Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  After taking the three forts in Tennessee, Grant did further damage to his relationship with his commanding officer by pressing ahead to exploit the crack in the Rebel line. Eager to get to Nashville before the retreating Confederates could strip the city of supplies, Grant moved east on a path taking him out of Halleck’s department and into Buell’s. As soon as Halleck learned of the advance, he ordered Grant to stop where he was. But Grant wasn’t finished: as resourceful as he was aggressive, he found a kindred spirit among the commanders in General Buell’s army and promptly directed that officer to mobilize his division to seize Nashville. When Buell heard that Grant was steering troops from his own command, he was furious. To complete this fiasco, Halleck’s increasingly testy telegrams ordering Grant to stop and file a report never reached their destination. Old Brains grew angrier by the day.

  This was the Union command at its envious worst. Great as the fruits of his victories had been, Grant believed that much more was possible if the Union kept up the pressure. “We could have marched to Chattanooga, Corinth, Memphis and Vicksburg with the troops we then had,” he later wrote. Other military men perceived the same opportunities. One of them, a fiery red-haired warrior named William T. Sherman, was working ferociously in Paducah, organizing troops and supplies and pushing them upriver to Grant as fast as he could. At the time, Sherman outranked Grant, and no protocol in army regulations allowed a junior officer to command a superior. But this meant nothing to Sherman compared with the chance to press the victory. “Every boat that came up with supplies or reinforcements brought a note of encouragement from Sherman,” Grant later recalled, “asking me to call on him for any assistance that he could render and saying that if he could be of service at the front I might send for him and he would waive rank.” Thus began one of the most important partnerships of the war.

  Halleck, however, saw a different opportunity: the chance to add to his own authority. He pleaded with McClellan to combine the two western departments and give him command over Buell. Presented with a choice between a rival (Halleck) and a friend (Buell), McClellan predictably refused. Buell, meanwhile, fretted that Grant’s strategic masterstroke was actually a looming disaster. In Buell’s view, Grant’s victories exposed the Union army to a massive counterattack by Beauregard and his phantom army from the east.

  Amid this jockeying for advantage, McClellan weighed in by telegraph with a shocking proposal: the general in chief suggested to Halleck that he place Grant under arrest for failing to file his report. McClellan’s recommendation was prompted by a gossipy wire from Halleck suggesting that Grant had “resumed his former bad habits”—that is, the hard drinking that marked his period of depression years earlier while separated from his wife in California. The entire episode appalled Andrew Foote, the gray-haired gunboat commander, who had seen enough of life to recognize immediately what was driving these assaults on Grant: “I was disgusted,” he wrote to his wife. “It was jealousy.”

  Grant wasn’t arrested, but he did lose his command for a short time. (It was given to C. F. Smith, a veteran soldier whom Grant greatly admired.) But when word of the strange goings-on in the West reached the White House, Lincoln instructed the War Department to open an investigation. Halleck immediately backpedaled: “You cannot be relieved from your command,” he wired Grant. “There is no good reason for it.” Grant’s authority was soon restored.

  As Grant reflected on this bumbling, he was less troubled by the insult than by the squandering of a golden chance amid the pettiness. The more ground his troops secured, the fewer men the Rebels would have available to draft into their armies. The fewer men the Confederates had, the sooner the war would end. Instead, as Grant later wrote, “time was given the enemy to collect armies and fortify his new positions.” Over the next two years, this motif—of lost opportunities and unexploited victories—would haunt the Union cause time and again.

  * * *

  While Lincoln remained preoccupied with his son’s illness, the thankless task of pushing George McClellan to deploy his ever growing army had fallen to that brusque dynamo Edwin Stanton. The new secretary of war had all of Lincoln’s urgency but none of his finesse, and inevitably what had been a friendship between Stanton and McClellan curdled. Stanton quickly lost confidence in the general, and Little Mac added another name to his list of perceived tormentors.

  That list was growing very long, and its charter members, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, still had their sights trained on him. McClellan’s excuses for inaction—the muddy roads, the Rebel multitude, the brilliant intricacy of his plans—grew tedious, especially in comparison to Grant’s alacrity. On February 19, as Willie Lincoln lay dying, Chairman Wade lit into McClellan during a meeting at the White House, noting correctly that the general had not even managed to clear the Rebel batteries blocking the Potomac River.

  This scolding, along with Lincoln’s order to move by Washington’s Birthday, finally provoked the general in chief to take his first step. Early in the war, Confederate raiders had destroyed the bridge at Harpers Ferry that carried the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad across the Potomac and into the heartland. This key artery needed both a lasting repair and adequate Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley to protect it from future raids. McClellan decided to build a pontoon bridge made of heavy timbers laid across tethered canal boats, and use the bridge to send troops to capture and hold Winchester, Virginia, at the northern end of the valley.

  Full of high hopes, McClellan led 8,500 blue-coated soldiers into Virginia on February 26, crossing a lightweight temporary bridge. “It was a magnificent spectacle,” he recounted to his wife. “One of the grandest I ever saw.” The army’s heavy supplies would follow the next day, once the pontoon bridge was completed. Pleased with himself, the general quickly informed Stanton of his splendid progress.

  The boats for the pontoon bridge, meanwhile, had been shipped along a canal that paralleled the Potomac. All that remained was to transfer the boats from the canal into the river through a lock connecting the two. There, to his dismay, McClellan discovered that the boats were some six inches wider than the lock. They were stuck in the canal. There would be no pontoon bridge.

  The timing of this disaster could not have been worse: just three days had passed since Lincoln watched his son’s casket slide into the crypt. McClellan’s chief of staff, Randolph Marcy, drew the unpleasant assignment of explaining to the grieving president why the crucial railroad could not be reopened on schedule. Lincoln erupted. “Why in tarnation couldn’t the General have known whether a boat would go through that lock before he spent a million of dollars getting them there?” he demanded.

  Before Marcy could answer, Lincoln sneered: “I am no engineer”—McClellan was—“but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a hole, or a lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it. I am almost despairing. Everything seems to fail! The general impression is growing daily that the General does not intend to do anything. By a failure like this we lose all the prestige we gained by the capture of Fort Donelson.”

  The president was quiet for a moment and then repeated himself. “I am grievously disappointed and almost in despair.”

  4

  MARCH

  A year had now passed since William Henry Seward experienced the astounding day when Abraham Lincoln became president instead of him. Any number of men had wanted the job, including at least three others in Lincoln’s cabinet. But Seward was the man who was supposed to be president. The garrulous and wealthy New Yorker seemed chosen by destiny: his political career had started almost four decades before, when a chance encounter introduced the young Seward to Thurlow Weed, the political kingmaker of the Empire State. With Weed’s backing, Seward became governor of New York at age thirty-seven. In the 1850s, he rose to become a dominant figure in the U.S. Senate and a builder of the new Republican Party, and by 1860 he was the most prominent Republican in America. But Seward’s apparent strength soon became his w
eakness, because Republicans—looking for a less controversial candidate for president—chose this moment to select a nominee with a lower profile. Outmaneuvered at the convention by Lincoln and his people, Seward was again trumped by Lincoln when he was steered into the cabinet on the president’s terms rather than his own.

  Despite this rather stark evidence of Lincoln’s superior political skills, Seward attempted to elbow Lincoln aside only weeks after the inauguration. On April 1, 1861, the new secretary of state gave Lincoln a memo asserting that the administration was rudderless; after a month in office, Seward wrote, the president was still “without a policy, either foreign or domestic.” Lincoln was too busy handing out patronage jobs, Seward declared, when he ought to be tending to important matters. Seward took it on himself to sketch a few suggestions; notably, he advised Lincoln to stir up a war against a European foe as a way to reunite patriots North and South against a common enemy. “It must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct [policy] incessantly,” Seward continued. “Either the President must do it himself or … some member of his Cabinet.” He concluded, disingenuously: “I seek neither to evade nor assume responsibility.”

  There was some truth in Seward’s point about the president’s lack of a strategic plan. “I have none,” Lincoln once said. “I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.” To put it more precisely, he had one policy—to preserve the Union—and would adopt no others until he was certain that they advanced him toward his goal. As for Seward’s arrogant attempt to seize power, Lincoln simply shrugged it off. He was accustomed to being underestimated; in fact, he made an art of turning low expectations to his own advantage. And his skin was as thick as the hide of a rhinoceros. In response to Seward’s memo, he simply batted his secretary of state down—“If this must be done, I must do it,” he replied—and went on devoting dozens of hours every week, month after month, to the tedium of doling out federal jobs.

  Seward was not the only critic dismayed by the energy that Lincoln appeared to waste on job seekers. “He seems to me to be fonder of details than of principles … of patronage, and personal questions than of the weightier matters of empire,” complained the writer and attorney Richard Henry Dana. The line of supplicants often ran from the waiting room in the president’s second-floor office, out the door, along the corridor, and down the stairs. Nicolay complained of being pestered by people wanting “‘to see the President for only five minutes.’ At present this request meets me from almost every man, woman and child I meet—whether it be by day or night—in the house or on the street.”

  Lincoln frequently felt overwhelmed by the press of job seekers. Soon after becoming president, he compared himself to “a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.” Drowning in minutiae, he seemed not even to know which jobs were truly important. One day early in Lincoln’s tenure, Seward escorted the new U.S. ambassador to Great Britain into the president’s office. Charles Francis Adams had gold-plated credentials: he was a congressman and a noted antislavery leader, and though he had no formal experience as a diplomat, he was the son and grandson of men who had held the office now occupied by Lincoln. None of this, however, seemed to matter much to Lincoln, who had originally wanted someone else for the job. When Adams entered the president’s office, he was dismayed to find Lincoln wearing trousers worn thin at the knees and a pair of slippers on his feet. Sprawled in a chair and distracted, Lincoln only half-listened as Adams offered the customary soliloquy of gratitude for the president’s trust and confidence. “Very kind of you to say so Mr. Adams, but you are not my choice,” Lincoln answered. “You are Seward’s man.” Then, turning to Seward, Lincoln brightened and said, “Well, Governor, I’ve this morning decided the Chicago post-office appointment!”

  Adams was appalled, but what he and the other critics failed to see was that Lincoln used patronage as a powerful adhesive, one that went a long way toward holding the fragile Union coalition together. His decision to fight the rebellion required that he ask many competing factions to share a grim and painful ordeal. By shrewdly dispensing the favors at his disposal, he endeavored to give all those factions a stake in the Union’s success. Two scholars estimated that in his first year as president Lincoln filled about twelve hundred jobs in “the most sweeping” turnover of the federal workforce the country had ever seen. And as the war fueled further growth of the government, that number grew.

  Lincoln often welded political leaders to the Union cause by making them generals—some of them because they had relevant military experience, but many more simply because of their influence with one political group or another. “In regard to the patronage sought with so much eagerness and jealousy, I have prescribed for myself the maxim, ‘Fairness to all,’” Lincoln declared. Though Republicans seethed, Lincoln was careful to give stars to a number of prominent Democrats, never forgetting that the opposition carried nearly 45 percent of the Northern vote in 1860. He made generals of John A. Dix, a former Democratic senator from New York; John McClernand, the leading Democrat in southern Illinois; Benjamin Butler, the most prominent Massachusetts Democrat; and, most notably, George McClellan.

  Lincoln also catered to ethnic groups. He made the Irish nationalist hero Thomas Meagher a brigadier general, one of a dozen Irish-born Union generals who served in the war. An order to the War Department gives a window into Lincoln’s thinking about military patronage: “There has got to be something done unquestionably in the interest of the Dutch, and to that end I want Schimmelfennig appointed.” Lincoln knew that the name alone would delight German-Americans. He even learned to be attentive to the religious denominations of his appointees, after being scolded for putting too many Episcopalians in his cabinet. “I must do something for this great Methodist church,” he told a visiting congressman. “Seward is an Episcopalian, Chase is an Episcopalian, Bates is an Episcopalian, and Stanton swears enough to be one.”

  Over the course of his first year in office, Lincoln’s painstaking attention to job seekers and favor hunters—which he once compared to “bail[ing] out the Potomac with a spoon”—had come to make more sense to Seward and others as they watched the president struggle to hold the fractured Union together. In the words of Gideon Welles: “Never under any administration were greater care and deliberation required” in dispensing presidential favors, for Lincoln was shoring up “a demoralized government and a crumbling Union.”

  Despite his initial skepticism about the president’s abilities, Seward gradually came to see the discipline and cold calculation behind Lincoln’s every decision. Friendship, Seward discovered, rarely clouded the president’s view. In early 1862, when Lincoln chose his first Supreme Court justice, he declined to appoint his close friend Orville Browning, whose wife, Eliza, had pleaded with Lincoln on her husband’s behalf. He also passed over David Davis, another Illinois friend and the chief engineer of Lincoln’s presidential nomination. Instead, he picked an Ohio attorney, Noah H. Swayne—who, not coincidentally, was sponsored by one of Lincoln’s most dangerous antagonists, Ben Wade of the congressional joint committee. “He would always give more to his enemies than he would to his friends,” a disappointed Davis supporter later wrote. “And the reason was, because he never had anything to spare.” Or, as Lincoln himself put it, he “always had more horses than oats.” The president trusted that his friends would remain his friends, even when he disappointed them; meanwhile, he took great care to make sure that his enemies were appeased.

  In the year since he’d joined the administration, Seward had earned his way into Lincoln’s confidence and even his affections, “spen[ding] a considerable portion of every day with the President,” according to one cabinet colleague. His adroit handling of the Trent affair proved his diplomatic skill, and on a personal level, the two men had much in common. Both were informal, careless about their grooming, and sometimes uncouth. Both li
ked children and pets. When Seward discovered that the Lincolns had a soft spot for cats, he promptly delivered two kittens to the White House. Both men loved yarns and jokes, including ribald and off-color ones. Lincoln liked to claim that he was the better storyteller: “Mr. Seward is limited to a couple of stories which repeating he believes are true,” Lincoln teased. “The two men found it easy to drop into nonsensical and preposterous dialogue,” a Seward biographer wrote. Emerson, during his visit in February, caught the flavor of their banter when Seward recounted a typical exchange. “The President said yesterday, when I was going to tell him a story, ‘Well, Seward, don’t let it be smutty.’”

  Where the two men were different, they complemented each other. Lincoln was indifferent to food and took no interest in entertaining guests. Seward, on the other hand, was renowned in Washington as an extravagant and enthusiastic host; his eleven-course dinner parties began with soup and ran through fish, beef, and fowl; then the guests tarried over ice cream and fruit before the evening ended four hours later with port and fine Cuban cigars. As a consequence, he picked up plenty of useful intelligence at his dinner table and other tables around town. More important, Seward’s sturdy optimism bolstered the melancholy Lincoln. The secretary of state projected this buoyancy through his frequent letters to U.S. emissaries abroad, so that he became a brash and sunny face of the embattled nation. On March 6, for instance, he visited Lincoln to preview his latest dispatch to Adams in London; his cheerful nature rang from nearly every sentence. “It is now apparent that we are at the beginning of the end of the attempted revolution,” Seward wrote. “That end may be indeed delayed by accidents or errors at home, as it may be by aid or sympathy on the part of foreign nations. But it can hardly be deemed uncertain.”

  * * *

  Many Confederates might secretly have agreed, for their situation was suddenly beginning to look precarious. On a rainy late February morning in Richmond, Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy. In his first message to the Confederate Congress, Davis spoke bluntly of the recent failures of the rebel army. “The Government has attempted more than it had the power successfully to achieve,” Davis admitted. The South simply had too many borders and not enough men; it was hopeless to try “to protect by our arms the whole territory of the Confederate states, seaboard and inland.” Davis had summoned General Robert E. Lee to Richmond, asking Lee to suspend his work preparing coastal defenses and advise him on strategy.