Rise to Greatness (43 page)

Even as Pope was throwing his roundhouse right at Jackson’s entrenched lines, Stanton and Chase were drafting the petition, with help from Stanton’s assistant secretary Peter Watson. When they finished, Chase carried the paper, written in Stanton’s unmistakable hand, to the office of Gideon Welles, hoping to collect his signature. Welles was unpredictable. A former Hartford newspaper editor and a Democrat turned abolitionist Republican, he was perhaps the most unusual member of Lincoln’s singular cabinet. With his flowing white beard and elaborate wig of curls, Welles was an easy man to ridicule. He also carried a large chip on his shoulder: he believed, not without justification, that his navy accomplished more than the army, and did it with far less, yet never received proper credit. Welles was therefore extremely skeptical of the army’s tempestuous boss, Edwin Stanton. This was one reason why he began to smell a rat almost as soon as Chase opened his mouth.

To begin with, Welles said to Chase, the petition he was being asked to sign was intemperate, charging not just dereliction but treason. Welles agreed that McClellan should probably be fired, but he wasn’t ready to insist on it. Why couldn’t they just talk to Lincoln about this? he asked. Chase responded with surprising vehemence: “The time had arrived when the Cabinet must act with energy,” he told Welles, “for either the Government or McClellan must go down.” Chase detailed a string of offenses by the general, some of which were new to Welles; still, “this method of getting signatures … was repugnant” to the navy man. What about the others in the cabinet? Welles asked. Chase answered that the interior secretary, Caleb Smith, was ready to sign. Welles persisted: How about Attorney General Bates and Postmaster General Blair? “Not yet,” Chase replied. “Their turn had not come.”

As if on cue, Montgomery Blair walked in. Chase went pale. Noting the Treasury secretary’s distress, Welles said nothing about the petition until the cabinet’s most conservative member had finished his errand and gone away. Shouldn’t we call him back? Welles now asked Chase. After all, Blair was the only member of the group who had military training. “No, not now,” Chase blurted as he collected the unsigned letter from Welles. “It is best he should for the present know nothing of it.” Chase strode from the room, then stepped back inside. He had a “special request”: that the navy secretary tell no one about this meeting.

Lincoln, none the wiser, spent the day foraging for news from the front. Things seemed well enough. Colonel Haupt provided a steady stream of encouraging updates as Union supply trains pushed into Manassas and telegraph lines were repaired. Lincoln was waiting with Hay at Halleck’s office when Stanton poked his head in and invited the pair to have lunch at his home. During the meal, the war secretary vented his anger about McClellan—though he never breathed a word about the circulating petition. When this fight was over, he declared, there should be a court-martial, for “nothing but foul play could lose us this battle.” Afterward, Lincoln and Hay returned to Halleck’s office to find the general in chief quietly confident that “the greatest battle of the Century” was under way and would yield a Union triumph. At about five
P.M.
, hopes for a victory rose still higher when Haupt passed along a premature report that Jackson had surrendered.

Stanton, meanwhile, returned to the War Department, where he was not surprised to receive a visit from a very curious Gideon Welles. Caleb Smith of Interior was already there, and Stanton, still angry, treated his colleagues to a lengthy recitation of McClellan’s offenses and his own manifold woes, dating back to his first day in the cabinet. He spoke of the chaos of Simon Cameron’s mismanaged department; of $20 million in unpaid bills piled on his desk; and of this secretive, unstable, double-dealing general who “did nothing, but talked always vaguely and indefinitely and of various matters,” though never of the matters that really counted. Stanton proceeded through the litany of the canal boats, the confusion over troops left behind to defend Washington, and the squelchy slog up the peninsula, where McClellan had promised the ground was always dry. The secretary retold the whole saga all the way up to the present moment when, “for twenty-four hours [Franklin’s] large force remained stationary, hearing the whole time the guns of the battle.”

Smith, already convinced, excused himself as soon as Stanton finished. Alone with Welles, Stanton lowered his voice conspiratorially. He had heard from Chase that Welles had “declined to sign the protest.” How could Welles “not think we ought to get rid of him?” When Welles answered that the petition was “discourteous and disrespectful to the President,” the war secretary almost shouted in reply. What did he, Edwin Stanton, owe the president? “He knew of no particular obligations he was under to” Abraham Lincoln, “who had called him to a difficult position and imposed upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry”—burdens made much heavier by the added weight of McClellan, “a commander who was constantly striving to embarrass him.” Enough was enough, Stanton spat. “He would not submit to a continuance of this state of things.”

*   *   *

That evening, Lincoln still thought victory was at hand—for Pope, and thus for himself. “Everything seemed to be going well and hilarious on Saturday & we went to bed expecting glad tidings at sunrise,” Hay reported. In fact, the fight on the Bull Run battlefield was not going well at all: in the gloaming, just as Jackson’s line began to crack, Longstreet unleashed his men on Pope’s neglected left flank and upended the Union army.

The reversal happened so suddenly, so violently, that word rippled back to Washington in jumbled surges, and a full report came together only the next morning. At eight, as Hay was getting dressed in his tiny room off the president’s office, Lincoln called out: “Well, John, we are whipped again, I’m afraid. The enemy reinforced on Pope and drove back his left wing and he has retired to Centerville, where he says he will be able to hold his men. I don’t like that expression. I don’t like to hear him admit that his men need holding.”

As the streets of Washington began to fill with stragglers and runaways from the direction of the battlefield, Stanton’s War Department issued orders to prepare all city churches to receive the wounded, and a call went out for government clerks willing to go to the front as nurses. Plans were announced to seize the mansion of the Washington banker and art collector W. W. Corcoran—a Confederate sympathizer—for use as a hospital. (“Malice,” sniffed Corcoran’s neighbor Gideon Welles. “Vandalism.”) McClellan promised his wife he would try to rescue the family silver from their Washington home, lest it fall into the hands of Confederate invaders. Reports of roads jammed with fleeing soldiers brought back memories of the first defeat at Bull Run the previous summer, leading Lincoln to quip mordantly: “I’ve heard of ‘knocking a person into the middle of next week,’ but the rebels have knocked us into the middle of last year.”

There was a difference, though, between that summer and this: by now Lincoln had seen too much of panic to tolerate any more. With Robert E. Lee’s entire army somewhere near the capital, the president spent much of August 31 holed up in his office with Chase, diligently resolving the remaining squabbles over patronage plums under the new tax law. As the day wore on, word arrived from Centerville that Pope had organized a strong defense; emotions subsided a bit and Lincoln adopted, in Hay’s words, “a singularly defiant tone of mind.” Several times, he said: “We must hurt this enemy before it gets away.” Many in the government had difficulty seeing this latest debacle as an opportunity; Hay, for one, thought the Union’s situation looked bad, but when he tried to say so, Lincoln scolded him. “No, Mr. Hay. We must whip these people now. Pope must fight them [and] if they are too strong for him he can gradually retire to these fortifications” in Washington. Otherwise, “we may as well stop fighting.”

The president still had heard nothing of the brewing cabinet revolt. Chase and Stanton had managed to bring Bates into their scheme by having him write a new version of their petition. They also had a new count to add to their indictment of McClellan: he had refused to send ammunition to the embattled Army of Virginia unless Pope pulled a sufficient force out of action to serve as guards for the supply train. “McClellan ought to be shot,” Chase told Welles on September 1, when he went again to plead for the navy secretary’s signature.

Despite that sentiment, the Bates draft was more measured and careful than Stanton’s original. Welles was surprised that Bates would join the cabal, for his own view of the petition had only darkened since Saturday. “Reflection had more fully satisfied me that this method of conspiring to influence or control the President was repugnant … it was unusual, would be disrespectful, and would justly be deemed offensive.” Chase’s entreaties got him nowhere, for Welles was adamant. Further, as he studied the document and noticed a blank spot where William Seward’s signature might go, Welles realized that he had no idea what had become of the secretary of state. He wasn’t in Washington. Why? The more he pondered that question, the more Welles suspected that Seward was “purposely absent” precisely to avoid taking sides.

*   *   *

It was indeed an odd time for a vacation, but with Europe relatively quiet as aristocrats took their holidays, the secretary of state had traveled to Auburn, New York, for a brief visit home. The news that rivalries and resentments had poisoned Pope’s offensive hit him hard. Before his departure, Seward had gone to Alexandria to see the Army of the Potomac arriving, and he believed that the Union’s most perilous hours were past: those Federal legions seemed “invincible.” After a lifetime of politics, Seward thought he knew what pettiness men were capable of, but this episode had left him genuinely disillusioned. Encountering John Hay on a Washington sidewalk after his return from New York, Seward asked glumly: “Mr. Hay, what is the use of growing old? You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it. I have only just now found out what military jealousy is.… It never had occurred to me that any jealousy could prevent these generals from acting for their common fame and the welfare of the country.”

Hay agreed, saying that it had not seemed possible that one American leader could all but abandon another in the heat of battle. “I don’t see why you should have expected it,” Seward countered. “You are not old. I should have known it.”

Henry Halleck was likewise badly shaken. According to Lincoln, “he broke down—nerve and pluck all gone,” reduced almost overnight from a general to “a first-rate clerk.” At wit’s end, Halleck pleaded with McClellan to come to Washington and tell him what to do. “I beg of you to assist me in this crisis with your ability and experience,” he cabled to Alexandria late the night of August 31. “I am utterly tired out.” Making matters worse, Halleck was suffering from acutely painful hemorrhoids, inflamed by the stress, and was treating his discomfort with a tincture of opium.

Like his unsteady general in chief, Lincoln saw no alternative but to work with the tools at hand. Reluctantly, he turned to the man who knew more about the defenses of Washington than any other: George McClellan. “Pope should have been sustained, but he was not,” Lincoln later explained. “It was humiliating … to reward McClellan” by giving him command of the capital. However, “personal considerations must be sacrificed for the public good.” On the morning of September 2, Lincoln once again placed McClellan at the head of the army in Washington.

As rumors began to spread that Little Mac was in authority rather than in disgrace, the cabinet uprising reached a dead end. Welles refused to sign the revised petition; Blair was apparently never even asked. Instead, the cabinet gathered at ten
A.M.
in Lincoln’s office. While they were waiting for the president, Stanton hurried in. In a low and trembling voice, he confirmed that McClellan was back on top. Everyone began talking at once, and then into the room walked Lincoln.

Welles later confided to his diary that Lincoln began the meeting by saying he had “done what seemed to him best, and would be responsible for what he had done to the country.” Looking at the shocked faces, the president quickly added that the appointment was only temporary. “McClellan knows this whole ground,” Lincoln said. “He is a good engineer … there is no better organizer; he can be trusted to act on the defensive.” True, McClellan suffered from “the slows,” but that would not matter in this case.

The reaction was intense. Never, according to Welles, had the fractious cabinet been so “disturbed and desponding.” Having given his explanation, Lincoln sat “greatly distressed” as Stanton, Chase, and the others loosed their anger and fears. “Giving the command to [McClellan] was equivalent to giving Washington to the rebels,” Chase said finally. Only Blair agreed with Lincoln, and the postmaster general’s reasoning was characteristic of his cool political calculation. They had all just seen how venomous army politics had become, and now tens of thousands of armed men—the partisans in that rivalry—were in and around the capital. Unless they believed in the general who led them, they would be an unreliable, even threatening, force. As Blair put it, McClellan “had beyond any [other] officer the confidence of the army.”

Lincoln certainly saw it that way. “I must have McClellan to reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos,” he said three days later. “There has been been a design, a purpose in breaking down Pope without regard of consequences to the country. It is shocking to see, and I know this, but there is no remedy at present. McClellan has the army with him.”

Chase had vowed that either McClellan would go or the cabinet would collapse, but at least for the moment, both went wobbling forward. And then the stakes, higher than they had ever been, were raised again. Lee jabbed at Pope near Chantilly, and without warning anyone Pope pulled his men into the Washington fortifications, having seen the backs of no enemies whatsoever. In a flash, Lee was gone, northbound for Maryland, while in the West the Confederates invaded Kentucky. The Civil War reached its zero hour, and now Lincoln had no choice but to send the infuriating General George McClellan into the field in pursuit of Lee. John Dahlgren’s lament spoke for multitudes: “Oh, for our country! Who shall save it?”