Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  6

  MAY

  George McClellan’s works before Yorktown were just about perfect. As May began, the muddy roads leading to the front were neatly corduroyed with logs for traction, and every rain-swollen creek along the way had been bridged. Behind stout earthen walls reinforced with lumber, the general had installed fixed lines of 13-inch seacoast mortars, fat iron cauldrons that could lob enormous iron balls into the Confederate fortifications. He had 10-inch mortars and 8-inch mortars and 8-inch howitzers, too. He had ordnance guns, Napoleon guns, and Parrott guns of nearly every size—rows and rows of rifled cannon, some capable of firing 200-pound shells at the Rebel batteries. He had many tons of ammunition stockpiled, and an endless train of mule-drawn wagons ready to bring more from his base near Fort Monroe. And he had tens of thousands of infantrymen poised to swarm the Rebel positions once those were softened by the blasting and bombarding.

  McClellan looked over all that had been created during the past month and decided that it was … not quite enough. He wanted the 30-pound Parrott siege guns that he’d left behind in the forts around Washington. Lincoln, who had been expecting the attack on Yorktown for weeks, was irate.

  “Your call for Parrott guns from Washington alarms me—chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination,” the president fumed in a coded telegram. The general responded as he always did, saying in essence that so little was happening because he was doing so much. “All is being done that human labor can accomplish,” McClellan declared. No matter how hard Lincoln pushed his general, Little Mac refused to alter his pace; he was like a stubborn child who walks slower when asked to hurry up.

  Having watched McClellan for eight months over the quiet ramparts of Manassas and Yorktown, Confederate general Johnston formed a crisp conclusion about his opponent: “McClellan seems not to value time especially.” Nevertheless, Johnston believed—as he had in March at Manassas—that the Federals were finally preparing to attack, and on May 5 he ordered another preemptive retreat. Over the past month, the Confederacy had collected some 55,000 troops at Yorktown; flushed from their fortifications, they had to move fast to get safely inside their next line of trenches. In their haste they left behind more than eighty artillery pieces, plus large stores of ammunition, tents, and rations—scarce resources the Rebels could not afford to lose.

  The Federals set off after them, catching Johnston’s rearguard at the picturesque colonial capital of Williamsburg. There, the Rebel army turned and fought like a hounded stag, tossing the Yankees backward. Hearing this news, McClellan rushed to the battlefield, where he found chaos in the Union ranks. Major General Edwin “Bull Head” Sumner, of the II Corps, was nominally in command. Sumner, who had earned his nickname during a long-ago scrap when a musket ball struck him in the head and supposedly bounced off, had more than forty years’ military experience; he was the oldest general to serve in Civil War combat on either side. But he had never led a force remotely as large as the one he commanded at Williamsburg, and he was clearly out of his depth. Quickly surveying the tangled lines of soldiers struggling in the thick Virginia underbrush, McClellan issued a few sharp orders and got the Federals moving forward again to capture Williamsburg’s Fort Magruder. “In five minutes after I reached the ground a possible defeat was changed into certain victory,” he boasted.

  McClellan had never gotten over his annoyance at Lincoln’s choice of corps commanders for the Army of the Potomac. He still believed in his own idea of letting the best men rise through the heat of battle, and he insisted that the near disaster at Williamsburg proved his point. In a letter to his wife, he grumbled that the battle was bungled by the “utter stupidity & worthlessness of the Corps Com[manders],” with Sumner the worst offender. Old Bull Head “proved that he was even a greater fool than I had supposed & had come within an ace of having us defeated.”

  On balance, though, McClellan was delighted with the events of early May. Once again, his careful maneuvering had forced the enemy to give up a fortified position without a fight. “I feel very proud of Yorktown; it and Manassas will be my brightest chaplets in history; for I know that I accomplished everything in both places by pure military skill,” he declared. In Washington, the reviews were mixed; by this point everything McClellan did was controversial. John Dahlgren agreed that Yorktown was a masterpiece of military science. “McClellan’s strategy seems to be conclusive,” he wrote. “He forced the Confederates to leave Manassas without a blow, and now to abandon Yorktown.” And yet, Dahlgren reported, “the extreme Republicans are … persistent in their attacks on McClellan, as if nothing but a battle would content them.”

  McClellan’s maneuvers on the peninsula had crystallized two irreconcilable views of the proper way to fight the rebellion. One approach emphasized the steady capture of strategic points by the least violent methods available, in hopes that the Confederates would see that their cause was doomed before too much bloodshed made a relatively peaceful resolution impossible. This was McClellan’s theory of the war, and it explained why in the midst of a military campaign he insisted that his soldiers protect the property of local Confederate sympathizers. While his letters were full of references to an epic battle ahead, a decisive clash of Blue and Gray, on a deeper level McClellan did not envision a truly decisive moment. Instead, he imagined that his victories would somehow return the United States to its earlier condition, unchanged—except that now levelheaded men like himself would engineer peaceful solutions to the differences between North and South. The war, in his view, was not the bitter fruit of an irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom. It was an avoidable tragedy wrought by agitators driven by extreme passions and bad motives.

  The other school of thought held that the time for coaxing the parties toward peace was long past. The division between North and South had been a long time coming, and nothing short of a fight could resolve it. Especially after Shiloh, the river of blood was running and could not be called back. The Union must press ahead, must crush and conquer the Rebels through relentless battle and waste. Soft war versus hard war: Lincoln, for one, was moving more solidly into the hard-war camp, as evidenced by his growing admiration for Ulysses Grant.

  Lincoln was not alone. The hard-war camp was gaining by the day, while the ranks of soft warriors dwindled. McClellan was irritated to discover that even his wife failed to see the brilliance of his relatively bloodless Yorktown campaign. “I really thought that you would appreciate a great result gained by pure skill & at little cost,” he sulked after Mary Ellen McClellan greeted the Rebel retreat with the written equivalent of a yawn. “It would have been easy for me to have sacrificed 10,000 lives in taking Yorktown,” he added. “I presume the world would have thought it more brilliant.” Even in the midst of the most important undertaking of his life, while armored in the manpower and wealth of the North, McClellan saw himself as a lonely hero standing against an uncomprehending and even malicious world.

  Despite their differences over politics and military strategy, Lincoln tried to save the vainglorious general from his worst tendencies. When McClellan asked permission to do away with the corps commanders after Williamsburg, the president responded with a frank tutorial in political prudence. McClellan needed to understand how shaky his support was in Congress, Lincoln warned in a private telegram. What was more, he needed to be alert to the fact that many officers in his army were complaining about the cliquishness of McClellan’s high command.

  “I think it is indispensable for you to know how your struggle against [the corps command structure] is received,” Lincoln wrote. “It is looked upon merely as an effort to pamper one or two pets.… I am constantly told that you have no consultation or communication with [the corps commanders]; that you consult and communicate with nobody but General Fitz John Porter, and perhaps General [William] Franklin. I do not say these complaints are true or just,” he added, “but at all events it is proper you should know of their existence.” Coming to his central point, Lincoln cautioned Mc
Clellan against overplaying his hand by taking on three corps commanders (and their congressional friends): “Are you strong enough—even with my help—to set your foot upon the necks of Sumner, Heintzelman, and Keyes all at once? This is a practical and very serious question for you.”

  The general’s self-absorption also seemed to blind him to the increasingly obvious fact that the Rebels weren’t the least bit mollified by his care for their homes and possessions. They weren’t softening; their resistance was intensifying. “There has arisen a desire to see the city [of Richmond] destroyed rather than surrendered,” Jefferson Davis proudly informed his wife as McClellan moved up the peninsula. And the Confederates again escalated the violence of the war, this time by planting mines among the supplies they left behind at Yorktown. McClellan was disgusted by this ungentlemanly tactic. “The rebels have been guilty of the most murderous & barbarous conduct in placing torpedoes within the abandoned works, near wells & springs, near flag staffs, magazines, telegraph offices, in carpet bags, barrels of flour, etc.,” he wrote. He promised a stern response to these improvised explosives: Rebel prisoners of war would be put to work clearing the mines.

  Unlike Grant after Shiloh, McClellan failed to draw the larger lesson from this deeper engagement with the murderous brutality of modern warfare. Month by month, the Confederates were taking the choice between soft war and hard war out of the hands of Northern leaders. Fighting for homes and pride, the insurrectionist army was pushing all its chips onto the table, offering the North no choice but hard war or capitulation.

  * * *

  On Monday, May 5, as his soldiers fought at Williamsburg, Abraham Lincoln boarded the Miami at the navy yard, bound for Fort Monroe, near Yorktown, and one of the most remarkable voyages in presidential history. His specific reasons for embarking on the trip are not recorded, but in his role as unofficial general in chief, Lincoln occasionally felt the need to gather his own intelligence, to look men in the eye as they delivered information, and to see for himself certain facts that the telegraph could relay only in hazy outline.

  The presidential party, including Stanton and Chase, set off at twilight, cruised almost immediately into a heavy rainstorm, and anchored about fifteen miles below Alexandria when visibility dropped nearly to zero. The storm cleared as the president slept, and the Miami was under way again before dawn. She entered the heaving waters of Chesapeake Bay by noon. Lincoln grew wrenchingly seasick. When lunch was served, he couldn’t face it; instead, he stretched his long frame across the top of a locker. There he suffered while his cabinet secretaries tried to eat: “The glasses tumbled over and slid and rolled about—and the whole table seemed as topsy-turvy as if some Spiritualist were operating on it,” Chase recounted. After lunch, Stanton staggered to another locker and joined Lincoln in prone misery.

  When at last the Miami reached the harbor at Old Point Comfort, night had settled over the water, but Lincoln wasted no time. He summoned Major General John Wool, the commander of the Fort Monroe garrison, who arrived at the cutter shortly before ten P.M. Wool’s independence from McClellan’s command—another sore spot for Little Mac—enabled Wool to give Lincoln an unvarnished view of conditions in the wake of the Army of the Potomac’s advance. Quickly the president realized that preparations to capitalize on the fall of Yorktown were nonexistent. As McClellan moved up the peninsula toward Richmond, Norfolk and the ironclad in its harbor seemed to have slipped the general’s mind. But the Virginia’s panic-inducing first voyage was still fresh in Lincoln’s memory and he was eager to put the behemoth out of commission. On the spot, he decided to call on the navy’s senior man in Hampton Roads, Commander Louis Goldsborough, to see what could be done.

  A tugboat ferried Lincoln’s party to the commander’s flagship. Now it was Chase’s turn to grow queasy. The little tug and the much larger Minnesota rose and fell on the choppy water, with the only connection between them being the rope ladder dangling from the flagship’s bulwark. “The guiding ropes on either hand [were] hardly visible in the darkness,” Chase reported in a letter to his daughter. “It seemed to me very high and a little fearsome.” As the Treasury secretary peered nervously at this arrangement, Lincoln stepped forward confidently and clambered up the side of the frigate. Somehow, Chase managed to follow.

  With the president and his party on board, Goldsborough outlined the situation. A Confederate battery at Sewell’s Point, across Hampton Roads from Fort Monroe, blocked the mouth of the Elizabeth River leading southward to Norfolk. Behind the battery, in the safe haven of the river, lay the ironclad. Goldsborough’s wooden battleships could take out the battery, but they were no match for the Virginia. And the Monitor, having proven its ability to hold the Rebel ship in check, was too valuable to risk in an all-out assault.

  There was, however, a new Federal asset on the scene, a weapon that might tip the stalemate at Hampton Roads in the Union’s favor, and Stanton proposed an inspection the following morning. After breakfast on May 7, the group visited a sleek steamship belonging to the Yankee shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt—his personal yacht, perhaps the swiftest and most maneuverable craft afloat, with two masts and twin hundred-ton paddlewheels amidships. By far the wealthiest man in America, Vanderbilt had offered in March to donate the yacht for a specific purpose: after being converted into a U.S. Navy ramming ship, she would hunt down the Virginia, punch a hole in her hull, and send her to the bottom. Lincoln had quickly accepted the offer, and now the elegant Vanderbilt rode low at anchor in Hampton Roads. The modified ship was virtually solid wood for fifty feet behind her prow, which was heavily plated with rolled iron.

  Delighted to find the luxurious ram ready for action, Lincoln’s impromptu high command formed a plan of attack. Supported by Wool’s big guns at Fort Monroe, Goldsborough’s wooden gunships would open fire on the Rebel battery at Sewell’s Point. Ideally, this barrage would lure the Virginia out of the river and into Hampton Roads to challenge the gunboats, and once the ironclad revealed herself, the speedy Vanderbilt would smash her. With the battery silenced and the ironclad out of the way, Wool’s troops would land at Sewell’s Point and commence the march to Norfolk.

  The attack was launched immediately. Lincoln and his entourage went by tugboat to an artificial island in the channel of Hampton Roads to watch the action. Confederate gunners at the shore battery soon abandoned their posts under the hot fire from the gunboats. “The rebel terror,” as Chase called the ironclad, came slowly out from her haven. The Monitor steamed up to shield the gunboats as they withdrew to safety, while the Vanderbilt began maneuvering for position and building steam. But at the critical moment, the Virginia declined to take the bait, retreating to safety as the confrontation fizzled. This inconclusive encounter left Chase buzzing with excitement. “The rebel Monster don’t want to fight and won’t fight if she can help it,” he gloated. But as long as the Virginia survived, Wool’s army couldn’t go ashore at Sewell’s Point. Another line of attack would have to be found.

  Buoyed by the thrill of observing a small battle from a safe distance, Chase offered to return to the Miami and scout for another landing site. Poking along the enemy shoreline proved to be a skittish business, however; at one point, the cutter’s captain suddenly veered away from land, having spotted a possible Rebel picket. The nearsighted Chase peered intently at the narrow beach but saw nothing. Then a white flag went up, which the Miami crew answered by waving a bedsheet. A group of slaves emerged from the woods; fearing a trap, Chase sent two boatloads of armed men to parley with them and the white woman who soon joined them. She proved to be a Union loyalist ready to point out local paths and roads that led to Norfolk, roughly ten miles away.

  Delighted, Chase returned to the fort, only to find that Lincoln was ahead of him. The president was standing over a detailed map of Hampton Roads, a veteran navy ship pilot by his side. Together they were studying every inch of the ragged coast. Soon Lincoln decided that there was a closer landing point than the one Chase had found, and he wa
nted to have a look at it. Calling for twenty riflemen from Wool’s garrison, Lincoln took a boat close enough to the beach to draw the interest of a couple of men on horseback. Satisfied with the lay of the land, the president returned to the fort to finalize preparations for an assault by Wool’s infantry.

  * * *

  Though Lincoln enjoyed being away from Washington, he still wore the pall of grief that was his constant garment. Willie was never far from his thoughts, even amid the rumbling guns and tense hours of military planning at Fort Monroe.

  During a break one evening, the president turned the conversation to one of his favorite topics, Shakespeare. More than one friend commented that Lincoln seemed to feel a connection to the Bard that erased the centuries between them. His relish for Shakespeare was intimate, not awed; he had strong feelings about the plays that mattered most to him. Of Hamlet, for example, he insisted that “To be or not to be” was not as good as its reputation. He much preferred the soliloquy of King Claudius, in which the murderer ponders his guilt and the judgment of eternity. Macbeth was perhaps Lincoln’s favorite play; he responded powerfully to that harrowing dramatization of the lure and cost of political power (and the challenges of living with a tempestuous, goading wife). More generally, Lincoln was known to say, “I have only one reproach to make of Shakespeare’s heroes—that they make long speeches when they are killed.”

  On this particular evening he turned to a lesser drama, King John, and his innermost thoughts bubbled to the surface. In the play’s tangled story of rivals for the throne of England, Queen Constance harbors dreams of greatness for her favorite son, Arthur, whose kidnapping and likely murder plunges her into unendurable grief. With the fluency that comes only from repeated careful readings, Lincoln recited the queen’s heartbreaking lament for an idealized child: