Sherman fought political battles the same way he fought with rifles and cannon, giving no mercy. His testimony won over Halleck while routing his enemies in Washington and Ohio. Thomas Ewing, Jr., in Washington on business, reported on the mood at the highest levels of the army: “Halleck says in a dispatch to [Stanton] that ‘Sherman saved the fortunes of the day.’” His father instructed the younger Ewing to report this to the president, “and remind him that I said to him last winter Sherman was the best fighting general he had.”
Sherman’s earlier trial by newspaper—when he was accused of madness for predicting that the Rebels would be very hard to defeat—had left him with a fairly thick skin. This time he was able to take the criticism in stride; he even paused in his letter-writing to hunt up battlefield souvenirs for his sons, including a box of shells, some of them still live. For Grant, who had grown to enjoy his lionizing coverage, the criticism after Shiloh left him feeling “shockingly abused.” Along with the other charges, his enemies exhumed his California drinking problem and used it to bolster the accusation that Grant was drunk during the battle. These charges could not be ignored, much as Lincoln might have wanted to wish them away. The president ordered Stanton to get to the bottom of the matter. On April 23, Stanton wired Halleck, who replied with a lukewarm defense of Grant and the promise of an investigation.
While he waited for the results of this inquiry, the president fended off demands that he cashier the former hero. The story soon spread that he had asked what brand of whiskey Grant preferred because “I’d like to send a barrel to my other generals.” (Lincoln later told a questioner that he had not actually said this, but “it would have been very good if [I] had.”)
The president badly wanted to believe the version of Shiloh that he was hearing from Sherman’s allies, because he needed Grant to be a man possessing, as Lincoln would later put it, “the grit of a bulldog.” He had enough failing generals on his hands already; he was willing to overlook many shortcomings in a military leader, including lack of polish on the parade ground and uncertain fealty to the field manual. All that mattered was that his soldiers act according to the simple truth expressed by the Rebel cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest: “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” When the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure called on Lincoln to say that the outraged citizens of his state were demanding Grant’s head, Lincoln answered almost plaintively: “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
* * *
George McClellan showed little eagerness to fight, but he did take great pleasure in the complex logistics and furious industry required to prepare for battle. He marveled at the projects he himself directed—the digging of elaborate trenches and the placement of enormous siege guns on the road to Richmond—exulting in a letter to his wife that they “may almost be called gigantic.”
But the Confederates had been busy, too. By mid-April Joseph E. Johnston had successfully relocated most of his army to positions between McClellan and Richmond—“the best troops of the Confederacy,” John Dahlgren fretted, “strongly intrenched and barring the way.” McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, designed to swing around Johnston and dash into Richmond, had lost all its swing and dash. On April 22, Senator Ben Wade hosted a dinner party attended by Attorney General Bates where once again conversation turned—as it did everywhere in Washington—to the question of McClellan’s true loyalties. A visitor from Ohio claimed to have heard Little Mac say that “the South was right and he would never fight against it.” Bates disagreed. “I cannot concur in believing [McClellan] a traitor. With more charity I conclude that he is only a foolish egotist.”
In an effort to speed things along, Lincoln took a field trip on April 19 down the Potomac to Aquia Creek, where he hoped to meet Irwin McDowell, commander of his withheld army corps. It was a wet trip, but the president was glad to get out of the White House and free of the capital. Several of Lincoln’s advisers were also aboard, including two members of his cabinet, as well as the revered New York attorney David Dudley Fields and Captain Dahlgren with his grown son Ulric. Lincoln chatted with Stanton and Chase as the cutter Miami steamed past the stately town houses that climbed the hill behind the Alexandria waterfront, then rounded a bend to find Washington’s house at Mount Vernon standing sentinel over its wide green lawn.
When the group arrived at Aquia Landing, McDowell was nowhere to be found. The men bunked for the night aboard ship, “in the little cabin … stowed away in a place like a box,” Dahlgren recalled. Lincoln spent the evening telling stories and favorite jokes, like the one about a naughty schoolboy who was ordered to hold out his hand to have his knuckles rapped. Shocked at the filthy hand that slowly appeared from behind the boy’s back, the schoolmaster declared that he would suspend the punishment if the boy could find anything else so dirty in the entire classroom. “There it is!” cried the boy, presenting his other hand.
Early the next morning, McDowell reported to the president. As rain drummed on the cabin roof, the general said that his troops had chased a detachment of Rebels across the Rappahannock and that now, with his corps scattered between Warrenton and Falmouth, the region south of Washington was well in hand. Lincoln seemed pleased. The Confederate retreat had him feeling more confident about the safety of the capital, and he was thinking about combining McDowell’s corps with troops in the Shenandoah Valley under Nathaniel Banks for a march on Richmond from the north.
Stanton took over the discussion, clearly excited by the size and power of the Union forces available to capture the Rebel capital. Generals were beginning to complain about the secretary’s tendency to inflate their troop strength; Sherman, for one, warned his brother that “there may be enough on paper, but not enough in fact.” True to form, Stanton now spoke of 150,000 men available to McClellan and began imagining how large a force they could gather under McDowell. Why stop with Banks? Stanton asked. Why not add Frémont’s army to the thrust?
“There’s the political trouble,” Lincoln answered: John Frémont was never going to march quietly under the command of Irwin McDowell. But they were both major generals, Stanton countered. “The law authorizes you to give command to any of like commission.”
Here it was again, the same old incomprehension. Like Bates telling him at the beginning of the year that he had the authority to fire McClellan, or like the abolitionists who preached to him about his duty to free the slaves, Stanton had an abstract understanding of Lincoln’s power but was blind to the political realities constraining that power. It didn’t matter what the law authorized Lincoln to do, or what the higher laws of morality called on him to do. It mattered only what he could actually accomplish while keeping his tenuous grip on the fractious Northern coalition. Stanton’s grandiose idea was not something he could put into practice, Lincoln said. If he tried to put the radical Republican hero Frémont into a subordinate role under McDowell, in a movement designed to aid the Democrat McClellan, “there would be an outcry.”
Still, as he left Aquia that Sunday morning, Lincoln remained intrigued by the idea of combining McDowell and Banks in an overland thrust designed to join McClellan in front of Richmond. He mulled the idea as the week went by—a week marked by anxious waiting for word from Farragut’s fleet below New Orleans, and by a troublesome visit to Richmond by the French ambassador Henri Mercier.
The cascade of Confederate losses, along with the emperor’s hunger for cotton, inspired Mercier to visit the Rebel capital for a firsthand look at Southern morale. As he rounded the peninsula where McClellan was making his slow way forward, the envoy saw the forest of masts and smokestacks signaling the immense quantities of supplies being ferried daily to the mighty Union army. Mercier’s transport, the French warship Gassendi, passed the sturdy little Monitor, poised at anchor beneath the guns of Fort Monroe. Sailing up the James River and arriving at Richmond, Mercier “expect[ed] to hear talk of surrender,” according to the historian Amanda Foreman. Instead, he met unyielding men like the Confederate secretary o
f state, Judah Benjamin, who deeply impressed the Frenchman with his hatred of the North and his determination to fight to the end. Benjamin and his fellow Rebels were prepared to lose Richmond and New Orleans—indeed, all their ports, if necessary—but they would never submit to Federal authority. Mercier’s ears were also filled with warnings of how a Northern victory would spell the end of cotton for years to come: liberated slaves would abandon the fields, and proud Southerners burn their stores.
When Mercier returned to Washington on April 24, Lincoln and Seward welcomed him. The ranking admiral of the French navy, who happened to be in New York, visited Washington for the occasion, and along with the captain of the Gassendi he received Lincoln on board “with all the honors paid to a sovereign.” There is no record of the president’s conversation with Mercier, but Lincoln undoubtedly hoped that the envoy had seen the fatal weakness of the Confederate position and that France would at last accept the grand bargain he was offering. The opposite was the case. Disembarking from the ship, Mercier promptly paid a visit to Lord Lyons, his British counterpart, and argued that the time had come to recognize Confederate independence. The government in Richmond had persuaded him that the Rebels were about to strike back, hard.
That night, Seward hosted Mercier and the French admiral at his mansion across the street from the White House. As the guests consumed an abundant dinner, Mercier was fairly bursting with his knowledge of the Confederacy’s secret plans to regain the upper hand. Turning to Dahlgren, he slyly mentioned that he had met Dahlgren’s old friend Catesby Jones, the new commander of the dreaded ironclad Virginia, during his stay in Richmond. “He sends his respects,” Mercier purred, then added, “and said ‘not to be caught napping at Washington.’” Dahlgren mulled over this cryptic remark, and concluded that Mercier was hinting at something important. He decided to warn the president.
The following day, Lincoln heard not only Dahlgren’s warning but also a fresh bit of intelligence picked up by Stanton’s assistant Peter Watson. According to Watson’s source, the Confederates were preparing a sneak attack on McDowell’s scattered army—an attack that, if successful, would open the road to Washington. A few days earlier, Lincoln had been confident enough about the security of the capital to consider sending McDowell on the offensive. Now he was reminded of the enormous risks involved.
When Orville Browning visited the White House that evening, he found the president complaining of a headache. The two old friends began talking, and as he often did when he wanted a distraction, Lincoln steered the conversation around to poetry. He and Browning both had lines by Thomas Hood committed to memory, and after quoting these back and forth, Lincoln asked whether Browning recalled Hood’s poem “The Haunted House.”
When Browning admitted that he had never read the poem, the president rang for a servant who soon returned with a copy of Hood’s works from Lincoln’s library. The president proceeded to read aloud the eerie verses—a compendium of broken windows, creaking hinges, scuttling insects, unlit stairs, swarms of bats, a ticking clock, a bloody hand. Lincoln was swept away. When he reached a particularly vivid line or verse, he would pause to talk about why it worked so well. He enjoyed his own performance so much that he rang the bell again and sent for another volume, then performed Hood’s low comic poem “The Lost Heir.” Lincoln scarcely paused before launching into a third poem, and by the time he finished that one, an hour and half had sped by and both men were in better spirits. But as he said goodbye, Lincoln accurately predicted that when Browning left, there would be “a crowd … buzzing about the door like bees, ready to pounce upon him” and return him to “the annoyances and harassments of his position.”
* * *
From the beginning of the war, New Orleans was the prize Lincoln coveted most. It was the first great city he ever saw as a young man, his destination during the flatboat journey that marked his personal declaration of independence from his father. No other place reflected quite so well the geographical and commercial ties binding North and South, for in happier times the bounty of the continent collected there for shipment around the world. Lincoln had closely monitored months of arduous preparation, first in Washington and then in the Gulf of Mexico, for a Union campaign to take the city. Now, on April 25, the day of Browning’s visit to the White House, a fleet of battered warships under David Farragut finally steamed toward the docks of the Crescent City, dodging unmanned barges carrying blazing loads of cotton. The citizens of New Orleans, the largest city and most important port in the Confederacy, had only this futile gesture to make in response to the arrival of Lincoln’s conquering armada.
Not long past midnight of the previous day—after sand had been stowed in buckets, ready to be spread across decks that would soon be slick with blood—Farragut had ordered seventeen ships in single file past the two Confederate forts guarding the river below the city. Union mortars had been bombarding the forts for nearly a week, but the passage remained formidable. Farragut’s ships first had to steer through a line of sunken hulks. Behind these obstacles the Rebels had prepared bonfires on unmanned rafts, ready to float among the wooden vessels of the Federal fleet. Behind the fire rafts waited the meager Confederate navy, a bold but underweight armada of riverboats mounting a mix of surplus guns. Among them was the half-finished ironclad Manassas, a hulking former sidewheel steamboat covered in old railroad tracks so as to be pressed into service as a ram. The Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, had assured Jefferson Davis that the Union’s fleet could never get through.
The batteries in the two forts thundered to life at 3:30 A.M. on April 24. “I do not believe there was ever a grander spectacle witnessed before the world than that displayed during the great artillery duel which then followed,” a Confederate gunnery captain later recalled. In the hours before dawn, a deafening, firelit struggle played out on the wide, muddy river. The forts were supposed to be invincible; instead, Farragut proved that ships fast enough, sailed by men brave enough, could pass through the terrible barrage. One shell-shot ship at a time, the Union fleet managed to reach safety upstream, beyond the Rebel guns.
While running the terrible gantlet, Farragut’s flagship, the Hartford—flying a huge Stars and Stripes through the red glare—caught fire when a Confederate tugboat pushed a floating bonfire into her port side. Quickly, the crew pulled out fire hoses and manned the pumps. The admiral’s gunners held to their work despite the blistering heat, as Farragut screamed over the roar of the flames, “Don’t flinch from that fire, boys! There’s hotter fire than that for those who don’t do their duty.” The burning barge stuck to the Hartford, feeding the inferno, until a fast-thinking officer uncapped several shells and shoved them over the side and into the fire. Seconds later, in a huge explosion, the raft of fire disintegrated and sizzled away.
Now, steaming in his wounded craft toward the great prize of New Orleans, Farragut saw black smoke rising from bales of white cotton piled on the wharves, torched by merchants determined not to let the precious crop fall into Yankee hands. Union spies had been correct: the city had no soldiers to speak of. All its guns had been sent north or mounted on the now defeated Rebel riverboats. The last hopes of New Orleans had been pinned on the forts downriver, and on two unfinished ironclads: the Manassas, lost in the battle, and the Mississippi, scuttled and burning near the shipyard.
Dropping anchor, Farragut allowed the mayor to choose: he could either raise the Union flag or watch his city be turned to rubble by the fleet’s guns. When the mayor offered a surly no, the admiral sent marines ashore to raise the red, white, and blue. At last the Crescent City and the mouth of the great river—the strategic endpoint of Winfield Scott’s original plan for breaking the Confederacy—once again belonged to the Union.
The capture of New Orleans was a devastating blow to the Confederacy: “the great catastrophe,” as Jefferson Davis called it, “the fall of our chief commercial city, and the destruction of the naval vessels on which our hopes most rested for the protection
of the lower Mississippi and the harbors of the Gulf.” The Rebel diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote: “New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two?”
The news astounded European leaders; Charles Frances Adams reported “general incredulity.” The French government, which of all institutions should have appreciated the strategic importance of the mouth of North America’s greatest river, tried to minimize the significance of Farragut’s coup. When Ambassador Dayton mentioned the capture to Foreign Minister Thouvenel, the Frenchman angrily jabbed at a map of the United States, pointing to the empty interior of the Deep South. The Confederates could not be beaten, he scoffed, because “they would retire there”—where he was pointing—and “it was a vast country.”
But if the French didn’t understand that the South’s navigable rivers made it vulnerable to attack, Lincoln and others in Washington did. New Orleans was viewed as the beginning of the end.
Rise to Greatness Page 18
