Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Mary Lincoln had dreamed from her youth that she would be “Mrs. President” someday; now here she was, and life seemed impossible to bear. When she finally mustered the strength to reply to her friend in Springfield, she wrote: “Our home is very beautiful, the grounds around us are enchanting, the world still smiles & pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled. Everything appears a mockery.” The death of her “beloved Willie a being too precious for earth” had left her “completely unnerved.… When I can bring myself to realize that he has indeed passed away, my question to myself is, ‘can life be endured?’” She had ordered Willie’s favorite toys sent away, but she still refused to enter the bedroom where he had died, or the Green Room, where his body had reposed before the funeral.

  And she insisted that her sorrow be undisturbed. When the Marine Band prepared for its annual series of public concerts on the White House lawn, a twice-a-week staple of Washington summer evenings, Mary demanded that the programs be canceled. How could she be expected to listen to the brassy tunes that had delighted her cherished son? Citizens protested, leading Navy Secretary Welles to suggest that the concerts be moved to Lafayette Square, but Mary was resolute. “It is our especial desire that the Band does not play in these grounds, this summer,” she instructed John Hay. “We expect our wishes to be complied with.”

  On Sunday, May 19, the first lady agreed to go to church with the Brownings. The weather was turning warm, and the previous day she had ordered from her favorite milliner a new lightweight mourning bonnet for summer, made of black straw with a long black crepe veil. “I want the crape to be the finest jet black English crape—white & black face trimmings—Could you obtain any black & white crape flowers? Small delicate ones—I want it got up, with great taste and gentility.”

  By this time, Mrs. Lincoln had also ordered a change of scenery. The idea of another hot summer in the White House, where dismal memories crouched around every corner, was so oppressive that she decided to relocate the family to a handsome cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, a few miles north of Capitol Hill. Formerly the summer home of the Washington banker George W. Riggs, the cottage commanded a hilltop well above the swampy bottomlands occupied by the White House, so it caught fresh breezes instead of the stifling reek of stagnant water. James Buchanan had used the retreat during his term in office, but the Lincolns had been far too busy to move to the cottage during their first summer. Now Mary was counting the days.

  After church that Sunday, the president invited Orville Browning to join him on a visit to the hospital where Rebecca Pomroy worked. The dedicated nurse had continued to check in on the grieving Lincoln family, and one day the president—who had come to consider her “one of the best women I ever knew”—had surprised her by saying, “Mrs. Pomroy, I want to do something for you; what shall it be? Be perfectly free to tell me what you want most, and if it is in my power, you shall have it.” A few weeks later, she would answer Lincoln’s question by seeking his help in getting a regular army commission for her son George, but at first all she could think to ask was that he come meet the wounded soldiers in her care.

  When Lincoln and Browning arrived at the hospital, there was a bustle of brass and a banging of drums as officers called for their men to limp into line. “Mr. Lincoln, in his unpretentious way, with his hat off, shook hands with each one, asking his name and the name of his regiment and company,” Pomroy recalled. Most of the patients had been wounded in the battle of Williamsburg and belonged to McClellan’s devoted Army of the Potomac. Yet Lincoln found that they loved him, too. Several soldiers promised to vote for him when he ran for reelection; one refused to wash his hand for several days after shaking Lincoln’s.

  As he prepared to leave, Lincoln found Pomroy waiting to say goodbye alongside three black servants who were clearly quite nervous. “And who are these?” Lincoln asked. They were the hospital cooks. Without hesitation, Lincoln shook their hands and greeted them by name. After the presidential carriage rolled away, several officers accused Pomroy of “a mean, contemptible trick”: inducing an important white man to touch and speak with lowly black workers. Even her favorite young patient, an orphan from Vermont who had come to love Pomroy like a mother, scolded her. “What could you be thinking of to introduce those niggers to the President?”

  Worried, Pomroy later asked Lincoln whether she had done wrong. “No, indeed!” he answered. “It did my soul good.” The president had lived in the White House for only a little more than a year, and the servants who kept Washington moving—the cooks, maids, stable hands, and carriage drivers—were a more vital black community than he had known before. His encounters with them were changing his opinions about the capacities of black people; gradually, he was coming to see the despised race as a population and not just as a problem, and to understand that the Union could not afford to keep this significant human resource on the sidelines. As he told Pomroy: “It will not be long before we shall have to use them as soldiers.”

  * * *

  May 22 was a relatively quiet Thursday. At the navy yard, Commander Dahlgren was nearing the end of a long day when, to his surprise, Edwin Stanton arrived at about nine P.M. to ask for a ship—immediately. Dahlgren was even more surprised when Lincoln arrived a few minutes later from the White House. “He left so privately that Mrs. Lincoln alone knew of it,” Dahlgren said. As a vessel was hastily made ready, the commander served dinner to his unexpected guests. The clocks chimed ten as the three men slipped onto the boat and steamed quietly out of the darkened harbor and down the Potomac.

  Near dawn, Lincoln awoke at Aquia Creek, where he had visited McDowell a few weeks before. The general, who had gathered his troops near Fredericksburg, was now preparing to march toward Richmond, and Lincoln wanted to discuss the critical offensive in person while he still had the chance. At the landing, he boarded a rough supply train for the next leg of the journey. Riding in the baggage car, he sat with Stanton and Dahlgren on camp stools. The railroad ended well short of McDowell’s headquarters, but the general was waiting for them when the baggage car jerked to a stop.

  McDowell quickly assured Lincoln that progress was being made on extending the southbound rail line to support the Federal advance. As proof, the general led his visitors to a bridge that Union engineers had just completed over a wide and deep ravine. An impressive trestle, it rose perhaps a hundred feet over a winding creek. Beside the rails ran a single plank for foot traffic, with nothing but open air on either side. “Let us walk over,” Lincoln said eagerly, and strode out onto the plank. McDowell followed. Stanton hesitated before edging his way onto the bridge. With a doubtful look down at the ribbon of water far below, Dahlgren brought up the rear. Then Stanton froze. “About half-way, the Secretary said he was dizzy and feared he would fall,” Dahlgren wrote in his diary. “I managed to step by him, and took his hand.” This was itself quite dangerous, because Dahlgren’s own head was “somewhat confused by the giddy height.”

  Lincoln alit on the other side as if he had strolled down a sidewalk. Somehow the others made it over, too, at which point they swung into the saddles of waiting horses for the remaining hour’s ride under a cloudy sky to McDowell’s camp. There, the group ate breakfast and talked about the advance, which promised to close the Union grip on Richmond. McDowell said that the troops under James Shields had only just arrived on the Rappahannock, bringing the total Federal strength here to some 45,000 men. Unfortunately, McDowell added, Shields wouldn’t be ready to move again until Sunday. “Take a good ready and start Monday morning,” Lincoln answered.

  As they talked, various combat commanders dropped by to meet the president. One of them, the wealthy Pennsylvanian George Meade, praised Lincoln for revoking Hunter’s emancipation order. “I am trying to do my duty,” Lincoln replied, “but no one can imagine what influences are brought to bear on me.” With Brigadier General John Gibbon, the new commander of the 3rd Brigade, Lincoln preferred to tease. Noting the surname, he asked: “Is this the man who wrote The D
ecline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” Gibbon, a regular army man from North Carolina who had chosen his country over his state, stared blankly. “Never mind, general,” Lincoln continued. “If you will write the decline and fall of this rebellion, I will let you off.”

  Lincoln was pleased to learn that the French ambassador, Henri Mercier, was also in camp. Knowing how Mercier’s recent visit to Richmond had raised French opinion of Confederate prospects, the president seized the opportunity to show off his own army’s strength by inviting Mercier to join him in reviewing the troops. By now “the sun had come out in the morning, and was warm,” Dahlgren recorded. “We saw one division after another, all in fine order, the men cheering tremendously. Abe rode along the line with hat off.” Eyeing the long ranks of blue stretching in every direction, Dahlgren worried that Lincoln might suffer in the heat. But though “the whole afternoon was consumed, and in one lone ride I thought we traveled ten miles,” the president remained energetic and fully engaged. After a pause for a simple dinner, the group made its way, with Mercier still in tow, back to the boat landing. There, Lincoln and the envoy parted company.

  On the water again after more than sixteen hours of hard travel, Lincoln ate another meal and read some poetry before dousing the lights. He was up again at five A.M. on May 24, strolling half-dressed into the cabin that Stanton and Dahlgren shared. A conversation the previous day had put him in mind of a joke, the president told his bleary-eyed shipmates. Someone had said that Shields was crazy, and Lincoln recalled that George III was told the same thing about one of his commanders. The king, who admired the man’s fighting spirit, replied, “If he’s mad, I wish he would bite my other generals.”

  But the merriment soon ended. Upon returning to the navy yard, Lincoln learned that Stonewall Jackson had materialized the previous day at Front Royal, west of Washington. Falling on a detachment of Banks’s army, Jackson’s Rebels had already killed or captured about a thousand Union men, and Banks was in peril of losing his entire army and its supplies. After weeks of begging to join the advance on Richmond, Banks was now racing down the Shenandoah Valley in retreat. Lincoln sent an urgent message to McClellan informing the general of this development, which he blamed on the fact that “we have so thinned our line to get troops for other places”—namely McClellan’s front. Nevertheless, he assured Little Mac that McDowell was on his way, and urged him to extend his right wing to prepare to meet the reinforcements.

  * * *

  Jackson’s attack was exactly what the president had feared: a counterthrust in the vicinity of Washington as McDowell moved south. “Apprehension of something like this,” he wrote McClellan, “has always been my reason for withholding McDowell’s force from you.” Front Royal was just across the Blue Ridge from Manassas, which was just down the road from Washington. When news of Jackson’s strike filtered into the capital, people responded with a panic of desperate speculation and hand-wringing. Word went around that there were riots in Baltimore, with secessionists taking up arms to menace Washington from the north. The wild talk at Willard’s so upset one woman that she dashed straight from the hotel to the White House, where she buttonholed Nicolay to ask “if she had not better leave the city as soon as possible.” The New York Herald, which had just published its ruminations on the impending “fall of Richmond,” swung to the other extreme, reporting that the whole Rebel army was marching north.

  Initially, Lincoln’s information was not much better. He knew neither the size of Jackson’s force nor which way the Rebels were headed. Eager for news, the president paid a visit to the War Department. As more dispatches arrived in the telegraph office outside Stanton’s door, the picture grew bleak. Senator Sumner stopped by to get a fresh report of what had happened, and Lincoln described a disorderly retreat. “Banks’s men were running and flinging away their arms, routed and demoralized,” Sumner summarized. “Another Bull Run,” said Lincoln gloomily. For all he knew, Lincoln told Orville Browning on May 25, the entire Union force in the Shenandoah Valley was lost. The anxious president agreed with Stanton to call on nearby states for spare militia.

  But despite the obvious danger, Lincoln that day remained supremely confident in his newfound ability to direct military campaigns. Since the first of the year, his strategic decisions had all proved correct, at least from his vantage point. He had ordered the armies to move, and Grant had quickly broken the Confederate line in the West. The ironclads, mortar boats, and rifled guns he spent hours promoting had revolutionized naval warfare. His philosophy of multiple campaigns pressing the Rebel perimeter from end to end had stretched the Confederacy so thin that New Orleans and Nashville fell without a fight, while Richmond and Corinth teetered on the brink. Even his tactical command skills, on display at Norfolk, proved impressively sharp. Now Lincoln believed that the most controversial of his decisions—to withhold McDowell and the I Corps from McClellan’s campaign—had been vindicated. Further, he was convinced that he could discern the motive behind the Rebel counterattack: it was, he told McClellan, “a general and concerted one,” not a mere diversionary thrust in the “very desperate defence of Richmond.”

  And so, after conferring with Stanton, Lincoln took the extraordinary step of ordering McDowell to stop in his tracks, turn around, and head to the valley. He also sent a telegram to Frémont, urging him eastward into the valley from the other direction with “the utmost speed. Do not lose a minute.” Informing McClellan that the promised reinforcements weren’t coming after all, Lincoln warned the general that his own orders, too, might be about to change. “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defense of Washington.”

  Trained military men—both the Democrat McClellan and the Republican McDowell—were shocked. “This is a crushing blow,” protested McDowell, who felt strongly that his troops were too far from the valley to be of use. McClellan’s scorn was withering. “I have this moment received a dispatch from the Pres[ident] who is terribly scared about Washington—& talks about the necessity of my returning in order to save it!” he wrote to his wife. “Heaven save a country governed by such counsels!… It is perfectly sickening to deal with such people.… I get more sick of them every day—for every day brings with it only additional proofs of their hypocrisy, knavery & folly.… A scare will do them good, & may bring them to their senses.”

  McClellan tried to persuade Lincoln that he was misreading Jackson’s intentions: the sudden assault really was nothing more than a desperate bid to distract the Federals at the gates of Richmond. “The object of the enemy’s movement is probably to prevent reinforcements being sent to me,” he telegraphed. “All the information obtained from balloons, deserters, prisoners & contrabands agrees in the statement that the mass of rebel troops are still in immediate vicinity of Richmond ready to defend it.”

  McClellan was right in this case and Lincoln was wrong. The move in the valley was diversionary, and Lincoln had taken the bait. This became clear once Banks managed to get his army safely across the Potomac after losing so many supply wagons that the Rebels dubbed him “Commissary Banks.” But instead of ordering McDowell to resume his advance on Richmond, Lincoln hungrily shifted from defense to offense. He reckoned that if McDowell, moving west, could connect with Frémont, moving east, to trap Jackson as he stood face-to-face with Banks at the bottom of the valley, the Union would have old Stonewall surrounded. Converging Federal troops could then crush the irksome military genius.

  Taking the offensive wasn’t necessarily bad strategy. Out west, Ulysses Grant—no slouch as a strategist—was looking at Halleck’s laborious obsession with Corinth and wondering “how the mere occupation of places” would end the war “while large and effective rebel armies existed.” Lincoln weighed the same conceptual alternatives and chose to make the destruction of Jackson’s army a priority, ahead of the occupation of Richmond. But the problem with Lincoln’s plan was its naïve overconfidence. Imagining a trap on a map, and having the tools to commu
nicate that vision with the blazing speed of electricity, was not the same thing as actually setting the trap and springing it. No less an authority than Napoleon Bonaparte had called the maneuver that Lincoln was attempting—the convergence and combination of large, separate forces in the presence of the enemy—the most difficult of all military movements.

  Sure enough, as soon as Lincoln issued his new orders, they began to go awry. Frémont, ordered east, instead marched north. The skies opened, turning roads to muck, then hammered the muck with hail. McDowell’s scouts failed for days to find the Rebels. A railroad accident slowed the progress of Shields’s division. Banks reported that his troops were “much disabled” by their earlier fighting. At every turn, Lincoln’s initiative encountered a catalog of unpredictable, yet somehow inevitable, snares and errors.

  Yet Lincoln pursued his trap for most of a week, using the telegraph like a spur to drive the Federal forces into place, even as he struggled to pinpoint the location of his elusive enemy. At one point, the president issued a pass for his friend Ward Hill Lamon to saddle up and look for Jackson himself. By May 29, Lincoln had some 40,000 Union troops converging in what he thought was the vicinity of Jackson’s 16,000. But the numerical advantage proved something of a tactical albatross, because the more troops Lincoln drove, the slower they seemed to go. “The game is before you,” he pleaded with Frémont on the night of May 30.

  By then it was too late. Jackson and his army had already moved southward and slipped between the closing gates of the converging Union forces. The commander in chief’s bold gambit had failed.

  McClellan seethed. Physically, he was a wreck, suffering a relapse of the malaria he had contracted as a young man in the Mexican War. Emotionally, he was on fire, spinning a dark but undefined plan to deploy in case Lincoln tried to recall his army to Washington. He scarcely tried to hide his delight at Lincoln’s miscalculations. “Proves them all to have been a precious lot of fools & that I have been right all the time,” he crowed to Mary Ellen.