Rise to Greatness (50 page)

Some twenty years ago.

“As I well knew it would, the song only deepened his sadness,” Lamon wrote later. He also reported that he then “did what I had done many times before: I startled him from his melancholy.” Sometimes Lamon jolted Lincoln with a ribald joke, sometimes with an outrageous statement. This time, he launched into a comic song made famous in minstrel shows, one that celebrated the famous banjo player Picayune Butler. It “broke the spell … and restored somewhat his accustomed easy humor.” It also sowed the seeds of a minor scandal: when Lincoln returned to Washington, he was closely followed by outraged reports that he had spent his time in Maryland enjoying boisterous songs beside the fresh graves of the Union dead.

The president left Sharpsburg the next day. As McClellan had expected, Lincoln warned his general “that he would be a ruined man if he did not move forward, move rapidly and effectually.” But Lincoln was not hopeful. Officially, he had nothing to report at the end of his visit. Passing through Frederick on the way home, he disappointed a cheering crowd by saying: “In my present position it is hardly proper for me to make speeches. Every word is so closely noted that it will not do to make trivial ones.” But to trusted friends he revealed his skepticism. Once again, he had seen McClellan’s forces well-ordered and in good spirits. “For the organization of an army … I will back General McClellan against any general of modern times,” he said. “But I begin to believe that he will never get ready to fight.”

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While Lamon sang to Lincoln in Maryland, Union forces in faraway Mississippi were battling fiercely to maintain their foothold in the Deep South. Sterling Price and Earl Van Dorn had at last managed to combine their little armies for an attack on Grant at Corinth, and now their troops pressed through choking smoke in ninety-four-degree heat, driving the Federals as they came. But as the blue line fell back, it found even stronger positions in the well-built fortifications around the railroad junction. The first day’s combat ended with the Southerners stalled.

The next morning, October 4, the Rebels charged again. Union artillery, firing exploding canisters that sprayed musket balls, blew ragged holes in the advancing ranks. Grant would have few opportunities in his long war to enjoy the advantages of fighting while entrenched in a strong defensive position, but on this day he watched the enemy melt under murderous fire from his soldiers. After losing nearly a quarter of their men in the effort to break through, the Rebel generals gave up. Price wept when he saw what remained of his vanquished army.

The effort to uproot Grant from Dixie died then and there. And with Lee pushed back into Virginia, two of the three Confederate initiatives of September had now been thwarted. Only Bragg’s Kentucky invasion remained viable—but not for long. On the day of the battle at Corinth, Bragg was watching his puppet governor Richard Hawes take the oath of office in Frankfort. The general was eager to get on with it, because Union troops under Buell were marching down from Louisville and would arrive at any minute. Sure enough, just as Hawes launched into his inaugural address, the roar of Federal artillery rose from the outskirts of town. The speech was cut short; the Hawes administration did not last much longer.

Bragg decided to avoid a clash at Frankfort and instead attack what he thought was a small detachment of the Union army near Bardstown, to the west. This was just what Buell hoped he would do. In fact, the Federal sortie that broke up the inaugural party in Frankfort was just a feint, while the troops at Bardstown formed Buell’s main body. Bragg’s confusion led within a few days to the even greater confusion that was the battle of Perryville, fought on October 8. A nightmare of jumbled violence, it was, according to Bragg, “the severest and most desperately contested engagement” ever compressed into a few hours. The chaos on the battlefield was such that at one point the commander of the Confederate right wing, Leonidas Polk, rode straight into the middle of a Union regiment, thinking they were his own troops. The bluecoats responded with equal confusion: when this unknown man with stars on his shoulders (who had quickly realized his mistake) brazenly ordered them to cease firing, the Federals actually put down their rifles. And Polk rode safely away.

Perryville was more than just pointless slaughter, however, for at least two reasons. When the Rebels opened the battle with a sudden attack on what they thought was a small Union force and the surprise threatened to collapse the North’s left wing, a young general named Philip Sheridan saw what was happening from a nearby hilltop and swiftly turned his guns on the Confederate flank. He followed this up with a cavalry charge that broke the Rebel momentum. The Confederacy would hear much more from Phil Sheridan, and his response on this day was the sort of quick, decisive, and effective action that was separating the true warrior-generals from the mass of Northern men so hastily pressed into service.

Perryville was also the excuse Bragg needed to bring his deflated project to an end. It was mere vanity to believe that his army could impose Confederate government on a state that didn’t want it. When Kentuckians failed to join Bragg’s cause, they rendered a clear verdict on his invasion; after that, the only question was how much blood he would spill on his way back to Tennessee. The 7,600 combatants lost on that October afternoon must have been enough, because Bragg mustered his men at midnight and turned them toward the south.

Some in his army disagreed bitterly with this decision, among them General Basil Duke, who still believed the Confederates could crush Buell and then do as they pleased with the singular prize of Kentucky. Whether or not he was right about strategy, Duke was correct when he summed up the effects of Bragg’s retreat. “On the 10th of October more than fifty thousand Confederate soldiers were upon the soil of Kentucky,” he wrote. “The first of November they were all gone, and with them departed all hope, perhaps, of Southern independence.”

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Lincoln returned from Sharpsburg to find the White House corridor even more jammed than usual. This was the price he paid for leaving town: after being away for most of a week, he “was perfectly overwhelmed with the crowd on his return.” He and his secretaries toiled to catch up on “deferred and delayed business,” as Nicolay reported. Lincoln may have been too busy to notice that his monthly paycheck, issued that day, was light by $61. Thanks to the new revenue bill he had signed, an income tax was withheld from the salaries of the nation’s highest earners for the first time in American history.

Lincoln departed the Antietam battlefield convinced that a highway to victory lay wide open in front of McClellan. The general could potentially lead his army straight to Richmond, about 150 miles away; with Lee camped to the west of the mountains in the Shenandoah Valley, the path was clear of Rebels. Lincoln would have preferred to see McClellan hit Lee where he stood, but that had not happened. Alternatively, why not set off for Richmond and let Lee try to catch him? If McClellan outmarched the enemy, the Confederate capital would be his prize. If Lee caught up to him, McClellan could choose his ground for the decisive battle that Lincoln desired. Either way, from Lincoln’s point of view, the result would be a success. Besides, he felt the clock ticking toward another winter of muddy roads and mired wagon trains and he did not want to lose more time. He instructed Halleck to get Little Mac going.

“The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south,” the general in chief wired McClellan. “Your army must move now while the roads are good.” By taking the route that kept his army between Lee and Washington, McClellan would provide protection for the capital—a result that, Halleck informed him, would allow the government to send him an additional 30,000 troops.

These orders arrived just as the general was putting the finishing touches on a statement he planned to issue to the entire Army of the Potomac. For two weeks, soldiers had been arguing about the Emancipation Proclamation. Fitz John Porter told the newspaper editor Manton Marble that the camps were rife with “disgust, discontent, and expressions of disloyalty.” Not only the soldiers but the whole country wanted to know what McClellan’s reaction would be. Everyone understood that this issue was a source of deep division between McClellan’s command and the abolitionist Republicans in Washington, and many saw that division as the cause of all the army’s woes.

McClellan’s initial response to Lincoln’s decree was outrage and dismay. He suspected that the order was designed to foment a slave revolt. When Lincoln followed up by suspending habeas corpus protections, the general detected the foul hand of a despot. For days, Little Mac brooded on these twin disasters. At one point he drafted a letter to Lincoln criticizing the policies, but a friend persuaded him to destroy it. He consulted with other generals, including Burnside, who warned him that open defiance of the elected government would be “a fatal error.” Even his supporters in New York agreed. One of these advisers, the transportation magnate William Aspinwall, received a letter from McClellan in which the general said he was “very anxious to know how you and men like you regard the recent Proclamations of the Pres[ident].” Aspinwall rushed to Sharpsburg to deliver his answer in person. An open clash between McClellan and Lincoln would only prolong the war, Aspinwall said; the best course was to “submit” and “quietly continue doing [your] duty as a soldier.”

Wisely, the general decided to pursue this more conservative course. Released on October 7, his statement to the Army of the Potomac admonished his men to remember that military subordination to civilian government was “a fundamental rule of our political system” and “should be thoroughly understood & observed.” Failure to respect this rule in their political conversations could “destroy the discipline & efficiency of troops by substituting the spirit of political faction” for a soldier’s “highest duty.” This was certainly patriotic and true, but McClellan didn’t stop there. Reminding his audience that elections were under way in the North, he added: “The remedy for political error if any are committed is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.” Ostensibly addressed to the men of his army, this sentence had no practical value for them; they were miles from the nearest ballot box. The real audience for this message was the Northern electorate, which McClellan was counting on to boost Democrats into control of Congress, where they could crush Stanton, chasten Lincoln, and implement policies more to the general’s liking. Writing to his wife, Little Mac was more candid than he had been in his public statement: “I still hope the indignant people will punish them as they deserve.”

But the autumn elections would continue for another month, and meanwhile McClellan had new orders from Washington, along with Halleck’s offer of 30,000 new troops. He had been pleading for reinforcements for six months; thanks to renewed recruiting, they were at last available in large numbers. But, as McClellan and other Union generals well understood, all reinforcements are not created equal. The recruits he wanted were fresh soldiers who had not yet been organized into regiments and brigades. Such men could be inserted into existing units to replace fallen troops; in this way the new soldiers would quickly mature by learning from their experienced, battle-hardened comrades.

However, owing to political considerations the reinforcements almost always arrived already formed into new regiments, because new regiments created new positions of honor for their newly elected officers and inspired fresh pride for the communities that sent them marching off to war. This argument—form new regiments or fill old ones—would continue for most of the war, with Lincoln in the middle of it. The military men were correct in military terms, and the politicians were correct in political terms. For Lincoln, politics took priority.

Further complicating matters for McClellan was the difficulty of feeding and clothing the troops already with him. Western Maryland was a remote piece of real estate on which to shelter and supply a force that was growing to number more than 100,000 men. Only a small canal connected Washington to Harpers Ferry, and a single strand of railroad ran from Pennsylvania to Hagerstown, in the rear of McClellan’s vast camps. These supply lines were quickly snarled. The Union general John Reynolds complained that many of his men lacked “shoes, tents, blankets, knapsacks, or other clothing.” William Franklin’s corps was short two thousand tents. George Meade reported that “artillery horses and train animals have been literally starving.”

With his seasoned troops still recovering from wounds, his fresh soldiers in need of training, and his entire army poorly supplied, McClellan shrugged off the orders from Halleck and settled down with his wife and year-old daughter in the lovely countryside. “We are having a very quiet & pleasant time,” he wrote to a friend.

Across the lines, General J. E. B. Stuart took a less leisurely approach to the business of war, setting out on another bold dash while the Federals sat motionless. Starting in the foggy dawn of October 9, Stuart led some 1,800 cavalry up the Cumberland Valley to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where he deepened the Union supply problems by looting a major depot. Then he turned east across the mountains and roared back down through Maryland, gathering livestock as he went. After three days’ hard riding, the Rebels recrossed the Potomac to safety, having once again circled the Army of the Potomac.

“It is humiliating, disgraceful,” stormed Gideon Welles. “The Rebels have possessed themselves of a good deal of plunder, reclothed their men from our stores, run off a thousand horses, fat cattle, etc. etc. It is not a pleasant fact to know that we are clothing, mounting, and subsisting not only our troops but the Rebels also.” Lincoln’s reaction was more wry than wrathful: “Three times round and out is the rule,” he said, referring to an early version of baseball. “Stuart has been twice around McClellan. The third time, by the rules of the game, he must surrender.”