Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (36 page)

Lincoln’s first task, saving the Union, was simultaneously military and political.

The Confederacy had reason to think it could win on the battlefield. Its subculture was more bellicose than that of the North. This bred an
arrogance that Montgomery Blair, who partook of it, defined when he wrote that southerners believed that any one of them equaled half a dozen Yankees. But even arrogance could work to the Confederacy’s advantage, since attitude and audacity often do carry the day. The situation of the Confederacy was favorable. Like the United States during the Revolution, it would be fighting a protective war, repelling the incursions of invaders. The defensive always has a natural advantage in war.

The Union had advantages of its own. Unlike Britain in the Revolution, it did not have to send attacking armies across an ocean. The enemy was always a few marches away. The Union would be better armed than the South, thanks to its superiority in manufacturing, and it would be better served by its more numerous railroads. Most important, it was more populous. Lincoln had made this point in 1859 in a speech in Cincinnati, addressing the Kentuckians who lived just across the Ohio. “Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; . . . but man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as
there are of us.”

The grand strategy devised by the aged Winfield Scott, known as the Anaconda plan, proposed to blockade southern ports, split the Confederacy into two unequal parts by taking control of the Mississippi River, and press in from the perimeter of the larger portion on different fronts simultaneously. Scott knew his business; this is in fact what the Union would do over the next four years.

But political accident gave northeastern Virginia special prominence. After Virginia seceded, a grateful Confederacy moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond. Virginia was no longer the largest state in the Union, scarcely the largest in the Confederacy. But it was the oldest, the most eminent, the nursery of presidents and of liberty. By moving to Richmond, the Confederacy appropriated Virginia’s luster.

The proximity of Richmond and Washington—the two capitals were only ninety-five miles apart—made voters and politicians on both sides avid for quick victories. The proximity was deceptive, because many winding rivers lay between the two cities. The proximity was doubly
deceptive, because the primary goal in war is not the conquest of capitals, but the destruction of the enemy’s ability and will to fight. Yet since losing a capital necessarily entails a loss of morale and prestige, focusing on Washington and Richmond made some sense after all, especially since both the Union and the Confederacy were republics, in which popular sentiment and the election calendar always had to be considered. If people and politicians thought the capitals were important, then they became so. Thus the Virginia theater was crucial for both sides.

From its site on the Potomac, Washington stared Virginia in the face. A rebel flag flying over the Marshall House, a hotel in Alexandria, could be seen from the White House with a spyglass. In May 1861 Union troops took Alexandria; one of their officers, Elmer Ellsworth, a dashing young Illinoisan who had studied law under Lincoln in his Springfield office, and accompanied him on his preinaugural train trip, sprang up the hotel stairs to tear down the disloyal banner. The manager shot him dead (and was killed in turn by a Union man). Lincoln wrote Ellsworth’s parents: “In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here is scarcely less
than your own.”

Everyone knew there would be more deaths to come, though no one suspected how many. What came at the end of July was a full-dress battle twenty-five miles southwest of Washington. The Union called it Bull Run, after the nearest stream, the Confederates Manassas, after the nearest crossroads. If Scott had been even ten years younger and fifty pounds lighter, he might have led the Union troops himself. Instead the Union advance was commanded by Irvin McDowell, one of his former staff officers. After initial setbacks, the Confederates rallied. The Union retreat became a rout, with exhausted, disorderly soldiers straggling back to Washington. A total of almost 900 men from both sides were killed, and almost 3,000 wounded—small numbers compared to the hecatombs of Napoleon or Marlborough. But the battle was one of the bloodiest fought so far in North America. (By way of comparison, 24 men had died altogether at the Battle of Trenton, and just over 300 at the Battle of New Orleans.)

The war in Virginia became a series of offensives and counteroffensives. The names of the major engagements were once known to every schoolchild and are still sacred to reenactors, history buffs, and patriots: Seven Days’, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. They were, with one exception, a procession of Union defeats incurred by a rotating cast of commanders.

Scott retired at age seventy-five in November 1861, and was succeeded by George McClellan, forty years his junior, who had won plaudits by defeating the rebels in Virginia’s Appalachian northwest (the future state of West Virginia). McClellan’s plan for winning the war was to land on the Virginia coast and approach Richmond from the southeast, moving up the long peninsula between the York and the James rivers—hence the name by which his effort is known, the Peninsula Campaign. McClellan was an excellent organizer who was always popular with his men. But in the Seven Days’ Battles (June 25–July 1, 1862), the Confederates, though they lost more men than he did, managed to stop him short of Richmond.

The Confederates then made their own move north, nearly destroying an army under John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30). They decided to swing northwest into central Maryland, but McClellan, restored to grace after his stalemate on the peninsula, stopped their advance at Antietam (September 17).

McClellan’s failure to pursue the enemy after this near-victory ended his period of grace, and the Union’s next efforts to take the war south again were led by other commanders, disastrously. Ambrose Burnside (whose whiskers were the model and namesake of sideburns) got as far as Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River, where he suffered fearful casualties (December 11–15). The next spring, at Chancellorsville (May 1–4, 1863), only a few miles from the site of Burnside’s defeat, Joseph Hooker was beaten by Confederate forces half as strong as his.

Union generalship on the Virginia front was certainly inadequate. (One Union general knew it: Burnside, a modest man, had refused two offers to take a commanding role before—unfortunately—accepting.)
At the same time, the Confederates could not mount a successful offensive of their own, and they, too, were bleeding.

The Anaconda plan worked better in the West. By the spring of 1862 the Union had managed to clear western Tennessee, with victories at Fort Henry (February 6), Fort Donelson (February 16), and Shiloh (April 6–7). At the southern end of the Mississippi, New Orleans, the largest city and greatest port in the Confederacy, fell on May 1.

In faraway London, Charles Francis Adams’s son Henry, who had accompanied his father as his personal secretary, found himself surrounded by Confederate sympathizers: the light-headed and the fashionable, always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs. The Union capture of New Orleans fell on them, Henry wrote, like a “blow in the face on
a drunken man.”

Lincoln had poked fun at his meager military experience for years; it was one element of his rube/boob persona: “[I never] saw any live fighting Indians,” he said of his days in the Black Hawk War, “but I had a good many bloody struggles with the
mosquitoes.” Now he took his responsibilities as commander in chief seriously. He borrowed a textbook from the Library of Congress entitled
Elements of Military Art and Science
, by Henry Halleck, an officer who would later become chief of staff for the entire army, and studied it. He followed his generals’ actions minutely and corresponded with them anxiously, careful to couch most of his ideas as advice rather than orders. Sometimes his advice was worthless. He ended the letter in which he congratulated Hooker on replacing Burnside with this imitation gemstone: “Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and
give us victories.” It was like telling an investor to buy low and sell high. In fairness to Lincoln, his opposite number, Jefferson Davis, despite far greater experience (colonel in the Mexican War, secretary of war under Franklin Pierce), gave orders and advice that were consistently worse.

The longer arc of Lincoln’s relationship with his commanders was sound: he supported them until they failed unignorably, then he sought new ones.

Supporting them often required a vast patience. The egos of military men (never small) had been piqued by the career of Napoleon. Perhaps they could win as many victories as he had. Perhaps they could, as he had, become more than military men. McClellan, who was nicknamed the Little Napoleon—he was of average height, but youth, slimness, and attitude gave him a bright, bristling appearance—wrote early in the war: “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might
please me.” Hooker, on the eve of his elevation, said that “nothing would go right until we had a dictator, and the sooner
the better.”

McClellan made his remark about a dictator in a letter to his wife; Hooker spoke his to a reporter. Lincoln knew about Hooker’s remark, and knew McClellan well enough to know his frame of mind (it was not hard to discern). He correctly judged that their talk was bluster, not actual disloyalty—these were not towering geniuses—and he let them try to do their jobs. “I will hold McClellan’s horse,” he said, “if he will only
bring us success.” He joshed Hooker about his dictator talk in a letter: “Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the
dictatorship.”

And yet once these men failed, Lincoln cast them aside and looked for others. When he found generals who won, he stuck by them. The first Union victories in western Tennessee were won by Ulysses Grant, a thirty-nine-year-old whose early military career had been marred by drinking. But the two-day Battle of Shiloh was almost lost through his overconfidence: not believing the enemy to be near, he had not ordered his men to entrench, and the Confederates nearly drove them from the field. On the second day, he saved all with a ferocious counterattack. The casualties on both sides, however, were terrible (over 1,700 Union soldiers were killed, and more than 8,000 wounded; Confederate losses
were similar). A storm of criticism beat on Grant, but Lincoln would not dismiss him: “I can’t spare this man;
he fights.”

As the war widened, Lincoln had to preserve the Union politically.

His first task was to stop the hemorrhaging of states. After the last four states had seceded in April and May 1861, four slaveholding states still remained in the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Missouri stayed loyal, though it was so plagued by pro-Confederate guerrillas and quarrels among its own unionists that Lincoln, in a moment of irritation, compared it to the tree stumps in the fields of his youth that were so deeply rooted that he could not dig them up or burn them out, but only plow around them. Delaware, small and isolated, would have to do whatever Maryland did, and Maryland had enough unionists and enough Union troops in regular transit that it, too, stayed loyal.