Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The British government could not be blamed for wishing the crisis away. The foreign minister, Lord Russell, summed up the prevailing attitude in a speech in Parliament at about this time. Surely the American territory was big enough for two independent nations, he said, adding that he hoped the Lincoln government would agree to a peaceful separation. Events were moving in exactly the opposite direction, though, for each day Lincoln grew more confident of victory and the Rebels became more ferocious in their resistance. The increasingly bloody war was proof of the vanity of Russell’s wishes: there was no longer any chance of the United States becoming two nations by peaceful means.

  But while Russell wished and hoped, others in England were taking action. The normally bustling port of Liverpool, quieter now because of the Federal blockade and the Southern cotton embargo, was a hive of Confederate sympathizers. A fund-raising appeal in the city had collected £40,000 to buy arms and ammunition for the Rebels; a second appeal was launched in April, to even greater enthusiasm. Laird Brothers, a major Liverpool shipbuilder, was producing lightning-fast cruisers for Confederate use as blockade-runners or open-sea raiders. The builders pretended that the ships weren’t meant for the Rebels; the first one, recently finished, was already on her way to the West Indies flying a neutral flag and bearing the name Oreto. But that was a charade. As soon as she dropped anchor, she would be transformed into a Confederate warship. This cynical violation of Britain’s declared neutrality moved Charles Francis Adams to enter a formal protest, but Lord Russell simply turned a blind eye. Once again, he saw only what he wished to see.

  Reflecting on William Dayton’s report of his surprise meeting with Napoleon in March, Lincoln came to believe that the ambassador had stumbled onto the perfect answer to the needs of the French and the wishes of the British. The way to link all these issues—the cotton shortage, the Union victories, and the damage being done by lingering Confederate sympathies—was to strike a deal: Lincoln would begin to reopen the cotton trade in places where the Union had regained power, and in exchange France and Britain would withdraw their recognition of the South as a lawful belligerent. At Seward’s request, Adams left London and crossed the English Channel to hear Dayton’s proposal for himself, and on April 11, he reported to Seward that he “derived great benefit” from meeting with Dayton and would make “a corresponding change of policy” to conform his approach to his colleague’s. As if to give this new strategy a boost, the Union scored another important victory the same day. Using modern rifled artillery that fired powerful shells, Federal gunners forced the surrender of the seemingly impregnable Fort Pulaski, which controlled access to the port of Savannah, Georgia.

  A wild rumor in Washington had Seward embarking on a secret mission to Mississippi to negotiate a peace with the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, but the secretary of state was in fact in his office that day, laboring to formalize the delicate proposal. Seward prepared a long memorandum for Adams to present to the British government, laying out Lincoln’s official version of the bargain. To support his case, Seward wrote boastfully of “a full month of military successes” and asserted that the Rebel cause was now “hopeless.” He proceeded to explain why in great detail, and with his letter he enclosed a specially prepared map illustrating the successes and strategies of the U.S. military. Seward closed this strong presentation with a characteristically optimistic flourish. The health of the United States, he declared, was “more robust and vigorous than … ever before.”

  The effort was wasted. As soon as Adams returned from Paris—not knowing about the message Seward was preparing—he asked for a meeting with Lord Russell, during which he pitched the deal as Dayton had outlined it, without supporting materials. The two men had a long talk, candid by diplomatic standards, sparring politely, jabbing each other’s sore spots just hard enough to be noticed but not hard enough to cause offense. Adams did not trust the British; perhaps no grandson of a colonial revolutionary hero ever could. He believed that they saw a future rival in the young United States and were not so secretly pulling for its collapse. Russell, for his part, still believed that the Lincoln administration faced a hopeless task in trying to tame so vast a region. Britain’s only interest in the matter was a quick restoration of normal trade, he said: cotton headed east, manufactured goods headed west. And the easiest way to achieve that, from Britain’s perspective, would be for the North to let the South go in peace. Russell also reminded Adams that the Union had initially asked Europe to remain neutral, and Europe had complied. Neutrality remained the preferred position.

  As the short, dark days began to lengthen in London, Adams worried that Europe’s precarious diplomatic balance would not last long. The pressure for cotton built daily. The British chancellor of the exchequer, William Gladstone, a politician with a keen sense of the popular mind, traveled to the heart of England’s mill country to deliver a speech in Manchester that was more favorable to the Confederates than any he had given before. “The North fights for supremacy, the South fights for independence,” the future prime minister declared. His tone, Adams warned in a dispatch to Seward, was a dark portent: “As the period approaches when the end of the existing stock of cotton grows more and more visible, the distress of the [textile workers] appears more aggravated, and the speculations as to the future are more freely indulged in.” Adams believed that England was watching the French emperor, hoping, “in secret, that he will have the courage to do what many here wish, but are ashamed to declare to the world”—that is, deliver victory to the South.

  * * *

  As spelled out in Seward’s long memo, the president’s proposed grand bargain appealed to the cold economic calculations of the British government: cotton in exchange for a change of policy. But Lincoln, of all people, appreciated that the ability to be coldly calculating did not necessarily imply hardness of heart. The England that cravenly ignored the Confederate ships under construction in Liverpool was the same England that had led the world in eradicating slavery.

  Lincoln was mindful of this nobler aspect of Great Britain; he saw a constant reminder of it on his office wall. Among the military maps, Lincoln had hung only two pictures. One, over the fireplace, was a portrait of Andrew Jackson, hero of the opposition Democrats. Jackson’s picture was a reminder to all visitors that preserving the federal Union was not a partisan affair, for Jackson had also faced down a rebellion rooted in South Carolina, over the supposed right of states to nullify federal laws. A smaller portrait hung nearby: a likeness of John Bright, a British abolitionist, reformer, and longtime member of Parliament. Bright was, like Lincoln, a gifted orator steeped in the ideals of an equal-opportunity, free-labor society. He and his colleague Richard Cobden were such devoted proponents of the American system that they were sometimes known as the MPs for the United States. Bright’s picture on the president’s wall underlined the importance of England’s antislavery movement to the success of Lincoln’s delicate and perilous foreign policy. And when his eye fell on the large round face and bushy whiskers, he was assured that the Union had strong, true friends in England. His task as president was to help them help him.

  With that in mind, Lincoln on April 10 asked the Senate to ratify a treaty long advocated by British abolitionists, guaranteeing American cooperation in shutting down the international slave trade. It was a point of great national pride in England that Her Majesty’s navy was the world’s leading force against the trafficking of human beings. Over the years, most maritime nations had entered agreements to permit British warships to stop and search suspected slave smugglers at sea. But because the slave states controlled the Senate in the period before the war, the United States was not among them.

  Lincoln forwarded the treaty to Charles Sumner at a time when the Senate was busier than it had ever been: major debates raged over bills authorizing confiscation of Rebel property (a way of freeing Confederate-owned slaves) and ending slavery in the District of Columbia. In addition, countless details in the huge tax bill requ
ired resolution; long lists of new officials in the fast-growing government needed confirmation; and complex bills involving homesteads, land-grant colleges, and the transcontinental railroad spawned endless committee meetings. Meanwhile, Lincoln wanted to create a new federal department for agriculture, and he continued to argue for diplomatic recognition of Liberia and Haiti. Despite the chamber’s heavy workload, Sumner somehow managed to push the treaty to a vote in just two weeks. It passed unanimously.

  “Laus Deo!”—praise be to God—Sumner wrote after the vote was tallied, for he believed that the treaty would effectively end the slave trade while seeding “good will & friendship between U.S. and England.” He rushed from the Capitol to Seward’s office to deliver the news. Sumner found the secretary of state napping on his sofa. Startled awake, Seward reacted straight from his deeply political gut: “Good God! The Democrats have disappeared.” After a moment’s reflection, he added, “This is the greatest act of the Administration.” That night, Lord Lyons, the British ambassador, called on Sumner to thank him. “He overflowed with gratitude & delight,” the senator reported, “happy that his name was signed to a treaty of such importance—perhaps the last slave-trade treaty which the world will see.”

  Though never fast enough for abolitionists, the ground was shifting daily under the teetering edifice of slavery. On April 11, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to outlaw slavery in the District of Columbia, the one jurisdiction where Congress had undisputed authority to take this step. The vote came near the close of business that Friday afternoon, too late for action by the Senate. Hundreds of slaves across the city slipped into hiding so that their masters couldn’t force them into Maryland or Virginia before the law took effect. Reformers who had worked for a generation to reach this milestone had to wait through another weekend.

  When Monday finally came, the Senate passed the bill by a wide margin. Now, surely, the wait was over. After all, Lincoln had offered a similar bill as a young congressman some fourteen years earlier. Unexpectedly, however, the president didn’t sign the new bill immediately. Monday ended and Tuesday dragged past, with still no word from the White House. It was well known that Lincoln preferred gradual emancipation on the pragmatic theory that slaves might be unprepared for a freedom that came overnight. Given the prejudice against former slaves, what would become of the suddenly jobless and homeless freed slaves of Washington? Who would provide for helpless children and elderly slaves who could no longer work? Lincoln also supported a public referendum on the question of slavery in the District, not least because it would show border state conservatives that Republicans respected the will of the people.

  But these reasons hardly seemed sufficient for Lincoln to withhold his signature. An irritated Sumner went to the White House hoping to speed things along. He tried embarrassing Lincoln, telling the president that as long as he sat on the bill he was “making himself … the largest slave-holder in the country.” He tried tugging Lincoln’s heartstrings, advocating for the “poor slaves” who were “waiting for the day of Freedom to come out from their hiding places.”

  The president apparently didn’t disclose his reason for delaying; indeed, it probably would not have passed the senator’s moral muster. Lincoln had promised a seventy-three-year-old Kentucky congressman, Charles Wickliffe, enough time to move two elderly slaves out of the jurisdiction. The three old people had been together a very long time, and while the congressman saw no point in changing their relationship, Lincoln saw no value in upsetting a very important man. Besides, the president owed Wickliffe a favor: the former Kentucky governor had worked with Lincoln’s friend Joshua Speed to smuggle thousands of guns into Kentucky in the earliest days of the conflict, thus arming loyal Unionists against a possible secessionist uprising. And Lincoln still hoped to win Wickliffe’s support for his compensated emancipation plan.

  At last, after the promised interval, the waiting ended on Wednesday, April 16. With a stroke of his pen, Abraham Lincoln became the first U.S. president to give freedom to slaves whom he did not himself own.

  * * *

  Henry Halleck, dressed in a brand-new uniform and wearing his ceremonial sword, arrived at Pittsburg Landing on April 11 to take charge of the combined western armies. It was his first wartime field command, and what he saw must have taken some of the starch out of his shirt. What Grant described as “the most incessant rains … ever known” had turned the shallow graves of the Shiloh dead into a slurry of mud and bones. “Skulls and toes are sticking up from beneath the clay all around and the heavy wagons crush the bodies turning up the bones of the buried,” one horrified soldier reported. Thousands of wounded men, many of them near death, suffered in the tents and meager farmhouses of the neighborhood, waiting to board transport ships to better facilities in Cincinnati.

  Halleck was a wealthy and cultured man, fluent in several languages, and married to the granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. He was so bookish that he once lashed himself to a bunk during a stormy passage around Cape Horn so that he could safely continue reading by candlelight. He was the sort of general who complained about the way subordinates folded their reports. In other words, Old Brains was completely out of his element on a miserable, corpse-strewn battlefield—a place where Grant was increasingly at home. The short time these mismatched men would spend together very nearly cost the Union its greatest warrior.

  For the moment, Grant was the toast of Washington, but Halleck found little to admire. He was appalled by the condition of Grant’s bruised army and immediately ordered him to clean up the camps and crack down on discipline. “I never saw a man more deficient in the business of organization,” Halleck sniffed. Summoned to Halleck’s headquarters aboard a steamer tied to the dock, Grant was forced to stand respectfully as Halleck paced back and forth “scolding him in a loud and haughty manner.” Halleck had never commanded a great mass of volunteers, so he didn’t understand how they differed from professional soldiers. He was shocked to see that some men sat down on guard duty; worse yet, some of their volunteer officers let them do it. Halleck issued a flurry of orders: to properly train sentinels, to get to work improving the muddy roads around the camps, to close the saloons on board the steamships at the river landings.

  Buell did what he could to stoke Halleck’s fire. When a complaint crossed Buell’s desk about rowdy troops firing their muskets in camp, he added a note blaming Grant’s men before he sent it on to Halleck. A week in the same camp with Grant had done nothing to change Buell’s belief that Grant’s incompetence would have caused the annihilation of his army at Shiloh if Buell had not come to the rescue. By Buell’s account, Grant “had no line or order of battle, no defensive works of any sort, no outposts, properly speaking, to give warning” of the attack. When the Rebels struck, Grant was as surprised as his troops: he was caught breakfasting at his headquarters downstream. Worse yet, Buell asserted, Grant had been late to the field and had spent most of the day in retreat until his dwindling and “defeated” force was “driven to refuge in the midst of its magazines, with the triumphant enemy at half-gunshot distance.” Only Buell’s timely arrival had checked the Rebels, and the next day he had driven them away.

  This version of the epic Shiloh battle reached the public on April 14, when a Cincinnati newspaper published a long and scathing description of Grant’s failures by Whitelaw Reid, a young journalist from Buell’s home state of Ohio. The account was promptly picked up by the Herald in New York. Reid’s earlier reports from Pittsburg Landing, before the battle, had already caused a stir with their mix of inflammatory charges and hit-or-miss accuracy; this new dispatch landed just as the first lists of Shiloh casualties sowed grief through the towns and farmsteads of the North. Overnight, Grant plunged from his pedestal. No longer was he “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Now he was an absentee commander who let his men be slaughtered like hogs. After the lieutenant governor of Ohio visited wounded volunteers from his state, he published another version of the same indictment. Thes
e shocking reports hit Washington with the power of massed artillery. “All that we hear of our officers at Pittsburg Landing is most painful,” wrote Charles Sumner to the governor of Massachusetts, John Andrew. “Some of them ought to be shot.”

  Grant’s first impulse was to ignore the charges. Sherman responded differently: as commander of the division hit first by the Rebels, he was implicated as well, and silence was not his operating style. Despite his bandaged hand, he immediately began scrawling his testimony in letters to his politically powerful relatives: his brother John was a U.S. senator and his foster father was Thomas Ewing, Sr., a confidant of both Stanton’s and Lincoln’s. “This story of surprise is an afterthought of the Rascals who ran away & had to Excuse their Cowardice,” Sherman explained to his brother in the Senate. “Newspapers now rule,” he complained to Ewing. “Their representatives the Reporters are to me the most contemptible race of men that exist, cowardly, cringing hanging round and gathering their material out of the most polluted sources.” Thus supplied with material to rebut Reid’s charges, the Sherman lobby fought back in the press and in Congress.

  Sherman understood who was behind many of the stories, and why the attacks were coming out of his home state: the regiments that broke and ran in Sherman’s division comprised Ohio volunteers and were led by prominent Ohio citizens. One such officer, Colonel Jesse Appler of the 53rd Ohio, was a young judge whose political ambitions died the moment he called out to his men (who were in fact fighting quite well): “Retreat! Save yourselves!” and began running toward the river. Another, Colonel Rodney Mason of the 71st Ohio, was the son of a well-known lawyer. Like many elected officers of the all-volunteer army, Mason, it was said, “went into the service not from motives of patriotism, but to win a name and fame that would carry him into the Halls of Congress.” According to Sherman, Mason not only ran from the battlefield on the first day of fighting but also refused to return on the second day, even after reinforcements arrived. “Instead of joining with the fragment of his Regiment then steadily advancing under fire, he made direct to the Steamboat Landing,” Sherman declared, adding: “I will not permit Col. Mason … to accuse me [and] shield himself at my expense.”