President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  On the Union side there was another wrinkle: the ninety-day enlistment of the first set of volunteers. One finds in General McDowell’s official report of the battle, looking back on August 4 at the whole event, this stunning passage:

  On the eve of the battle the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment of Volunteers and the battery of Volunteer Artillery of the Eighth New York Militia, whose term of service expired, insisted on their discharge. I wrote to the regiment as pressing a request as I could pen, and the honorable Secretary of War, who was at the time on the ground, tried to induce the battery to remain at least five days, but in vain. They insisted on their discharge that night. It was granted; and the next morning, when the Army moved forward into battle, these troops moved to the rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon.

  In the next few days, day by day I should have lost ten thousand of the best armed, drilled, officered, and disciplined troops in the Army. In other words, every day which added to the strength of the enemy made us weaker.

  The effect was not only the melting away of those who left but also the fading away in battle of those who stayed, whose term was almost up and whose reluctance to be shot understandably increased as it approached. These men were not easy to command. Another telegram from McDowell, this one on the morning of July 22 from Fairfax Court House, described the situation:

  Many of the volunteers did not wait for authority to proceed to the Potomac, but left on their own decision. They are now pouring through this place in a state of utter disorganization. They could not be prepared for action by to-morrow morning even were they willing. I learn from prisoners that we are to be pressed here to-night and to-morrow morning, as the enemy’s force is very large and they are elated. I think we heard cannon on our rear guard. I think now, as all of my commanders thought at Centreville, there is no alternative but to fall back to the Potomac, and I shall proceed to do so with as much regularity as possible.

  As we have seen, Lincoln had made the decision on April 14, announced on April 15, to call for 75,000 volunteers to the state militias for the ninety-day enlistment that the law provided. Presumably he and General Scott and whoever else participated in that decision expected then that ninety days would be enough to put down the rebellion. Just forty-eight hours later, on April 17, it was clear that Virginia would join the rebellion, and he and they might have made a different estimate both of the number and of the time it would take.

  But as we noted in Chapter 5, the ninety days was not a number he pulled out of the air; it was specified in the 1795 Militia Act, shaped in response to President Washington’s coping with the Whiskey Rebellion. Ninety days, which the law specified, had been enough to cope with a “rebellion” of Pennsylvania farmers over whiskey, but as Bull Run showed, it would not be enough to put down this rebellion of more than a third of a nation over slavery. Lincoln had already on May 3, without a specific statutory basis, authorized an increase of 22,714 in the regular army and of 18,000 in the navy. And he had asked Congress in its special session—meeting from July 4 until August 8, with Bull Run on July 21 a sharp chop in the middle—to authorize 400,000 volunteers for three years. Congress, which retroactively endorsed all those extraordinary actions of the president except the suspension of habeas corpus, and granted all his wartime requests, raised the number to 500,000, “the largest citizens’ army yet known to history.” Congress approved the Army Bill on July 18; Lincoln signed it on Black Monday, July 22. The earlier acceptance of the law’s mere ninety days, like the decision to ask for only 75,000 men, had been based on the estimate in that first brief moment, which was quickly revised and by July 22 altogether exploded.

  After the June 29 consultation, Lincoln had ordered McDowell to attack at Bull Run on July 9. There were delays. When the troops finally started the march on July 16, there were more delays; the men were not trained for cross-country marching, and stopped to pick blackberries, and got very tired. For all that, when the battle came, they did not do as badly as would be reported in the initial shock of defeat.

  They had the bad luck that the battle came on a Sunday, which meant that senators and congressmen and journalists and ladies in their summer dresses were free to come to see it. These observers were all green too; they did not yet know that war was not a spectator sport, and when the retreat began, they mingled with it and caused a traffic jam on their hurried way back to Washington. And what these spectators saw, and reported to the world, was not the fighting but the fleeing—notoriously the correspondent for the Times of London, William Russell, who acquired from his coverage the nickname “Bull Run.”

  Lincoln had shown in the struggle for Kentucky that he could perceive and evaluate the political elements, in comparison to the military, more shrewdly than the West Pointers Davis and Polk. But in this case perhaps the sheer military considerations that Scott was telling him about deserved particular attention: these men were not trained. McDowell was to write: “I wanted very much a little time. All of us wanted it. We did not have a bit of it.”

  The strong political reasons for making an early attack had to do with Northern opinion, which was still mostly unified since the shock of the fall of Sumter. That would not last, and the momentum would diminish. And the pressure to act was intense. In the middle of May the Confederate capital had moved from remote Montgomery to nearby Richmond, which if you were a congressman, a senator, or an eastern seaboard journalist looked like easy prey now that all those volunteers had swarmed into the militias: “Forward to Richmond!”

  On June 26 Horace Greeley’s widely read newspaper, the New York Tribune, essential to the Republican cause, carried this proclamation at the top of its editorial page:

  THE NATION’S WAR CRY

  Forward to Richmond. Forward to Richmond!

  The rebel Congress had scheduled its first Richmond session for July 20; the Tribune seized on that for a deadline:

  The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there the 20th of July.

  BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY

  The Tribune kept carrying this war cry on its editorial page every day, and other papers picked up versions of it. “On to Richmond” passed into Civil War folklore.*27

  When on July 21 the Union army not only did not go “on to Richmond” but fell back from Bull Run, retreated from Fairfax Court House, and came tumbling back into Washington, the response included shock, dismay, despair, and blame. Edwin Stanton wrote to his former chief Buchanan about the “imbecility” of the Lincoln administration.

  In an overwrought letter Greeley patronized Lincoln, exalted his own importance, indirectly accused Lincoln (said Nicolay and Hay) “of criminal indifference,” and proposed that the Union “make peace with the Rebels.” Lincoln did not reply to Greeley’s letter.

  Walt Whitman wrote of these days:

  [I]t is certain that the talk among certain of the magnates and officers and clerks and officials everywhere, for twenty-four hours in and around Washington after Bull Run, was loud and undisguised for yielding out and out, and substituting the southern rule, and Lincoln promptly abdicating and departing…One of our returning colonels express’d in public that night, amid a swarm of officers and gentlemen in a crowded room, the opinion that it was useless to fight, that the southerners had made their title clear, and that the best course for the national government to pursue was to desist from any further attempt at stopping them, and admit them again to the lead, on the best terms they were willing to grant. Not a voice was rais’d against this judgment, amid that large crowd of officers and gentlemen.

  Lincoln was only four and a half months into his role as president when, on the night of July 21, it fell to him to cope with this wholly unexpected, humiliating, and devastating defeat.

  Up to that point Lincoln’s life had been a series of steep ascensions to new plateaus, developing himself anew repeatedly. He had known defeat, but only personal and party defeat; he had known sorrow, but only personal sorrow. What he dealt with now was too
vast (to borrow his own phrase) for the sorrows and defeats of merely personal life. This was the night when the civilian politician became fully a war leader—a leader of a nation at war, a commander of immense and embattled armies (as they would become) in war.

  Lincoln’s transformation had had anticipations in those overwhelmingly concentrated days of high policy decision about Fort Sumter and Pickens and the calling out of the militia; he had had a taste of battle in the Baltimore riots; he had had to make decisions about remote events through the fog of distance and war in Missouri. But this was the moment when the full weight of decisions he made came home to his doorstep.

  The report in the New York World said:

  All the forenoon fugitive soldiers have come straggling into the city. They were like lost sheep without a shepherd. Notices at length appeared at the different hotels, calling upon members of the various regiments to assemble at such and such a place, at an appointed hour, the object being to discover how many and who were missing. Meantime the returned soldiers clustered about the hotels, and some in their weariness lay down on doorsteps, or any place they could find where the rain did not touch them.

  A NIGHT LIKE THIS CAN NEVER AGAIN RETURN

  WHEN THE PRESIDENT learned that Bull Run was a horrendous defeat, at about six-thirty on the evening of July 21, he walked immediately to the War Department to read the confirming telegram. He conferred with General Scott and with several eyewitnesses to the battle. And so began a sleepless night. At two in the early morning of July 22 a wire from the War Department summoned General McClellan, the hero of the battles in West Virginia, to “come hither without delay” to organize a new army, now composed of three-year regiments. Lincoln and Scott worked through the night, and Lincoln probably began that night to compose a list of steps to be taken that would be given the date July 23.

  That memorandum, written in pencil in his own hand, with a couple of additions on July 27, shows by its tone and its content Lincoln’s response to the defeat. It reflected a civilian’s inexperience with military matters, no doubt, but at the same time it also showed resolve, and the beginnings of a conceptual grasp on the scope of the war.

  July 23. 1861.

  1. Let the plan for making the Blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible despatch.

  2. Let the volunteer forces at Fort-Monroe & vicinity—under Genl. Butler—be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.

  3. Let Baltimore be held, as now, with a gentle, but firm, and certain hand.

  4. Let the force now under Patterson, or Banks, be strengthened, and made secure in it’s possition.

  5. Let the forces in Western Virginia act, till further orders, according to instructions, or orders from Gen. McClellan.

  6. [Let] Gen. Fremont push forward his organization, and operations in the West as rapidly as possible, giving rather special attention to Missouri.

  7. Let the forces late before Manassas, except the three months men, be reorganized as rapidly as possible, in their camps here and about Arlington.

  8. Let the three months forces, who decline to enter the longer service, be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.

  9. Let the new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible; and especially into the camps on the two sides of the river here.

  Years later a Republican functionary would report that on Black Monday, July 22, when he visited Lincoln’s office, Lincoln burst out: “John, if hell is not any more than this, it has no terror for me.” Throughout the war there would be reports of Lincoln’s privately anguished responses. But on Black Monday he also took action. He signed the bill for the enlistment of 500,000 men. Three days later he signed another bill for an additional half million. He tightened the blockade of Southern ports and strengthened forces in the Shenandoah Valley and at Fort Monroe in Virginia. He rapidly gathered forces in Washington. Most important, he began training and restoring morale in the army that McDowell had led at Bull Run. For that purpose the hero of the West Virginia battles, George McClellan, arrived in Washington on July 26. On July 27 the president would add these items to his memorandum.

  When the foregoing shall have been substantially attended to—

  1. Let Manassas junction, (or some point on one or other of the railroads near it;); and Strasburg, be seized, and permanently held, with an open line from Washington to Manassas; and and [sic] open line from Harper’s Ferry to Strasburg—the military men to find the way of doing these.

  2. This done, a joint movement from Cairo on Memphis; and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee.

  Walt Whitman would write, in Specimen Days, about Lincoln’s response to Bull Run:

  [W]hatever returns…a night like that can never again return. The president, recovering himself, begins that very night—sternly, rapidly sets about the task of re-organizing his forces, and placing himself in positions for future and superior work. If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall—indeed a crucifixion day—that it did not conquer him—that he unflinchingly stemm’d it, and resolv’d to lift himself and the Union out of it.

  THE LAST BREATH OF THE UNION—THREE OR FOUR TIMES

  THIS FIRST DEFEAT was by no means the last or the worst that the Union forces would suffer; it was not even the last or the worst they would suffer on this very spot. A year and a month later there would be a second battle at Bull Run, and another precipitous retreat by a Union army, and the casualties would be much worse. (Union casualties at First Bull Run were 2,950; at Second Bull Run, 13,830.) And there would be other and much worse defeats, and bloody battles in which it would be hard to say who won, and battles that counted as victories but had Union army casualty lists much longer than those of Bull Run. But Bull Run would be the first, the harbinger, the announcement, the alarm.

  Whitman would conclude his paragraph on Bull Run with a parenthetical observation: “The fact is, the hour was one of the three or four of those crises we had then and afterward, during the fluctuations of four years, when human eyes appear’d at least just as likely to see the last breath of the Union as to see it continue.”

  In October 1861 Union arms would see defeat in General McClellan’s northern Virginia operation—a botched effort on the Potomac—at a place called Ball’s Bluff. This would be a smaller affair than Bull Run, with fewer casualties, but one death would hit Lincoln personally. Edward Baker, his friendly rival from the Seventh Congressional District in Illinois, the friend for whom he named his second boy, Eddie, who had moved to Oregon and become a senator, and who had introduced him on Inauguration Day, had been shot dead. To this day he is the only sitting U.S. senator to be killed in action in the armed services.

  Lincoln had already had the shock of another personal loss in the earliest days of the war, on May 24, in a Union army movement to secure Alexandria. His young friend E. E. Ellsworth was waylaid and shot while on a sudden quixotic venture: he was removing the rebel flag from the top of the Principal Hotel, where it had been flaunting its treason within sight of the nation’s capital. The hotel owner shot Ellsworth as he came down the stairs with the flag, and was in turn shot dead. Lincoln wrote the first of his eloquent and sensitive letters of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents.

  The deaths of Ellsworth and Baker would be harbingers for him personally of the casualty lists to come, which would reach a dimension that in those first months neither he nor anyone else could have anticipated. And Lincoln, the unmilitary western politician rather abruptly put in this office, would become the commander in chief who issued the calls for volunteers, eventually instituted a draft, sent men into battle, appointed and dismissed their generals, and again and again in the telegraph office read the reports of defeat and the counting of the dead.

  The history of the war would be the experience of Bull Run multiplied and repeated, of h
igh hope followed by devastating disappointment; of dark days followed by reviving hope; of repeated expectation of an ending that did not come; of repeated, staggering increases in destructiveness.

  Lincoln’s firm response to this first and shocking defeat at Bull Run revealed to the world, and possibly to himself, the resolution that he would need and would draw upon during four years of lost lives, lost battles, sometime opposition, and lack of courage from the public, even from his own generals.

  After the reverses of 1861, the late winter and spring of 1862 would revive hope. There would be victories, particularly in the West—Forts Henry and Donelson on the rivers, captured by a new general named Grant—and in Missouri and along the Atlantic coast. Union hopes were so high that in April the new secretary of war ceased recruiting. But in that same month, after exactly a year of war, a western battle once again redefined the war’s magnitude. As the reports came in from the battle called Shiloh in the North and Pittsburg Landing in the South, the nation began to comprehend some of the scale to which this war would extend. Within the battle itself fortunes had been reversed. It had been a near defeat, which a recovery by U. S. Grant would turn into victory. It nonetheless represented a leap in deadliness for both sides, a first glimpse of the scale of what was coming, 13,047 Union dead.