Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The general’s sudden illness caught Lincoln and his cabinet off guard, and to make matters worse, McClellan’s chief of staff (General Randolph Marcy, who happened to be McClellan’s father-in-law) was also down with the fever. If these two men died, McClellan’s secret plans might die with them, and the extent of Lincoln’s ignorance about military preparations would become obvious not just to his cabinet and the congressional joint committee, but to the whole country. Yet here as well was an opportunity for Lincoln: with his general in chief at death’s door, he had an excuse to bypass McClellan and open direct communication with key generals at the next level in the chain of command. It was the only tool the president had, so he grabbed it.

  His first attempts were simple enough. Immediately after the New Year’s Eve cabinet meeting, Lincoln had sent telegrams to the generals commanding U.S. armies in the west. He opened his message by informing them that “General McClellan is sick.” Staff officers at the War Department could easily have delivered this news, but doing so himself let Lincoln assert his authority. He did so briskly in his next sentences, asking whether his generals were cooperating with each other. As he put it to Major General Henry W. Halleck, commanding in St. Louis, referring to Brigadier General Don C. Buell in Louisville: “Are General Buell and yourself in concert?”

  Now, working in his office on New Year’s Day, Lincoln read their extremely discouraging answers. “There is no arrangement between General Halleck and myself,” Buell reported. Halleck’s telegram concurred: “I have never received a word from General Buell. I am not ready to co-operate with him. Hope to do so in a few weeks.” No communication whatsoever: not a word, not even ready for a word, and this from the two men whose forces were charged with subduing the Confederate heartland. Halleck closed his telegram on a patronizing note. “Too much haste will ruin everything,” he cautioned the president.

  In the U.S. Army, Henry Wager Halleck—author of treatises on topics ranging from military strategy to international law; distinguished lecturer (“The Elements of Military Art and Science”) at the Lowell Institute in Boston—was known as Old Brains. However, Old Brains was completely wrong. Too much caution was far more dangerous than too much haste, for the air was going out of the Union. Lincoln took a clean sheet of his official letterhead and picked up his pen. In short order, he composed replies to the two western generals.

  One of Lincoln’s most striking talents was his ability to condense large ideas into strong, concise prose. The messages he wrote on January 1, 1862, are textbook examples. Though only a few sentences long, they distilled many months of study and consultation. “My dear General Halleck,” he began in his firm, tight script. After advising Halleck that McClellan should not be disturbed, he reached the point of his missive, saying that he was “very anxious” to have the western armies move soon—and not just move, but move together. Lincoln proposed that Halleck send a force down the Mississippi toward Columbus, Kentucky, where Rebel forces under Leonidas Polk had accumulated 143 artillery pieces of various vintages and descriptions at a fortress on the bluffs. Confederates had proclaimed Columbus “the Gibraltar of the West”; it was the left-flank anchor of their long defensive line strung thinly across the crucial Bluegrass State. Further, Lincoln proposed that, while Halleck moved on Columbus, Buell should take his Army of the Cumberland south from Louisville to engage the other end of the Confederate western line. The president wanted very much for Buell’s troops to liberate the Union loyalists in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

  Both missions were essential to Lincoln’s basic strategy for defeating the Rebels. His ideas had begun to take shape under the influence of McClellan’s predecessor, the old warhorse Winfield Scott. When Lincoln arrived in Washington as president, he found Scott elderly, overweight, and creaky, but still in possession of the sharp strategic mind that had once inspired the Duke of Wellington to call him “the greatest living soldier.” Lincoln and Scott had much in common: Whigs by temperament, they were both reared in border slave states (Scott was a Virginian). Both were tall and imposing; both were avid readers and sly humorists. Crucially, both men believed that secession lacked popular support in the South. The Confederacy, they felt, had been hatched by wealthy slave owners to advance their interests at the expense of ordinary Southerners. On the basis of this conviction, Scott formulated a strategy for smothering the rebellion by blockading Southern ports and sending an army to open the Mississippi, the vital artery linking North and South. With these objectives achieved, secession fever would burn itself out and Southern loyalty would reemerge. Months after Scott left Washington, the president still had in mind the twin goals of opening the Mississippi River by capturing Columbus, and bolstering Southern Unionists in eastern Tennessee.

  But Lincoln’s thinking had clearly ripened through his reading and reflection on military strategy, because he also outlined an additional concept that would be essential to Union victory against the sprawling South. The Rebels had a relatively small population and a very long border to defend. The North had far more men, and more guns to arm them, and more farms to feed them. The way to bring these advantages to bear, the president had realized, was to send multiple Union armies to strike simultaneously along the Confederate line, forcing the undermanned Rebels to concentrate against one attack, thus leaving another point undefended. In his letter to Halleck, he suggested that “a real or feigned attack upon Columbus from up-river,” in coordination with Buell’s march into Tennessee, would compel the Rebels to choose. If the Confederates defended Columbus, they would be strung too thinly to hold Nashville. Conversely, if the Rebels shifted troops from Columbus to strengthen Nashville, they would be “throwing Columbus into our hands.” Then he noted, “I sent General Buell a letter similar to this.”

  Lincoln was walking on thin ice here, and he knew it. As a civilian whose military experience consisted of a few weeks’ service in the Illinois state militia, who was he to instruct Old Brains and McClellan’s chum Buell in fine points of strategy? So he added a note of deference: “You and he will understand much better than I how to do it.” But Lincoln reverted to a commanding note as he closed, showing just what he thought of Halleck’s warning about too much haste: “Please do not lose time in this matter. Yours, very truly, A. Lincoln.”

  The president wrote a third note on New Year’s Day, this one to McClellan. Someone had told him, perhaps during the reception in the Blue Room, that the bedridden general was, through the fog of his fever, quite nervous about the congressional joint committee. Eager to get his side of things on the record quickly, McClellan had planned to meet with Senator Wade’s inquisitors at the outset of their work. But then he had fallen ill, and now the committee was busy investigating the war effort without him—and not, McClellan feared correctly, with friendly intent. “My dear general,” Lincoln began, “I hear that the doings of the Investigating Committee, give you some uneasiness.” He continued soothingly: “You may be entirely relieved on this point. The gentlemen … were with me last night; and I found them in a perfectly good mood.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, but even Abraham Lincoln would bend the truth when he absolutely needed to. And particularly at this point, he would say almost anything to spur his generals into action.

  2

  JANUARY

  A cold front swept into Washington on the second day of January. Blustery winds rattled the canvas of the soldiers’ tents and raised the dust from dry streets. Behind the winds came freezing temperatures and, intermittently for the next month, every variety of wetness: snow, sleet, rain, fog. Roads around Washington, which seemed always to be in one miserable condition or another, changed from powder to mire, and drivers who had been licking grit from their teeth a few days earlier now found themselves bogged down in a foul, sticky mix of mud and manure. The bad roads were more than just an inconvenience. Mud made it nearly impossible to move the army, with its countless tons of artillery and supplies.

  Lincoln braved that day’s chill wind
to visit McClellan in his big house on Lafayette Park, taking with him the discouraging wire he had received from Halleck. The president was in a low mood; one adviser who spoke to him that day said that Lincoln permitted himself to wonder what it might mean to have the old United States split into “two nations.… He did not see how the two could exist so near to each other.” Reaching McClellan’s house, he was pleased to find that the worst of the typhoid—high fever, blackened tongue, foul breath—was past. His general in chief seemed “very much better.”

  McClellan did not appear upset that Lincoln was dealing directly with the western commanders. Perhaps he was pleased to have the president “browsing” (as McClellan disdainfully referred to Lincoln’s amiable hunts for information) in places other than his own headquarters. For whatever reason, after Lincoln’s visit McClellan gathered his strength to dictate a message, the first he had sent in two weeks, endorsing the president’s advice to Halleck. “Not a moment’s time should be lost,” he wrote.

  Lincoln’s communications with Halleck and Buell deepened over the next week. By chattering telegraph, the president and his western generals went back and forth over issues of how and where and especially when their armies would move. Halleck protested that he needed more men, and his men needed more guns. He criticized Buell’s Nashville strategy (“condemned by every military authority I have ever read,” he sniffed). For a time, Buell simply disappeared from telegraph range. “Delay is ruining us,” Lincoln protested, “and it is indispensable that I have something definite.” Exasperated, he ordered the generals to produce a timetable for joint action, but Halleck and Buell ignored him. “It is exceedingly discouraging,” Lincoln admitted to his secretary of war, Simon Cameron. “As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”

  Three days after the president’s first visit to McClellan’s home, he traveled there again, this time carrying an infuriating telegram from Buell in which the general declared that he “attached little or no importance” to a campaign into eastern Tennessee. A light snow over an earlier crust of sleet covered the ground, and the rutted side streets were frozen. Lincoln did much of his best thinking while walking, and since he resisted all efforts to surround him with bodyguards, he almost certainly made this trip alone or nearly alone. Dressed in his black cloak and hat, stark against the whiteness of the lawn, the president cut a distinctive figure. “When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly; his long arms and giant hands swung down by his side,” his law partner William Herndon once wrote. “He put the whole foot flat on the ground at once, not landing on the heel; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, and hence there was no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory—catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain, all up and down his person, and thus preventing them from locating.”

  McClellan was still weak from his illness, but after his meeting with Lincoln the general again took up his pen, this time to write a spine-stiffener to his old friend Buell. “The political consequences of the delay … will be much more serious than you seem to anticipate,” McClellan warned. He had his own reasons for wanting Buell to be more aggressive: if Buell could get far enough into Tennessee to cut the South’s main east–west railroad, then McClellan could launch his campaign in Virginia without worrying about Rebel reinforcements pouring in from the west. Nevertheless, the young general’s explicit support of Lincoln’s efforts might have been a sign that he was awakening to political reality himself.

  Yet when it came to his own conduct and his own command, McClellan was as uncooperative as ever. Despite Lincoln’s encouragement on New Year’s Day, by January 6 the general still had not met with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. When the cabinet convened that day for a discussion with the committee, the radicals from Congress were angrier than before. Ben Wade and the others pressed Lincoln to fire McClellan. They were sure that the general’s Democratic, antiabolition views were the root cause of his army’s failure to do anything more assertive than dig trenches around Washington and march in parades. “A great deal of discussion took place,” Treasury Secretary Chase noted mildly in his diary. Chase, in fact, was one of the most active participants, and he clearly had an agenda of his own.

  Lincoln’s cabinet was, in the words of Doris Kearns Goodwin, “a team of rivals,” comprising Lincoln’s vanquished political opponents and leading members of the opposition Democratic Party. It was the embodiment of the clashing fragments of the Union and, like the Union itself, was easily distracted from the crisis of the moment by the chafing of past disputes and by scheming over future rivalries. Others in the cabinet tried to suppress their political ambitions, but Salmon Chase did not. Even while serving in 1862 as one of Lincoln’s most important advisers, Chase was obviously angling to run for the presidency in 1864. “He has got the presidential maggot in his head and it will wriggle there as long as it is warm,” Lincoln observed. Playing the dual role of key official and leading rival kept Chase quite busy. In fact, he was starting to worry that service to Lincoln was a dead weight dragging him down. “He would rather be on the bench of the Supreme Court, or in the Senate,” a confidant reported. “He begins to fear that to reach the presidency, with Seward’s opposition and all the contingencies and very great dangers of managing the finances during this very great crisis, is rather a ‘hard road to travel.’”

  An errand Chase ran on that morning of January 6, before the cabinet meeting, provides a vivid example of his conflicted circumstances. He had been working furiously for months to patch up the government’s dire fiscal situation; reluctantly, he had concluded that the United States could no longer afford to tie the value of the dollar to fixed amounts of gold or silver. Until now, U.S. currency had been backed by precious metals, so a person holding a paper dollar could actually trade it at the bank for a dollar’s worth of gold. But with the cost of the war rising exponentially, the supply of precious metal was no longer sufficient. In late December 1861, Chase had informed Congress that by July 1 of the next year the federal debt would be more than $500 million, a greater than fourfold increase in a single year. This news had set off a bank panic and frozen the bond market; the only solution, Chase reluctantly concluded, was to switch to fiat money—so-called greenbacks, supported by nothing but the public’s faith in the government—which the Treasury could print as needed. The fact that Wall Street seemed willing to go along with such a dangerously inflationary plan was a testament to Chase’s reputation and credibility.

  A believer in sound money, Chase found the new monetary system unappealing. Even so, once the change was made it dawned on him that people all over the country were about to receive valuable pieces of paper from the government, paper that would feed their families, pay their rent, and appease the tax man. In that case, he thought, why not put his own handsome visage on those pieces of paper, making his face literally the face of prosperity and trustworthiness, putting his picture in the pockets of every American voter? And since design of the new money was his responsibility, he had gone that morning to a photographer’s studio for an official portrait. The photographer posed Chase with his arms crossed over his chest and his face slightly turned from the camera—an image that would soon be the most widely distributed in the country.

  Lincoln explained to one confidant that he “had determined to shut his eyes to all these performances” of Chase’s political ambition because the man “made a good secretary.” He well knew what Chase was up to, but could not afford to lose him. “I have all along clearly seen his plan of strengthening himself. Whenever he sees that an important matter is troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man of some influence, he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades the victim … that he would have arranged it very differently.… I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in these schemes, so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.”

  Chase was particularly shifty during the cabinet meeting with the joint com
mittee on January 6. First he defended McClellan as “the best man for the place,” who would surely have things moving by now if he hadn’t fallen ill. Then he pivoted to undercut McClellan by suggesting that command of the Army of the Potomac be transferred to a Republican favorite, Irwin McDowell. Supreme command and field command were too much for McClellan, or any one man, to handle, Chase argued. This was a reasonable observation, but Chase’s solution was wildly impractical. McDowell was the general who had failed at Bull Run. The idea that he could be placed in command of the army McClellan had built, or that McClellan would willingly share power, was absurd. But Chase was eager for the support of the pro-McDowell Republicans on the congressional committee, and his suggestion seemed calibrated to please them.

  All the talk by Chase and others that day led nowhere. The committee was sent away with only a promise from Lincoln to speak once more with McClellan. But this time, when the president ambled into the general’s house, he was turned away. The general, he was told, was too weak to see him. Whether McClellan had experienced a relapse or was simply fed up with visits from Lincoln is not clear. Little Mac did complain a few days later that “they don’t give me time to recover,” but he seemed fine when the Lincoln boys, Willie and Tad, roamed over to his headquarters the day after their father was rebuffed. They returned with news that McClellan had been out for a brisk ride in the subfreezing cold.

  After his unsuccessful attempt to meet with his general in chief, Lincoln delivered his advice on paper. “You better go before the Congressional Committee the earliest moment your health will permit—to-day if possible,” Lincoln counseled McClellan. Still, the general didn’t budge.