Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Lincoln missed the more open communication he had enjoyed with Winfield Scott, who—though he was too old and sick to command troops—was a deeply experienced soldier. Scott was also genuinely respectful of the president and willing to help him gain an understanding of the enormous military task ahead. Now, with Scott gone from the capital and McClellan shutting him out, Lincoln began to seek advice from an informal network of men outside the chain of command, among them Montgomery Meigs, the master organizer who had engineered the Capitol dome project; Gustavus Fox, the can-do assistant navy secretary; and John Dahlgren, another navy man, who shared Lincoln’s passion for new inventions, especially those involving guns. These were men more likely to solve a problem than to be one.

  The president recognized, though, that he would have to develop and rely on his own judgments about how the war should be fought. Accordingly, the self-taught Lincoln decided to undertake a crash course in military tactics and strategy. Virtually everything he knew well, from prose style to politics, from arithmetic to law, he had learned through solitary reading, personal experience, conversation, and deep thought. He ordered a selection of books on military science from the stacks at the Library of Congress and began to work through them. Though “his reading was laborious and by no means rapid,” one associate recalled, the absorbency of his mind made him a quick study. “He needed fewer ‘explanations’ than any other man I ever knew.”

  * * *

  Hovering over everything on this fine January morning, the burden touching all others, was the problem of slavery. Everyone who greeted Lincoln that day had strong opinions about the topic, which in turn fed equally strong disagreements. The passage of a century and a half since 1862 has joined the Civil War and the demise of slavery as tightly as thunder and lightning. But as that year began, only the most zealous believed that the war must settle the future of slavery. Most felt, as the nation’s founders had, that the key to holding the Union together was to avoid the issue as much as possible. Lincoln’s generation of leaders had grown from childhood to maturity under the constant threat of disunion; they scarcely knew a time when American politics was not entering, enduring, or recuperating from a sectional crisis. Those earlier dramas—over Missouri statehood, nullification, the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act—had been resolved short of an all-out war on slavery. Why must this be different?

  Lincoln himself would eventually look back on the opening phases of the war and recall just how foggy the role of slavery had been. In his Second Inaugural Address, he said: “All knew that [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war,” loading the word “somehow” with mystery. The Confederacy sought to “strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” slavery, he said, “while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” In other words, the South was fighting to defend the slave system, but it didn’t follow that the North was united by a desire to destroy slavery. This distinction, often confusing to later generations of Americans, was second nature to many of Lincoln’s visitors. “Neither party expected” a war of great “magnitude,” Lincoln continued, and “neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.” The result we now take for granted—a blood-soaked struggle leading to emancipation—was, at the start of 1862, still an “astounding” notion, as Lincoln put it.

  Some of the members of Congress passing through the Blue Room to shake Lincoln’s hand that day were drawn to that astounding possibility with all the fervor of crusaders. For men like Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, George Julian of Indiana, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and Henry Wilson and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, abolition was a moral imperative, and the war was its hour of fulfillment. But there were other men, like Orville Browning of Illinois and Charles Wickliffe of Kentucky, for whom that notion was appalling. They were certain that a war to free the slaves was a war most Northerners would reject, and they had sound reasons for that belief. Browning’s Illinois, for example, banned free blacks from settling within the state’s boundaries. Slaveowners in Wickliffe’s Kentucky, meanwhile, held 225,000 blacks in bondage. McClellan’s words to an influential political leader land brutally on modern ears, but he was voicing a wish widespread in the early days of the war when he wrote: “Help me dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him.”

  Lincoln faced no greater challenge than that of holding these vastly differing parties together long enough for the war’s own nature to reveal itself. To him, human history was an inexorable current that sometimes meandered, sometimes raged, but ultimately found its own course. And although it was his oft-spoken view that history was flowing away from slavery toward freedom, he believed that his most important responsibility was to keep the Union from breaking up short of that destination.

  So while abolitionists pressed him for a war on slavery and conservatives pleaded with him to submerge the issue, Lincoln was steering a middle way, guided by two principles. First, his actions must be consistent with the Constitution; this would show Northern conservatives that he was not a radical, and simultaneously protect his flank against Chief Justice Taney. In Lincoln’s view, this principle, however sensible, severely limited his options, because the Constitution specifically recognized the existence of slavery and the right of states to maintain it. His second principle was that he would work through his options starting with the most cautious initiatives, because he understood that with each step he took on this volatile issue, there was no going back. Overreach could be fatal, so he would have to make his way forward very carefully, even as the world around him was aflame. Lincoln never claimed to “comprehend the whole of this stupendous crisis,” nor to “fully understand and foresee it all,” he once said. “And that being the case, I can only go just as fast as I can see how to go.”

  One small step involved the tiny state of Delaware, in which lived approximately eighteen hundred slaves, most of them in a single county on the Maryland border. Lincoln had recently decided to put the full force of his power and persuasion into the seemingly small initiative of freeing Delaware’s slaves. This hardly seemed like a radical idea: Delaware did not share any borders with the Confederacy, and its legislature had once come within a single vote of abolishing slavery. Lincoln believed that if he could coax Delaware to free its slaves, the result would be the snowball that starts the avalanche. Maryland would soon follow suit, and then the other border slave states, Missouri and Kentucky, would do the same. This would sap Confederate morale while galvanizing support for the North among antislavery Europeans. The tide of the war would turn, the Constitution would be preserved, and slavery would be on the path to extinction—all because of Delaware.

  The trouble was that Delaware did not care for abolitionists, a fact made perfectly clear in the 1860 election, when the state chose for its senators “two of the most truculent proslavery Democrats on Capitol Hill.” But Lincoln was undeterred, and was crafting a tiptoe process of gradual emancipation in which the federal government would pay up to $500 for each slave set free. He planned to propose that Delaware immediately free all slaves over the age of thirty-five and also declare freedom for all children born to slaves henceforth. When every slave in the state had reached the age of thirty-five, the gradual process would be complete, although Lincoln suspected that total emancipation would come more quickly once partial emancipation got under way. “If Congress will pass a law authorizing the issuance of bonds for the payment of the emancipated Negroes in the border states,” he told a friend, “Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri will accept the terms.” After that, the gradual death of slavery would be inevitable. Delaware, he believed, was “the initiative to hitch the whole thing to.”

  The plan seemed eminently reasonable to Lincoln. But these were not reasonable times. Many of those who tolerated slavery immediately attacked his proposal as an unprecedented federal intervention in what was properly a state-level issue. Meanwhile, antislavery forc
es in Congress and the press grew increasingly outraged by what they saw as Lincoln’s pussyfooting. “Timid, vacillating, & inefficient” was Senator Chandler’s assessment of the president’s strategy for dealing with slavery. When Senator Wade told the president on New Year’s Eve that he was “murdering [the] country by inches,” he was giving voice to the feelings of many.

  * * *

  Lincoln shook the last dignitary’s hand; then, precisely at noon, as The New York Times reported, “the gates were thrown open to the public, and the immense multitude made a simultaneous rush for the reception room.” Scrambling up the mansion driveway, jostling for advantage as they passed through the doors, the crowd slowed near the East Room, where the Lincolns had relocated to greet the general public. Care had been taken to protect Mary’s recent purchases. Protective cloths were laid over the East Room carpets, marking a path from the doors, past the president, to a flight of temporary steps through a tall window and down to the lawn.

  Attorney General Bates fretted about the crowd “overwhelming the poor fatigued President,” and by the end of the reception Lincoln’s right hand was indeed numb and trembling. In two hours, the president had shaken hundreds if not thousands of hands. “There certainly never was a man who [shook hands] with the celerity and abandon of President Lincoln,” wrote one observer. “He goes it with both hands, and hand over hand, very much as a sailor would climb a rope. What is to the satisfaction of all is, that he gives a good honest, hearty shake, as if he meant it.” Lincoln’s aides were constantly trying to limit the time he spent meeting office seekers, grieving mothers, delegations of churchmen, and other visitors, but the president understood keenly the value of these encounters. Further, he scoffed at fears for his safety. “Anything that kept the people themselves away from him he disapproved,” said Hay.

  Lincoln knew that these were the citizens who paid the taxes and sent the soldiers. If there was pain to endure and sacrifice to be made to save the Union, her citizens must carry the cost. And he was confident they would, if only he could explain the need for the war and show them some results. No generals and no strategies would save the Union if these ordinary people did not choose to save it, and so Lincoln tried to help them see that their power—not his—was at stake. Not only did the citizenry have the right to elect a government, they should be able to trust that the losing voters would not destroy the nation in protest. This principle, above all others, was worth fighting for, and it was at the heart of Lincoln’s conviction that the Union must not ransom its future to an aristocracy of slave owners.

  Having made his own way up from a dirt-floored hovel, Lincoln believed that economic opportunity, the right to rise in the world, was the foundation of political liberty. Slavery, for Lincoln, was the ultimate repudiation of the link between effort and advancement. Owning slaves, he once remarked to a friend, was the sign of “the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labour.” But in a healthy society, Lincoln believed, nothing was above labor—neither wealth, nor aristocracy, nor dictatorial power. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” Lincoln said. “This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system which opens the way to all—gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty.” These good citizens, the president believed, must never surrender their power.

  On that first day of the new year, Abraham Lincoln shook those outstretched hands until his fingers trembled because with the public on his side he might be able to untangle this horrible knot: master the army, hold Europe at bay, tame the Congress, coordinate the government, rescue the Treasury, launch an offensive, hold on to the border states, solve the problem of slavery, and somehow preserve his own sanity. Without public support, the country was finished. Lincoln knew he must move quickly—but never faster than the public could tolerate. He must move boldly—but never more vigorously than the people would sustain. He was driven by a simple theory, one friend summed up: “That but one thing was necessary, and that was a united North.”

  The president shook the last hand at about two P.M., and then the final visitors descended from the East Room window to the White House lawn. Beyond the gates, the holiday continued long into the night, with parades and cannon fire and barrels of beer. Lincoln’s right arm ached, and his thoughts were dark. As he told a trusted friend the next day, he was, for the first time, beginning to consider “the bare possibility of our being two nations.” But he had sworn a solemn oath to preserve the Constitution and, as the coming year would prove, he did not give up easily. So Lincoln walked with his ungainly stride down the long central corridor of the White House and climbed the stairs to the second floor. With his boys lost joyfully in the celebration outside, there was nothing to keep him from the office, and though he was exhausted, it was time to go to work.

  * * *

  Lincoln’s first task as the year began was to get the army moving. So much hinged on the idea of action. Action would raise the mood of the public. It would create a unifying sense of purpose in the North, and that, in turn, would strengthen congressional support for the administration and unfreeze the market for government bonds. Action would stave off foreign intervention, as the European powers waited to judge the results. Action would begin to push the front lines southward, out of the border states, and thus would bind Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri more tightly to the Union.

  The question was not what to do, but how to make it happen. At the embarrassing cabinet meeting on New Year’s Eve, Bates had urged Lincoln to take charge of the army himself, rather than defer to military men who were just as inexperienced in large-scale warfare as their commander in chief was. “We have no general who has any experience in the handling of large armies—not one who has ever commanded 10,000 under fire,” Bates observed. He suggested that the president appoint a personal staff of professional soldiers, “two or three or four,” who could translate his thinking into crisp military orders. Anyone who refused to fall in line should be cashiered. “By law, [you] must command,” Bates summed up, speaking as one lawyer to another. “The Nation requires it, and History will hold [you] accountable.”

  As a matter of constitutional theory, Bates was on solid ground. The president was commander in chief. But Bates’s prescription ignored important political realities, and therefore his advice was of limited value to a man who ate, slept, and breathed political realities. For Lincoln, the military battlefield was inseparable from the political battlefield; he drilled this idea into his aides until they could channel the president’s philosophy. “Every war is begun, dominated, and ended by political considerations,” explained John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s faithful secretaries. “Without a nation, without a Government, without money or credit, without popular enthusiasm which furnishes volunteers, or public support which endures conscription, there could be no army and no war.… War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent.”

  George McClellan was a colossal political reality, built up during the previous months into a hero for millions of Americans. He had created the Army of the Potomac, and now he was his soldiers’ idol. The Constitution might say that he was Lincoln’s subordinate, but political reality decreed him to be an independent power whose influence rivaled—and perhaps exceeded—Lincoln’s own. Elected by the smallest plurality in American history, Lincoln was “a minority president,” as he put it himself, while McClellan was “a majority general.” And despite Lincoln’s insistence on action, his senior commander was determined not to be rushed.

  True, McClellan’s deliberate pace had begun to tarnish his star, but Lincoln’s popularity was battered as well. He had infuriated ardent Republicans by removing Frémont, the party’s original standard-bearer
, from command in Missouri. Lincoln had outraged bellicose patriots by apologizing to Great Britain over the Trent affair. He was too conservative for radical Republicans and too radical for conservative Democrats.

  Worst of all, the country was losing hope. Public pessimism was quickly eroding the president’s power. Congressman Henry L. Dawes, of Massachusetts, writing to his wife as the new year dawned, described the widespread lack of faith in Lincoln’s administration: “Times are exceedingly dark and gloomy—I have never seen a time when they were so much so. Confidence in everybody is shaken to the very foundation— The credit of the Country is ruined—its arms impotent, its Cabinet incompetent, its servants rotten, its ruin inevitable.”

  In such a weakened condition, Lincoln lacked the leverage necessary to budge an obstacle as weighty as General McClellan and unstick his motionless armies. No matter what Bates might believe, two or three or four presidential aides with West Point credentials would hardly alter that situation. Even so, fate had offered Lincoln a tiny opening: McClellan’s grave illness.

  Disease was rampant in filthy wartime Washington, where churches were hastily converted into hospitals by laying rough planks across the pew backs to serve as infirmary floors. Soldiers were dying at a shocking rate: “Forty or fifty per day are carried off,” wrote one observer—the equivalent of a regiment wiped out every three weeks. The capital city was a cauldron of epidemics. Measles: on that New Year’s Day, in a makeshift ward not a mile from the White House, a hundred young men from a single regiment, the 11th Maine, were near death. Smallpox: “There are cases of it in almost every Street in the City,” wrote a diarist as the disease leaped from unvaccinated soldiers into the parlors of the city’s civilians. “There is said to be over 400 cases in private families.” Typhoid fever: this was McClellan’s scourge, a deadly bacterial infection spread through drinking water contaminated by human waste. No one was safe from its ravages in a city where the watershed was crowded with tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers living in unsanitary camps. Even at the White House, where drinking water poured from modern indoor plumbing, the pipes that fed the faucets drew straight from the unclean Potomac.