Abraham Lincoln (15 page)

5: T
HE
W
ARRIOR

He was, then, a warrior for the American dream, prepared to do whatever was necessary to save it short of abandoning the dream itself. This ends-justifies-the-means philosophy was blazingly clear in Lincoln's approach to military strategy. Here he faced some perplexing questions: How could he utilize the Union's vast superiority in manpower and war matériel to stamp out the rebellion? Should he battle only the armies of the insurrectionists, or their institutions and resources as well?

At first, Lincoln elected to fight only the rebel military forces, a decision that would alter drastically as the war roared on and necessity demanded a harsher strategy. But almost from the start Lincoln had the whole military picture in mind, which was to be expected of a man who saw the struggle itself in a world dimension. Before any of his generals or advisers, Lincoln understood that the only way to whip the hard-fighting Confederates was to hit them with coordinated attacks in all theaters. Only that way could the Union bring to bear its tremendous advantage in manpower and war resources.

Yet it took Lincoln a long time to translate his strategic insights into action. He made mistakes. He gave too many important commands to “political” generals or to incompetent professionals
who impressed him simply because they were generals. Who was he, a mere civilian, to question their military expertise? When his chosen commanders failed to fight as he wanted, he could lose his temper and cry “damn” or “hell” and even throw his stovepipe hat on the floor, as he did on one battlefront visit in 1862. Too many of his early generals, as he put it himself, had the “slows” when it came to fighting. Yet it was Lincoln who had chosen them.

Let us examine the cases of George B. McClellan and Don Carlos Buell. McClellan was a bright and brash young general with red hair, a red mustache, and irresistible military good looks. He had an air of cocky arrogance and called himself “the Little Napoleon.” But he was a superb organizer. And so was aloof, irascible Buell. In 1861, after the Union reversal at Bull Run, Lincoln put McClellan in command of the showpiece Army of the Potomac and Buell in charge of the Department of the Ohio, with headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. The President intended for them to operate in concert, for McClellan to attack rebel forces in northern Virginia while Buell smashed into east Tennessee, liberated its pro-Union population, severed the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, put his forces between the rebels and their “hog and hominy” (as Lincoln phrased it), and then menaced the flank of the Confederates in Virginia.

It was a fine idea. The only trouble was with McClellan and Buell, both of whom bogged down in endless delays, organizing and reorganizing their armies, drilling and drilling their men. Unsure of how to deal with professional soldiers, the President recommended that they move. With rising anxiety, he asked them why they did not move. With both generals it was always the same: they faced insuperable problems with preparation and supply. Worse still, both insisted that the rebels overwhelmingly outnumbered them and both cried for reinforcements. McClellan, for his part, was almost paranoid about the Confederate army in front of him. In the enemy entrenchments around Manassas Junction, he saw the Russian hordes massed at Sevastapol during
the Crimean War. He insisted that the rebels then numbered 220,000 (actual size: about 36,000) and that it would be suicidal for him to attack with only 120,000 men. He needed 273,000. Only then could he attack Manassas, seize Richmond, and win the war. In the meantime, he had to train his army, train and train it. Give him credit for whipping the Potomac Army into a potent fighting force. He pleaded with Lincoln not to force him into a premature advance, pleaded for time and understanding. Lincoln gave him plenty of both. But in January, 1862, with the public clamoring for McClellan to move, clamoring for a decisive victory that would end the rebellion, Lincoln started losing his patience. He said if McClellan was not going to use the army, he would like to borrow it. He wasn't joking. “I am thinking of taking the field myself,” he told an old Illinois friend.

But he didn't take the field himself. McClellan, after all, was a professional soldier, second in his class at West Point, author of a text on the art of war. Lincoln, by contrast, had never commanded anything beyond a company of unruly volunteers back in the Black Hawk Indian War of 1832. And even then he had not come close to real combat. With no Indians to shoot, his hardbitten boys had “made war” on nearby farms, liberating pigs and chickens for their evening fires. Lincoln's singular claim to military glory, he liked to say, had been “a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes.”

Still, he had sound military concepts, and he wanted them adopted. In mid-January, he wrote down his “general idea of the war” and how it ought to be fought, a strategic plan that grew out of his own military studies (he had been reading books on warfare borrowed from the Library of Congress) and his notions about concerted action. Lincoln noted that the Union had the superior forces, but the rebels, by shifting their troops across interior lines, had the greater ability to concentrate their manpower “upon points of collision.” To defeat them, Union armies must worry the enemy simultaneously at various points. If the rebels made no change in their forces, the Union could launch coordinated attacks all across the front. Or, if they weakened one spot to rein
force another, the Union could hit the weakened point and smash through to victory. How did this apply to the current military situation? His armies in the West could threaten the rebels in Kentucky and eastern Tennessee while McClellan attacked them at Manassas: at some point the rebels would have to weaken—and when they did, Union forces could drive through the lines and rout them.

Lincoln's generals were slow to implement his plan. Buell, coming alive in eastern Kentucky, did move out and win a battle there. At the same time, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant drove into northwestern Tennessee and captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. The two forces were not cooperating as Lincoln desired, but he was so desperate for a victory that he personally nominated Grant for promotion to Major General.

In the East, though, McClellan's inaction had become chronic. Lincoln and cavalcades of angry Republicans called on the general and exhorted him to move. McClellan lashed back at them all. Who were they—who was the President—to interfere with a professional soldier? He refused to take his Commander-in-Chief into his confidence and discuss frankly and fully what he planned to do. Finally, Lincoln simply ordered him to advance and engage the enemy. But the President did not order McClellan to embrace his plan of operation. In place of that, McClellan offered his own, a brilliant plan in McClellan's judgment: his army would sail down Chesapeake Bay, land at the sandy peninsula between the York and James rivers, and dash boldly northwest into Richmond, the capture of which would virtually end the rebellion in a masterstroke.

While Lincoln had serious reservations about the plan, he told McClellan to go ahead. At all events, he must fight the enemy somewhere. Again, Lincoln's self-doubts overrode his better judgment, and he authorized a campaign he disliked, sent forth a general whose fighting abilities he questioned. No wonder he was beset with anxiety.

A first-rate organizer, McClellan was simply inept in the field.
He consumed an entire month besieging lightly defended York-town when he could have taken it with a single offensive thrust. Then McClellan inched up the peninsula toward Richmond, only to halt, entrench, and howl for reinforcements, convinced that the rebels outnumbered him two to one. This was sheer hallucination. Throughout the peninsula operation, McClellan had a larger army than the Confederates.

Lincoln and McClellan haggled over the size of his army, haggled over reinforcements, haggled over McDowell's corps and the defense of Washington—all in the middle of a campaign. No wonder it went nowhere. Before McClellan had set out for Virginia, Lincoln had ordered him to secure the capital with 40,000 men. It was the beginning of a fateful misunderstanding. There were 40,000 men in Washington and northern Virginia, and McClellan assumed that this met the President's stipulation. But Lincoln meant that number in the capital itself. When he and his advisers discovered that only 19,000 troops manned the forts and redoubts around Washington, they concluded that McClellan had arrogantly disobeyed orders. Therefore the President detained McDowell's corps of 38,000 intended for McClellan's army and had it guard the capital. McClellan, of course, cried out in protest. He still had about 100,000 men, but in his mind this was not nearly enough to battle the rebel masses he envisioned in his front. In righteous indignation, he blasted the government for refusing to send him additional troops and warned that it would shoulder full responsibility for any disaster that befell him.

It was Lincoln's turn to fume. Your complaints “pain me very much,” he informed McClellan. “I give you all I can.” By now, Lincoln realized that he should never have let McClellan take his army down to the peninsula on the other side of Richmond. He should have made McClellan launch his big strike at Manassas while the rebel army was still there. Now that army was entrenched in front of Richmond, McClellan was belligerently inert, Union forces in Virginia badly divided, Buell again immobilized in the West, and the chances of victory increasingly
dim. Then McClellan did an astonishing thing. Instead of attacking Richmond, he retreated from it, switching his base of supply down to the James River and squalling for reinforcements as he went.

The peninsula campaign was a fiasco, and Lincoln in approving it had to shoulder the consequences, as cries of outrage pummeled him from all corners of the Union. With Buell and McClellan bogged down again, Lincoln decided that he needed a general at his side, a military man to direct and coordinate his armies and translate his ideas into language his field commanders could understand. He therefore made Henry Halleck General-in-Chief, thus relieving Lincoln of the harrowing responsibilities of that job, and installed Halleck in Washington. Lincoln liked “Old Brains,” a stout officer with watery eyes and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Union College, and told him it was his job to make his field commanders fight. For Lincoln agreed with his congressional colleagues that “fighting, and
only
fighting,” would ever end the rebellion.

He realized something else, too. The war could never be won simply by seizing the rebel capital. What Lincoln perceived from his White House windows was that only the complete annihilation of the enemy armies could win this war. Only when they had no armies left would the tenacious insurrectionists give up the fight.

And now Halleck must communicate that to his field commanders, make them understand in their own language what Lincoln saw. Through Halleck, Lincoln ordered Buell to advance against East Tennessee or
else
. When he still did not budge, Lincoln twice intended to sack him, and twice let Halleck talk him out of it, because Lincoln trusted the general's judgment more than his own.

Alas, Lincoln's new command set-up brought no victories. In despair, the President summoned a griping McClellan back to Washington and waited in mounting distress as a new army under blustering John Pope engaged the rebels in the battle of second
Bull Run, near Manassas. It was another Union debacle, as Robert E. Lee smashed up Pope's army and sent it reeling back to Washington. Lincoln was so depressed that he said “we may as well stop fighting.”

With awakened resolution, though, he fired Pope and put McClellan in command of a reorganized Potomac Army that included the remnants of Pope's force. The Cabinet strenuously objected—not McClellan again! But who else did he have? Lincoln said. Who else was better at regrouping dispirited and defeated men? When Lee invaded Maryland in the autumn of 1862, McClellan led his army out to do battle, vowing to give Bobbie Lee the drubbing of his life. McClellan fought Lee at Antietam Creek, but was so obsessed with the possibility of retreat that he held an entire corps in reserve. Had he thrown that into the battle, he might have crippled Lee seriously. As it was, he forced Lee to withdraw from the battlefield, thus halting his invasion. McClellan was so excited that he wired Washington that his victory was “complete.” Lincoln, of course, interpreted this to mean that Lee's army had been eliminated as a fighting force. When he found out that this was not the case, that Lee in fact had escaped to fight again, Lincoln was thoroughly disgusted with McClellan. Yet Antietam did give him a triumph of sorts, enough for him to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, as we have seen.

Almost a month later, McClellan was still encamped on the Antietam battlefield. Lincoln hectored him until he moved, hounded him southward into Virginia, and finally removed him from command—something he should have done long before. “He is an admirable engineer,” Lincoln said of McClellan, “but he seems to have a special talent for a stationary engine.”

Lincoln's relationship with McClellan is a measure of his own self-doubts and vacillations as Commander-in-Chief: he had appointed McClellan field general of the Potomac Army, promoted him to General-in-Chief, demoted him to field commander again, allowed him to undertake a campaign Lincoln seriously questioned, interfered with it because McClellan was not a fighter,
recalled him from Virginia when his operation was plainly a disaster, put him back in charge of a reorganized army, and then fired him after Antietam because he moved with all the speed of a glacier. Still, Lincoln learned from his mistakes. Never again would he leave a balking general so long in command.

Lincoln lowered the ax on Buell too—Buell who after ten months of campaigning was no closer to eastern Tennessee than when he had begun. Why, Lincoln groaned, can't we march as the enemy marches, fight as he fights? In a desperate search for aggressive generals, Lincoln put William S. Rosecrans in command of Buell's force (now called the Army of the Cumberland) and Ambrose E. Burnside in charge of the Army of the Potomac. But Lincoln's armies continued to function with cheerful disregard for one another. In central Tennessee, “Old Rosey” did repel a Confederate attack at Murfreesboro, only to sit on his haunches and rail at the government for not supporting him. In the East, Burnside sputtered that he was not fit to command a whole
army
—and then proved it in the terrible Union reversal at Fredericksburg. Looking about in his grab bag of eastern generals, Lincoln next produced Joseph Hooker of Massachusetts to head the Army of the Potomac, whose brave men deserved better than that handsome incompetent. “Beware of rashness,” Lincoln admonished Hooker, “but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.” When Hooker promised to go forward, talking grandiosely about what he would do once he captured Richmond, Lincoln became apprehensive again.