Rise to Greatness (14 page)

The Reverend Phineas Gurley of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church conducted the funeral in the East Room. It was a simple affair that brought tears to the eyes of many of those attending, including McClellan. Afterward, Lincoln and his oldest son climbed into the presidential carriage, drawn by two black horses. Accompanied by the two senators from Illinois, Orville Browning and Lyman Trumbull, they followed Willie’s little casket in a hearse pulled by white horses to the chapel at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. Behind them rolled carriages bearing a parade of dignitaries half a mile long; following the carriages, on foot, trudged the African-American servants who worked at the White House. Once the procession reached the cemetery, the remains were placed in a crypt, where they would be kept until the family returned home to Springfield.

*   *   *

During the ordeal of Willie’s illness, Lincoln tried to keep working, though exhaustion dogged his every step and his temper sometimes frayed. One day shortly after Willie’s seeming recovery, an earnest young Treasury agent named Edward Pierce appeared at the president’s office, sent there by Salmon Chase. Pierce, an ardent abolitionist, wanted to report on an experiment in which slaves on plantations seized by Union troops along the South Carolina coast were receiving education and religious instruction in hopes of becoming models of emancipation. Perhaps they could even serve in the Union army, Pierce ventured. Lincoln listened briefly, then snapped. Why was he being troubled with such details? “There seems to be a great itching to get Negroes within our lines!” the president exclaimed. He then began complaining bitterly about the radicals in the Senate who were withholding promotions from generals based on their views about slavery. The stunned young man reminded the president that he had been sent by the Treasury secretary. Lincoln composed himself and suggested that Pierce return to Chase’s office in the building next door.

Fortunately, the news from the western front continued to be encouraging; under happier circumstances, these would have been the most heartening days of Lincoln’s presidency thus far. In the wake of Grant’s aggressive strikes in Tennessee, the Confederate line in the West was melting away. With Nashville falling into Union hands, Leonidas Polk began the evacuation of Columbus, the Confederacy’s supposed Gibraltar. Seven weeks after Henry Halleck warned Lincoln that at least 50,000 Federal troops would be needed to take the city, the Rebels were forced to give it up without firing a shot, thanks to Grant’s brilliant campaign.

Astonishingly, Grant’s reward for his victories was to be temporarily relieved of his command. Perhaps Old Brains was wary of Grant’s will to action. Or perhaps Halleck was unhappy that Grant sometimes seemed unwilling to wait for orders before taking the fight to the enemy. Whatever the reason, Halleck pointedly snubbed his subordinate after the capture of Fort Donelson. Reporting the victory to his superiors in Washington, Halleck praised a general who had done nothing more than send reinforcements from Kansas, but he had nothing good to say about Grant. In fact, Halleck advised the War Department that all the credit for the colossal success in Tennessee should go to one of Grant’s division commanders.

After taking the three forts in Tennessee, Grant did further damage to his relationship with his commanding officer by pressing ahead to exploit the crack in the Rebel line. Eager to get to Nashville before the retreating Confederates could strip the city of supplies, Grant moved east on a path taking him out of Halleck’s department and into Buell’s. As soon as Halleck learned of the advance, he ordered Grant to stop where he was. But Grant wasn’t finished: as resourceful as he was aggressive, he found a kindred spirit among the commanders in General Buell’s army and promptly directed that officer to mobilize his division to seize Nashville. When Buell heard that Grant was steering troops from his own command, he was furious. To complete this fiasco, Halleck’s increasingly testy telegrams ordering Grant to stop and file a report never reached their destination. Old Brains grew angrier by the day.

This was the Union command at its envious worst. Great as the fruits of his victories had been, Grant believed that much more was possible if the Union kept up the pressure. “We could have marched to Chattanooga, Corinth, Memphis and Vicksburg with the troops we then had,” he later wrote. Other military men perceived the same opportunities. One of them, a fiery red-haired warrior named William T. Sherman, was working ferociously in Paducah, organizing troops and supplies and pushing them upriver to Grant as fast as he could. At the time, Sherman outranked Grant, and no protocol in army regulations allowed a junior officer to command a superior. But this meant nothing to Sherman compared with the chance to press the victory. “Every boat that came up with supplies or reinforcements brought a note of encouragement from Sherman,” Grant later recalled, “asking me to call on him for any assistance that he could render and saying that if he could be of service at the front I might send for him and he would waive rank.” Thus began one of the most important partnerships of the war.

Halleck, however, saw a different opportunity: the chance to add to his own authority. He pleaded with McClellan to combine the two western departments and give him command over Buell. Presented with a choice between a rival (Halleck) and a friend (Buell), McClellan predictably refused. Buell, meanwhile, fretted that Grant’s strategic masterstroke was actually a looming disaster. In Buell’s view, Grant’s victories exposed the Union army to a massive counterattack by Beauregard and his phantom army from the east.

Amid this jockeying for advantage, McClellan weighed in by telegraph with a shocking proposal: the general in chief suggested to Halleck that he place Grant under arrest for failing to file his report. McClellan’s recommendation was prompted by a gossipy wire from Halleck suggesting that Grant had “resumed his former bad habits”—that is, the hard drinking that marked his period of depression years earlier while separated from his wife in California. The entire episode appalled Andrew Foote, the gray-haired gunboat commander, who had seen enough of life to recognize immediately what was driving these assaults on Grant: “I was disgusted,” he wrote to his wife. “It was jealousy.”

Grant wasn’t arrested, but he did lose his command for a short time. (It was given to C. F. Smith, a veteran soldier whom Grant greatly admired.) But when word of the strange goings-on in the West reached the White House, Lincoln instructed the War Department to open an investigation. Halleck immediately backpedaled: “You cannot be relieved from your command,” he wired Grant. “There is no good reason for it.” Grant’s authority was soon restored.

As Grant reflected on this bumbling, he was less troubled by the insult than by the squandering of a golden chance amid the pettiness. The more ground his troops secured, the fewer men the Rebels would have available to draft into their armies. The fewer men the Confederates had, the sooner the war would end. Instead, as Grant later wrote, “time was given the enemy to collect armies and fortify his new positions.” Over the next two years, this motif—of lost opportunities and unexploited victories—would haunt the Union cause time and again.

*   *   *

While Lincoln remained preoccupied with his son’s illness, the thankless task of pushing George McClellan to deploy his ever growing army had fallen to that brusque dynamo Edwin Stanton. The new secretary of war had all of Lincoln’s urgency but none of his finesse, and inevitably what had been a friendship between Stanton and McClellan curdled. Stanton quickly lost confidence in the general, and Little Mac added another name to his list of perceived tormentors.

That list was growing very long, and its charter members, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, still had their sights trained on him. McClellan’s excuses for inaction—the muddy roads, the Rebel multitude, the brilliant intricacy of his plans—grew tedious, especially in comparison to Grant’s alacrity. On February 19, as Willie Lincoln lay dying, Chairman Wade lit into McClellan during a meeting at the White House, noting correctly that the general had not even managed to clear the Rebel batteries blocking the Potomac River.

This scolding, along with Lincoln’s order to move by Washington’s Birthday, finally provoked the general in chief to take his first step. Early in the war, Confederate raiders had destroyed the bridge at Harpers Ferry that carried the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad across the Potomac and into the heartland. This key artery needed both a lasting repair and adequate Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley to protect it from future raids. McClellan decided to build a pontoon bridge made of heavy timbers laid across tethered canal boats, and use the bridge to send troops to capture and hold Winchester, Virginia, at the northern end of the valley.

Full of high hopes, McClellan led 8,500 blue-coated soldiers into Virginia on February 26, crossing a lightweight temporary bridge. “It was a magnificent spectacle,” he recounted to his wife. “One of the grandest I ever saw.” The army’s heavy supplies would follow the next day, once the pontoon bridge was completed. Pleased with himself, the general quickly informed Stanton of his splendid progress.

The boats for the pontoon bridge, meanwhile, had been shipped along a canal that paralleled the Potomac. All that remained was to transfer the boats from the canal into the river through a lock connecting the two. There, to his dismay, McClellan discovered that the boats were some six inches wider than the lock. They were stuck in the canal. There would be no pontoon bridge.

The timing of this disaster could not have been worse: just three days had passed since Lincoln watched his son’s casket slide into the crypt. McClellan’s chief of staff, Randolph Marcy, drew the unpleasant assignment of explaining to the grieving president why the crucial railroad could not be reopened on schedule. Lincoln erupted. “Why in tarnation couldn’t the General have known whether a boat would go through that lock before he spent a million of dollars getting them there?” he demanded.

Before Marcy could answer, Lincoln sneered: “I am no engineer”—McClellan was—“but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a hole, or a lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it. I am almost despairing. Everything seems to fail! The general impression is growing daily that the General does not intend to do anything. By a failure like this we lose all the prestige we gained by the capture of Fort Donelson.”

The president was quiet for a moment and then repeated himself. “I am grievously disappointed and almost in despair.”

4

MARCH

A year had now passed since William Henry Seward experienced the astounding day when Abraham Lincoln became president instead of him. Any number of men had wanted the job, including at least three others in Lincoln’s cabinet. But Seward was the man who was
supposed
to be president. The garrulous and wealthy New Yorker seemed chosen by destiny: his political career had started almost four decades before, when a chance encounter introduced the young Seward to Thurlow Weed, the political kingmaker of the Empire State. With Weed’s backing, Seward became governor of New York at age thirty-seven. In the 1850s, he rose to become a dominant figure in the U.S. Senate and a builder of the new Republican Party, and by 1860 he was the most prominent Republican in America. But Seward’s apparent strength soon became his weakness, because Republicans—looking for a less controversial candidate for president—chose this moment to select a nominee with a lower profile. Outmaneuvered at the convention by Lincoln and his people, Seward was again trumped by Lincoln when he was steered into the cabinet on the president’s terms rather than his own.

Despite this rather stark evidence of Lincoln’s superior political skills, Seward attempted to elbow Lincoln aside only weeks after the inauguration. On April 1, 1861, the new secretary of state gave Lincoln a memo asserting that the administration was rudderless; after a month in office, Seward wrote, the president was still “without a policy, either foreign or domestic.” Lincoln was too busy handing out patronage jobs, Seward declared, when he ought to be tending to important matters. Seward took it on himself to sketch a few suggestions; notably, he advised Lincoln to stir up a war against a European foe as a way to reunite patriots North and South against a common enemy. “It must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct [policy] incessantly,” Seward continued. “Either the President must do it himself or … some member of his Cabinet.” He concluded, disingenuously: “I seek neither to evade nor assume responsibility.”

There was some truth in Seward’s point about the president’s lack of a strategic plan. “I have none,” Lincoln once said. “I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.” To put it more precisely, he had one policy—to preserve the Union—and would adopt no others until he was certain that they advanced him toward his goal. As for Seward’s arrogant attempt to seize power, Lincoln simply shrugged it off. He was accustomed to being underestimated; in fact, he made an art of turning low expectations to his own advantage. And his skin was as thick as the hide of a rhinoceros. In response to Seward’s memo, he simply batted his secretary of state down—“If this must be done, I must do it,” he replied—and went on devoting dozens of hours every week, month after month, to the tedium of doling out federal jobs.