The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

by Shelby Foote

  The words had a Stantonian ring, which Pope explained long afterwards by identifying the Secretary himself as their author. At any rate, whoever wrote them, the effect was something other than the one that had been intended: particularly among the men the undersigned general addressed. They found the comparison odious, and they resented the boasting tone in which it was made. “Five Cent Pope,” they dubbed their new commander, while old-time regulars recalled a parody that had made the army rounds some years ago, when he issued oversanguine reports of success in boring for artesian water on the bone-dry plains of Texas:

  Pope told a flattering tale

  Which proved to be bravado

  About the streams which spout like ale

  On the Llano Estacado.

  McClellan’s supporters of course resented him, too: Fitz-John Porter for example, who declared that Pope had “written himself down [as] what the military world has long known, an ass.… If the theory he proclaims is practiced you may look for disaster.”

  Beyond the lines, where the address enjoyed wide circulation, the Confederate reaction combined contempt and amusement. Reports that this new spread-eagle opponent was heading his dispatches “Headquarters in the Saddle” prompted a revival of the old army jibe that he had his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be.

  By the time Pope’s flamboyant address was issued in mid-July, Lincoln had been down to the Peninsula and back. Between the two boat-rides, going and coming, he not only made a personal inspection of the Army of the Potomac and questioned its chief and subordinate generals, but he also made up his mind about a matter he had been pondering ever since his visit to Winfield Scott three weeks ago—a command decision, involving this and all the other armies of the Union.

  Within two days of his July 1 plea for 50,000 men, with which to “retrieve our fortunes” after the blood-letting of the Seven Days, McClellan doubled the ante; 100,000 would now be needed, he declared. Lincoln replied on the 4th that any such figure “within a month, or even six weeks, is impossible.… Under these circumstances the defensive for the present must be your only care. Save the army—first, where you are, if you can; secondly, by removal, if you must.” He added, perhaps ironically: “p.s. If at any time you feel able to take the offensive, you are not restrained from doing so.” Once more he was losing patience fast. Sending troops to McClellan, he said, was like trying to shovel fleas across a barnlot; so few seemed to get there. Also, there were alarming rumors as to the condition of the men the general already had. Lincoln decided to see for himself. Boarding a steamer on the night of July 7, he reached Harrison’s Landing late the following afternoon and rode out at once with the army commander for a sundown inspection of the camps.

  Apparently to his surprise he found the men in good condition and high spirits—though the latter could be accounted for, at least in part, as a reaction to seeing the President on horseback. For one thing, an observer wrote home, there was the imminent danger that his long legs “would become entangled with those of the horse … and both come down together.” Occupied as he was in the attempt to control his mount, which seemed equally nervous, he had trouble tipping his tall hat in response to cheers that were redoubled when the difficulty was seen. “That arm with which he drew the rein, in its angles and position resembled the hind leg of a grasshopper—the hand before, the elbow away back over the horse’s tail.… But the boys liked him,” the soldier-observer added. “In fact his popularity with the army is and has been universal. Most of our rulers and leaders fall into odium, but all have faith in Lincoln. ‘When he finds out,’ they say, ‘it will be stopped.’ … God bless the man and give answer to the prayers for guidance I am sure he offers.”

  If guidance was what he was seeking he could find it right there alongside him, astride Dan Webster. Less than three weeks ago McClellan had requested permission to present his views on the state of military affairs throughout the country; Lincoln had replied that he would be glad to have them—preferably in a letter, he said—if their presentation would not divert too much of the general’s time and attention from his immediate duties. So tonight, when they returned to headquarters, McClellan handed the President a letter “covering the whole ground of our national trouble” and setting forth the conditions under which he believed the struggle could be won.

  The rebellion, he said, had now “assumed the character of a war,” and “as such … it 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 in any event. It should not be at all a war upon population, but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” This last was a point he emphasized, since “a declaration of radical views” in this direction would “rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” More strictly within the military province, he advised concentration as the guiding rule. “The national force should not be dispersed in expeditions, posts of occupation, and numerous armies, but should be mainly collected into masses, and brought to bear upon the armies of the Confederate States. Those armies thoroughly defeated, the political structure which they support would soon cease to exist,” and the southern people, unembittered by depredations, would turn against the willful men who had misled them out of the Union and sue at once for peace and reëntry. So he saw it. However, no matter what “system of policy” was adopted, he strongly urged the appointment of a general-in-chief, “one who possesses your confidence, understands your views, and who is competent to execute your orders.” He did not ask that post for himself, he said; but he made it clear that he would not decline the reappointment, since he was “willing to serve you in such position as you may assign me,” including this one. In closing he added a final explanation and disclaimer: “I may be on the brink of eternity, and as I hope forgiveness from my Maker I have written this letter with sincerity toward you and from love for my country.”

  Lincoln took it and read it through, with McClellan standing by. “All right,” he said, and put it in his pocket. That was all. Apparently he had not come down here in search of guidance.

  What he had come for, it developed, was a look at the present condition of the army and some specific answers to a specific question which he put the following day to the five corps commanders: “If it were desired to get the army away from here, could it be safely effected?” Keyes and Franklin replied that it could and should be done. The other three thought otherwise. “It would be ruinous to the country,” Heintzelman said; “We give up the cause if we do it,” Sumner said; “Move the army and ruin the country,” Porter said. Once the questioning was over, Lincoln and the generals took a glass of wine together and the President got ready to go back to Washington.

  McClellan was upset: particularly by the evidence that the Administration might order him to evacuate the Peninsula. After seeing Lincoln off next morning, he wrote his wife that he feared the President had some “paltry trick” up his sleeve; his manner, he said, “seemed that of a man about to do something of which he was ashamed.” For a week the general brooded and delivered himself of judgments. Lincoln was “an old stick, and of pretty poor timber at that,” while Stanton was “the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard, or read of.” He believed he saw which way the wind was blowing: “Their game seems to be to withhold reinforcements, and then to relieve me for not advancing, well knowing that I have not the means to do so.” Accordingly, in mid-July he wrote to his friend William H. Aspinwall, asking the New York transportation tycoon to be on the lookout for a job for him.

  Lincoln meanwhile had made up his mind to act on the command decision which he had been considering for weeks. All through the previous autumn, old General Scott had held out in Washington for as long as he could, putting up with McClellan’s snubs and digs for the sake of Halleck, who was on his way from California.
It was Scott’s hope that Old Brains would be there to take his place when he retired as general-in-chief. But the way was long and the digs were sharp; the old man gave up before Halleck got there, and McClellan got the job. Since then, the contrast in accomplishments East and West seemed to reinforce Scott’s original opinion, which he repeated when the President came to West Point on the eve of the Seven Days, Lincoln saw merit in the recommendation, but he thought he would have a talk with Halleck before he acted on it. Back in Washington in time for the outbreak of the Seven Days, he wired the western commander: “Please tell me, could you make me a flying visit for a consultation without endangering the service in your department?”

  Halleck did not want to come, and said so. Even if he did, he added, “I could advise but one thing: to place all the [eastern] forces … under one head, and hold that head responsible.”

  Refusal was always provocative for Lincoln; in the course of the war, several men were to learn that the surest way to get something from him was to pretend they did not want it. He almost made up his mind, then and there. Down on the Peninsula, however, the matter was more or less cinched by McClellan himself. His Harrison’s Landing letter, an exegesis of the conservative position, was the strongest possible proof that its author was not the kind of man to fight the kind of war Lincoln was rapidly coming to believe the country was going to have to fight if it was going to win. Returning to Washington on the night of July 10, he had Stanton send a wire to Corinth next morning, which left the recipient no choice in the matter: “Ordered, that Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck be assigned to command the whole land forces of the United States as General-in-Chief, and that he repair to this capital as soon as he can with safety to the positions and operations within the department under his charge.”

  There were delays; Halleck did not arrive for nearly two weeks, being occupied with the incidentals of transferring his command. The delay was hard on Lincoln; “I am very anxious—almost impatient—to have you here,” he wired. Down on the Peninsula, McClellan was spared for nine days the shock of hearing that his old post had gone to a rival. Then he read of it in a newspaper. “In all these things,” he wrote his wife, “the President and those around him have acted so as to make the matter as offensive as possible. He has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling, and I cannot regard him as in any respect my friend. I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow if he dared to do so. His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings than those of contempt.”

  This was going to be a harder war from here on out, and Lincoln knew it. He knew it because he was going to make it so. In fact, he was going to make it just as hard as he had to, and he said as much quite frankly to anyone who asked him. Most particularly, despite conflicting advice from McClellan and men like him, it was going to be harder on civilians. Of the four actions which the general had said “should [not] be contemplated for a moment”—1) confiscation of property, 2) political execution of persons, 3) territorial organization of states, and 4) forcible abolition of slavery—the first and second had already been carried out with governmental sanction, the third was in the legislative works, and the fourth was under urgent consideration.

  The second of these was the most obviously harsh, and for that reason should be the most obviously effective in securing obedience to occupation rule. So Benjamin Butler reasoned, at any rate, when he reached New Orleans and found that the national ensign, prematurely raised over the Mint, had been ripped from its staff by the mob. “They have insulted our flag—torn it down with indignity,” he notified the War Department. “This outrage will be punished in such manner as in my judgment will caution both the perpetrators and abettors of the act, so that they shall fear the stripes if they do not reverence the stars in our banner.” As good as his word, Butler found a man still wearing a tatter of the outraged bunting in his buttonhole, brought him before a drumhead court, and carried out the resultant sentence by hanging him in public from a window of the building where the crime had been committed.

  It worked about as well as he had expected. The sight of one man dangling by his neck from the eaves of the Mint sobered the others considerably. Fear, not reverence, was what Butler had wanted, and he got it—at least from the men. The women were another matter. In them he saw no signs of fear, and certainly none of reverence. In fact, they missed no chance to show their contempt for the blue-clad invaders. Passing them on the street, they drew their skirts aside to escape contamination, or else they walked straight ahead, taking their half of the sidewalk out of the middle, and forced oncoming Yankees to step off into the mud. The climax came when one of them, taking careful aim from an upstairs window, emptied a slopjar onto the head of Farragut himself. Butler retaliated with a general order, directing “that hereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”

  At home and abroad, the reaction was uproarious. Beauregard made Butler’s order the subject of one of his own: “Men of the South! shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters and our sisters be thus outraged by the ruffianly soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat, at their pleasure, the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse, friends, and drive back from our soil those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties!” Overseas, Lord Palmerston remarked: “Any Englishman must blush to think that such an act has been committed by one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race.” In Richmond, before the year was out, Davis branded Butler a felon, an outlaw, an enemy of mankind, and ordered that in the event of his capture “the officer in command of the capturing force do cause him to be immediately executed by hanging.”

  Southerners and their blushful friends abroad were not the only ones offended by the cock-eyed general’s zeal. Pro-Union men of the region he controlled found that they too came under his strictures, particularly in economic matters such as the seizure of cotton and the freezing of foreign funds, and they were equally vociferous in protest. But Lincoln had little use or sympathy for them. If these riders on the ship of state thought they were “to touch neither a sail nor a pump, but to be merely passengers—deadheads at that—to be carried snug and dry throughout the storm, and safely landed right side up,” they were mistaken. He gave them a midsummer warning that the voyage was about to get rougher.

  “The true remedy,” he said, switching metaphors, “does not lie in rounding the rough angles of the war, but in removing the necessity for war.” This they could accomplish, he replied to one protestant, by bringing Louisiana back into the Union. Otherwise, “it is for them to consider whether it is probable I will surrender the government to save them from losing all. If they decline what I suggest, you scarcely need to ask what I will do. What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or would you prosecute it in future with elder-stalk squirts charged with rosewater? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied?” The questions were rhetorical, and he closed by answering them: “I am in no boastful mood. I shall do no more than I can, and I shall do all I can, to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination. I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”

  Already he had sent an official observer, a Maryland senator, down to New Orleans to look into the situation. But when the senator reported that there was indeed much harshness and irregularity (Butler’s brother was getting rich on confiscated cotton, and the general himself had been given the nickname “Spoons,” implying considerable deftness in the execution of his duties) as well as much disturbance of the master-slave relationship by the enlistment of Negroes in labor battalions, Lincoln was even more forthright in his statement of conditions and intentions: “The people of Louisiana—all intelligent people everywhere—know
full well that I never had a wish to touch the foundations of their society or any right of theirs. With perfect knowledge of this they forced a necessity upon me to send armies among them, and it is their own fault, not mine, that they are annoyed.” Here again the remedy was reëntry into the Union. “And might it not be well for them to consider whether they have not already had time enough to do this? If they can conceive of anything worse … within my power, would they not better be looking out for it?…. I am a patient man, always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance. Still, I must save this Government if possible. What I cannot do, of course, I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”

  The unplayed card was emancipation. Mindful, so far, of his inaugural statement: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so,” Lincoln had resisted all efforts to persuade him to repudiate his words. He resisted mainly on practical grounds, considering the probable reaction in the border states; “We should lose more than we should gain,” he told one Jacobin delegation. Not only had he refused to issue such a proclamation as they were urging on him, he had revoked three separate pronouncements or proclamations issued by subordinates: one by Frémont, one by Cameron, and recently a third by Hunter in South Carolina. In the instance of the latter revocation, however, he had shown which way his mind was turning in mid-May: “Whether it be competent for me, as Commander in Chief of the army and navy, to declare the slaves of any state or states free, and whether, at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself.”