Lincoln (78 page)

Nor did Lincoln doubt the loyalty of General Buell, who commanded the Army of the Ohio in central Tennessee. But he was often exasperated with that general, who was nearly as slow as McClellan, and he fumed when Buell resolutely ignored directives to invade mountainous eastern Tennessee, where Union loyalists lived under a Confederate reign of terror, and insisted on remaining in the Nashville region. In the fall his unhappiness increased after two Confederate armies, under Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby-Smith, launched an invasion of Kentucky, timed to coincide with Lee’s raid into Maryland, and forced Buell to retreat to Louisville. His patience exhausted, Lincoln gave General George H. Thomas the command of the army unless, at the time Thomas received his orders, Buell was actually preparing
to fight. The indecisive battle of Perryville, Kentucky (October 8, 1862) temporarily saved Buell from removal.

But the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac was another matter. The principal generals and most of the headquarters staff were Democrats, and many felt no special loyalty to a Republican President who seemed bent on changing the nature and scope of the war. These high-ranking officers had developed an intense loyalty to their commander, and they generally shared McClellan’s view that warfare was for professionals and that civilian property—including slaves—should not be touched by the armies. Most of them attributed McClellan’s failure on the Peninsula to ill-advised and politically motivated meddling by civilian authorities. Pope’s humiliating defeat at the second battle of Bull Run and Lincoln’s vacillation over restoring McClellan to command strengthened their contempt for the President. Just before the battle of Antietam members of McClellan’s staff were reported to have seriously discussed “a plan to countermarch to Washington and intimidate the President,” so that he would abandon his attempt to interfere with slavery and the war could be ended. The President’s Emancipation Proclamation, reported General Fitz-John Porter, “was ridiculed in the army—causing disgust, discontent, and expressions of disloyalty to the views of the administration, amounting... to insubordination.” Among the “Potomac Army clique,” General Pope reported, there was open talk “of Lincoln’s weakness and the necessity of replacing him by some stronger man.”

After the battle of Antietam, Lincoln moved with great delicacy to determine whether McClellan was involved in these schemes. The general, for his part, was equally curious whether he still held the President’s confidence. Because Lincoln sent him only meager congratulations after the battle of Antietam, which McClellan considered “a masterpiece of [military] art,” the general feared the President had fallen under the sway of his opponents. Consequently he sent Allan Pinkerton, his chief of intelligence, who was presumably an expert in ferreting out information, to the White House. In Pinkerton’s long interview with the President on September 22—the day the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, though that document was never mentioned—McClellan was using his chief detective to spy on the President, and the President was using the detective to spy on his commanding general.

From Pinkerton, Lincoln learned a great deal more than the detective thought he was revealing. Employing the techniques for cross-examining a witness he had perfected during his years at the bar, he expressed himself, so Pinkerton wrote McClellan, as humbly “desirous of knowing some things which he supposed from the pressure on your mind, you had not advised him on or that you considered was of minor importance, not sufficiently worthy of notice for you to send to him.” Then, using language so deferential that Pinkerton did not realize he was being grilled, the President asked a series of telling questions: Why had McClellan failed to come to the rescue of the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, which had been forced to surrender to Stonewall Jackson just before Antietam? What was the relative strength of
the Union and Confederate forces at Antietam? (He appeared to accept McClellan’s and Pinkerton’s preposterous estimate that the Confederates had 140,000 men, when in fact Lee’s effective troops numbered about 52,000.) Why did the Union army not renew the attack the day after the battle? How were the Confederates able to slip back unhindered across the Potomac River?

Lincoln impressed the detective as entirely friendly toward McClellan. He was not at all suspicious when the President used uncharacteristically effusive language to express the nation’s “deep debt of gratitude” to McClellan for his “great and decisive victories” at South Mountain and Antietam. Lincoln told him he had no doubt that McClellan had fought the battle of Antietam skillfully—“much more so than any General he knew of could have done”—and said that he was “highly pleased and gratified with all you had done.” “I am rather prejudiced against him,” Pinkerton concluded his report, “but I must confess that he impresses me more at this interview with his honesty towards you and his desire to do you justice than he has ever done before.”

The information Lincoln wormed out of Pinkerton convinced the President that Antietam had not been a great victory but a lost opportunity, squandered by the high command of the Army of the Potomac. While he did not get any evidence from Pinkerton that McClellan was disloyal, his suspicions grew as the detective ingenuously poured out a story of wasted chances. He came to suspect that the leaders of the Army of the Potomac had only a halfhearted commitment to crushing the Confederacy.

There was little reliable evidence to justify this belief, but in these days after the battle of Antietam and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was in a highly anxious state, and he magnified barroom boasting and military gossip about the need for a dictator into a real threat. He resolved to end it. Just a few days after his interview with Pinkerton, the President learned that Major John J. Key, of Halleck’s staff, had been reported as saying that the Union army had not “bagged” the Confederates after Antietam because “that is not the game.” “The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other,” Key went on, “that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.”

Summoning Key to the White House on September 27, the President held an impromptu court-martial, heard the evidence against the major, ruled that it was “wholly inadmissible for any gentleman holding a military commission from the United States to utter such sentiments,” and ordered him dismissed “forthwith” from the army. If there ever had been a “game” among Union men not to take advantage of victories over the Confederates, the President stated grimly, “it was his object to break up that game.”

Lincoln terminated Key’s promising military career with reluctance, but he thought it necessary to give “an example and a warning” to “a class of officers in the army, not very inconsiderable in numbers.” He feared Key’s
silly, treasonable remarks were “staff talk and I wanted an example.” In all probability he knew that John J. Key’s brother was Thomas M. Key, acting judge advocate on McClellan’s staff and one of the general’s most trusted political advisers.

Lincoln’s suspicion that McClellan was disloyal had no basis, but he was correct in thinking that the general did not approve of his policies. McClellan was opposed to both the Emancipation Proclamation, which he privately labeled “infamous,” and the suspension of habeas corpus. He asked William H. Aspinwall, a political adviser in New York, what he ought to say about these measures, which meant “inaugurating servile war, emancipating the slaves, and at one stroke of the pen changing our free institutions into a despotism.” Aspinwall replied that the general was under no obligation to make any public statement, since he was under oath to obey his commander-in-chief. When the Blair family reminded him of what had happened to John Key, McClellan gave up any plan of public opposition to the proclamations.

Determined to test the stories about disloyalty in McClellan’s entourage, the President, with almost no notice, slipped out of Washington on October 1 to visit the sites of the recent battles and to inspect the army. He was late in arriving at the headquarters of McClellan’s army, and some soldiers were disappointed to see the President of the United States driving up in “a common ambulance, with his long legs doubled up so that his knees almost struck his chin, and grinning out of the windows like a baboon.” “Mr. Lincoln,” concluded one, “not only is the ugliest man I ever saw, but the most uncouth and gawky in his manners and appearance.” Taking the President out to the Antietam battlefield, McClellan tried to explain what had taken place on September 17, but Lincoln turned away abruptly and returned to camp. He spent the night in a tent adjacent to McClellan’s.

At daybreak the next day the President woke up O. M. Hatch, a Springfield neighbor who accompanied him on this trip, and walked with him to a high point from which almost the entire army camp could be seen. Leaning toward his friend, Lincoln almost whispered: “Hatch—Hatch, what is all this?” “Why, Mr. Lincoln,” replied Hatch, “this is the Army of the Potomac.” After a moment’s pause the President straightened up and said in a louder voice: “No, Hatch, no. This is
General McClellan’s body-guard.”

Later Lincoln, mounted on a spirited coal black horse, reviewed the troops, but they received from him none of the cordial greetings and salutes to which they were accustomed. Instead, he rode the lines at a quick trot, apparently taking little notice of the men and offering, one disgruntled officer related, “not a word of approval, not even a smile of approbation.” After the review of Burnside’s corps, ambulances took him and his party the two or three miles to Fitz-John Porter’s corps, and along the way he asked Ward Hill Lamon to sing his favorite “little sad song,” a ballad called “Twenty Years Ago.” Afterward, to break the gloomy mood, Lamon also sang “two or three little comic things,” including a piece called “Picayune Butler.” The episode was one Lincoln came to regret, for opponents later charged that
he had desecrated the battlefield by singing ribald songs over the graves of the Union dead.

During the visit Lincoln managed to conceal his negative view of McClellan, and the general hid his low opinion of the President. McClellan reported to his wife that the President was “very kind personally” and “very affable,” and that he said “he was convinced I was the best general in the country.” Shortly afterward McClellan attempted to reciprocate the compliment by issuing a general order to his troops, announcing, for the first time, that the President had issued an Emancipation Proclamation and that it was the duty of good soldiers to obey their country’s laws. He took care to see that a copy of this document reached the President himself.

Lincoln returned to Washington generally pleased with his visit. “I am now stronger with the Army of the Potomac than McClellan,” he told a friend. The troops that had been most resentful when he named Pope to command recognized that he had tried to rectify his mistake by restoring McClellan to command. During the recent campaign they saw that the President and the War Department gave McClellan everything that he asked for, but he had thrown away his chance to win a decisive battle and had lost the opportunity to push Lee’s army into the Potomac. “The supremacy of the civil power has been restored,” he rejoiced, “and the Executive is again master of the situation.”

Now confident that he could remove McClellan without causing a mutiny, the President nevertheless delayed. While at Antietam he had warned the general against “over-cautiousness,” and he thought he had McClellan’s promise to pursue Lee’s army into Virginia. He wanted to give the general one more chance. Lincoln, as Nicolay noted scornfully, habitually indulged McClellan “in his whims and complaints and shortcomings as a mother would indulge her baby.”

But McClellan began giving arguments why he could not advance. He exhausted the President’s patience with plaintive reports that his troops were worn out and his supplies depleted. Exasperated, Lincoln noted that McClellan delayed for nineteen days before putting a man across the Potomac and that it took nine more days to bring the whole army across. While his huge army lay quietly north of the Potomac, “Jeb” Stuart led a daring Confederate cavalry raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania, where he destroyed military stores, machine shops, and trains at Chambersburg, and returned almost unscathed. The raid had no special military importance, but because it occurred just a few days before the elections, it was especially vexatious and embarrassing. Lincoln, as Nicolay reported, “well-nigh lost his temper over it,” but once again he restrained himself.

In the months after Antietam and Perryville the President exhibited a growing mastery of military affairs. Getting little help from Halleck, who responded to inquiries by scratching his elbows and taking all sides of every question, Lincoln had to apply his good common sense to the problems of the army. On his trip to Antietam he had been impressed by the number of
stragglers from the Union army, and he began making notes on the enormous number of soldiers who were absent from their regiments. Some were deserters, but more had furloughs. “You won’t find a city..., a town, or a village, where soldiers and officers on furlough are not plenty as blackberries,“he complained to some visitors in early November. “To fill up the army is like undertaking to shovel fleas. You take up a shovelful”—and he made a comical gesture—“but before you can dump them anywhere they are gone.”

The root of this problem, he began to realize, was that neither the generals nor the people had recognized that they were at war and that it would take hard, tough fighting to win it. “They have got the idea into their heads that we are going to get out of this fix, somehow, by strategy!” he exclaimed. “That’s the word—strategy! General McClellan thinks he is going to whip the rebels by strategy; and the army has got the same notion.” It was to this belief in strategy that he attributed both Buell’s leisurely pursuit of Bragg into Tennessee after the battle of Perryville and McClellan’s slowness to move against Lee after Antietam.

Leaving Halleck to urge Buell on, Lincoln devoted himself to getting McClellan to move, and he began sending the general pointed, short messages that amounted, as Nicolay said, to “poking sharp sticks under little Mac’s ribs.” Resenting “the mean and dirty character of the dispatches” he received from Washington, McClellan told his wife, “There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’”