Rise to Greatness (42 page)

Dr. Henry invited Colchester to conduct another séance, at which the scientist deduced that the medium must be wearing a device under his clothes that produced noises when he tensed his muscles. But Noah Brooks wanted to be sure, and he subsequently went with a friend to yet another of Colchester’s sessions, where Brooks took his seat next to the spirit summoner. When the ghosts stirred up a ruckus of thumps and clanking, Brooks seized Colchester’s hand in the dark. Several things happened almost simultaneously: Brooks called for his friend to strike a match; something hard whacked the journalist over the head; and the match flared to reveal a bell in Colchester’s hand, poised over a small drum. Caught red-handed, the medium hinted that he had information with which to blackmail Mrs. Lincoln. Brooks, bleeding but delighted, threatened to have him arrested unless he left Washington immediately.

Even Colchester’s exposure was not enough to persuade Mary that her fleeting contacts with her lost boy were figments of imagination and deceit. She preferred to feel that Willie—and Eddie, and her brothers Sam and Aleck, and Rebecca Pomroy’s family, and the Stanton baby, and all the sons and husbands and fathers in rude graves at Manassas and Pea Ridge and Fort Donelson—were not entirely and forever gone. As she explained to Charles Sumner, she wished to believe that only “a very slight veil separates us from the loved and lost.” The deceptions of spiritualism might offend men like her husband and Dr. Henry and Noah Brooks, but “to me there is comfort in the thought that though unseen by us” the dear departed “are very near.”

*   *   *

A headline in New York said it baldly: “Mysterious Disappearance of the Rebels.” Stonewall Jackson and his army had vanished before John Pope’s eyes, and the anonymous reporter who wrote the accompanying story predicted that Jackson “may appear where he is least expected.” Sure enough, on August 26, Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry led the way into Manassas Junction with Jackson’s hungry Rebels marching behind. The Confederate troops had enjoyed a brisk hike down the Shenandoah Valley from Thoroughfare Gap to Front Royal, screened from view by the Blue Ridge Mountains as they eased past Pope’s right flank. Now they moved quickly, plundering Union supply depots. Whooping and hollering, they filled wagons with captured food and ammunition, confiscated herds of horses and mules and beef cattle, and stuffed themselves and their knapsacks.

Like a man stung on the backside by a bee, Pope swung around angrily, not quite sure what had hurt him but determined to find and stomp it. As he wheeled, the Rebels in his front melted into the valley. Confused, Pope began retracing his steps toward Manassas, with enemy troops to his front, flank, and rear. Typically, however, he was brimming with confidence. Pope didn’t know what he didn’t know, nor did he much care.

The general’s confusion spread quickly to Washington, because Jackson’s men had cut the telegraph wires linking the army to the capital. Hoping for news of Pope’s army, Lincoln went that night to the telegraph room at the War Department. He was prepared to stay until morning if need be, but the room was distressingly quiet. “Do you hear any thing from Pope?” he wired to Ambrose Burnside after a long and fruitless wait. “What news from the front?” he cabled McClellan. “Is the railroad bridge over Bull Run destroyed?” he asked Colonel Herman Haupt, the man in charge of Union trains.

Though he heard almost nothing from nearby sources, Lincoln did receive two urgent telegrams from Minnesota, bringing word of a fresh problem: Sioux warriors had gone to war against white settlers. They struck like lightning from a clear sky, raiding hamlets and farms across the southwestern part of the young state.

These bloody events had been some time coming, with roots that were sadly familiar. People who had once followed abundant game across unmarked prairies were now reduced to paltry lands and routinely cheated by U.S. agents. A week earlier, four hungry young Sioux had dared one another to take some chicken eggs belonging to a white farmer. Their taunts and challenges escalated until the young men had murdered an entire family of five settlers.

Sioux elders faced a decision: hand over the young braves to be punished, or follow their example and make the whites bleed. It wasn’t an easy choice, for they knew resistance was futile. More whites would come; they always did. But if the Sioux were ever to fight, now was the ideal moment: as one chieftain put it, “All the white soldiers are in the south fighting other white soldiers.” Thorns of grievance and honor spurred Chief Little Crow to war. The next morning, Sioux fighters raided a trading post near New Ulm on the Minnesota River; over the next few days, warriors tortured and killed several dozen men, women, and children, and then slaughtered twenty-four soldiers from the undermanned garrison at Fort Ridgely. On August 23, the settlers of New Ulm waged a day-long battle, holding off a Sioux army in house-to-house fighting. Thirty-four whites and an unknown number of Indians died, while a third of the little town was destroyed.

As the state militia stumbled to respond, Governor Alexander Ramsey appealed to the War Department for help. Could Stanton postpone Minnesota’s deadline for delivering its quota of fresh troops for Southern battlefields and send a force of army regulars to Minnesota’s rescue? Stanton was leery. He immediately suspected that Confederate agents were stirring up the Indians, and he was reluctant to give an inch to the enemy’s designs. Ramsey tried a direct appeal to the president. “The Indian outbreak has come upon us suddenly. Half the population of the State are fugitives,” he wired late on August 26. “No one not here can conceive the panic.” As it happened, Nicolay was in Minnesota, having just arrived to investigate mistreatment of the Native Americans. He echoed Ramsey’s assessment, warning Lincoln that, “a wild panic prevails in nearly one-half of the state.”

Lincoln was a practical man; to him, pressing problems demanded workable solutions. A crisis was no time for stickling over rules. Now, while he canvassed for news of Pope’s predicament, the president briskly sorted out the conflict between the frightened governor and the War Department. He could not give Minnesota a formal extension on its recruiting deadlines—that would set a terrible precedent; soon, every state would ask for one. But of course the deadline no longer applied. “Attend to the Indians,” he advised Ramsey. “If the draft can
not
proceed, of course it
will
not proceed. Necessity knows no law.”

*   *   *

Around nightfall on that same August 26, George McClellan stepped onto the wharf at Alexandria. Word of Jackson’s raid at Manassas had just arrived. The general wasn’t surprised to hear it, nor was he exactly disappointed. “I have a strong idea that Pope will be thrashed during the coming week,” he had predicted before leaving the peninsula, and “very badly whipped he will be & ought to be—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Still smoldering during his last days at Berkeley plantation, McClellan had wondered how God allowed “the dolts in Wash[ington] … to
live,
much less to occupy the positions they do.” But in Pope’s troubles he saw fresh hope, for the dolts had grown fearful about their dangerous plan to move his army. After Halleck cabled him on August 21, pleading urgently for him to make haste, McClellan exulted to his wife: “I believe I have triumphed!!” Once again, the nation was calling him to the rescue.

He could not be the hero, though, unless John Pope was made the goat. Accordingly, when McClellan returned to Alexandria, he bubbled with plans for saving Washington but was notably lethargic when asked to send reinforcements to Pope. His first day back from the peninsula, he received orders from Halleck to put Franklin’s corps on the road to Manassas. Little Mac answered that he couldn’t comply; he had no artillery, and none of his cavalry had arrived. Instead, he peppered the general in chief with advice for protecting the capital. After a year spent poring over maps of Virginia, McClellan knew every fort and trench and road and village between Washington and the Rappahannock. But Halleck—whose short month in Washington had been eaten up with recruiting squabbles, the mess in the West, McClellan’s foot-dragging, and Pope’s peril—was in no mood just then for Little Mac’s counsel, and eventually he snapped. “From your knowledge of the whole country about here, you can best act,” he cabled. “I have no time for details.”

That night, McClellan went to Washington, where he met with the already overfatigued Halleck until three
A.M.
After Little Mac’s departure, Halleck dropped into bed believing that Franklin’s corps would move to Pope’s aid within hours, but another hot day dragged past while the Army of the Potomac sat still. Soon the sound of guns booming in the west let Washington know that Pope had stumbled into Jackson. Even now, McClellan found new reasons to decline to send troops. Better to concentrate around Washington and hold the capital, he advised the general in chief repeatedly. Halleck tried hectoring: at three thirty
P.M.
on August 28, he cabled McClellan, “Not a moment must be lost in pushing as large a force as possible toward Manassas.” Four hours later he tried again: “There must be no further delay in moving Franklin’s corps toward Manassas. They must go tomorrow morning, ready or not ready.”

The next day, believing he had Jackson pinned down near the old Bull Run battlefield, Pope put all he had into breaking the Rebel line. Reinforcements would have been welcome, but Franklin’s promised six
A.M.
departure from the Alexandria neighborhood turned into a one
P.M.
launch, and his trip to find the enemy quickly halted in peaceful Annandale, more than fifteen miles from the churning battle of Second Bull Run. McClellan explained to a flabbergasted Halleck that “it was not safe” to go any farther. Instead, Little Mac spent the day talking wildly of great hordes of Confederate troops in the vicinity of Washington; doubling reality, as he always seemed to do, he claimed that at least 120,000 Rebels lurked nearby. Rather than move Franklin and then Sumner’s corps aggressively to Pope’s support, McClellan gave orders to prepare the Chain Bridge over the Potomac for demolition in case Lee tried to cross into the capital.

Finding no help from McClellan, Pope looked to Fitz John Porter, who had fought so well in the Seven Days battles, to join the attack on Jackson’s men. But Porter had grown strangely inert after his corps landed at Aquia Creek and was assigned to Pope’s army. As the days went by, McClellan’s pet managed to give many people the impression that he had no intention of helping the hated John Pope.

Lincoln was beside himself. “What news from the direction of Manassas?” he cabled Haupt, the railroad man. “Any further news?” he asked Burnside. And to McClellan: “What news?”

After more than five weeks of silence, Little Mac decided that now was a good time to resume communications with the president. And what the general chose to say on August 29 shocked Lincoln more deeply than any of McClellan’s previous reckless statements. Though armies were clashing within earshot of the White House, McClellan responded to the president with a lecture. Saying that “one of two courses should be adopted,” he advised the following: “Concentrate all our available forces to open communication with Pope,” or “leave Pope to get out of his scrape” while making “the Capital perfectly safe. No middle course will now answer.” In closing, Little Mac chirped: “Tell me what you wish me to do & I will do all in my power to accomplish it.”

This was outrageous. For two and a half days, McClellan had been fending off orders precisely to concentrate his forces and open communications with Pope. How could he now claim he was keen to bend his powers in that direction? But if the general’s eagerness to pursue the first option was questionable, Lincoln could only conclude that he was entirely serious about the second: McClellan was willing to allow a Union army to fight the enemy unaided while tens of thousands of well-rested, well-equipped reinforcements sat watching nearby.

*   *   *

John Hay rode his horse from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home early the next morning and found Lincoln’s mount already saddled in the yard. Within moments, the president came down the stone steps and put a big boot in the stirrup. He was eager to give voice to his emotions, and the quiet road into town seemed like a good place to do it. Lincoln was “very outspoken in regard to McClellan’s present conduct,” Hay noted. That appalling line from the general’s telegram—“leave Pope to get out of his own scrape”—was seared in the president’s memory and he quoted it perfectly. Nor was that all. He told Hay about McClellan’s “dreadful panic” as he prepared to destroy the Chain Bridge (an order that the War Department had immediately reversed), and complained about “his incomprehensible interference with Franklin’s corps.”

Some thirty miles distant from the two men on horseback, Pope directed his troops on the Manassas plain. He was confident that this day, August 30, would be his glory. After the pounding his men and guns had given Jackson the day before, the Rebels had to be weak. Now Pope’s Army of Virginia would stack its muscle on the right and deliver the decisive blow. He did not see the trouble to his left, where Longstreet was quietly emerging from behind the screen of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Lincoln, suffering a blind spot of his own, was unable to see that his cabinet was on the verge of revolt. McClellan’s poisonous return from the peninsula had catalyzed the grievances of these strong, frustrated, overworked men. Stanton was so furious when Little Mac halted Franklin’s modest advance that he stormed to Chase’s office and told him that McClellan must go. “He has long believed,” Chase recorded, “and so have I, that Genl. McClellan ought not to be trusted with the command of any army of the Union; and the events of the last few days have greatly strengthened our judgment.” But what could they do? It was pointless to complain to Abraham Lincoln. He listened and then did as he pleased. “Argument was useless,” as Chase put it. “It was like throwing water on a duck’s back.”

But if Lincoln could ignore cabinet members one by one, he could not ignore them all at once. Stanton and Chase hatched a plan to gather signatures on a petition for McClellan’s firing. Either the general must go, or the cabinet would collapse.