President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  And then the failure of the Army of the Potomac before Richmond would bring another reversal, another dark day. In March the huge army drilled and named by McClellan had made a grand display of its departure from the Washington area, vastly more impressive than the tromp across the bridges on the way to First Bull Run. Taking the army of 112,000 and all its horses and guns and equipment in four hundred boats of every description down the Potomac to the bay, and along the bay down to Fort Monroe, was said by an English observer to be “the stride of a giant.” But thereafter McClellan’s progress up the peninsula toward Richmond would be the waddle of a dwarf. As it came up the peninsula, the army would be defeated and turned back by the new Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee, in a series of battles that came to be called the Seven Days. Northern morale plummeted. Lincoln realized that recruiting had to be renewed but feared the effect of a presidential call. So he maneuvered to have Northern governors urge him to call for more volunteers. In a letter to Seward on June 28, 1862, intended to be shown to Union governors, he presented his view of the current state of the war and included one of the great Lincolnian sentences. It is remarkable alike for its moral rigor, its literary grace, and its lawyerly covering of all contingencies: “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or ’till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.”

  The mythic picture of Lincoln as a giant of brooding kindliness, of charity for all and malice toward none, turns out, on investigation, to be truer than many myths about great persons. But it is only half of the more complex and remarkable truth. Lincoln was indeed a man of extraordinary generosity. But at the same time he displayed a formidable resolve, including a willingness to employ the relentless use of force. He was a statesman managing the immense coercive machinery of a nation-state fighting for its life in a profoundly destructive war. He discovered or developed in himself the strength of will and tenacity required for executive leadership and high command in his own non-Napoleonic way.

  It is true that in those first April days, and later too, he found in the Constitution—or really in the logic of the situation—the necessity to exercise powers beyond those that had been exercised by any other president or that were explicitly provided in law. And to be sure, his enemies would call Lincoln a tyrant, and in after years scholars would debate whether to attach to him the word “dictator” (a debate that has now happily subsided). But if one reads through his letters and messages and examines the reports of his conduct, one finds that Lincoln’s resolution and strength of will did not spring from, or lead to, mindless stubbornness or egotistical willfulness. Lincoln’s high resolve arose, rather, from the response of a rigorously dutiful intellect to a moral imperative that he found in the objective situation. A strong resolve was of great importance, but only as it rested on the stability of truth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On Holding McClellan’s Horse

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the humorous citizen from the raucous backwoods politics and argumentative civil law courts of the “least militarized of Western societies,” suddenly in 1861 had thrust into his large hands the management of a giant modern war. That meant, among a great many other things, that he had the exacting duty of coping with an outburst of generals.

  The United States had come out of a republican tradition that was explicitly opposed to standing armies. No general in the most recent American war, the Mexican War, had commanded a force even as big as McDowell’s green troops that crossed the Potomac bridges headed for Bull Run. The United States had trained few military leaders; when civil war came, nearly a third, including some of the ablest, joined the rebellion.

  Among the experienced military leaders who remained, as we have seen, was the great old figure Winfield Scott. There then came onto the scene a brilliant well-trained younger man, a protégé of Scott, George McClellan. McClellan floated into the capital on the afternoon of July 26, 1861, accompanied by glowing reports of his career, his talents, and his victories in western Virginia.

  But McClellan proved to be a master not of battle but of delay. He would proceed to test Lincoln’s forbearance by the longest series of snubs, slights, slurs, affronts, demands, complaints, missed opportunities, and failures to follow orders by any supposed subordinate during the whole of his presidency. Lincoln patiently put up with a great deal from the young general in the effort to extract victories in the field. But those victories never seemed to happen; trying to get George McClellan to lead men into battle proved to be like pushing a noodle.

  Lincoln had a crushing awareness, as McClellan did not seem to, of the enormous public stake in achieving victories sooner rather than later. The pent-up yearning for results brought forth what must have been the largest collection of imaginatively pointed tropes, right up to the borderline of sarcasm, that Lincoln ever uttered about any person. The pressure of Lincoln’s controlled exasperation with this extremely difficult young general would have its outlet in the steady whistle of escaping wit.

  McCLELLAN AND LINCOLN

  LINCOLN AND MCCLELLAN both came rather suddenly into great power in 1861, and neither man had much preparation for the immense responsibility that fell to him. McClellan’s task, although much more narrowly focused than Lincoln’s, nevertheless resembled and overlapped with it. He would be the shaper as well as the first and longest-serving commander of the Army of the Potomac, and for a time of all the Union armies. He and Lincoln had a great deal to do with each other—more, we may guess, than either of them wanted, at least fifty-seven meetings in the six months McClellan was in Washington. And then—to look ahead—McClellan would be nominated in 1864 by the Democrats to run against Lincoln for president. In August of that year both men thought that on March 4, 1865, McClellan would succeed Lincoln as president.

  George McClellan was an able man, intelligent, much better educated and more widely traveled than Lincoln; by reputation at least he was a good organizer and administrator. He was young, only thirty-four when the war started. (He would not yet be forty when, after the election of 1864, his career on the national stage would be over.) He came from a cultured doctor’s family in the upper reaches of Philadelphia society, went to a good private school, and had been a success at everything he had done: he was second in his class at West Point, did honorable service in the Mexican War, was singled out to study European armies and the Crimean War, was given plum army assignments, and then, after resigning his commission, became one of the highest-paid railroad executives in the country. (In 1858 he had loaned his private railroad car to Senator Douglas in his Illinois Senate campaign against Lincoln.) When war broke out, the three most populous states, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, sought him out as commander of their militias. While commanding Ohio’s troops he had won victories in western Virginia, the only victories at first the North could celebrate. McClellan, summoned in a 2:00 a.m. telegram in the bad hours after Bull Run, was an obvious choice to play a central role in the rapidly expanding U.S. Army.

  And McClellan began right away to do what was needed: to make an army out of the dispirited troops after Bull Run. He cleaned out the loiterers on Washington streets and brought them back into the army. He gave the army a name—the Army of the Potomac—and began to give it spirit, morale, pride. He became proud of the men, and they became proud of him.

  McClellan and Lincoln would respond quite differently to a sudden ascension to prominence and power. The higher McClellan rose, the more it went to his head; the higher Lincoln rose, the weightier he felt his duty to be.

  McClellan’s ascent was more abrupt, and the deference given him more unalloyed. The day after his arrival in Washington in late July 1861, he wrote to his wife: “I almost think that if I were to win some small success now I could become dictator or anything else that might please me.” At a state dinner in those heady first days, the British ambassador Lord Lyons said to a French dignitary who had been speaking to McClellan, “You are aware that you are talking with the next President of t
he United States?” When the remark was repeated to McClellan, he smiled.

  He wrote to his wife: “Who would have thought when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?” That he was called upon to save the country, or had already saved it, would be a recurrent theme for the next year and a half.*28

  Lincoln wrote, “I shall do nothing in malice,” and he pretty nearly succeeded; McClellan’s letters to his wife express his disdain for everyone in a position over him and for every rival to him, starting right away with his benefactor and superior General in Chief Winfield Scott.

  The seventy-five-year-old Scott, who had been an American war hero before George McClellan was born, had been McClellan’s sponsor; he had been the chief guest at McClellan’s wedding to Mary Ellen in Calvary Church in New York in May 1860, and had been the key figure in his rise since the war started. And yet no sooner had McClellan taken his command in Washington than he began to snub Scott and write contemptuous remarks about him. Scott was a “perfect imbecile” who “understands nothing, appreciates nothing, and is ever in my way” “the great obstacle…either a traitor or incompetent” “the most dangerous antagonist I have.”

  General Scott, loaded not only with honors but also with years and pounds and infirmities, felt himself repeatedly undercut by his “ambitious junior,” who was swirling around the capital casting up plans and demands and phony threats without consulting “the nominal General-in-Chief of the Army.”

  Commander in Chief Lincoln had to deal with the wounded ego of General Scott on the one side and the inflated ego of General McClellan on the other. On October 31, 1861, Scott wrote to Secretary of War Cameron resigning his command, indirectly addressing the president, “who has treated me with distinguished kindness and courtesy,” and on November 1 he retired. He was replaced as general in chief not by Henry Halleck, whom Scott wanted, but by George McClellan, who would combine that overall job with continuing to command the Army of the Potomac. When Lincoln asked whether combining the two jobs might be a “vast labor,” McClellan coolly answered, “I can do it all.”

  George McClellan had won his victory over General Scott. But he had not won any victory over General Beauregard, or General Johnston, or any general on the other side in the war.

  McClellan’s pattern with Scott would be the pattern with other authorities and rivals: Stanton, when he became secretary of war (“the most unmitigated scoundrel”);*29 Halleck, when he became general in chief (“the most stupid idiot I ever heard of”); and Irwin McDowell, when he became a rival general (“a scoundrel a liar & a fool who in seeking to injure me has killed himself”). One could decorate the page with McClellan’s epithets for all the cabinet, both individually and collectively.

  In September 1862, after he had been restored to the command of his army, he wrote to his wife about his enemies, meaning not Robert E. Lee and the rebel army but Stanton and Halleck: “It is something of a triumph that my enemies have been put down so completely.” Two days earlier he seemed to consider any victory over the Confederate army a secondary matter, a possible addition to his victory over his primary enemies: “my enemies are crushed, silent & disarmed—if I defeat the rebels I shall be master of the situation.”

  One would be hard put to name any comparable words and acts in Lincoln’s career. In the 1850s, as a rising Republican, he did feel a personal competition with Senator Stephen Douglas, mainly as a result of contesting views of public policy but with a flavoring of personal rivalry as well. Most of that sort of thing, mild as it was, was put aside in his presidency—except for some wry remarks that fall well short of being mean-spirited.

  Shortly after McClellan was made general in chief, succeeding Scott, Lincoln, Seward, and Hay (according to Hay’s diary) went to McClellan’s house; a servant said the general was attending a wedding and would return soon. After the three had waited about an hour, McClellan did return, and “without paying any particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up stairs, passing the door of the room where the President and Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half-an-hour and sent once more a servant to tell the general they were there, and the answer [‘cooly’ scratched out] came that the general had gone to bed.”

  John Hay’s diary entry concluded: “Coming home I spoke to the President about the matter but he seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” In another of these episodes that point was explicit: Lincoln waited with a general and the governor of Ohio for McClellan to keep a stated appointment—and waited and waited and finally said, “Never mind. I will hold McClellan’s horse if he will just bring us successes.”

  The root of Lincoln’s conduct was not solely his modesty and lack of ego; it was also—or rather primarily—his concentration on the immense national purpose of which he was the instrument. What Lincoln dealt with was too vast for mere personal pride. If McClellan will bring us victories, he might have said, then I will overlook repeated snubs and hold a dozen horses. Deference to me is not the point; victory is the point; a preserved and reborn United States of America is the point.

  PHANTOM ARMIES

  VANITY, rudeness, and malice were not, however, McClellan’s most distinctive vices as a commander; many other leaders are guilty of those vices. It was Lincoln, unusually free of all three, rather than McClellan, who was the exception on those counts among human beings who have been pushed up to vertiginous levels of power.

  McClellan had another pair of vices that, linked together, were more decisively crippling to him as a leader. His readings of the reality he faced were sharply skewed, and he balked at the risk of making decisions.

  The most distinctive of McClellan’s deficiencies was his everlasting self-deception about the size of the armies he faced. After the war, with Confederate records available, scholars could settle the matter: he always said the army he faced was larger than it really was, and he always underestimated his own force in comparison to it.

  This central delusion started right away, upon his arrival in Washington in the summer of 1861. In a letter he ostensibly addressed to General Scott (he actually sent it by messenger to President Lincoln, instructing him to read it “attentively”), he insisted that Washington was in “imminent danger.” He said that he had “information from various sources” that the Confederate army out at Manassas had 100,000 men threatening the capital, and that if he were General Beauregard, he would attack the Union forces. On September 13, in a letter to Secretary of War Cameron, he wrote that “the enemy probably have 170,000!” In fact, the peak strength of the Confederate field army facing Washington in these months was less than 45,000.

  Through that winter of 1861–62 the newly named Army of the Potomac, encamped around Washington, grew to be the biggest and best-equipped army in American history to that point. When the Peninsula Campaign began in March 1862, and the army and McClellan began their slow movement toward Richmond, his overestimates of the Confederate armies went with him all the way, until, as he approached Richmond, he believed them to number 200,000; in fact, they never numbered more than 85,000.

  Parallel to this inflation of the opposing force was a deflation of his own. “With the figures for his own forces McClellan could also do amazing things; here his forte was subtraction.” “The normal sick, the normal absent on leave or without leave, and the normal number in the Guard House—every military command has men so classified every day, cannot help it and expects it. But McClellan subtracted all the ineffectives.” This mathematical wizardry meant that McClellan always needed reinforcements.

  This trait of McClellan’s was an ongoing stimulus to Lincoln’s powers of satirical imagination: “Sending men to that army is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard; not half of them get there.” “The president told me,” wrote Orville Browning in his diary for July 25, 1862, “that if by magic he could reinforce McClellan with 100,000
men today he would be in ecstasy over it, thank him for it, and tell him he would go to Richmond tomorrow, but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”

  LINCOLN TRIES TO MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN

  AT THEIR FIRST MEETING on July 27, 1861, Lincoln asked McClellan for a war plan, and just a week later the general provided one—a plan to end all plans, a plan to end the war in a swoop: 273,000 men under his command, 100,000 in reserve, “such an overwhelming strength, as will convince all our antagonists…of the utter impossibility of resistance.” McClellan wrote to his wife, “I shall carry this thing on ‘en grand’ and crush the rebels in one campaign.”

  So McClellan set about drilling and reviewing and parading his impressive army, living at 15th and H, riding about on his horse Daniel Webster, and dining out in Washington. All through the good fighting days of autumn Lincoln and Washington and the North waited for McClellan to attack and win victories, but it did not happen. The conscientiously self-educating president, during the winter of quietude on the Potomac, began to read some military strategy for himself. When, in late December, George McClellan came down with typhoid fever, it meant that both the commander of the biggest army in the East and the general of all the Union armies were out of commission.

  On January 10, therefore, President Lincoln called a council of war, mingling generals and cabinet members. In this setting Lincoln made, according to General McDowell, another of his canonical wry remarks about McClellan, saying that if McClellan was not going to use the Army of the Potomac, he, Lincoln, would like to borrow it.