Rise to Greatness (7 page)

2

JANUARY

A cold front swept into Washington on the second day of January. Blustery winds rattled the canvas of the soldiers’ tents and raised the dust from dry streets. Behind the winds came freezing temperatures and, intermittently for the next month, every variety of wetness: snow, sleet, rain, fog. Roads around Washington, which seemed always to be in one miserable condition or another, changed from powder to mire, and drivers who had been licking grit from their teeth a few days earlier now found themselves bogged down in a foul, sticky mix of mud and manure. The bad roads were more than just an inconvenience. Mud made it nearly impossible to move the army, with its countless tons of artillery and supplies.

Lincoln braved that day’s chill wind to visit McClellan in his big house on Lafayette Park, taking with him the discouraging wire he had received from Halleck. The president was in a low mood; one adviser who spoke to him that day said that Lincoln permitted himself to wonder what it might mean to have the old United States split into “two nations.… He did not see how the two could exist so near to each other.” Reaching McClellan’s house, he was pleased to find that the worst of the typhoid—high fever, blackened tongue, foul breath—was past. His general in chief seemed “very much better.”

McClellan did not appear upset that Lincoln was dealing directly with the western commanders. Perhaps he was pleased to have the president “browsing” (as McClellan disdainfully referred to Lincoln’s amiable hunts for information) in places other than his own headquarters. For whatever reason, after Lincoln’s visit McClellan gathered his strength to dictate a message, the first he had sent in two weeks, endorsing the president’s advice to Halleck. “Not a moment’s time should be lost,” he wrote.

Lincoln’s communications with Halleck and Buell deepened over the next week. By chattering telegraph, the president and his western generals went back and forth over issues of how and where and especially when their armies would move. Halleck protested that he needed more men, and his men needed more guns. He criticized Buell’s Nashville strategy (“condemned by every military authority I have ever read,” he sniffed). For a time, Buell simply disappeared from telegraph range. “Delay is ruining us,” Lincoln protested, “and it is indispensable that I have something definite.” Exasperated, he ordered the generals to produce a timetable for joint action, but Halleck and Buell ignored him. “It is exceedingly discouraging,” Lincoln admitted to his secretary of war, Simon Cameron. “As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”

Three days after the president’s first visit to McClellan’s home, he traveled there again, this time carrying an infuriating telegram from Buell in which the general declared that he “attached little or no importance” to a campaign into eastern Tennessee. A light snow over an earlier crust of sleet covered the ground, and the rutted side streets were frozen. Lincoln did much of his best thinking while walking, and since he resisted all efforts to surround him with bodyguards, he almost certainly made this trip alone or nearly alone. Dressed in his black cloak and hat, stark against the whiteness of the lawn, the president cut a distinctive figure. “When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly; his long arms and giant hands swung down by his side,” his law partner William Herndon once wrote. “He put the whole foot flat on the ground at once, not landing on the heel; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, and hence there was no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory—catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain, all up and down his person, and thus preventing them from locating.”

McClellan was still weak from his illness, but after his meeting with Lincoln the general again took up his pen, this time to write a spine-stiffener to his old friend Buell. “The political consequences of the delay … will be much more serious than you seem to anticipate,” McClellan warned. He had his own reasons for wanting Buell to be more aggressive: if Buell could get far enough into Tennessee to cut the South’s main east–west railroad, then McClellan could launch his campaign in Virginia without worrying about Rebel reinforcements pouring in from the west. Nevertheless, the young general’s explicit support of Lincoln’s efforts might have been a sign that he was awakening to political reality himself.

Yet when it came to his own conduct and his own command, McClellan was as uncooperative as ever. Despite Lincoln’s encouragement on New Year’s Day, by January 6 the general still had not met with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. When the cabinet convened that day for a discussion with the committee, the radicals from Congress were angrier than before. Ben Wade and the others pressed Lincoln to fire McClellan. They were sure that the general’s Democratic, antiabolition views were the root cause of his army’s failure to do anything more assertive than dig trenches around Washington and march in parades. “A great deal of discussion took place,” Treasury Secretary Chase noted mildly in his diary. Chase, in fact, was one of the most active participants, and he clearly had an agenda of his own.

Lincoln’s cabinet was, in the words of Doris Kearns Goodwin, “a team of rivals,” comprising Lincoln’s vanquished political opponents and leading members of the opposition Democratic Party. It was the embodiment of the clashing fragments of the Union and, like the Union itself, was easily distracted from the crisis of the moment by the chafing of past disputes and by scheming over future rivalries. Others in the cabinet tried to suppress their political ambitions, but Salmon Chase did not. Even while serving in 1862 as one of Lincoln’s most important advisers, Chase was obviously angling to run for the presidency in 1864. “He has got the presidential maggot in his head and it will wriggle there as long as it is warm,” Lincoln observed. Playing the dual role of key official and leading rival kept Chase quite busy. In fact, he was starting to worry that service to Lincoln was a dead weight dragging him down. “He would rather be on the bench of the Supreme Court, or in the Senate,” a confidant reported. “He begins to fear that to reach the presidency, with Seward’s opposition and all the contingencies and very great dangers of managing the finances during this very great crisis, is rather a ‘hard road to travel.’”

An errand Chase ran on that morning of January 6, before the cabinet meeting, provides a vivid example of his conflicted circumstances. He had been working furiously for months to patch up the government’s dire fiscal situation; reluctantly, he had concluded that the United States could no longer afford to tie the value of the dollar to fixed amounts of gold or silver. Until now, U.S. currency had been backed by precious metals, so a person holding a paper dollar could actually trade it at the bank for a dollar’s worth of gold. But with the cost of the war rising exponentially, the supply of precious metal was no longer sufficient. In late December 1861, Chase had informed Congress that by July 1 of the next year the federal debt would be more than $500 million, a greater than fourfold increase in a single year. This news had set off a bank panic and frozen the bond market; the only solution, Chase reluctantly concluded, was to switch to fiat money—so-called greenbacks, supported by nothing but the public’s faith in the government—which the Treasury could print as needed. The fact that Wall Street seemed willing to go along with such a dangerously inflationary plan was a testament to Chase’s reputation and credibility.

A believer in sound money, Chase found the new monetary system unappealing. Even so, once the change was made it dawned on him that people all over the country were about to receive valuable pieces of paper from the government, paper that would feed their families, pay their rent, and appease the tax man. In that case, he thought, why not put his own handsome visage on those pieces of paper, making his face literally the face of prosperity and trustworthiness, putting his picture in the pockets of every American voter? And since design of the new money was his responsibility, he had gone that morning to a photographer’s studio for an official portrait. The photographer posed Chase with his arms crossed over his chest and his face slightly turned from the camera—an image that would soon be the most widely distributed in the country.

Lincoln explained to one confidant that he “had determined to shut his eyes to all these performances” of Chase’s political ambition because the man “made a good secretary.” He well knew what Chase was up to, but could not afford to lose him. “I have all along clearly seen his plan of strengthening himself. Whenever he sees that an important matter is troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man of some influence, he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades the victim … that he would have arranged it very differently.… I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in these schemes, so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.”

Chase was particularly shifty during the cabinet meeting with the joint committee on January 6. First he defended McClellan as “the best man for the place,” who would surely have things moving by now if he hadn’t fallen ill. Then he pivoted to undercut McClellan by suggesting that command of the Army of the Potomac be transferred to a Republican favorite, Irwin McDowell. Supreme command and field command were too much for McClellan, or any one man, to handle, Chase argued. This was a reasonable observation, but Chase’s solution was wildly impractical. McDowell was the general who had failed at Bull Run. The idea that he could be placed in command of the army McClellan had built, or that McClellan would willingly share power, was absurd. But Chase was eager for the support of the pro-McDowell Republicans on the congressional committee, and his suggestion seemed calibrated to please them.

All the talk by Chase and others that day led nowhere. The committee was sent away with only a promise from Lincoln to speak once more with McClellan. But this time, when the president ambled into the general’s house, he was turned away. The general, he was told, was too weak to see him. Whether McClellan had experienced a relapse or was simply fed up with visits from Lincoln is not clear. Little Mac did complain a few days later that “they don’t give me time to recover,” but he seemed fine when the Lincoln boys, Willie and Tad, roamed over to his headquarters the day after their father was rebuffed. They returned with news that McClellan had been out for a brisk ride in the subfreezing cold.

After his unsuccessful attempt to meet with his general in chief, Lincoln delivered his advice on paper. “You better go before the Congressional Committee the earliest moment your health will permit—to-day if possible,” Lincoln counseled McClellan. Still, the general didn’t budge.

*   *   *

About this time, an alarming dispatch arrived in Washington from Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London. Adams warned that the British government would face a wave of pro-Confederate opinion when Parliament convened in January. For months, there had been no official forum outside the British cabinet in which to debate the idea of European intervention. But when the House of Lords met, the matter was likely to be at the top of the agenda, and Adams feared the pressures that would be unleashed. “Nothing but very marked evidences of progress towards success will restrain for any length of time the hostile tendencies” in elite British opinion, Adams warned.

But how and where could Lincoln demonstrate marked evidences of progress? The president pored over the varnished maps that hung on his office wall. Nicolay and Hay, who spent uncounted hours with Lincoln in his office, reported that “no general in the army studied his maps … with half the industry” of the president. And few men could get more from a map than he, a former flatboat pilot, surveyor, and title attorney.

Visitors to the White House often came away with stories of Lincoln’s animated lectures on aspects of the war, delivered while his long, bony fingers traced lines on those maps. The charts showed an immense Confederate territory: the eleven seceded states covered three quarters of a million square miles and stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, from the southern tip of Florida to the northern border of Tennessee. (In addition, Confederate armies were deployed northward into “neutral” Kentucky.) Secretary of State Seward, Lincoln’s frequent companion at the maps, lamented that even sophisticated people underestimated the sheer scope of the Union’s task. They failed “to apprehend that the insurrection has disclosed itself over an area of vast extent, and that military operations, to be successful, must be on a scale hitherto practically unknown in the art of war.”

But to a man who could read them, the maps suggested how the enormous project might be tackled. Like a slab of marble, the South was veined with lines along which it could be pierced and split. These features fell into three types. The first were the mountains of the Appalachian range, a political fault line separating the eastern Confederacy from the west. Because the terrain was unsuitable for plantation agriculture, the settlers in these mountains had no economic interest in slavery, nor did they relish the idea of living in a new nation run by plantation aristocrats. This explained Lincoln’s urgent desire to reach east Tennessee, and do for Unionists there what McClellan had done for the mountain Unionists of western Virginia. “My distress is that our friends in East Tennessee are being hanged and driven to despair, and even now I fear, are thinking of taking rebel arms for the sake of personal protection,” he explained.

The rough dirt roads of the South were of little use as invasion routes: a team of mules could haul a wagon only so far before the animals would eat more than the wagon could hold, and long supply lines over poor roads through hostile territory have always been an invitation to military disaster. Railroads, however, offered a second way of piercing the Confederacy. Unfortunately for the Union, relatively few rail lines had been built from north to south, and those that existed were highly vulnerable to rebel cavalry raids and guerrilla operations.