve. He was defeated, even if his army was not. He abandoned all thought of making a stand or ordering a counterattack. While the Confederates assaulted the thirty thousand Federals north of the Chickahominy at Gaines’ Mill, McClellan had seventy thousand facing only twenty-five thousand Confederates south of the river. But he wired the War Department that he was “attacked by greatly superior numbers in all directions.”18 He decided to destroy his supply base and retreat south to the James River. “I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” he told Stanton. “The Government must not & cannot hold me responsible for the result…. I have seen too many dead & wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Government has not sustained this army…. If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” The colonel in charge of the War Department telegraph office was so shocked by McClellan’s final two sentences that he deleted them from the copy he sent on to Stanton, so he and Lincoln did not see them.19

  Although Lincoln did not read these sentences, he saw plenty of other evidence that McClellan had gone to pieces. And when news of the Seven Days’ reached the North in a form that magnified the Union defeat, home front morale plunged. A panic on Wall Street sent stocks as well as the value of the new greenback dollar (introduced in February 1862) into a temporary free fall. Newspapers described the public mood as “mortified” by this “stunning disaster” which had caused “misery” and “revulsion” throughout the North.20 A State Department translator wrote in his diary that this Fourth of July was “the gloomiest since the birth of this republic. Never was the country so low, and after such sacrifices of blood.” Lincoln told a Connecticut congressman that when he learned of McClellan’s retreat to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, “I was as nearly inconsolable as I could be and live.”21

  But the president refused to panic. He did what he could to calm McClellan. He telegraphed the general to “maintain your ground if you can…. Save the Army, material and personal; and I will strengthen it for the offensive again, as fast as I can…. We still have strength enough in the country, and will bring it out.”22 Lincoln ordered several thousand troops from the coast of the Carolinas to reinforce the Army of the Potomac.23 The president also asked General Halleck if he could spare some troops from his western armies to reinforce McClellan—but only if it would not jeopardize the campaign to liberate East Tennessee. Halleck replied that such a detachment would indeed jeopardize that campaign, so Lincoln dropped the matter.24

  McClellan was not the only one whom Lincoln had to calm and reassure. On the night of July 4–5 the normally unflappable Montgomery Meigs awakened the president at the Soldiers’ Home cottage that the Lincolns used as a summer White House. Meigs said excitedly that the Army of the Potomac must be evacuated from the Peninsula at once before the enemy captured it, all supplies must be destroyed, and all the horses killed because they could not be gotten away. Lincoln sent Meigs home and went back to sleep. The president later told John Hay of the incident, and added: “Thus often I who am not a specially brave man have had to sustain the sinking courage of these professional fighters in critical times.”25

  Lincoln also tried to reassure the public. He announced that “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.” He had Seward instruct Northern governors to ask the president to call for three hundred thousand new three-year volunteers so “the recent successes of the Federal arms may be followed up…to bring this unnecessary and injurious civil war to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion.” Lincoln issued the call on July 1, 1862.26

  Lincoln decided to visit the Army of the Potomac to see its condition for himself. Arriving on July 8, he reviewed the troops and found their morale to be better than he expected. The next day he met with McClellan and five corps commanders. The president asked their opinion about removing the army from the Peninsula. Most said it could be done, but McClellan plus three corps commanders said that to do so would be ruinous to the cause. Only one (Gen. William B. Franklin) wanted to withdraw and start a new overland campaign from the region between Washington and the Rappahannock River. Lincoln was noncommittal about his intentions but returned to Washington “in better spirits” than before he went, according to John Nicolay.27

  The same could not be said of McClellan. “I do not know what paltry trick the administration will play next,” he wrote his wife. “I did not like the Presd’t’s manner—it seemed that of a man about to do something of which he was much ashamed…. [He] is ‘an old stick’—& of pretty poor timber at that.”28 The first thing Lincoln did after getting back to Washington was to appoint Halleck as general-in-chief. McClellan considered this appointment “a slap in the face…. It is grating to have to serve under the orders of a man whom I know by experience to be my inferior.”29

  McClellan reserved his bitterest rhetoric for Stanton, whom he professed to blame even more than Lincoln for undercutting his Peninsula campaign by withholding reinforcements. One of Stanton’s greatest sins, according to McClellan, was to have challenged the general’s claim that the Confederates had outnumbered him. Stanton’s (quite accurate) statement that Union forces were larger than the enemy’s “is simply false,” fumed McClellan. “They had more than two to one against me.”30 When one of Burnside’s divisions from North Carolina went to Pope instead of to McClellan, the latter as usual blamed Stanton. The secretary of war was “the most depraved hypocrite & villain” he had ever known, McClellan wrote. If he “had lived in the time of the Saviour, Judas Iscariot would have remained a respected member of the fraternity of Apostles.”31

  The outcome of the Seven Days’ battles produced a flurry of scapegoating in the press as well as within the Army of the Potomac. Republican newspapers blamed McClellan, but their criticism was muted compared with the opposition’s tirades against Stanton. Democratic newspapers—especially the powerful New York Herald—took their cue from McClellan. The secretary of war, announced the Herald, was “the tool of abolitionists, the organizer of disasters, the author of defeats.” His “reckless mismanagement and criminal intrigues” caused “thousands of lives” to be “thrown away, unnecessarily sacrificed, wantonly squandered, heedlessly murdered.”32

  Many officers and men in the Army of the Potomac echoed the Herald. McClellan remained their hero. For them as for him, it was an article of faith that they had not been outfought or outgeneraled but beaten by superior numbers because traitors in Washington withheld reinforcements. A soldier in the crack Eighty-third Pennsylvania, which had suffered 65 percent casualties in the Seven Days’ (including 111 killed), wrote that “no one
thinks of blaming McClellan. His men have the fullest confidence in his ability…. Anyone who saw how the rebels…pour five different lines of fresh troops against our one, can tell why he does not take Richmond.” A Massachusetts officer considered Stanton “the great murderer of the age, for to him are fairly imparted the deaths of all the men who have fallen since the siege of Yorktown.”33

  To prevent the vendetta against Stanton from getting further out of hand, Lincoln used the occasion of a Union rally in Washington on August 6 to defend the secretary as “a brave and able man” who did all he could to support McClellan. If anyone was responsible for withholding troops, said Lincoln, it was himself—because those soldiers were needed elsewhere. It was time to stop blaming Stanton “for what I did myself.” And it was also time to stop this internecine faultfinding and move forward together against the real enemy. “I know Gen. McClellan wishes to be successful, and I know he does not wish it any more than the Secretary of War for him, and both of them together no more than I wish it.”34

  POLITICAL POLARIZATION WITH respect to the Army of the Potomac was closely related to the increasing intensity of the slavery issue. As the war entered its second year Lincoln pretty much gave up his earlier hope that a conciliatory policy might coax supposed Unionists in the Confederacy out of the closet. Guerrilla attacks behind Union lines in the West and cavalry raids in Tennessee and Kentucky by Confederate troopers under Gens. Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan took place just after the Seven Days’. The success of these Confederate counteroffensives helped to harden the attitudes of Republicans including Lincoln toward “rebels.” Senator John Sherman wrote to his brother William of a growing sentiment “that we must treat these Rebels as bitter enemies to be subdued—conquered—by confiscation—by the employment of their slaves—by terror—energy—audacity—rather than by conciliation.”35

  Many soldiers on the front lines espoused this notion of “hard war,” even in the Army of the Potomac, where their beloved McClellan deplored such attitudes. It was time, they thought, to stop coddling Southern civilians, many of whom Union soldiers considered “bushwhackers” who raided behind Union lines, fired at Northern soldiers from their houses, and harassed Union operations in any way they could. “The star of the Confederacy appears to be rising,” wrote an Ohio colonel about these Southern counteroffensives, “and I doubt not it will continue to ascend until the rose-water policy now pursued by the Northern army is superseded by one more determined and vigorous.” An Illinois officer believed that “the iron gauntlet must be used more than the silken glove to crush this serpent.”36 A lieutenant in the Tenth Massachusetts complained of McClellan’s conciliatory policy toward civilians on the Peninsula. “The whole aim [of] this kid glove war,” he wrote, “seems to be to hurt as few of our enemies and as little as possible.” Even General Halleck, previously a sharp critic of such hard-war ideas, became a convert. After he moved to Washington as general-in-chief, one of his first orders to Grant, now commander of occupation forces in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi, was to “take up all active [Rebel] sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use…. It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of the war.”37

  “Take their property.” The principal form of property in the South was slaves. They were also an essential part of the Confederacy’s labor force and of the logistical operations of Confederate armies. A Wisconsin major insisted that “the only way to put down this rebellion is to hurt the instigators and abettors of it. Slavery must be cleaned out.” The colonel of the Fifth Minnesota, stationed in northern Alabama, wrote that “I am doing quite a business in the confiscation of slave property…. Crippling the institution of slavery is…striking a blow at the heart of the rebellion.”38

  One prominent advocate of hard war was Gen. John Pope. Soon after becoming commander of the newly formed Army of Virginia in June 1862, Pope issued a series of orders authorizing his officers to seize enemy property without compensation, to hold civilians responsible for guerrilla attacks on Union communications or personnel, to shoot civilians caught firing on Union soldiers, to expel from occupied territory any civilians who refused to take an oath of allegiance, and to treat them as spies if they returned.39

  Lincoln approved of these orders, which were based in part on the Second Confiscation Act passed by Congress and signed by the president on July 17. Lincoln issued separate orders, milder than Pope’s and also based on the Confiscation Act, that among other provisions authorized the employment of confiscated slaves “for Military and Naval purposes, giving them reasonable wages for their labor.”40

  The New York Times, which represented the views of moderate Republicans (including Lincoln), considered Pope’s orders just the ticket. “The country is weary of trifling,” declared the Times. “We have been afraid of wounding rebel feelings, afraid of injuring rebel property, afraid of using, or under any circumstances, of freeing rebel slaves. Some of our Generals have fought the rebels—if fighting it be called—with their kid gloves on”—a thinly veiled allusion to McClellan. But now, said the Times, “there is a sign of hope and cheer in the more warlike policy which has been inaugurated.”41

  McClellan bitterly opposed these steps toward hard war. If the government “adopts these radical and inhuman views to which it seems inclined, & which will prolong the struggle,” he wrote, “I cannot in good conscience serve the Govt any longer.” He did not resign, however, but sought to push his own views of how the war should be fought. “The people of the South should understand that we are not making war upon the institution of slavery,” he instructed the new general-in-chief, Halleck. “Private persons and property should enjoy all the protection we can afford them” in order to prove to Southern civilians that the government “is, as we profess it to be, benign and beneficent.”42 McClellan issued his own set of orders to the Army of the Potomac intended to have the opposite effect from that of Pope’s “infamous orders” to his army. “I will not have this army degenerate into a mob of thieves,” McClellan declared. “We are not engaged in a war of rapine, revenge, or subjugation,” he informed his soldiers. “This is not a war against populations, but against armed forces.”43

  Before the Seven Days’ battles McClellan had asked Lincoln for permission to lay before the president some suggestions about how the war should be fought. Lincoln acquiesced, and when he came to visit the army at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan handed him a letter dated July 7. “The time has come when the Government must determine upon a civil and military policy,” the general told his commander in chief. “It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the Southern people…and it should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization…. Neither confiscation of property…nor forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment. Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude…. A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.”44

  Lincoln read this extraordinary document in McClellan’s presence and pocketed it without comment—then or later. But his thoughts can be guessed. Several months earlier he might have agreed with much of what McClellan wrote. In his message to Congress back in December he too had expressed a hope that the war would not “degenerate into a remorseless and revolutionary struggle.” But since then the conflict had become remorseless, and Lincoln was about to embrace the revolution. Democrats and border-state Unionists who expressed alarm about what the New York Times was calling “an active and vigorous war policy” now elicited an exasperated response from the president. The demand of professed Southern Unionists “that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident,” wrote Lincoln in July 1862, had become “the paralysis—the dead palsy—of the government in this whole struggle.” The war could no longer be fought “with elder-stalk squirts [that is,
squirt guns], charged with rose water,” Lincoln said sarcastically. “This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”45

  Lincoln was about to commit himself to a historic shift in national strategy toward slavery. But first he decided to give the border states one last chance to accept his offer of compensated emancipation, which had lain dormant since March. The “signs of the times” he had warned them about in May were even more obvious now. “You can form no conception of the change of opinion here as to the Negro question,” Senator Sherman wrote to his brother. “I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation.” A conservative Boston newspaper conceded that “the great phenomenon of the year is the terrible intensity that this [emancipation] resolution has acquired. A year ago men might have faltered at the thought of proceeding to this extremity, [but now] they are in great measure prepared for it.”46 Lincoln summoned border-state representatives to the White House on July 12 and laid out the “unprecedentedly stern facts of the case.” The pressure for emancipation was increasing, he pointed out. If they did not make “a decision at once to emancipate gradually…the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion.” But once again the border-state men turned him down, by a margin of two to one.47