Lincoln (79 page)

The breaking point came in late October. Facing a bitterly contested election, the Republican governors and representatives from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois demanded that Lincoln remove Buell, whose Army of the Ohio was largely recruited from those states. When that general, oblivious to political reality and apparently indifferent to the wishes of his military superiors in Washington, announced that he was not going into eastern Tennessee, where Unionists were clamoring for protection, but was going to make his winter quarters in the comfortable city of Nashville, even the President could no longer defend him. On October 24, Buell was relieved, and a few days later Rosecrans took command of his troops, reorganized as the Army of the Cumberland.

At almost the same time, McClellan informed the President that the Army of the Potomac could not pursue Lee because his cavalry horses were “absolutely broken down from fatigue and want of flesh.” Lincoln’s temper snapped. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” he shot back. In a subsequent message he attempted to tone down his language and said he certainly intended “no injustice,” but the fate of McClellan had been decided. He told Francis P. Blair, Sr., that “he had tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.”

Telling Secretary Chase that it was “inexpedient” to remove the general before the elections, the President bided his time, but on November 5 he
directed Halleck to relieve McClellan and entrusted the command of the Army of the Potomac to Ambrose E. Burnside.

Naming Rosecrans and Burnside was a shrewd move. Burnside, in particular, was a happy choice. In addition to having some military reputation from his expedition against Roanoke Island, he looked like a great commander. His sturdy figure, his commanding presence, and even his elaborate side-whiskers gave an impression of manly competence. Generally considered a protégé of McClellan, he would be less objectionable to that general’s admirers than almost any other possible commander. Yet McClellan’s enemies were aware that their friendship had recently cooled, since McClellan spoke slightingly of Burnside’s slowness to advance at Antietam.

Known to be generally in favor of the President’s policies, Rosecrans and Burnside were politically neutral. Unlike McClellan, they were not Democratic partisans, nor were they aligned with either the Moderate or the Radical faction of the Republican party. In the past, Republican Moderates had supported commanders like McClellan and Buell, practitioners of limited war, waged by professionals, with minimal impact on civilians. The Radicals—and more particularly the vocal ultra-Radical Jacobins—looked to military leaders like Joseph Hooker, who promised to bring the war to the people of the Confederacy and to revolutionize Southern society. Belonging to neither group, Lincoln tried to stake out the central ground for his own.

Whether the appointments of Burnside and Rosecrans were a shrewd military move was open to question. Burnside himself said that he was not capable of leading the Army of the Potomac, and Rosecrans had hitherto displayed no talent for a large command. But for the moment, most were willing to give the new commanders a fair trial, and the President gained a little time to attend to some of the numerous other duties of his office, necessarily neglected during the previous months of crisis.

He continued to work long hours, rising early, often after a sleepless night, to go to his White House office before his breakfast, which consisted of a cup of coffee and an egg. Returning to his desk after breakfast, he examined papers and signed commissions for another hour or so. There were always routine matters to be handled, like the required congratulations to Frederick Grand Duke of Baden, on the announcement of the marriage of Her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess Leopoldine of Baden to His Most Serene Highness the Prince Hermann of Hohenloe Langenburg. Of course, the State Department drafted these messages, but the President had to sign them. In the course of a morning he efficiently handled many requests by briefly endorsing the papers: “Submitted to Gen. Halleck, asking as favorable consideration as may be consistent,” or, to Secretary Caleb B. Smith, “Let the appointment be made, as within recommend[ed],” or “Sec. of War, please make such response to this as may seem proper.”

At ten o’clock his office hours for petitioners and visitors began. A visitor, C. Van Santvoord, made notes on those who called on the President in a single morning: One “dapper, smooth-faced, boyish-looking little person” whispered a request, apparently for a clerkship, until the President dismissed him with an emphatic “Yes, yes, I know all about it, and will give it proper attention.” A lieutenant asked to be appointed to head a colored regiment, though the decision to employ blacks in the army had not yet been made, but Lincoln saw that he really was only asking to be promoted to colonel and cut him off. Then “a sturdy, honest-looking German soldier,” who had lost a leg and hobbled in on crutches, asked the President for a job in Washington, but he had no papers or credentials to show how he had lost his leg. “How am I to know that you lost it in battle, or did not lose it by a trap after getting into somebody’s orchard?” Lincoln asked with a droll smile. Then, relenting, he gave the young man a card to present to a local quartermaster.

The next visitor got a less kindly reception. Apparently he wanted to use the President’s name in connection with a business project, pleading that he was too old and obscure to start up on his own. “No!” exclaimed Lincoln indignantly. “Do you take the President of the United States to be a commission broker? You have come to the wrong place, and for you and every one who comes for such purposes, there is the door!”

After that, a “white-haired, gentlemanly-looking person” and his “very pretty and prepossessing” daughter asked simply to pay their respects, and the President greeted them cordially in his “frank, bland, and familiar manner.” Next a Scottish visitor reported that his countrymen hoped the President would stand firmly behind his Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln pledged: “God helping me, I trust to prove true to a principle which I feel to be right.”

His final caller of the morning, a rough Western countryman, had come by “to see the President, and have the honor of shaking hands with him.” Eyeing his tall visitor, Lincoln engaged in a little exercise that he always found amusing and challenged the man to compare heights with him. When the countryman proved a shade taller than six foot four inches, Lincoln congratulated him and could not resist the inevitable pun: “You actually
stand higher
to-day than your President.”

On the day when Van Santvoord was an observer, the President ended his open office hours at noon, but on most days after a brief lunch—when he remembered to eat anything—he continued to receive petitioners in the afternoons. Though his secretaries fretted that he was wasting his time in these interviews, Lincoln felt he gained much from what he called his “public opinion baths.” These visits—random, sporadic, and inconsequential as they often proved to be—offered the President an opportunity, in these days before scientific public opinion polling, to get some idea of how ordinary people felt about him and his administration.

Customarily the President’s open office hours were suspended on two
afternoons each week for cabinet meetings. Occasionally, when he could spare the time, he went for a horseback ride in the afternoon, and from time to time Mrs. Lincoln, concerned about her husband’s health, insisted that he come on a carriage ride with her, usually to visit the army camps around Washington or the soldiers’ hospitals. Then after dinner, when Lincoln absently ate whatever was put in front of him and drank no wine, he frequently returned to his White House office, sometimes working three or four more hours. When important military movements were under way, he would often wrap his long gray shawl about his shoulders and walk over to the telegraphic office in the War Department, usually without escort or guard. There he would read the latest dispatches from the armies and talk and banter with the telegraph operators. Often it was near midnight before he got back to the living quarters of the White House. “I consider myself fortunate,” Mary Lincoln lamented, “if at eleven o’clock, I once more find myself, in my pleasant room and very especially, if my tired and weary Husband, is
there,
resting in the lounge to receive me—to chat over the occurrences of the day.”

Even in the brief honeymoon period after Burnside and Rosecrans assumed command of their armies, there were few uneventful days like the one chronicled by Van Santvoord. Serious problems arose that only a President could decide. During October and November much of Lincoln’s attention had to be given to an uprising among the Sioux Indians of Minnesota. Bureaucratic delays in paying these Indians the annuities promised to them at the time they gave up most of their land left the Sioux desperate and almost starving. During the summer their agent unsuccessfully tried to get food for them, but his supplier announced, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” In August some young Sioux men, raiding an Acton, Minnesota, farm for eggs, broke into the house and killed five white settlers. Quickly violence spread throughout southwestern Minnesota, and before the Indian uprising could be quelled, more than 350 whites had been killed. It was the largest massacre of whites by Indians in American history.

When news of the uprising reached Washington, Lincoln was almost wholly absorbed by Lee’s invasion of Maryland, and he could devote little attention to Indian affairs. He did dispatch General Pope, fresh from his defeat at Second Bull Run, to take charge of military operations against the Sioux. The general accepted the assignment reluctantly. He felt that the President had been “feeble, cowardly, and shameful” in failing to defend him from his critics.

Once in Minnesota, Pope deflected his hostility from the President to the rebellious Indians. Finding “panic everywhere in Wisconsin and Minnesota”
and predicting “a general Indian war all along the frontier, unless immediate steps are taken to put a stop to it,” he announced: “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” With the enthusiastic cooperation of Minnesota authorities, who saw an opportunity both to gain revenge and to secure additional Indian lands, Union troops by early October broke the back of the rebellion, and a military commission began to try more than 1,500 Indians, including women and children, who had been captured.

As soon as the news reached Washington, in mid-October, the President told Pope to stage no executions without his sanction. To gain further information and to help restore peace, he sent Assistant Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher (soon to replace Caleb B. Smith in the cabinet) to Minnesota, and he also sought the advice of Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple, who advised “a new policy of
honesty
was needed” for dealing with this “wronged and neglected race.”

Lincoln admitted that he was poorly informed on Indian affairs. In September, when Chief John Ross had urged him to offer military protection to the Cherokees, who had fallen under Confederate control, the President told him, “In the multitude of cares claiming my constant attention I have been unable to examine and determine the exact treaty relations between the United States and the Cherokee Nation.” He had little acquaintance with Indians. In general, like most whites of his generation, he considered the Indians a barbarous people who were a barrier to progress. The ceremonial visits of Indian chiefs, dressed in their tribal regalia, he welcomed, both because they were exotic and because he rather enjoyed playing the role of their Great Father, addressing them in pidgin English and explaining that “this world is a great, round ball.” Occasionally, as during the following year, he would offer them little homilies on how they could profit by learning “the arts of civilization.” Pointing out the “great difference between this pale-faced people and their red brethren,” he told a group in the White House that whites had become numerous and prosperous partly because they were farmers rather than hunters. Even though he admitted that “we are now engaged in a great war between one another,” he also offered another reason for white success: “We are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.” The irony was unintentional.

Nor did Lincoln know much about the operations of the Office of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior. When he had appointed Caleb B. Smith as Secretary of the Interior and William P. Dole as Indian Commissioner, he was rewarding them for political favors, not for interest in or concern for the Indians. In naming their subordinates, the President almost invariably followed the wishes of the Republican members of Congress. A typical note directed Smith: “Please make out and send blank appointments for all Indian places, to serve in Wisconsin, in favor of the persons unitedly
recommended by the Wisconsin Congressional delegation.” It was assumed that Indian agents and Indian traders would make profits from their positions, not merely for themselves but for their Republican sponsors.

But what was now going on in Minnesota far exceeded the usual fraud and embezzlement connected with the Indian service. Whites who had been terrified during the uprising were determined to secure vengeance. Republican Governor Alexander Ramsey, calling the Sioux “assassins” and “ravishers of... wives and sisters and daughters,” insisted that whites in his state “will not tolerate their presence... in any number or in any condition.” Many thought the defeat of the Sioux offered an opportunity to drive not merely that tribe but the peaceable Chippewas out of the state and to confiscate their lands.

On November 8, Lincoln received from Minnesota a list of 303 Sioux men the military commission had condemned to die. Promptly the President directed General Pope to send complete records of these convictions, indicating the more guilty and influential of the culprits. Pope responded that the people of Minnesota were so exasperated that if everyone on the list was not executed it would be “nearly impossible to prevent the indiscriminate massacre of all the Indians—old men, women, and children.” Minnesota Senator Morton S. Wilkinson echoed the threat: “Either the Indians must be punished according to law, or they will be murdered without law.” Governor Ramsey added that unless every condemned Sioux Indian was executed “private revenge would on all this border take the place of official judgment on these Indians.”