Rise to Greatness (28 page)

As acting general in chief, Lincoln, too, had perhaps become overconfident about progress in the western theater. After the capture of New Orleans, Farragut had taken his boats unmolested up the Mississippi to demand the surrender of Vicksburg; city officials refused, but many on the Union side considered their defiance a trifling matter. The opening of the great river from top to bottom was generally seen as an accomplished fact, with only a bit of mop-up to do at Memphis and Vicksburg. Lincoln, usually so strategic in his thinking, suffered an unusual lapse of concentration. Instead of pressing his advantage in the West, he put down the whip and left Halleck to his own devices. He continued to pursue his interests in the technology of war, making several trips to the navy yard in May to join Dahlgren in examining the latest artillery innovations. And he enjoyed testing rifles in the company of a young White House secretary, William O. Stoddard. Taking shots at a woodpile south of the mansion one morning, Lincoln remarked: “Our folks are not getting near enough to the enemy to do any good.… We’ve got to get guns that’ll carry further.”

McClellan and Richmond, not Halleck and Corinth, were the president’s prime focus now. After taking Yorktown, Little Mac was free to move troops and supplies along the York River, speeding his progress despite rain and sloppy roads. As he moved, the general continued his urgent calls for reinforcements, for he imagined the Confederate army to be roughly twice its actual size. “My entire force is undoubtedly considerably inferior to that of the Rebels, who still fight well, but I will do all I can with the force at my disposal,” he wired Stanton at the War Department. To his friend Ambrose Burnside, he put matters more melodramatically. Should he be forced to fight without more troops, McClellan declared, “If I win, the greater the glory. If I lose they”—he meant Lincoln and Stanton—“will be damned forever, both by God and men.”

The president was not deaf to McClellan’s pleas. In the days following his return from Fort Monroe, Lincoln completed plans to accommodate Little Mac’s pleas, at least partially. The Union now had some 200,000 troops dispersed in a wide arc across Virginia, from Fort Monroe in the east to Franklin in the mountainous west. Roughly half of these men were with McClellan on the peninsula. Another quarter of the force, approximately, was gathering in McDowell’s camps between Washington and Richmond. McClellan was desperate to have McDowell’s troops sent to him by boat as quickly as possible, but Lincoln was still skittish about leaving the path to Washington unmanned. He was reasonably certain, though, that the Rebel striking power was now all south of McDowell’s position, and it seemed that the rumored counterattack of April had evaporated.

Accordingly, Lincoln decided to order McDowell toward Richmond by the overland route. This way, the Union advance would be akin to a stopper being forced deeper into a bottle; even as McDowell’s troops moved farther into Rebel territory, they would continue to be a protective barrier for Washington. Then, after a march of fifty or sixty miles, McDowell’s left wing would connect with McClellan’s right wing on the doorstep of the Confederate capital.

There was only one hitch: the Shenandoah Valley. A seeming paradise of rolling fields and low mountains, the valley was, to men who understood it, a nearly perfect maze in which to operate a light, quick force against a larger, lumbering army. Unfortunately for the Union, none of its generals did understand the valley yet; worse, an army in butternut uniforms was just then marching at the top of the valley toward a little town called Staunton with an audacious plan to prevent the launching of McDowell’s men. The lean, tough Rebel troops, many of them barefoot, were led by a lush-bearded man of strange temperament and habits, whose name was Thomas Jonathan Jackson. Ever since he stemmed the Yankee tide at the battle of Manassas, people had called him Stonewall.

*   *   *

The outbreak of war found Stonewall Jackson on the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where he’d come to appreciate the Shenandoah Valley’s strategic advantages through long hours of study in the institute’s map library. A distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, Professor Jackson stood out in Lexington as an odd duck, a religious zealot who habitually sucked on lemons and periodically pumped his left hand violently in the air to regulate his blood flow. “He seems to be cut off from his fellow men and to commune with his own spirit only, or with spirits of which we know not,” one associate wrote of Jackson. The intense focus that made him a notoriously dull teacher also made him an electrifying combat general, the sort of man who could demand far too much from his troops and yet be unshakably confident that they would deliver. Jackson knew a simple truth about men in armies: even more than shoes or food or sleep, they crave victory.

He also knew, from his map study, that the Shenandoah Valley could be a kind of magic box. Striped north to south by a series of ranges and ridges, the valley allowed an army to be seen one moment and disappear the next, simply by slipping through a gap or pass. It was the perfect place to practice Jackson’s philosophy of war: “Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy.”

Jackson had given the Union its first lesson in valley warfare in March, when he popped up in Kernstown to attack a Union force preparing to leave the vicinity. This led to Lincoln’s decision to deploy an army under Nathaniel Banks to pacify the valley, and by the first of May, the former speaker of the house felt confident in his success. Jackson’s army, Banks reported, was skedaddling, “bound for Richmond. This is the fact, I have no doubt.”

In the wake of this apparent good news, Lincoln ordered one of Banks’s divisions, commanded by the Irish politician James Shields, to leave the valley and join McDowell. Jackson promptly reappeared and delivered lesson number two, this time at a railway junction in Staunton, west of Charlottesville. There, he confronted the oncoming army of John Frémont. On May 8, Frémont threw 6,000 men at Jackson’s Rebels, who proceeded to push the Federals backward in an afternoon of hot fighting. Then, once again, Jackson’s army vanished.

During the following week, as Banks and his army stood guard in the deceptively quiet valley, Lincoln decided it was finally time to order McDowell forward. Communications between McClellan and Stanton had by now broken down almost entirely, but according to intelligence that McClellan sent to Lincoln, “the enemy were concentrating all their available force”—presumably including Jackson’s troops—around Richmond. At the same time, Lincoln was being assured that Halleck faced a great mass of Rebels at Corinth. With such large concentrations of Confederate troops reported at both places, the threat of a Rebel offensive down the valley seemed minimal.

On May 17, by secret order, Lincoln directed McDowell to head south and link up with McClellan. But Stonewall Jackson, who was not in Richmond or anywhere near it, had a plan to stop him. The fierce-eyed Jackson put his army in motion—heading north.

*   *   *

If the president felt relatively sanguine about the current progress of the war, he found much to concern him at home. “I feel worried about Mary; her nerves have gone to pieces,” Lincoln confided around this time. “She cannot hide from me that the strain she has been under has been too much for her mental as well as her physical health.” Adding to her grief over Willie’s death and the strain attending her scandalous finances, there came a third blow: Mary received word that her half-brother Samuel Todd had died of wounds suffered while fighting on the Confederate side at Shiloh. Weeks later, she remained so sick with sorrow that she found it impossible to answer a letter of condolence from a Springfield friend.

Mary Lincoln had dreamed from her youth that she would be “Mrs. President” someday; now here she was, and life seemed impossible to bear. When she finally mustered the strength to reply to her friend in Springfield, she wrote: “Our home is very beautiful, the grounds around us are enchanting, the world still smiles & pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled. Everything appears a mockery.” The death of her “beloved Willie a being too precious for earth” had left her “completely unnerved.… When I can bring myself to realize that he has indeed passed away, my question to myself is, ‘can life be endured?’” She had ordered Willie’s favorite toys sent away, but she still refused to enter the bedroom where he had died, or the Green Room, where his body had reposed before the funeral.

And she insisted that her sorrow be undisturbed. When the Marine Band prepared for its annual series of public concerts on the White House lawn, a twice-a-week staple of Washington summer evenings, Mary demanded that the programs be canceled. How could she be expected to listen to the brassy tunes that had delighted her cherished son? Citizens protested, leading Navy Secretary Welles to suggest that the concerts be moved to Lafayette Square, but Mary was resolute. “It is our especial desire that the Band does not play in these grounds, this summer,” she instructed John Hay. “We expect our wishes to be complied with.”

On Sunday, May 19, the first lady agreed to go to church with the Brownings. The weather was turning warm, and the previous day she had ordered from her favorite milliner a new lightweight mourning bonnet for summer, made of black straw with a long black crepe veil. “I want the crape to be the
finest jet black
English crape—white & black face trimmings—Could you obtain any black & white crape flowers? Small delicate ones—I want it got up, with great taste and gentility.”

By this time, Mrs. Lincoln had also ordered a change of scenery. The idea of another hot summer in the White House, where dismal memories crouched around every corner, was so oppressive that she decided to relocate the family to a handsome cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, a few miles north of Capitol Hill. Formerly the summer home of the Washington banker George W. Riggs, the cottage commanded a hilltop well above the swampy bottomlands occupied by the White House, so it caught fresh breezes instead of the stifling reek of stagnant water. James Buchanan had used the retreat during his term in office, but the Lincolns had been far too busy to move to the cottage during their first summer. Now Mary was counting the days.

After church that Sunday, the president invited Orville Browning to join him on a visit to the hospital where Rebecca Pomroy worked. The dedicated nurse had continued to check in on the grieving Lincoln family, and one day the president—who had come to consider her “one of the best women I ever knew”—had surprised her by saying, “Mrs. Pomroy, I want to do something for you; what shall it be? Be perfectly free to tell me what you want most, and if it is in my power, you shall have it.” A few weeks later, she would answer Lincoln’s question by seeking his help in getting a regular army commission for her son George, but at first all she could think to ask was that he come meet the wounded soldiers in her care.

When Lincoln and Browning arrived at the hospital, there was a bustle of brass and a banging of drums as officers called for their men to limp into line. “Mr. Lincoln, in his unpretentious way, with his hat off, shook hands with each one, asking his name and the name of his regiment and company,” Pomroy recalled. Most of the patients had been wounded in the battle of Williamsburg and belonged to McClellan’s devoted Army of the Potomac. Yet Lincoln found that they loved him, too. Several soldiers promised to vote for him when he ran for reelection; one refused to wash his hand for several days after shaking Lincoln’s.

As he prepared to leave, Lincoln found Pomroy waiting to say goodbye alongside three black servants who were clearly quite nervous. “And who are these?” Lincoln asked. They were the hospital cooks. Without hesitation, Lincoln shook their hands and greeted them by name. After the presidential carriage rolled away, several officers accused Pomroy of “a mean, contemptible trick”: inducing an important white man to touch and speak with lowly black workers. Even her favorite young patient, an orphan from Vermont who had come to love Pomroy like a mother, scolded her. “What could you be thinking of to introduce those niggers to the President?”

Worried, Pomroy later asked Lincoln whether she had done wrong. “No, indeed!” he answered. “It did my soul good.” The president had lived in the White House for only a little more than a year, and the servants who kept Washington moving—the cooks, maids, stable hands, and carriage drivers—were a more vital black community than he had known before. His encounters with them were changing his opinions about the capacities of black people; gradually, he was coming to see the despised race as a population and not just as a problem, and to understand that the Union could not afford to keep this significant human resource on the sidelines. As he told Pomroy: “It will not be long before we shall have to use them as soldiers.”

*   *   *

May 22 was a relatively quiet Thursday. At the navy yard, Commander Dahlgren was nearing the end of a long day when, to his surprise, Edwin Stanton arrived at about nine
P.M.
to ask for a ship—immediately. Dahlgren was even more surprised when Lincoln arrived a few minutes later from the White House. “He left so privately that Mrs. Lincoln alone knew of it,” Dahlgren said. As a vessel was hastily made ready, the commander served dinner to his unexpected guests. The clocks chimed ten as the three men slipped onto the boat and steamed quietly out of the darkened harbor and down the Potomac.

Near dawn, Lincoln awoke at Aquia Creek, where he had visited McDowell a few weeks before. The general, who had gathered his troops near Fredericksburg, was now preparing to march toward Richmond, and Lincoln wanted to discuss the critical offensive in person while he still had the chance. At the landing, he boarded a rough supply train for the next leg of the journey. Riding in the baggage car, he sat with Stanton and Dahlgren on camp stools. The railroad ended well short of McDowell’s headquarters, but the general was waiting for them when the baggage car jerked to a stop.

McDowell quickly assured Lincoln that progress was being made on extending the southbound rail line to support the Federal advance. As proof, the general led his visitors to a bridge that Union engineers had just completed over a wide and deep ravine. An impressive trestle, it rose perhaps a hundred feet over a winding creek. Beside the rails ran a single plank for foot traffic, with nothing but open air on either side. “Let us walk over,” Lincoln said eagerly, and strode out onto the plank. McDowell followed. Stanton hesitated before edging his way onto the bridge. With a doubtful look down at the ribbon of water far below, Dahlgren brought up the rear. Then Stanton froze. “About half-way, the Secretary said he was dizzy and feared he would fall,” Dahlgren wrote in his diary. “I managed to step by him, and took his hand.” This was itself quite dangerous, because Dahlgren’s own head was “somewhat confused by the giddy height.”