Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  But as men fought over credit and blame, the larger meaning of Shiloh was written in the exhausted columns of mauled Confederates retreating through a pounding hailstorm, and in the Union lines too shattered and spent to pursue them. A strong Rebel force, fighting in its own heartland and on its own terms, had hammered a Union army yet failed to break it. And now, even as the Confederates made their way back to Corinth, additional manpower from the North was surging toward Pittsburg Landing: on the same day the Rebels were driven back from Shiloh, Pope’s army had finally captured Island No 10. In short, the bluecoats were firmly lodged in Dixie, and they would not be driven out by head-on attacks. Johnston had landed his best punch, but it wasn’t enough.

  Yet the ferocity of that blow was itself a grim turning point. A line had been crossed; on April 6 the splintered nation had entered an unspeakable realm. Total casualties were more than double the combined losses at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge—all the major battles in the war thus far. Men saw things at Shiloh that prefigured the horrors of the war to come: entire forests sheared off by cannon fire; brains exposed in crushed foreheads; men holding their own entrails; fields furrowed by shell fragments and littered with muddy haversacks and broken rifles; acres strewn with dead and dying men and horses. One field was so thick with corpses, in Grant’s description, “that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”

  During the battle, a portion of the 55th Illinois Regiment had been trapped in a ravine and surrounded by Rebels who fired down on their heads as fast as they could reload. “It was like shooting into a flock of sheep,” said one witness. The blaze of gunpowder and hail of bullets touched off a fire in the ravine’s undergrowth, burning dead and wounded together. A young soldier from Buell’s army named Ambrose Bierce passed by the ravine the next day and went “down into the valley of death.” The bodies lay “half-buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame. Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins. According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin.”

  Those who saw and survived Shiloh emerged with a new understanding of the Civil War. In Washington, Attorney General Bates imagined that the paired victories at Island No. 10 and Shiloh “must break the heart of the rebellion.” But the heart of the rebellion, as demonstrated in those fields and woodlands on the bank of the Tennessee, was strong and war-ready beyond all expectations. It would be broken only by long, hard fighting; as Sherman wrote to his wife in a letter scrawled with pen in wounded hand, “I still feel the horrid nature of this war, and the piles of dead Gentlemen & wounded & maimed makes me more anxious than ever for some hope of an End but I know such a thing cannot be for a long long time.”

  Years later, when the whole arc of the Civil War was behind him, Grant pinpointed these two days in April as the moment when he began to realize what the conflict truly would be. “Up to the battle of Shiloh I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon,” he wrote. But when the Rebels answered the defeats at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson by re-forming their lines and “made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost, then, indeed, I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”

  * * *

  As George McClellan established his headquarters some seventy miles east of Richmond and cast his eye on nearby Yorktown, he was still living in the pre-Shiloh world. “I think that a [Union victory] here substantially breaks up the rebel cause,” he assured the president. But when he learned on April 5 that Lincoln had ordered an entire corps of his army withheld, McClellan was “astonished.” The general felt certain that Washington was in no danger because no serious enemy force threatened it. Captured Rebels were telling him that Joseph E. Johnston’s army was now arriving at Yorktown to reinforce the garrison. McClellan, who had a bad habit of overestimating the enemy’s strength, guessed that he was facing at least 100,000 troops. (In fact, the garrison under John Magruder numbered only about 13,000 when the Federals first approached.) With Confederate guns booming in the distance, McClellan fired off a message to Lincoln begging him to reconsider: “In my deliberate judgment the success of our cause will be imperiled. I am now of the opinion that I shall have to fight all of the available force of the Rebels not far from here. Do not force me to do so with diminished numbers.”

  Later that night, as his chief of staff snored loudly in one corner of the room, the young general found himself too angry to sleep. By lantern light he poured out his resentment in a letter to his wife, Mary Ellen. “It is the most infamous thing that history has recorded,” he wrote. “The idea of depriving a General of 35,000 troops when actually under fire!” Nothing was turning out as McClellan expected. The navy was refusing to send gunboats to support his advance until Confederate shore batteries were silenced, but the troops he had assigned to take out the batteries were suddenly detained near Washington. The good sandy roads he had imagined were muddy from rain and snow. Even the maps he relied on proved to be “worthless.”

  With so much going so badly, McClellan decided that rather than attack Yorktown, he should settle down for a siege. It was Lincoln’s turn to be astonished. Responding to the general’s plea to have the corps restored to him, Lincoln scolded: “You now have over 100,000 troops with you. I think you better break the enemies’ line … at once.” This infuriated Little Mac even more. Again he expressed his feelings to Mary Ellen. “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come & do it himself,” he seethed. Instead, McClellan volleyed back with a telegram disputing Lincoln’s math, saying that the force on the peninsula was actually far smaller, only about 85,000 men. “I need all the aid the Government can give me,” he begged.

  In one short week, the expedition by the Army of the Potomac had gone from the stride of a giant to the slog of a siege. Reading the general’s appeal for more troops, the president realized just how far off track things had gone. McClellan had the largest, best-trained, best-supplied army the continent had ever seen, and while most of that army was not yet battle tested, the same was true of the Rebel force. It seemed to Lincoln that his general had changed positions without changing posture: McClellan was still leaning back from the fight, exaggerating obstacles and calling for help. Having pushed him up to the line, Lincoln felt McClellan sliding back into the dangerous zone where his motives could be questioned by his growing legion of enemies. Much of the country was fast concluding that Little Mac was either afraid of the Rebels or in league with them, and Lincoln could do no more to protect him.

  In response to McClellan’s plea, the president wrote out an argument that he hoped would restore momentum. It was Lincoln at his best: direct, lucid, combining force with sympathy. He explained why he had held back the army corps under the command of Irwin McDowell, asking pointedly: “Do you really think I should permit the line from Richmond … to this city to be entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by less than twenty thousand unorganized troops?” That was a question “which the country will not allow me to evade.” Lincoln also pronounced McClellan’s low troop count “a curious mystery,” then once again tried—as he had tried for months—to make the general see that delay gained him nothing while potentially costing him everything. “It is the precise time to strike a blow,” the president declared. “It is indispensable to you.… I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness,” he concluded. “But you must act.”

  Unfortunately, the moment when McClellan could easily have swept over
the ramparts at Yorktown was already slipping away. The methodical general set to work dragging heavy siege guns slowly up the muddy roads of the peninsula; at the front, meanwhile, the mighty Army of the Potomac moved forward not another inch. The war had reached its awful maturity in the West, but here in the East it remained bogged down.

  Indeed, the most fearful thing McClellan had to report was the “terrible scare” he experienced when his friend Brigadier General Fitz John Porter went floating away in an untethered surveillance balloon. Blown toward the Rebel fortifications, Porter frantically tossed sandbags overboard to gain altitude as the Confederates took potshots. A shift in the wind blew him back toward Union lines, but when he tried to release gas from the balloon, the valve opened wide and he began plunging to earth. With a desperate grab at the last moment, the terrified general latched onto a tree limb, then he nearly suffocated when the vast billows of silk balloon settled over him. Little Mac wrote to Mary Ellen, “You can imagine how I felt!”—but at last Porter came strolling safe and sound into his tent. Balloon flight was added to the list of things that George McClellan would not risk.

  * * *

  Mary Lincoln at last emerged from her private grieving to find that the scandals bubbling around her before Willie’s death had worsened. While she was cloistered, Thomas Stackpole of the White House staff had paid a visit to Orville Browning, seeking the senator’s help. It seemed that John Watt, the White House gardener, wished to be assigned to a European mission as a special agent of the Interior Department. Stackpole warned Browning that it would be a good idea to get Watt out of town, because he had been coaching Mary Lincoln in the dark art of defrauding the government. Watt “suggested to Mrs. Lincoln the making of false bills so as to get pay for private expenses out of the public treasury.” The president already knew about this and thought he had put a stop to it, Stackpole continued; Lincoln “was very indignant, and refunded what had been filched from the government out of his private purse.” But the stealing hadn’t stopped, and Mary went on filling her wardrobes and cupboards with expensive clothes and jewelry. Now, Stackpole reported, Watt’s wife was receiving $100 per month for a nonexistent White House job and kicking the money back to Mary. Stackpole also told of a case in which Mary paid for a new set of silver by having the merchant submit a fraudulent bill to the government for repairs supposedly made to a set of silver already owned by the White House. When Lincoln noticed the new silver, Mary told him it was a gift.

  Mrs. Lincoln had once explained her lavish spending thus: “I must dress in costly materials. The people scrutinize every article that I wear with critical curiosity. The very fact of having grown up in the West, subjects me to more searching observation.” And she was right. “They say Mrs. L is awfully Western, loud & unrefined,” harrumphed Harriet Lane, the White House hostess during the administration of the bachelor James Buchanan. Young Julia Taft got closer to the heart of the matter, though, when she said of Mary Lincoln: “She wanted what she wanted when she wanted it, and no substitute.” There was an obsessive edge to Mary’s spending that went far beyond looking nice. David Davis, a friend of the family who later served as administrator of the president’s estate, recalled a bill for three hundred pairs of kid gloves, purchased in the span of about three months.

  Following his disturbing meeting with Stackpole, Browning apparently agreed to use his influence to have Watt sent to Europe, thus getting him out of Mrs. Lincoln’s orbit. But Watt’s departure meant that the gardener’s wife would no longer be funneling a paycheck to Mary, and Mary needed that money to help mask her mounting debts. On April 4, dressed head to toe in mourning black, she approached John Hay with a proposal: since Mrs. Watt’s departure would create more work for her in running the house, Hay should pay the $100 salary to her. She also asked that Hay put her in charge of the White House stationery budget. The young secretary refused both requests. “I told her to kiss mine,” Hay jokingly reported to Nicolay. “Was I right?”

  The volatile first lady was furious at being refused, and what had been an uncomfortable tension between her and the young men who shared Lincoln’s office now exploded into outright hostility. Mary demanded that Lincoln fire Hay, but Lincoln brushed her off. “The devil is abroad” in the White House, Hay mused. “His daughter, the Hell-Cat … is in a ‘state of wrath’ about the Steward’s salary.”

  At home as well as in his presidential duties, Lincoln thus struggled to moderate between antagonistic factions. He also sought consolation for his continuing grief in a series of sermons written by the Reverend Francis L. Vinton of New York’s Trinity Church. A former West Point soldier from a family of fighting men, the popular priest was characterized by “uncompromising manliness,” according to one colleague, and when he called on Lincoln to offer spiritual assurance, he gently scolded the president for despairing over Willie’s death. A Christian is hopeful, Vinton preached.

  Slowly the Lincolns returned to something like their previous routine. They saw each other mainly at meals. She needled him; he fended off her criticisms with wisecracks. One April day, a guest was amazed to see one of the family cats climb onto a chair beside the president and gobble a morsel of food that Lincoln offered from his golden fork. Half bantering and half scolding, Mary said, “Don’t you think it is shameful for Mr. Lincoln to feed tabby with a gold fork?” Lincoln replied with a gibe at his feckless predecessor’s expense: “If the gold fork was good enough for Buchanan I think it is good enough for tabby.”

  Work was a distraction from grief, but it was taking a terrible toll. When a neighbor from Illinois paid a visit in mid-April, Lincoln complained of “the constant pressure,” which he found almost unendurable. “You know I am not of a very hopeful temperament,” he reminded his friend, though he did have the capacity to “take hold of a thing and hold on for a good while.” That was how he managed to get through this “protracted and severe” trial. “I am sometimes astonished at the part I am acting in this terrible drama. I can hardly believe that I am the same man I was a few years ago when I was living in my humble way with you in Springfield. I often ask myself the question, ‘When shall I awake and find it all a dream?’”

  During her long hours alone in her room, Mary had become fixated on the idea of communicating with Willie in the bourne beyond death. Spiritualism had a strong grip on the public imagination in those days, a grip that grew stronger as the war gathered its terrible harvest. It was therefore not surprising, perhaps, that the first lady’s thoughts turned in this direction.

  The seed may have been planted, according to Rebecca Pomroy, by an unidentified member of the Senate who told Mrs. Lincoln the story of a mysterious letter. In this strange tale, the senator arrived at his desk one morning to find the letter waiting, tied with a white satin ribbon. He also found instructions to deliver it to a certain Washington clergyman, who in turn would know how to find a particular widow in the capital city—a nurse whose husband and two children had died. On April 4, this twisting path led to Pomroy, who opened the letter and read it carefully. It was from a purported spiritualist in the far West, claiming to channel a message from Pomroy’s dead son. The boy reported that he had made a new friend in the spirit world: Willie Lincoln. The spirits of the two boys liked to hover over their mothers in Mary Lincoln’s bedroom, but they hated that the women were so sad. They wanted their mothers to be happy and stop grieving. That was the message: Stop grieving.

  Mary was electrified by this extraordinary tale and the two women spoke about the letter whenever Pomroy visited. The nurse quickly deduced that it must have been sent by a charlatan who once lived across the street from her family in Massachusetts and thus knew the details of her life, but Mary wasn’t interested in debunking such a reassuring story. She wanted to pursue it.

  As it happened, these two odd events—Mary’s appeal to John Hay for money, and Pomroy’s receipt of the message from beyond—both took place on April 4, a beautiful Friday when the Washington spring made the world seem fresh and ne
w. Happily, Tad had at last made a full recovery, so Lincoln called for the presidential carriage and the three of them went for a ride “for the first time since their recent affliction,” as The New York Times put it. Two days later, on Sunday morning, the president and the first lady attended church services together, knowing nothing of the terrible battle erupting that same moment beside the Tennessee River.

  * * *

  News of the Union victories at Shiloh and Island No. 10 reached Washington on April 9. The fickle springtime was serving up another round of “rain, sleet and snow,” yet citizens poured into the streets to celebrate. “The City is in wild excitement over the news. A Salute of 100 guns ordered by the Sec’y of War,” Horatio Taft recorded in his diary. “The great ‘Anaconda’ is drawing in his coils tighter and tighter around the rebels,” Taft crowed, capturing the full flood of Northern confidence. “They have behaved most cowardly in every instance where they did not have the advantage in numbers or position. The proud ‘Southerners’ had better strike the word chivalry from their vocabulary. I think they are a race of bombaster cowards and events are proving it every day.”

  Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving “to our Heavenly Father for these inestimable blessings.” Among the blessings, alongside military successes on land and sea, Lincoln included a suggestion that God was keeping Europe out of the war. Given the deepening cotton shortages, however, the president and his secretary of state weren’t content to leave foreign relations entirely in the hands of Providence. Indeed, Lincoln and Seward saw the string of Union victories as a lever they could use to separate the Europeans once and for all from the South. And they needed a lever, because powerful forces in France and England continued to push for intervention.

  By April, the French emperor was playing a double game, pleading with Dayton for shipments of cotton while secretly scheming to stir up a joint action with England to break the Federal blockade. Louis-Napoleon needed to get the French textile mills running, and he didn’t seem to care which side was helped or hurt in the process. England’s position was more complicated. It too needed to feed its looms, but the way the Confederacy boasted of the power of King Cotton to force England’s hand offended many British citizens, as did the continuing fact of Southern slavery. For the pragmatic Lord Palmerston, there was also the risk of backing the wrong horse. With Union armies on the move, he had to weigh the danger of recognizing the Confederacy only to have it defeated. That might make an enemy of the United States for generations to come.