Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Alarmed, the abolitionists began to fear that the moment chosen by Providence for the obliteration of slavery would slip away. If Lincoln’s policy was successful and the South rejoined the Union after a Federal victory or two on the battlefield, the serpent might never be crushed. Likewise, if Europe decided to tip matters in favor of the Confederates, slavery would persist in an independent Southern nation. Either way, the abolition movement would no longer be able to achieve its glorious mission.

  So the delegations kept coming. The abolitionist leaders Moncure Conway and William Ellery Channing called on Lincoln a few days before Howe’s poem was published, and urged him to act more boldly. Not yet, he answered. “When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to act, though it costs my life,” Lincoln assured them. Then he added ominously, “And gentlemen, lives will be lost.”

  * * *

  Among the lives in peril was one cherished by a seafarer from Maine named Nathaniel Gordon, who captained a ship full of whiskey to the Congo River in 1860. There, he traded the liquor for a cargo of about nine hundred human beings. On his return voyage, he was discovered by a U.S. Navy ship that was enforcing the ban on smuggling slaves.

  Hundreds of sea captains had violated this ban during the forty years since the United States had outlawed the international slave trade. A fair number had been captured, and some of those were brought to trial. But not one had ever been given the maximum sentence: death. It was Gordon’s fate to be the first convicted under a Republican administration. He was sentenced to hang.

  Gordon’s plea for mercy sat on Lincoln’s desk on February 2, and the abolitionists were keen to see what the president would do. As Conway and Channing knew from their visit, Lincoln wasn’t deaf to the aspirations of their movement. Indeed, he was cautiously reaching out to them by supporting some of their more modest but symbolically potent ideas, such as diplomatic recognition for the freed-slave nations of Haiti and Liberia, a stronger treaty with Britain to combat the slave trade, and a promise to protect the freedom of slaves liberated by Union expeditions along the Southern coast. The Gordon case had a particular resonance for the ultras. Here, it seemed, was a proper application for God’s terrible swift sword. But Lincoln was not eager to pick up that sword, much less wield it. “You do not know how hard it is to have a human being die when you know that a stroke of your pen may save him,” Lincoln said of Captain Gordon.

  Nevertheless, when the celebrated writer and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson paid a call on Lincoln that day, he found the president lit by a “boyish cheerfulness.” No doubt Lincoln had heard that the first of some 17,000 troops under Ulysses Grant had been loaded onto passenger steamers that morning, headed toward Fort Henry. In the six days since Lincoln issued his General War Order No. 1, Grant had secured Halleck’s permission to attack, organized his troops, distributed rations and ammunition, recruited transportation, and coordinated his strategy with Andrew Foote, commander of the flotilla of gunboats at Cairo. Finally, an army was moving.

  “Oh, Mr. Emerson!” Lincoln said heartily when the philosopher walked in with his tour guide, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. “I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems to say by his airs and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you!’”

  Emerson liked the Kentucky-born president more than he had anticipated. Lincoln wasn’t the backwoods boor whom he had half expected to meet, but rather “a frank, sincere, well-intentioned man” with the methodical mind of a lawyer and a knack for storytelling. Emerson was charmed by Lincoln’s delight in his own jokes: “He looks at you with great satisfaction, and shows all his white teeth, and laughs.”

  Emerson’s views on slavery needed no introduction. Not only was he a founder of the magazine that had printed Julia Ward Howe’s battle hymn on its cover, he had spoken at the Smithsonian two nights earlier on the need for forceful government action to resolve once and for all the moral crisis of slavery. Now he and Sumner wanted to discuss the fate of Nathaniel Gordon. Sumner told Lincoln, “I am against capital punishment, yet I am for hanging that slave-trader.” He gave three reasons: “(1) to deter slave-traders, (2) to give notice to the world of a change of policy, & (3) to show that the Gov[ernment] can hang a man.” When his visitors were finished, the president reviewed the case against the captain point by point, saying at last that he was “not quite satisfied” and would study the evidence once more before deciding. Emerson went away impressed by Lincoln’s “fidelity and conscientiousness.” Many people assumed that the president, following past policy, would spare Gordon without much thought. Not so: Emerson could see that Lincoln was weighing the matter seriously.

  * * *

  As Lincoln conversed with Emerson, and Grant started up the Tennessee River, Attorney General Bates, nursing a cold, tried to catch up on his diary. His outlook was decidedly bleak. In fact, Bates worried that the administration had no more than a few weeks left to save itself.

  The mood in Washington—the plotting, the backstabbing, the double-dealing—was poisonous. Half a billion dollars, enough to run the entire prewar government for seven years, had been spent to raise and equip Union forces, yet there was almost nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, criticism of the administration rolled in from every side. Unionists were reluctant to attack Lincoln openly, so they aimed at his cabinet instead. The navy secretary, Gideon Welles, was under investigation by the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. The interior secretary, Caleb Smith, was the target of corruption rumors. The most “formidable clique” was arrayed against Seward, whose influence was widely resented and therefore blamed for every failing of the Lincoln government. Anti-Seward schemers were reportedly cultivating Mary Lincoln, preying on her pride in her husband and her anxieties about wily Washingtonians. “They tell her Seward is working to undermine Lincoln and make himself the chief figure in the administration,” Bates recorded.

  In short, the attorney general concluded, the capital was running out of patience. The government was coming undone, and “a feeling of restless discontent” was spreading quickly. “If we fail to do something effectual in the next 30 days,” Bates concluded, “the administration will be shaken to pieces.”

  In the event, the administration was saved, not in thirty days, but in fourteen. After so many setbacks, Lincoln and his government now experienced their best two weeks since taking office. During this fortnight, Lincoln banked precious political capital, at home and abroad—every penny of which he would desperately need before the year was over.

  First, two days after Bates made his gloomy prediction, Lincoln bought some time with the abolitionists by denying Nathaniel Gordon’s plea for mercy. Noting the “large number of respectable citizens” who had begged him to spare Gordon’s life, the president nevertheless found that “duty” compelled him to allow the execution to proceed. Sending a slave smuggler to the gallows was a small step compared to the giant leap demanded by the abolitionists. Still, Lincoln’s decision to enforce the severest sentence for a crime against black victims was a symbolic blow to the doctrine of white supremacy on which slavery rested. By denying Gordon’s petition, Lincoln reversed, at least for a moment, the ugly current that had run steady and deep through generations of American history. The power of the government turned fatally against the slave economy.

  Gordon had no doubt assumed that he would be treated like all the slave traders before him, and this about-face was so abrupt that Lincoln worried the sea captain might not have time to take it in. The president therefore gave Gordon a brief respite, delaying his execution until later in the month, so that the doomed man could prepare for “the awful change which awaits him.”

  Lincoln’s next bit of good luck arrived in the guise of a successful party. On February 5, after weeks of planning, the day of Mary Lincoln’s midnight ball finally arrived. The guest list had grown. Nicolay estimated that “six or seven hundred guests” were invited to this startling break with Washington tradition. Pre
sidents normally entertained at formal dinners, and the invitation list was strictly limited. Or they held open houses, without refreshments, to which almost anyone could come. Mary’s idea was to replace the formal dinners with a few grand buffets, which would allow her to entertain more guests for less money. What mattered to the cutthroats of Washington society, of course, was making the guest list for the first of these parties.

  Determined to show Washington’s grandes dames that a woman from the West could entertain in style, Mary hired the finest New York caterer to fill the dining room with huge platters of turkey, duck, ham, and terrapin. Elaborate centerpieces were spun from sugar, fine French wines were uncorked, and punch was served from an enormous bowl delivered from Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry. The new carpets and draperies and furniture Mary had broken the budget to buy were dusted and fluffed for their debut. Multitiered chandeliers illuminated the East Room, above carpets of sea-foam green. The White House staff was dressed in mulberry-colored uniforms to complement the china Mary had chosen for the occasion.

  A little after eight P.M., Lincoln knotted his white tie and went into the room where Mary was getting into her elaborate gown with the help of her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly. Keckly later recalled the president standing before the fire, lost in thought with his hands behind him, when suddenly the rustle of Mary’s long, trailing white skirt—decked with black lace to mark the death of Britain’s Prince Albert—called him from his concerns.

  “Whew!” Lincoln exclaimed. “Our cat has a long tail tonight.” His eye took in the cleavage exposed by her low-cut bodice, and he added: “Mother, it is my opinion, if some of that tail were nearer the head, it would be in better style.”

  The guests arrived about nine o’clock: generals in full dress uniform; diplomats in regalia; cabinet members; selected congressmen and senators in formal wear. A few firebrands had refused to attend, feeling the times were all wrong for a party. Senator Wade of the joint committee fumed: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware there is a Civil War?” With time, such criticisms would grow savage; the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator pronounced the ball “not worthy of man or woman with ears open to the wail of the bereaved throughout the country.” But as Nicolay acidly observed, Washington has always worshipped the status conveyed by an invitation to an exclusive event, and few could resist the chance to be inside while the rest of the world was stuck outside.

  Everyone took note of McClellan, fully recovered from his illness and cutting the figure familiar from the previous autumn: straight-backed, dashing, leaning close to whisper a bit of news or to admire a fellow officer’s ornate ceremonial sword. He had spent the previous weekend working diligently on a long letter to Lincoln and Stanton defending his actions as general in chief and explaining in great detail his plans for a spring campaign. As always, he wanted a little bit more time. “If at the expense of 30 days delay we can gain a decisive victory which will probably end the war,” he wrote grandly, “it is far cheaper than to gain a battle tomorrow that produces no final results.” He made this calculation the same weekend that Edward Bates concluded the administration was down to its last thirty days, absent some pronounced success.

  At midnight, the guests crowded down the hallway from the East Room to the dining room, where they found the doors locked and the key missing. During the awkward pause while the key was found, someone made a joke suggesting that the party and the war were alike in being stalled. Even McClellan laughed politely. Then the doors opened, the feast began, and champagne flowed.

  The last guests lingered almost until dawn. In the basement, servants worked all night to clean up, drinking leftover wine as they toiled. Hot, tired, and drunk, several of them began arguing, which led to a fistfight in the kitchen. But the guests went home happy; years later, one Washington socialite still remembered the party as “the most splendid … ever served at the Presidential mansion, or, perhaps indeed, in Washington at any time.” It was Mary’s triumph as first lady, and it gave her husband a valuable lift among Washington’s elite at a moment when that small but influential world harbored great doubts about his fitness to lead the country out of the wilderness of war.

  * * *

  While the last of the partygoers were making their way home, Brigadier General Grant and his troops awoke in Tennessee, where they were camped just out of range of Fort Henry’s artillery. Grant and Andrew Foote had conceived a three-pronged assault. A division of infantry would seize Fort Heiman, across the river, and turn its guns on Henry. Another infantry division would cut the road linking Fort Henry with Fort Donelson, a dozen miles away. Then Foote’s flotilla of seven gunboats would steam up to the fort and open fire. Grant ordered the movement to begin at eleven A.M.

  Synchronizing these movements proved easier on paper than in reality. Even so, the ironclad gunboats performed brilliantly, pouring shells into the poorly situated Fort Henry and causing the Rebel garrison to flee. “Fort Henry is ours,” Grant wired Halleck in midafternoon, adding almost in passing: “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson”—a major undertaking that had not been part of his orders from St. Louis headquarters.

  Grant didn’t risk asking Halleck’s permission because he worried that his superior might get cold feet. He was right to be concerned: shortly before Grant embarked on his campaign, Halleck had received a report, based on information from a Confederate deserter, that General P. G. T. Beauregard, the Rebel hero of Fort Sumter and Manassas, was on his way west with a large body of reinforcements. (The intelligence was only partly correct: Beauregard was headed west, but he wasn’t bringing troops.) The more Halleck thought about that prospect, the more he doubted Grant’s ability to hold Fort Henry—to say nothing of taking Donelson—and he sent Grant an order to hunker down and wait for help. But Grant was not much for hunkering. When a correspondent for the New-York Tribune told the general that he was leaving for the nearest telegraph to report the capture of Fort Henry, Grant said: “You had better wait a day or two.”

  “Why?” the man asked.

  “Because I am going over to capture Fort Donelson tomorrow,” Grant answered.

  Grant wasn’t sure how well defended the fort was, but he didn’t want to delay his advance. In his view, 15,000 men attacking Fort Donelson in early February would have a better chance of succeeding than 50,000 men a month later, after the Confederates had had time to prepare. He drove his men through rain, snow, and sticky mud, and by the time Halleck’s order caught up to him, he and his troops had Donelson surrounded.

  * * *

  More good news for the Union effort arrived on February 14, when Stanton strode into a cabinet meeting in Lincoln’s office with a fresh report from Ambrose Burnside’s amphibious expedition to North Carolina. Reading from the paper in his hands, Stanton pronounced the attack on Roanoke Island a complete success, with four small forts, forty guns, three thousand muskets, and three thousand prisoners taken. The last frightened Rebels had escaped, he said, by plunging into Albemarle Sound and swimming away.

  Lincoln was delighted, though his thoughts quickly moved to more distant battlefields. He reminded the cabinet that a Union offensive to capture New Orleans—the “greatest business of all,” as he put it—was gathering in the Gulf of Mexico. David Farragut, a seasoned old sailor with the guts of a lion, had set sail earlier in the month to take command of the expedition; he would soon begin dragging his armada over the sandbars at the mouth of the Mississippi to put them in position for an attack. Lincoln also mused that Grant was probably attacking Fort Donelson as they spoke.

  The president was right about that, but Donelson proved a formidable nut to crack. The fort commanded the Cumberland River from an intimidating bluff and was manned by a force roughly equal to Grant’s. Foote led his flotilla perilously close to the ramparts and opened fire, but this time the Union gunboats were shot to pieces. Denied another easy victory, Grant worried that he might have to mount a siege.

  Before he could make his next move, though, the C
onfederate garrison surprised Grant’s right wing on February 15 and broke through the Union line. It was a critical moment: the Rebels were in a position to batter Grant’s cordon and perhaps drive him off, thus reopening the road to Nashville. But Grant kept his cool, and his green volunteers fought bravely to fill the hole. Union commanders learned as they fought; some didn’t even realize that the men at the front needed a constant supply of ammunition. Fortunately, the Confederate troops were just as raw, and they soon fell back into their fortifications.

  Now a siege seemed inevitable—except that Grant had a hunch. He knew the two Rebel generals he was up against, and he held them in contempt. Gideon Pillow had spent the Mexican War scheming for glory rather than winning it on the battlefield; his second in command, John Floyd, had conspired to aid the secessionists while serving as secretary of war in the Buchanan administration. Having just seen their troops retreat, Grant concluded that neither of these generals was much of a warrior and that they would collapse if given a push. Turning to his chief of staff, he declared, “The one who attacks first now will be victorious and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.” Audacious as ever, Grant ordered an immediate assault on the Confederate lines. By nightfall, his men had driven the Rebels inside Donelson’s walls and were camped in the Confederate trenches.

  True to form, Pillow and Floyd abandoned the fort during the night and slipped away on the Cumberland River, leaving a younger general, Simon Bolivar Buckner, to seek terms. Grant knew Buckner from their time together at West Point and in the war with Mexico, but his response to his old friend’s overture was cold and unyielding. He would accept nothing less than “an immediate and unconditional surrender,” Grant wrote, words that soon made him famous throughout the Union as a general with steel.