McClellan, when he learned they were having meetings without him, recovered quickly and attended the second such meeting, with three generals and three cabinet members, on January 13—but he maintained a sullen silence about his plans.
Lincoln, in his frustration with the dilatory McClellan and in his eagerness to make something happen, issued to General McClellan two quite dubious orders. On January 27, 1862, Lincoln issued his General Order No. 1, ordering a “general movement of the land and naval forces…against the insurgent forces” on February 22—an abrupt and bizarre order commanding the whole sweep of the Union force to march forward at once on the same day. And then in another special order, on January 31, he specifically ordered General McClellan to execute his, Lincoln’s, proposed plan of attack on the supply lines of the rebel army out at Manassas Junction.
These orders did seem to have the intended effect: McClellan came forth with his own plan. He proposed to take the army around by the Chesapeake Bay to the east of Richmond and to come up on the rebel capital by way of the rivers and railroads on the peninsula between the York and the James Rivers.
McClellan did not think his president—this amateur, this civilian—should speak of “my” plan for the attack in contrast to his own professional one, but Lincoln did and posed a clearheaded set of questions about the differences between the two “plans.”*30 At another odd meeting—a gathering of the twelve division generals—the vote was eight to four in favor of McClellan’s plan. Lincoln, saying that of course he was not a military man, acquiesced. McClellan, pleased, wrote to his wife that Lincoln was his friend.
Lincoln had acquiesced without being persuaded, so this major campaign, which would be called the Peninsula Campaign and absorb immense energy and attention, went forward without the commander in chief really believing in it. One distinguished military historian says that Lincoln should not have given his grudging approval; that this was the point at which he should have replaced McClellan.
On March 11, 1862, in preparation for McClellan’s departure for the peninsula, Lincoln did remove McClellan from the post of general in chief, leaving him with only the Army of the Potomac under his command. He appointed no one to the vacated post, and instead Lincoln and Stanton, working together in close collaboration, took on the overall command of all the armies for four months, until Henry Halleck was appointed to the general in chief post in July.
Doubtless McClellan forged a remarkable bond with his army—“my” army, he would call it. Some of the forging was manipulated. Bruce Catton gives a description: “A Massachusetts officer noted that when the army took to the road McClellan would remain in camp until the entire column had been formed. Then he would ride to the head of the column, preceded by a staff officer who went galloping along the line crying, ‘McClellan’s coming; Boys! McClellan’s coming! Three cheers for McClellan!’…Loyalty to McClellan was built up in the army as deliberately as loyalty to a leader in a political organization…it came from the top, actively generated by the officers.” Nevertheless we may infer that some of it was real, and so also was McClellan’s love (his word) for this army he had made. McClellan’s claim that he took care “to gain success with the least possible loss” no doubt was one element both in the attachment of the men to him and in his own reluctance to commit to the risk of battle.
When after spending its first six months in parades and reviews around Washington the army prepared to leave for this Peninsula Campaign, its commander addressed it with an exclamation point—“Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac!” In that address the general said, “The patience you have shown, and your confidence in your General, are worth a dozen victories,” to which Lincoln would surely have responded: No, they are not.*31
In early March, just before a spectacular departure for the peninsula, McClellan finally did what Lincoln had been urging him to do all winter and in Special Order No. 1 on January 31 had ordered him to do: McClellan moved upon the rebel army in Manassas and Centreville. In fact, he marched his whole army in battle formation, flags flying, out to the rebel fortifications—but the rebel army had withdrawn, moved south of the Rappahannock. And they had left for McClellan two further embarrassments: clear evidence that their numbers had been much smaller than he had been claiming, and some “guns” threatening Washington that turned out to be logs painted black—the famous “Quaker guns” about which McClellan would be mocked. Nevertheless McClellan would soon be presenting this march on Manassas—a “promenade,” a modern writer calls it—as a notable victory.
Something similar would happen in the first encounter on the peninsula at Yorktown. The Confederate general John B. Magruder, who had talent as a stage manager, directed his mere eleven thousand troops to hurry from place to place, making a show now here, now there, barking orders to nonexistent battalions in the empty woods. So McClellan concluded that the opposing force was huge—which was what he was always inclined to think anyway and one may say what he wanted to believe. Military experts, and the intelligent nonexpert Lincoln, believed he should have attacked, and analysis afterward suggests that, having in fact much larger numbers, he could have prevailed had he done so—another in the long list of McClellan’s missed opportunities.*32
What McClellan did instead was to lay down a siege. “He liked siege warfare, with its slowness, its engineering problems, and its small loss of life,” T. Harry Williams observes. He had studied the siege of Sevastopol; his West Point education and his military and civilian life featured engineering. But the slowly passing days of the siege of Yorktown gave the rebels time to make reinforcements and fortifications to defend Richmond. When McClellan finally did march on Yorktown, the rebel armies had already withdrawn back up the peninsula—this was an “open” siege, with a back door—and once again when the Army of the Potomac marched into an enemy camp, it was deserted, and once again he would nevertheless regard it as a victory.
As the army made its dwarf-size steps toward Richmond, McClellan did not attack, but Confederate general Joe Johnston did, and boldly. In a battle twelve miles from Richmond, McClellan for the first time commanded forces in a battle with significant casualties, and he was unnerved by it. Lincoln would be haunted by the killed and wounded also, and for that as well as other reasons he constantly pressed McClellan to bring the war to the soonest possible victorious conclusion; he was aware of the human cost of every delay. In one message to McClellan Lincoln deplored the “indefinite procrastination” that he perceived in a McClellan proposal. Such postponement of action meant more killed not only in other Union armies but also, because more men died of disease than of bullets, in the Army of the Potomac as well. McClellan would be taking his army into unhealthy swamps that he had not calculated on as he approached Richmond and as he retired to Harrison’s Landing.
Each time McClellan drew near to a decisive military engagement, he had a sudden attack that Lincoln—in perhaps his master trope for McClellan—would describe as “the slows.” Surely there was something rooted in McClellan’s psyche that made all those phantom armies spring up before him and get bigger when the time approached for him to commit to battle: some combination of human attachment to his army; perfectionism about this work of art, his army; fear of defeat that would stain his vanity; and temperamental avoidance of risk.
Among McClellan’s many excuses was the weather. Nicolay and Hay write, “It is characteristic of him that he always regarded bad weather as exclusively injurious to him and never to the other side.” And they then record another of Lincoln’s steadily flowing McClellan-inspired jests: “The President…said of him that he seemed to think that, in defiance of scripture, Heaven sent its rain only on the just and not on the unjust.”
One can count in Lincoln’s Collected Works forty-five messages, long and short, that Lincoln sent McClellan in the nearly five months of the Peninsula Campaign. These messages make an extraordinary record of thorough, clearly reasoned, incredibly patient, and persistent argument trying to bring McClellan to act, to mo
ve, to fight. In the first major communication with the general after his removal to Fort Monroe, Lincoln reminded him that he, Lincoln, had not believed that it was necessary to move all that way when the rebel army had been all winter just twenty-five miles away in Manassas. On April 9, 1862, Lincoln wrote to McClellan:
And, once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting and not surmounting a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.
Lincoln grasped, as McClellan did not seem to grasp at all, the importance of time. A military authority in later years would praise the three lines in which the “unexperienced lawyer” Lincoln summed up the situation—at the outset of the siege of Yorktown—which the professional soldier was constitutionally incapable of realizing. Lincoln wrote to McClellan: “By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you—that is, he will gain faster, by fortifications and re-inforcements, than you can by re-inforcement.”
Lincoln ended that letter with four words in italics that, preceded by a reassurance, summarized the whole correspondence: “I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.”
AFTER MIDNIGHT ON JUNE 28 an exhausted, demoralized, overwrought, and resentful McClellan poured out the first of two insulting messages he wrote to Lincoln in the summer of 1862. His army had been defeated, with many casualties, at the battle called Gaines’ Mill, in which Robert E. Lee’s boldness and McClellan’s loss of nerve had saved Richmond. McClellan’s long telegram to Stanton (obviously to Lincoln as well) explicitly said not only that he was not responsible for the defeat and that it was their fault but also that this “sacrifice” had been deliberate.
[O]ur men…were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers…The loss on both sides is terrible…Had I 20,000 or even 10,000 fresh troops to use to-morrow I could take Richmond, but I have not a man in reserve…If we have lost the day we have yet preserved our honor, and no one need blush for the Army of the Potomac…You must send me very large re-enforcements, and send them at once…
As it is, the Government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result.
I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Government has not sustained this army. If you do not do so now the game is lost.
If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington.
You have done your best to sacrifice this army.
These last two sentences accusing Stanton (and “any other persons in Washington”—that is, Lincoln) of having “done your best” to see this Union army defeated—in effect, of committing treason—so shocked the head of the War Department’s Telegraph Office that he had the deciphered telegram recopied without them, so Lincoln and Stanton did not see the very worst passage. But the rest is bad enough, plain enough: his men had been “needlessly” sacrificed by “the government,” upon whom all blame for the defeat rests.
Lincoln calmly responded by trying to bring McClellan to see the situation more objectively. “Save your army at all events,” said Lincoln, starting off with the most basic point. And then he tried to show the solipsistic young general that there were other fronts. “If you had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington…it is the nature of the case, and neither you or the government that is to blame.”
TELLING THE PRESIDENT WHAT THE WAR’S PURPOSE SHOULD BE
MCCLELLAN’S withdrawal from the line before Richmond is often said to mark the end of the first phase of the American Civil War; Lincoln in response made immensely consequential decisions that, as we will see, changed the war.
When the president came down to Harrison’s Landing on the James River for an examination of the army, McClellan handed him a letter that presumed to tell him what the purpose of the war should be. “The time has come,” McClellan wrote, “when the Government must determine upon a civil and military policy, covering the whole ground of our national trouble.”
McClellan’s letter raised the larger matters that were now coming to the fore. McClellan was a Democrat, and throughout his service in the army he kept up a correspondence with leading Democrats in New York. He was also soft on slavery, and hostile to abolitionists and Radical Republicans. Although some Republicans had eagerly supported him when he first came on the scene, that support had long since turned sour.
For months the dispute about McClellan’s conduct had had a partisan cast. He may not have realized how much Lincoln was his defender in an administration in which most were antagonistic.
He had expressed his views on slavery and the war in western Virginia and, in muted terms, about respecting “property,” but at that point, in the first summer of the war, he would have had wide support. In this letter to Lincoln a year later, he made a much more extended and explicit statement:
This…War…should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. It should not be a War looking to the subjugation of the people of any state…Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.
Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relation of servitude…A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.
The letter was so much a political statement that it would be reprinted and used in 1864 as a campaign document in McClellan’s presidential campaign.
Lincoln read the letter on the spot, made no comment, thanked McClellan, put it in his pocket, and never mentioned it again. And back in Washington he made some decisions that were altogether at odds with McClellan’s recommendations, as we shall see.
McCLELLAN LETS POPE GET OUT OF HIS SCRAPE BY HIMSELF
LINCOLN COULD OVERLOOK snubs to himself. He could respond with patient reasoning to the insulting charge in McClellan’s postmidnight June 28 telegram (called the Savage Station telegram because of the place of its sending). He could quietly pocket McClellan’s presumptuous letter from Harrison’s Landing on July 7. But then came an episode to which his pardon would not extend, in which he would explicitly describe McClellan’s conduct as “unpardonable,” and which would evoke his wrath. This would be McClellan’s failure to send support to General John Pope’s army, which Robert E. Lee decisively defeated, in the Second Battle of Bull Run in northern Virginia, at the very end of August 1862. Lincoln suspected McClellan of deliberately declining to support Pope.
While McClellan had been going through his long buildup to bad news before Richmond in the East, there had been some good news in the West, a series of Union victories that made February through May 1862 the first positive period for the harried Union president. When in the summer it appeared that McClellan would not ride triumphantly into Richmond after all, and the able new Confederate commander Robert E. Lee threatened Washington, Lincoln brought one of the victorious generals from the West, John Pope, to head an Army of Virginia, newly created by amalgamating old units, including many of the troops that had been commanded by McClellan.
To McClellan’s dismay, units from the Army of the Potomac were transferred to Pope’s command. The new general in chief Halleck (who, to be sure, McClellan also soon detested) ordered McClellan, the favorite general of conservatives and Democrats, his Peninsula Campaign now defunct, to bring what remained of his army as rapidly as he could to northern Virginia, to help to protect Pope.
Linc
oln perceived that McClellan, as usual dilatory, in this case had his slowness increased by his contempt for his fellow Union army general. McClellan’s modern biographer writes that “had General McClellan willed it, 25,000 reinforcements would have been at General Pope’s call in time for…the second and decisive day of the Second Battle of Bull Run.” When Lincoln in the telegraph office wired McClellan for news of the battle, McClellan responded with a statement of his preferred course of action that included this phrase, understandably infuriating to Lincoln: “to leave Pope to get out of his own scrape, and devote ourselves to securing Washington.” A newsman in the telegraph office wrote that he had never seen Lincoln so “wrathful,” and that evening Lincoln told John Hay that “it really seemed to him that McC. wanted Pope defeated.”
AN EXCESS OF MAGNANIMITY?
LINCOLN’S SECRETARIES, who rarely hint at a fault in the great man they served, would produce, about his dealing with McClellan, this near criticism, grounded to be sure in a virtue: “Mr. Lincoln certainly had the defects of his great qualities. His unbounded magnanimity made him sometimes incapable even of just resentments. General McClellan’s worst offenses had been committed against the president in person. The insulting dispatch from Savage’s Station and the letter from Harrison Landing, in which he took the president to task for the whole course of his…administration, would probably have been pardoned by no ruler that ever lived.”
There would be more to the story after that summer of 1862; Lincoln’s dealings with McClellan were not yet over. In the rush of severely exacting circumstances in the first week of September 1862, Lincoln, much against his inclination, returned the command of the now combined armies to McClellan.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 23
