Rise to Greatness (6 page)

The president shook the last hand at about two
P.M.
, and then the final visitors descended from the East Room window to the White House lawn. Beyond the gates, the holiday continued long into the night, with parades and cannon fire and barrels of beer. Lincoln’s right arm ached, and his thoughts were dark. As he told a trusted friend the next day, he was, for the first time, beginning to consider “the bare possibility of our being two nations.” But he had sworn a solemn oath to preserve the Constitution and, as the coming year would prove, he did not give up easily. So Lincoln walked with his ungainly stride down the long central corridor of the White House and climbed the stairs to the second floor. With his boys lost joyfully in the celebration outside, there was nothing to keep him from the office, and though he was exhausted, it was time to go to work.

*   *   *

Lincoln’s first task as the year began was to get the army moving. So much hinged on the idea of action. Action would raise the mood of the public. It would create a unifying sense of purpose in the North, and that, in turn, would strengthen congressional support for the administration and unfreeze the market for government bonds. Action would stave off foreign intervention, as the European powers waited to judge the results. Action would begin to push the front lines southward, out of the border states, and thus would bind Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri more tightly to the Union.

The question was not what to do, but how to make it happen. At the embarrassing cabinet meeting on New Year’s Eve, Bates had urged Lincoln to take charge of the army himself, rather than defer to military men who were just as inexperienced in large-scale warfare as their commander in chief was. “We have no general who has any experience in the handling of large armies—not one who has ever commanded 10,000 under fire,” Bates observed. He suggested that the president appoint a personal staff of professional soldiers, “two or three or four,” who could translate his thinking into crisp military orders. Anyone who refused to fall in line should be cashiered. “By law, [you] must command,” Bates summed up, speaking as one lawyer to another. “The Nation requires it, and History will hold [you] accountable.”

As a matter of constitutional theory, Bates was on solid ground. The president was commander in chief. But Bates’s prescription ignored important political realities, and therefore his advice was of limited value to a man who ate, slept, and breathed political realities. For Lincoln, the military battlefield was inseparable from the political battlefield; he drilled this idea into his aides until they could channel the president’s philosophy. “Every war is begun, dominated, and ended by political considerations,” explained John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s faithful secretaries. “Without a nation, without a Government, without money or credit, without popular enthusiasm which furnishes volunteers, or public support which endures conscription, there could be no army and no war.… War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent.”

George McClellan was a colossal political reality, built up during the previous months into a hero for millions of Americans. He had created the Army of the Potomac, and now he was his soldiers’ idol. The Constitution might say that he was Lincoln’s subordinate, but political reality decreed him to be an independent power whose influence rivaled—and perhaps exceeded—Lincoln’s own. Elected by the smallest plurality in American history, Lincoln was “a minority president,” as he put it himself, while McClellan was “a majority general.” And despite Lincoln’s insistence on action, his senior commander was determined not to be rushed.

True, McClellan’s deliberate pace had begun to tarnish his star, but Lincoln’s popularity was battered as well. He had infuriated ardent Republicans by removing Frémont, the party’s original standard-bearer, from command in Missouri. Lincoln had outraged bellicose patriots by apologizing to Great Britain over the
Trent
affair. He was too conservative for radical Republicans and too radical for conservative Democrats.

Worst of all, the country was losing hope. Public pessimism was quickly eroding the president’s power. Congressman Henry L. Dawes, of Massachusetts, writing to his wife as the new year dawned, described the widespread lack of faith in Lincoln’s administration: “Times are exceedingly dark and gloomy—I have never seen a time when they were so much so. Confidence in everybody is shaken to the very foundation— The credit of the Country is ruined—its arms impotent, its Cabinet incompetent, its servants rotten, its ruin inevitable.”

In such a weakened condition, Lincoln lacked the leverage necessary to budge an obstacle as weighty as General McClellan and unstick his motionless armies. No matter what Bates might believe, two or three or four presidential aides with West Point credentials would hardly alter that situation. Even so, fate had offered Lincoln a tiny opening: McClellan’s grave illness.

Disease was rampant in filthy wartime Washington, where churches were hastily converted into hospitals by laying rough planks across the pew backs to serve as infirmary floors. Soldiers were dying at a shocking rate: “Forty or fifty per day are carried off,” wrote one observer—the equivalent of a regiment wiped out every three weeks. The capital city was a cauldron of epidemics. Measles: on that New Year’s Day, in a makeshift ward not a mile from the White House, a hundred young men from a single regiment, the 11th Maine, were near death. Smallpox: “There are cases of it in almost every Street in the City,” wrote a diarist as the disease leaped from unvaccinated soldiers into the parlors of the city’s civilians. “There is said to be over 400 cases in private families.” Typhoid fever: this was McClellan’s scourge, a deadly bacterial infection spread through drinking water contaminated by human waste. No one was safe from its ravages in a city where the watershed was crowded with tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers living in unsanitary camps. Even at the White House, where drinking water poured from modern indoor plumbing, the pipes that fed the faucets drew straight from the unclean Potomac.

The general’s sudden illness caught Lincoln and his cabinet off guard, and to make matters worse, McClellan’s chief of staff (General Randolph Marcy, who happened to be McClellan’s father-in-law) was also down with the fever. If these two men died, McClellan’s secret plans might die with them, and the extent of Lincoln’s ignorance about military preparations would become obvious not just to his cabinet and the congressional joint committee, but to the whole country. Yet here as well was an opportunity for Lincoln: with his general in chief at death’s door, he had an excuse to bypass McClellan and open direct communication with key generals at the next level in the chain of command. It was the only tool the president had, so he grabbed it.

His first attempts were simple enough. Immediately after the New Year’s Eve cabinet meeting, Lincoln had sent telegrams to the generals commanding U.S. armies in the west. He opened his message by informing them that “General McClellan is sick.” Staff officers at the War Department could easily have delivered this news, but doing so himself let Lincoln assert his authority. He did so briskly in his next sentences, asking whether his generals were cooperating with each other. As he put it to Major General Henry W. Halleck, commanding in St. Louis, referring to Brigadier General Don C. Buell in Louisville: “Are General Buell and yourself in concert?”

Now, working in his office on New Year’s Day, Lincoln read their extremely discouraging answers. “There is no arrangement between General Halleck and myself,” Buell reported. Halleck’s telegram concurred: “I have never received a word from General Buell. I am not ready to co-operate with him. Hope to do so in a few weeks.” No communication whatsoever: not a word, not even ready for a word, and this from the two men whose forces were charged with subduing the Confederate heartland. Halleck closed his telegram on a patronizing note. “Too much haste will ruin everything,” he cautioned the president.

In the U.S. Army, Henry Wager Halleck—author of treatises on topics ranging from military strategy to international law; distinguished lecturer (“The Elements of Military Art and Science”) at the Lowell Institute in Boston—was known as Old Brains. However, Old Brains was completely wrong. Too much caution was far more dangerous than too much haste, for the air was going out of the Union. Lincoln took a clean sheet of his official letterhead and picked up his pen. In short order, he composed replies to the two western generals.

One of Lincoln’s most striking talents was his ability to condense large ideas into strong, concise prose. The messages he wrote on January 1, 1862, are textbook examples. Though only a few sentences long, they distilled many months of study and consultation. “My dear General Halleck,” he began in his firm, tight script. After advising Halleck that McClellan should not be disturbed, he reached the point of his missive, saying that he was “very anxious” to have the western armies move soon—and not just move, but move together. Lincoln proposed that Halleck send a force down the Mississippi toward Columbus, Kentucky, where Rebel forces under Leonidas Polk had accumulated 143 artillery pieces of various vintages and descriptions at a fortress on the bluffs. Confederates had proclaimed Columbus “the Gibraltar of the West”; it was the left-flank anchor of their long defensive line strung thinly across the crucial Bluegrass State. Further, Lincoln proposed that, while Halleck moved on Columbus, Buell should take his Army of the Cumberland south from Louisville to engage the other end of the Confederate western line. The president wanted very much for Buell’s troops to liberate the Union loyalists in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

Both missions were essential to Lincoln’s basic strategy for defeating the Rebels. His ideas had begun to take shape under the influence of McClellan’s predecessor, the old warhorse Winfield Scott. When Lincoln arrived in Washington as president, he found Scott elderly, overweight, and creaky, but still in possession of the sharp strategic mind that had once inspired the Duke of Wellington to call him “the greatest living soldier.” Lincoln and Scott had much in common: Whigs by temperament, they were both reared in border slave states (Scott was a Virginian). Both were tall and imposing; both were avid readers and sly humorists. Crucially, both men believed that secession lacked popular support in the South. The Confederacy, they felt, had been hatched by wealthy slave owners to advance their interests at the expense of ordinary Southerners. On the basis of this conviction, Scott formulated a strategy for smothering the rebellion by blockading Southern ports and sending an army to open the Mississippi, the vital artery linking North and South. With these objectives achieved, secession fever would burn itself out and Southern loyalty would reemerge. Months after Scott left Washington, the president still had in mind the twin goals of opening the Mississippi River by capturing Columbus, and bolstering Southern Unionists in eastern Tennessee.

But Lincoln’s thinking had clearly ripened through his reading and reflection on military strategy, because he also outlined an additional concept that would be essential to Union victory against the sprawling South. The Rebels had a relatively small population and a very long border to defend. The North had far more men, and more guns to arm them, and more farms to feed them. The way to bring these advantages to bear, the president had realized, was to send multiple Union armies to strike simultaneously along the Confederate line, forcing the undermanned Rebels to concentrate against one attack, thus leaving another point undefended. In his letter to Halleck, he suggested that “a real or feigned attack upon Columbus from up-river,” in coordination with Buell’s march into Tennessee, would compel the Rebels to choose. If the Confederates defended Columbus, they would be strung too thinly to hold Nashville. Conversely, if the Rebels shifted troops from Columbus to strengthen Nashville, they would be “throwing Columbus into our hands.” Then he noted, “I sent General Buell a letter similar to this.”

Lincoln was walking on thin ice here, and he knew it. As a civilian whose military experience consisted of a few weeks’ service in the Illinois state militia, who was he to instruct Old Brains and McClellan’s chum Buell in fine points of strategy? So he added a note of deference: “You and he will understand much better than I how to do it.” But Lincoln reverted to a commanding note as he closed, showing just what he thought of Halleck’s warning about too much haste: “Please do not lose time in this matter. Yours, very truly, A. Lincoln.”

The president wrote a third note on New Year’s Day, this one to McClellan. Someone had told him, perhaps during the reception in the Blue Room, that the bedridden general was, through the fog of his fever, quite nervous about the congressional joint committee. Eager to get his side of things on the record quickly, McClellan had planned to meet with Senator Wade’s inquisitors at the outset of their work. But then he had fallen ill, and now the committee was busy investigating the war effort without him—and not, McClellan feared correctly, with friendly intent. “My dear general,” Lincoln began, “I hear that the doings of the Investigating Committee, give you some uneasiness.” He continued soothingly: “You may be entirely relieved on this point. The gentlemen … were with me last night; and I found them in a perfectly good mood.”

This wasn’t exactly true, but even Abraham Lincoln would bend the truth when he absolutely needed to. And particularly at this point, he would say almost anything to spur his generals into action.