Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  One would-be supplier of a hundred thousand surplus French rifles, a man named William Roelofson, recounted his experience of the Stanton style. Roelofson’s hopes had soared when Stanton was named secretary of war, because a mutual acquaintance provided an introduction. The contractor rushed to Washington to peddle the guns, but Stanton kept him cooling his heels at Willard’s Hotel for three weeks. Finally, about a month into Stanton’s tenure, Roelofson attended a public day. He handed Stanton a carefully worded proposal, which the secretary snatched, skimmed, and slapped facedown on his desk. He scrawled a few lines, then, peering through his glasses, barked out to everyone assembled what he had written. “The Secretary of War declines to make any contract or arrangement with Mr. Roelofson in respect to the arms mentioned within—because the government has no use for them—and he has no occasion for the services of Mr. Roelofson in his Department of the Government.” Then, the chastened arms dealer recounted, Stanton returned his proposal “in such a manner that I not only felt chagrined but humiliated.”

  No one could accuse the secretary of war of backroom dealing, though many in Washington were coming to think he was a martinet. But if Stanton was beginning to get a grip on his swollen and disordered domain, he had little insight yet into McClellan and his chain of command. He told the president and his fellow cabinet members that the general in chief distrusted the civilian leadership and was using his position to hide information from them. In fact, McClellan had instructed his generals to make all reports directly to him, “and he reports nothing.” For more than a month, Stanton informed the group, McClellan had been holding key telegrams at his headquarters, refusing to share them with the War Department. To cure this intolerable situation, Stanton had ordered the main telegraph moved from McClellan’s office to his own.

  Stanton was correct about the motive behind McClellan’s excessive secrecy. He had only the most grudging respect for the constitutional chain of command. On one occasion, the navy’s David Dixon Porter was meeting with McClellan to discuss plans to capture New Orleans when an aide announced that Lincoln was outside. “Let him wait. I am busy,” McClellan answered. Shocked, Porter protested that Lincoln had a great interest in the New Orleans campaign; and besides, Porter said, “It’s not respectful to keep him waiting. Remember that he is our Commander-in-Chief.” McClellan replied: “Well, let the Commander-in-Chief wait, he has no business to know what is going on.”

  Stanton’s disturbing report about the telegrams—along with the fact that McClellan and his army had left Washington and advanced through rain and mud to assess the situation in Manassas—moved Lincoln to take an overdue yet fateful step. That evening he instructed John Hay to call Seward, Chase, and Stanton to his office. Seward got there first, and when he arrived Lincoln read aloud his President’s Special War Order No. 3, which removed McClellan as general in chief. Seward heartily approved, saying that after the “imbecility” of the canal boat episode, McClellan was lucky to retain command of the Army of the Potomac. Seward suggested publishing the order in Stanton’s name, as a way of strengthening the secretary of war, but by then Stanton had entered the room, and he demurred. Feelings were so raw between him and the McClellan faction, he said, that the order would look like a personal insult if it came from him. And indeed it would, because two other items in the order also cut against McClellan’s wishes. In the West, Halleck was given command over Buell’s department along with his own, while in the mountains of western Virginia a new department was created for the purpose of giving a command to the unreliable but politically powerful John Frémont.

  Putting Frémont in charge of an army again was a potentially explosive decision, because he was now engaged in a very public feud with the powerful Blair family, to which the postmaster general belonged and whose active support was an essential part of Lincoln’s appeal to Democratic Unionists. Further complicating the situation, the radical general had recently caused great embarrassment to Montgomery Blair by leaking a private letter he’d received from Blair the previous year. Published in the New-York Tribune earlier in March, the letter complained of the president’s “feeble policy,” which Blair considered a vestige of Lincoln’s days in the defunct Whig Party. When the letter appeared, Blair immediately went to the White House and offered to “make some amends by resigning.” Lincoln answered that he had no intention of reading the letter; he believed it had been published only to stir up trouble. “Forget it,” he told Blair, and “never mention or think of it again.” This magnanimous gesture no doubt influenced Blair’s decision to defend Lincoln’s appointment of Frémont in a strongly worded letter to his influential father. The president had no choice but to name Frémont to the post, Blair wrote, to arrest “the spread of factions in the country & prevent divisions at this time.”

  The consolation for McClellan in all this was that the president did not appoint a new general in chief above him. Instead, he ordered that “all commanders … [will] report directly to the Secretary of War,” and “prompt, full and frequent reports will be expected of all.”

  After much tribulation, a key problem facing Lincoln at the beginning of the year—namely, how to assert his authority over McClellan and the army—had at last been addressed. Now, through Stanton, the president would be his own general in chief. Lincoln’s confidence in his ability to command the armies had soared after the success of recent campaigns. The simultaneous movements of multiple expeditions had worked just as he predicted, stretching Confederate lines to the breaking point. The armored gunboats he had championed were proving themselves on inland rivers and along the coast.

  Public opinion had begun to turn in his favor as well, and the president could find affirmation of his leadership in newspapers throughout the North. The March 12 edition of The New York Times, for example, credited Lincoln with the string of victories that surely guaranteed “the end of the rebellion.” The paper declared: “With a patience only equaled by that of the people, he awaited the completion of preparations, but the moment these were completed, the word was given which set in motion the immense machinery of destruction, from the Atlantic to the Missouri line. The scheme of the campaign, the discipline of the troops, the elaboration of preliminary details, may be justly credited to others. Action and victory we owe directly to the President.”

  Lincoln was entitled to feel a new confidence. As he had done so often in his life, he had learned a new subject almost entirely through his own efforts: by reading, by questioning, and through lonely hours of thinking. He was now a competent military commander, having graduated at the top of a class numbering just one. Such rare ability to master a challenge through his own resourcefulness encouraged Lincoln’s tendency to rely on himself. Left unchecked, however, this burgeoning confidence threatened to tip into overconfidence.

  * * *

  McClellan took the news of his demotion with surprising good cheer. Getting out of Washington and marching his troops restored some of the exuberance he had shown the previous summer. The newspapers provided reports of meager camps and logs painted to look like cannon in the abandoned Rebel fortifications around Manassas, and Attorney General Bates scoffed that this first mission by the Army of the Potomac was “a fool’s errand.” But well-trained West Pointers recognized that the positions had been in fact, formidable; McClellan, for one, was delighted to have taken the key railroad junction with hardly any bloodshed. “My movements gave us Manassas with the loss of one life—a gallant cavalry officer—history will, when I am in my grave, record it as the brightest passage of my life that I accomplished so much at so small a cost,” he wrote. As for losing the top rank, he professed unconcern. His army was “half glad that I now belong to them alone,” while Lincoln, he wrote, “is my strongest friend.”

  With the Potomac open, McClellan called his transports to Alexandria and prepared to fill them with troops and supplies destined for the peninsula east of Richmond. The Confederate retreat had spoiled his hopes of separating Johnston’s army from the Rebel
capital, but a campaign on the fine roads between the York and the James rivers still seemed to offer the prospect of a decisive victory, an ambition that had filled his thoughts for months.

  Lincoln, by contrast, remained grief-stricken and broken by pain. Willie’s death, he confided to a visitor, “showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.” Mary, “distressed and pale,” inconsolable, remained secluded in her room day after day, alternating between silence and loud bursts of tears. Tad’s recovery was slow, and many nights he asked his father to sleep with him because he was lonely and afraid. With Mary incapacitated, it fell to the president to handle family crises.

  On March 10, for example, he was in the middle of a meeting when John Hay reluctantly interrupted. Stepping into the hall, Lincoln met Rebecca Pomroy, the nurse, who told him that Tad was refusing to take his medicine. After a few minutes alone with the boy, the president emerged from behind the closed sickroom door: “It’s all right now. Tad and I have fixed things up,” he said. Then he went to his desk, where he wrote out a check, drawn on his Riggs & Company bank account, for five dollars payable “to Tad (when he is well enough to present).”

  A few days later marked three weeks since Willie’s death; as he had done the previous two Thursdays, Lincoln spent part of the day alone in the room where the boy had died. His quiet there was inviolable. At mid-month, Pomroy returned to her work at the military hospital, but the president often asked her to return to the White House and keep his wife company for a few hours.

  As time went on and Mary remained in her room, Pomroy began to weary of the first lady’s self-pity: “She suffers from depression of spirits, but I do think if she would only come [to the hospital] and look at the poor soldiers occasionally it would be better for her.” Pomroy noted approvingly that Lincoln read the Bible almost daily around lunchtime. One afternoon she found him sprawled on the chaise with the big, worn volume open on his lap. He looked up and asked which book in the Bible was her favorite. The Psalms, Pomroy answered. “Yes, they are the best,” he agreed, “for I find in them something for every day of the week.”

  One of Pomroy’s visits fell on March 27—another Thursday, the weekly reminder of the family’s unanswerable loss. When it came time to leave, Mary pressed a picture of Willie into Pomroy’s hands, along with one of Tad. Then Lincoln offered the nurse a ride home. He was a little sturdier now, no longer asking her the same forlorn questions about God and grief again and again.

  A hard rain had turned Fourteenth Street into a bog; the presidential carriage got stuck. Lincoln ordered his driver and footman to hold the nervous horses steady while he got down and found three large stones to make a pathway. Taking Pomroy’s hand, he guided her across the stones to the safety of the sidewalk. As he often did, he perceived in this simple scene a principle for living. Standing in his muddy boots, the president counseled the nurse: “All through life, be sure to put your feet in the right place, and then stand firm.”

  * * *

  In 1862, a transatlantic voyage took two weeks or more, depending on the weather, so news of the war produced a delayed reaction in Europe. The February victories of Grant and Burnside registered in London and Paris only in March, followed a couple of weeks later by news of Lincoln’s proposal for a gradual end to slavery. Louis-Napoleon called Ambassador Dayton to the palace at once.

  Dayton had been having trouble scheduling a meeting with the foreign minister, Thouvenel, so he was surprised to be summoned on such short notice by the emperor himself. When the New Jersey lawyer was ushered into Louis-Napoleon’s presence at two P.M. on March 25, he found the handsome, mustachioed monarch in a very businesslike frame of mind. The emperor wanted to talk about cotton. When the war broke out, French warehouses had been stuffed with raw material for the nation’s busy looms, but the stockpiles were gone now and textile workers were jobless. A man with the name Napoleon did not need to be told what might happen when masses of working people found themselves poor and hungry. Having no interest in another French revolution, Louis needed cotton.

  Furthermore, the emperor said, his thinking about the American situation had changed in recent weeks. “When the insurrection broke out,” Dayton recalled him saying, “he did not suppose the North would succeed;… it was the general belief of statesmen in Europe that the two sections would never come together again,” because the South “was a large country, and for that reason difficult to subdue.” Now Louis was no longer so sure. He had seen the success of the Union war effort and knew that an expedition had been launched to retake the vital port of New Orleans. The monarch seemed favorably impressed by Lincoln’s emancipation proposal, which was “almost universally looked upon [in Europe] as the ‘beginning of the end’” of the war, Dayton noted.

  But the emperor confessed fears “that the war might yet be a long one.” And with the Confederates promising to burn cotton rather than let the Yankees capture it and sell it to Europe, he wanted to ask Dayton whether Washington had any strategy for reopening the cotton trade in places liberated by Union troops.

  Seeing an opening, Dayton reassured Napoleon that plenty of growers in the South would rather sell their crop than sacrifice it for the Confederate cause; he promised the monarch that once the Union gained control of New Orleans and other Southern ports, the military would find a way to get that cotton to market. However, Dayton added, nothing buoyed the hopes of the Rebels more than the possibility of European intervention. These hopes had been raised when France and Britain declared the Confederacy a lawful belligerent early in the conflict, and they would be crushed if the two countries withdrew that declaration. The rebellion would collapse, the Union blockade would be lifted, the cotton would flow, and the emperor’s workers would be back at their spindles.

  Louis-Napoleon promised to give Dayton’s words careful consideration. Indeed, the monarch had a lot to think about, because by now his grand plan to restore French power in the New World had become exquisitely complex. He badly wanted to conquer Mexico and install the Archduke Maximilian—butterfly-collecting younger brother of the emperor of Austria—as a puppet ruler. But he had to step carefully. He knew that proslavery Southerners had long considered Mexico prime territory for the spread of their peculiar institution, so he was eager to make the Confederacy a friend rather than an enemy. Together, Maximilian of Mexico and Jefferson Davis could more than offset the rising power of the former United States. Still, if the North really was about to throttle the rebellion, Napoleon needed to be on Lincoln’s good side, lest the president decide to use his huge new army to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against meddling Europeans. Perhaps the best response, from the emperor’s perspective, would be to help the South win its independence while making the North believe that France was still a trusted ally.

  Thouvenel took Dayton aside after the meeting with Louis Napoleon to underline the emperor’s views: the French government was now confident that the Union would get control of the ports, but lacked faith that the cotton crop could be saved. As for withdrawing the declaration of belligerent rights, Thouvenel felt it was beneath the dignity of a great nation to reverse its position simply because the South appeared beaten. In any event, nothing could be done without the agreement of Great Britain. Thouvenel closed on a hopeful note, according to Dayton. In his report to Seward, the ambassador wrote: “He said, if we took possession of the ports, the war would be altogether internal, and France would have nothing to do with it.… He said, furthermore, that we knew very well that all the sympathies of France and her people had been with the north from the beginning.”

  * * *

  “The period of inaction has passed,” George McClellan announced in a message to his Army of the Potomac, more than 100,000 strong. At last, after all the meetings and intrigues, he was moving. “I will bring you now face to face with the rebels, and only pray that God may defend the right.… I am to watch over you as a parent watches over his children, and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.”r />
  While newspaper reporters and congressmen prowled through the remains of the Confederate camps around Manassas in late March, McClellan began sending his army south in the largest movement of troops and supplies yet seen in North America. “Numerous steam-tugs were pulling huge sailing vessels here and there, and large transports, loaded with soldiers, horses, bales of hay, and munitions for an army, swept majestically down the river,” wrote one awed private. “Every description of water conveyance, from a canal boat to a huge three-decked steamboat, [was] pressed into the service.” An English observer termed it “the stride of a giant.”

  McClellan had revised his plans to account for the consequences of Johnston’s retreat. The Rappahannock River was closed now, and the still menacing Virginia lurked on the James. He would use the York River on the north side of the peninsula near Richmond as his supply line on the way to the Confederate capital. To accomplish this, he told Stanton, he would need to capture Yorktown in a coordinated attack by infantry and navy gunboats.

  But the expedition had scarcely begun when it had to be reined in. To maximize his own force, McClellan left a minimal number of troops behind. Lincoln was dismayed to find the ranks in and around Washington so thin. Though Little Mac’s supporters insisted that the capital faced no real risk, Lincoln believed that even a raid by the Rebels could deliver a mortal blow to the Union. “We began to fear the Rebels would take the capital, and once in possession of that, we feared that foreign countries might acknowledge the Confederacy,” he later explained. “Nobody could foresee the evil that might come from the destruction of records and property.”