Lincoln (75 page)

But he could not announce new views, nor act on his personal convictions yet. The draft of his emancipation proclamation lay locked in a drawer. Every now and then he took it out, and, as he recalled later, “added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, anxiously watching the progress of events.” But he needed a victory.

Victory did not come. Throughout July, McClellan’s huge army sweltered on the Peninsula, its commander unable to take the offensive and unwilling to withdraw. The general was furious that Halleck, and not he, had been named general-in-chief, and he spent much of his time brooding over the insult that Lincoln and Stanton had inflicted on him. He had learned of Halleck’s appointment from the newspapers. He complained that Lincoln had “acted so as to make the matter as offensive as possible—he has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling and I cannot regard him as in any respect my friend.” “I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow if he dared do so,” he told his wife. “His cowardice alone prevents it.”

For his pan, Lincoln had concluded that McClellan never would fight. “If by magic he could reinforce McClelland
[sic]
with 100,000 men to-day,” he remarked to Browning, “he would be in an ecstacy over it, thank him for it, and tell him that he would go to Richmond tomorrow, but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”

The President informed Halleck, now in command of all the armies, that he could keep McClellan at the head of the Army of the Potomac or remove him as he pleased. He promptly got an unwelcome insight into the character of his new general-in-chief. Halleck had arrived in Washington with a reputation
as a broadly informed student of the art of war and an experienced commander of armies that had won victories from the Confederates in the West. But the general, who was called “Old Brains” because he had been a professor at West Point, had more experience with theories of warfare than with realities of military politics. When it dawned upon him that Lincoln, Stanton, and some other members of the cabinet sought to have him take the blame for removing McClellan, he shied away. “They want me to do what they are afraid to attempt,” he wrote his wife. Even after Lincoln sent him down to the James to inspect the army himself, Halleck seemed incapable of exercising the authority the President had vested in him. Repeatedly Halleck urged, begged, cajoled, and ordered McClellan to move his army from the Peninsula back to the vicinity of Washington, where he would be in a position to reinforce Pope’s advancing army. Always slow, McClellan had no interest in assisting his archrival and dragged his feet, while Halleck wrung his hands. “I am almost broken down,” the general-in-chief complained; “I can’t get General McClellan to do what I wish.”

With McClellan apparently immovable on the Peninsula, the hope for Union victory rested with John Pope’s Army of Virginia, now advancing south of Manassas. Lincoln closely watched Pope’s progress. He was not discouraged when “Stonewall” Jackson checked his advance at Cedar Mountain on August 9, but he again urged McClellan to speed his departure from the James in order to be able to reinforce Pope. Even after Lee, rightly judging that McClellan’s army no longer posed a threat to Richmond, dispatched General James Longstreet’s corps to assist Jackson and threw the strength of the full Army of Northern Virginia on Pope’s forces in the second battle of Bull Run, the President remained optimistic. During the first two days of the fighting (August 28–29) he spent most of his time in the telegraph office of the War Department and closely monitored the dispatches from the front. On August 30 he was relaxed enough to attend an informal supper at Stanton’s house, presided over by the Secretary’s “pretty wife as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.” Stanton assured the President “that nothing but foul play could lose us this battle,” and after dinner at the War Department, Halleck also exuded quiet confidence. Lincoln retired, expecting to receive news of victory in the morning. His new plan for a hard, decisive war against the Confederacy was about to succeed.

But at about eight in the evening he came to Hay’s room with the news he had just received: “Well, John, we are whipped again, I am afraid.” Pope had been defeated and forced back to Centreville, where he reported he would “be able to hold his men.” “I don’t like that expression,” Lincoln said, doubtless recalling dozens of similar messages he had received from McClellan. “I don’t like to hear him admit that his men need ‘holding.’” Though the news was all bad, Lincoln was not in despair and hoped to resume the offensive. “We must hurt this enemy before it gets away,” he kept saying; “we must whip these people now.”

By the next morning he had absorbed the full extent of Pope’s defeat. Once again, Confederate troops threatened Washington. Once again, every hospital bed in the capital was filled with the wounded, and the streets of the city were crowded with stragglers and deserters. Though the Union soldiers, who had fought bravely, were less demoralized than after the first battle of Bull Run, their commanders were more so. Pope denounced McClellan for failing to reinforce him and urged courts-martial for Generals Fitz-John Porter and William B. Franklin. While the generals bickered, the army, in disarray, retreated to the outskirts of the capital.

Exhausted from long hours spent in the telegraph office attempting to learn the news and trying to speed reinforcements to Pope’s army, Lincoln fell into a deep depression. Once again, his plans had all failed. The strenuous, aggressive war that, in theory, should have resulted in the defeat of Lee’s army and the capture of the Confederate capital had aborted. With its failure disappeared Lincoln’s opportunity to issue a proclamation abolishing slavery, the cause of the war. Nothing that Lincoln did, it seemed, could speed Union victory. Again, the President returned to his bleak, fatalistic philosophy. “I am almost ready to say... that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet,” he wrote in an informal memorandum to himself. After all, God could “have either
saved
or
destroyed
the Union without a human contest,” yet He allowed the war to begin. “And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.” “In the present civil war,” Lincoln echoed his old doctrine of necessity, “it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” Consequently, as he explained to an English Quaker a few weeks later, he had to believe “that He permits [the war] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.”

With great reluctance the President abandoned the idea of waging an aggressive war against the Confederacy and returned to a defensive posture. With this reversal of policy he looked again to the indispensable man, McClellan. By this time Lincoln harbored no illusions about the general; he thought McClellan was the “chief alarmist and grand marplot of the Army,” ridiculed his “weak, whiney, vague, and incorrect despatches,” and considered his failure to reinforce Pope unpardonable. Yet he knew that McClellan was a superb organizer and an efficient engineer. And—what was equally important—he recognized that nothing but the reinstatement of McClellan would restore the shattered morale of the Army of the Potomac. “I must have McClellan to reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos,” he concluded, adding, “McClellan has the army with him.” Without consulting any of his advisers, and merely informing Halleck of his decision, the President asked McClellan to take command of the troops that were falling back into Washington and to defend the capital. “Mad as a March hare” over what he considered repeated snubs, McClellan accepted the assignment with reluctance and only after he had “a pretty plain talk” with Lincoln and Halleck about his new responsibilities. “I only consent to take it for my country’s
sake and with the humble hope that God has called me to it,” he explained to his wife.

Lincoln moved without consulting his advisers because he was aware that nearly all the members of his cabinet shared his reservations about McClellan. Hearing rumors that McClellan might be recalled to command, Stanton in great excitement told Welles that he “could not and would not submit to a continuance of this state of things.” When reminded that the President alone had the final say in selecting a general, he said “he knew of no particular obligations he was under to the President who had called him to a difficult position and imposed upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry, and which were greatly increased by fastening upon him a commander who was constantly striving to embarrass him in his administration of the [War] Department.” Together with Chase, Stanton drew up a written protest, charging that McClellan was an incompetent and probably a traitor, and he tried to get other members of the cabinet to sign it. Smith agreed to do so. In the hope of getting as many cabinet signatures as possible, Stanton and Chase permitted Bates to tone down the protest to read that it was “not safe to entrust to Major General McClellan the command of any of the armies of the United States,” and the Attorney General then signed. But Welles refused to join the others. He agreed that McClellan’s “removal from command was demanded by public sentiment and the best interest of the country,” but he thought the remonstrance “discourteous and disrespectful to the President.”

Already “wrung by the bitterest anguish” over the recent defeat, Lincoln was distraught when he received the memorial, and he told the cabinet that at times “he felt almost ready to hang himself.” He respected the “earnest sincerity” of his cabinet advisers who denounced the reinstatement of McClellan and in face of their unanimous opposition (Seward was absent and Blair was silent) declared he would “gladly resign his place; but he could not see who could do the work wanted as well as McClellan.” “We must use what tools we have,” he explained.

Lincoln expected McClellan’s role to be a temporary, defensive one, but Lee, instead of resting after his victory at Second Bull Run, pushed across the Potomac and invaded Maryland. Initially the President saw the invasion as an opportunity. “We could end the war by allowing the enemy to go to Harrisburg and Philadelphia,” he believed; far from his supplies and reinforcements, Lee could be readily defeated. But the approach of the Confederates had demoralized Pennsylvania state officials and the militia was almost on the point of mutiny. Halleck insisted that only McClellan could turn back the invasion. Lincoln agreed reluctantly to restoring McClellan to permanent command, placing full responsibility on Halleck. “I could not have done it,” the President explained to Welles, “for I can never feel confident that he will do anything.”

Despite his reservations, Lincoln during the next two weeks did all he could to strengthen McClellan’s army. To prevent the Army of the Potomac
from being dispersed, he fended off urgent requests for aid from local authorities in the path of the Confederate invasion. He had to turn aside a plea from the excitable governor of Pennsylvania for 80,000 troops, reminding Curtin: “We have not... eighty thousand disciplined troops, properly so called, this side of the mountains.” He had also to convince panic-stricken mayors from Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and Baltimore that the best way to protect their cities was to keep the Union troops together in pursuit of Lee’s army.

The Confederate invasion of Maryland, coming so close after Lee’s smashing victory at Second Bull Run, fanned criticism of the President and his conduct of the war. Recent events convinced George Templeton Strong that Lincoln, though an “honest old codger,” was simply “unequal to his place.” Old friends like Samuel Galloway of Ohio warned the President that “this changing from McClellan to Pope, and from Pope to McClellan, creates distrust and uncertainty.” Other critics were blunter. From Chicago the Reverend Robert Laird Collier, a Methodist minister, issued a call for the moral heroism that the President obviously lacked: “Tale-telling and jesting illy suit the hour and become the man in whose hands the destiny of a great nation is trembling.... Earnestness, unmixed and terrible, is the demand alike of the crisis and the people.”

Demands rose for a complete reorganization of the administration. Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis urged the President to fire both Stanton and Chase, “the most sinister of all the cabinet.” Others demanded that Lincoln oust McClellan. Chase condemned the President’s “humiliating submissiveness” to the general and lamented that Lincoln, for all his “true, unselfish patriotism,” had “yielded so much to Border State and negrophobic counsels that he now finds it difficult to arrest his own descent towards the most fatal concessions.” Massachusetts Governor Andrew began trying “if possible to save the Prest. from the infamy of ruining his country,” and he summoned a conference of his fellow war governors at Altoona, Pennsylvania, in late September.

Caught in a cross fire, Lincoln had to reconsider his emancipation policy as well as his military strategy. The logical parallel to reinstating McClellan to fight a limited, defensive war waged by professional armies was a return to his inaugural pledge not to interfere with slavery within the states. Many of his oldest and most loyal supporters urged exactly this policy, warning that a more radical policy would surely cost the Republicans support in the fall congressional elections. From Illinois, Browning, who was campaigning for the Republican candidates in that state, entreated him not to listen to the “few very radical and extreme men who can think, nor talk, nor dream of any thing but the negro.” If Lincoln held to a moderate course, Browning continued, he would have behind him not merely the members of his own
party but the Democrats, who “are for you almost to a man—quite as near a unit in your support as the Republicans.”

More than once in the days after McClellan’s return to command, Lincoln seemed to revert to this policy. On September 13 when a delegation of Chicago Christians representing all denominations urged him to issue an emancipation order, he reminded them of the practical difficulties in the way of any attempt to free the slaves. He noted that the recent Confiscation Act had not “caused a single slave to come over to us.” “What
good
would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated?” he asked. “I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!”