Lincoln (66 page)

More significant were the activities of a special committee named in July to look into allegations of fraud and mismanagement in government contracts. Headed by Charles H. Van Wyck of New York, this committee was instrumental in exposing some of the scandals of the Frémont regime in Missouri. Much of its work justifiably centered on the War Department, a model of maladministration and waste. There was, of course, no question of the President’s being involved in any of the shady deals that were making fortunes for manufacturers of shoddy goods. Lincoln was so punctilious that he refused to permit the army butcher to supply the White House with the choicest cuts of steak when he slaughtered cattle on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Told that this was a matter of little importance, he replied, “My observation is that frequently the most insignificant matter is the foundation for the worst scandal.” Nor was Simon Cameron believed to be personally venal, but he was the head of a corrupt department and was responsible for its actions.

Lincoln did not need a congressional investigation to tell him that the War Department was badly run. Cameron, he remarked confidentially to Nicolay, was “utterly ignorant... Selfish and openly discourteous to the President[,] Obnoxious to the country [and] Incapable of either organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.” If he had any doubts, his mail offered a chorus of objections to the Secretary of War. “Cameron ought to resign,” Gustave Koerner had warned Senator Trumbull as early as July 24. “The People have no confidence in him at all.... He is suspected of every sort of peculation. Lincoln
must
... have an
honest
man as war minister.” “It is universally believed that Cameron is a thief,” a New Yorker wrote the President, detailing how the War Department sold to the soldiers half-cotton blankets weighing less than five pounds for the same price as regulation all-wool blankets weighing ten or eleven pounds. The cautious Browning alerted Lincoln that his Secretary of War, “whether justly or not, has lost, or rather failed to secure the confidence of the country” and should be removed. A New York banker, James A. Hamilton, told the President that if he replaced Cameron the hard-pressed Treasury Department could immediately raise the $100,000,000 it needed to borrow.

Even though Lincoln had not wanted Cameron in his cabinet initially, he hesitated to fire him and tried to get rid of the Secretary by dropping hints. It might be unfair to replace Cameron now, he whispered to Schuyler Colfax, a friend of the Secretary—but he added “if it were an open question and to be settled de novo” he could see many advantages in having another-person in the War Department. He let it be known that he had a great desire to turn the War Department over to Joseph Holt, who had capably served as Secretary of War in the last days of the Buchanan administration. But Cameron was impervious to suggestion and stayed on.

As pressure for his resignation grew, the Secretary took a daring gamble. Asked, as were the other members of the cabinet, to prepare a report on the activities of his department to be submitted to Congress along with the President’s annual State of the Union message, he remembered how enthusiastically antislavery men had greeted Frémont’s edict of emancipation in Missouri and decided to include in his report an announcement that “it is ... clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves ... and employ their service against the rebels.” He then sent the document out to newspapers in the principal cities without informing the President. Lincoln immediately ordered the report recalled and Cameron’s remarks concerning slaves expurgated. After that it was simply a matter of time before Cameron left the cabinet. The President could put up with incapacity and sloth in his administration, but he would not allow Frémont or Cameron to set government policy on slavery.

On January 11, 1862, Lincoln curtly notified Cameron that he could now gratify his “desire for a change of position” by nominating him as minister to Russia. Cameron had no such desire, and he broke into tears when Secretary Chase gave him Lincoln’s letter, which he said was a personal affront which “meant personal as well as political destruction.” To save Cameron’s feelings the President withdrew his letter so that Cameron could submit his resignation. Lincoln then wrote another letter, this time expressing his “affectionate esteem” and praising Cameron’s “ability, patriotism, and fidelity to public trust.”

Lincoln’s troubles with Cameron did not end with his resignation. To the considerable discomfort of the President, the House committee on contracts continued to investigate malfeasance in the War Department with such vigor that Lincoln accused one of the most prominent members, Representative Henry L. Dawes, of having “done more to break down the administration than any other man in the country.” Acting on the committee’s recommendation, the full House in April voted to censure the former Secretary for actions “highly injurious to the public service.” At this point Lincoln had to intervene. Assuring the Congress that letting contracts without bids, disbursing public moneys without authorization, and other irregularities were actions taken of necessity in the early days of the war, he explained that Cameron, “although he fully approved the proceedings,” was not primarily to blame for them; “not only the President but all the other heads of departments were at least equally responsible.” Not wishing to bring down the entire government, the investigators let the subject die.

Investigations of military affairs fell to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, set up at the beginning of this session of Congress, and they continued throughout the conflict. The original purpose of the committee was to look into the disaster at Ball’s Bluff, but its scope was soon expanded to cover military operations throughout the country. It concentrated mainly on the activities—or the lack of activities—of the Army of the Potomac. Benjamin F. Wade, a severe critic of both Lincoln and McClellan, was chairman,
and he had the enthusiastic collaboration of Zachariah Chandler. The three House Republicans on the committee, George W. Julian of Indiana, John Covode of Pennsylvania, and Daniel Gooch of Massachusetts, also sought to prod the general and the President into prosecuting the war more vigorously. The two Democratic members—Andrew Johnson, the sole senator from the Southern states who remained in Congress, and Moses Odell, a New Yorker—played lesser roles.

Lincoln viewed the creation of the Committee on the Conduct of the War with some anxiety, fearing that it might turn into an engine of agitation against the administration. When Wade and Chandler learned of his objections, they rushed to the White House to assure the President that their purpose was to aid, not to embarrass, the Chief Executive. Probably neither party believed the promise, but a surface harmony was maintained. Lincoln had his first meeting with the committee on December 31 and was relieved to find the congressmen “in a perfectly good mood.”

Both the committee and the President were eager to learn McClellan’s plans. The general was reticent even with Lincoln. He declined to outline the campaign he proposed but dropped a cryptic hint that he no longer thought of advancing against the Confederate army at Manassas and had his “mind actively turned towards another plan of campaign ... not... at all anticipated by the enemy nor by many of our own people.” The committee did not get even this much from him. He was called to testify, but shortly before Christmas he fell ill with typhoid fever. For three weeks he was unable to do any serious work, much less to appear before the committee. He had no second in command, no council of officers to whom he had entrusted his plan for the coming campaign. As frustrated as the President, the committee began taking testimony from anti-McClellan witnesses, and it became a powerful engine of criticism not merely of the general but of his commander-in-chief.

The Bottom Is Out of the Tub

“T
he Prest. is an excellent man, and, in the main wise,” Attorney General Bates recorded in his final diary entry of 1861; “but he lacks
will
and
purpose,
and, I greatly fear he, has not
the power to command.”
That judgment by one of the most cautious and conservative members of the Lincoln administration represented a widely held opinion. Nearly everybody thought the President was honest and well meaning, and almost everyone who met him liked him. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, who visited the White House with Senator Sumner in January 1862, was not put off by Lincoln’s homely appearance and his awkward movements and gestures; he found the President a “frank, sincere, well-meaning man, with a lawyer’s habit of mind,... correct enough, not vulgar, as described, but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness.” But few thought he was up to his job.

He seemed unable to make things go right. With the surrender of Mason and Slidell the United States suffered a humiliating, if necessary, reverse in foreign affairs. Huge armies, raised at immense expense, lay idle in winter quarters. As the costs of the war mounted, the Treasury lived on credit, and banks throughout the country had to suspend specie payments. In the Northwest farmers were suffering as laborers went off to the army, and there was no market for farm produce because the Mississippi River was closed. “The people are being bled and as they believe to no purpose and will not long submit to it,” warned one Illinois Cassandra.

So desperate did things look in early January that Lincoln for the first time thought that the Confederates might be successful, and he spoke “of the bare possibility of our being two nations.”

At the heart of the problems was the failure of the armies to advance and win victories. Lincoln’s general-in-chief was still recovering from typhoid fever and unable to work. When the Committee on the Conduct of the War met with the President on January 6, its members were appalled to learn that neither he nor anybody else knew McClellan’s plans. Lincoln told the congressmen that he “did not think he had any
right
to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan.”

As pressure grew for action and McClellan was still incapacitated, the President tried to exercise the functions of the general-in-chief himself. He knew that McClellan had talked of a joint movement on the part of the armies west of the Appalachians, to be coordinated with an advance by the Army of the Potomac, and he wired Buell and Halleck to go ahead—only to learn that they knew nothing about the plan. Directing the two generals to get “in communication and concert at once,” he urged Halleck to make a real or feigned attack on Columbus, in western Kentucky, while Buell advanced on Bowling Green, in the south central part of that state. Lincoln hoped that Buell would eventually push into eastern Tennessee, where the Union army could cut the major east-west rail line of the Confederacy, the “great artery of the enemies’ communication.” More important, it could liberate the thousands of strongly Unionist inhabitants of eastern Tennessee, whom the President considered “the most valuable stake we have in the South.”

Both generals failed him. Lincoln was still too insecure to play the role of military commander. He offered “views” he hoped would be “respectfully considered” rather than orders, and the generals felt free to dispute or ignore them. Since the roads into eastern Tennessee were very bad in winter, Buell told the President he would prefer to go to Nashville—which, as Lincoln had pointed out, had no strategic value. Halleck responded that Buell’s plans did not make much military sense; anyway, he could not spare troops from his widely scattered command for an attack on Columbus. Sadly the President sent the correspondence over to the War Department with the endorsement: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”

With a growing sense of desperation Lincoln began to think of leading one of the armies into battle himself. After all, the Constitution made him commander-in-chief. He borrowed from the Library of Congress Henry W. Halleck’s
Elements of Military Art and Science,
a standard text, and several other books on military strategy and began studying them. He conferred frequently with military commanders in the vicinity of Washington, and he assiduously read the reports from others who were in the field. At times he convinced himself that he could do a better job.

But he knew he was no military man and that this was all fantasy that
helped him escape his real problems. On January 10, visiting Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, he summed up the difficulties he faced: “The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub.” “What shall I do?” he asked.

Meigs advised him to call on some of the senior division commanders of the Army of the Potomac for advice. That evening Lincoln invited General McDowell and General William B. Franklin to the White House, where they met with him, Seward, Chase, and Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson. To this informal council of war the President poured out his problems. He must talk to somebody, he said, because something had to be done. If General McClellan was not going to use the Army of the Potomac, the President continued, “he would like to
borrow
it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.” The generals gave different advice. McDowell urged another forward movement against Manassas, the scene of his defeat, while Franklin, who knew something of McClellan’s wishes, talked of moving the army down the Potomac to the York River, so as to advance on Richmond from the east. The President asked the two generals to learn more about the actual state of the army and to come back the next day.