Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  This jolt was not what Lincoln’s foreign policy needed at yet another delicate moment. The Senate was balking at a secret agreement struck by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Corwin, to pay down Mexico’s debts to France and England in exchange for an alliance with the Union. In Europe, the pressure for cotton continued to rise. Any hopes Lincoln still had of dividing the French and the British with respect to the Confederacy were dashed by William Dayton in a brisk message to Seward early in June: “It is vain to hope that France [will] separate her policy from that of England.” Meanwhile, another raiding ship for the Rebels, even finer than the Oreto, was in the water near Liverpool receiving finishing touches. A three-masted sloop with a copper bottom and powerful steam engines, this sleek new vessel measured 220 feet and promised to outrun almost any ship in the world.

  The Palmerston letter, then, would have to be handled with great care. But it dawned on Adams that the rash letter might be a weapon he could throw back at Palmerston. “It strikes me,” Adams mused in a report to Seward, “that he has by his precipitation”—that is, his undiplomatic tone—“already put himself in the wrong, and I hope to be able to keep him there.” Palmerston’s hypocrisy irritated Adams, too; he would have liked to point out to the old man that the women of New Orleans were far safer than the women of Delhi had been four years earlier, when British troops sacked the city and committed hundreds of rapes.

  Instead, he took a day to calmly plot his way forward, then answered the prime minister on June 13. Striking a note of consummate diplomacy, Adams said he was reluctant to take official notice of such a provocative message, and frankly was unsure how to proceed. It would help, he added, if Palmerston would explain whether the letter was intended as a statement of the ruling government or simply as the private expression of one gentleman’s opinion. This neat response managed to call attention to both the explosive nature of the document and Palmerston’s gross violation of diplomatic protocol, while also offering the prime minister a way to back down.

  Next, Adams called on the foreign minister, Lord Russell, to ask whether he knew what Palmerston intended. The earl was flummoxed, having heard nothing of Palmerston’s letter, and he was annoyed that the prime minister was stirring up diplomatic troubles behind his back.

  As for Palmerston, he blustered in reply to Adams’s message, but even inside his government it was clear he had gone off half-cocked. Adams, having handled the matter deftly, closed it down. “This anomalous form of proceeding”—namely, emotional letters dashed off in response to newspaper stories—was simply too dangerous, Adams wrote. Therefore, the American ambassador would “decline to entertain any similar correspondence” in the future.

  Feeling pleased with himself, Adams traveled to Russell’s office on June 19 to keep a four P.M. appointment. The official purpose of the visit was to have the envoy read the lengthy dispatch prepared by Lincoln and Seward explaining the rapidly changing effects of the war on Southern slavery. But when Adams opened his valise and fumbled through his papers, he discovered that he had left the document at home. What might have been a mortifying moment for the straitlaced New Englander instead led to an unusually relaxed and open exchange.

  Reporting back to Seward, Adams wrote that he and Russell had a conversation about “the progress of the war,” which “his lordship seemed to admit to have the appearance of drawing to a close. We also talked over the action of General Butler. On the whole, I have never known an occasion in which his lordship manifested more good humor and a more kindly spirit.” Perhaps Russell had a new feeling about Adams, having seen him outfox Palmerston—a man with whom Russell had been sparring for most of his career. But if the American thought for a moment that this would translate into a political advantage, he would see his mistake soon enough.

  * * *

  The rumor mill in Washington claimed that the president was spending his evenings trying to contact the dead. Rebecca Pomroy’s effort to unmask the charlatan who claimed to be speaking with Willie had no effect on Mary; her interest in séances deepened as the days grew longer. She was reportedly a regular at the spiritualist “circles” conducted in Georgetown by a medium named Nettie Colburn Maynard, who later claimed that she held one séance in the Red Room of the White House with the president in attendance.

  Lincoln’s pastor, Phineas Gurley, had grown increasingly close to the president since Willie’s death, and Lincoln had become a fairly regular participant at Gurley’s Wednesday evening prayer meetings. As word of Lincoln’s attendance began to spread, the meetings swelled with favor seekers hoping to catch the president’s attention. Gurley arranged for Lincoln to hide in the pastor’s nearby office with the door ajar so that he could join the prayers without being seen. Now, the pastor was worried enough about the rumblings of unorthodoxy to ask Lincoln directly: Was the president dabbling in spiritualism? Lincoln assured the reverend doctor that he was not. “A simple faith in God is good enough for me,” he said, “and beyond that I do not concern myself very much.”

  On Sunday morning, June 22, the president attended the service at Gurley’s church. Afterward, he asked Orville Browning to join him for the short carriage ride back to the White House. There, he took the senator to the library, where he showed his friend a collection of “memoranda”—clippings and souvenirs of important recent events. The inauguration of Richard Yates, a Lincoln family friend, as governor of Illinois was documented, along with Lincoln’s own inauguration. Major battles from the early days of the war, and the deaths of prominent men, were also memorialized. These treasures had been the makings of Willie Lincoln’s first scrapbook; the collection had only recently been discovered, Lincoln said sadly. Perhaps White House servants had turned up the trove as they packed for the move to the summer cottage, or perhaps the president had finally mustered the strength, four months into his grief, to sift through his son’s belongings.

  Among the fragments was probably a clipping of Willie’s first published writing, which appeared in a Washington newspaper after the death of Edward Baker at Ball’s Bluff. Baker had called on Lincoln the day before his death, chatting quietly with the president on the White House lawn as the autumn sun blazed, and then lifted Willie for a hug and kiss before riding off to his fate.

  There was no patriot like Baker,

  So noble and so true;

  He fell as a soldier on the field,

  His face to the sky of blue.

  Four stanzas in all, Willie’s poem was a wrenching reminder of what had been and could never be again. These words—“patriot,” “noble,” “true”—were threaded through the grief of thousands of families across Lincoln’s United States; soon there would be tens of thousands more, and unless the war could be redeemed by some high purpose, such words would surely break under the weight of sorrow.

  * * *

  The next day, June 23, Lincoln boarded a private car on a special northbound train at four P.M. at the Washington station. The train passed through Baltimore, across the Susquehanna River to Philadelphia, and onward in darkness to New York City. Arriving at one thirty A.M., he switched trains for a trip up the Hudson River valley to the hamlet of Garrison, New York, where he boarded a ferry shortly before three A.M. for the river crossing to West Point.

  A few hours later, the president left Cozzen’s Hotel for breakfast with Winfield Scott, the object of his journey. Nearly eight months had passed since Lincoln had laid eyes on the corpulent old general, and in that time many of Scott’s well-planted seeds from the early days of the war had ripened into fruit. The Union controlled the Confederate coast, with only a few major ports still to capture. The Mississippi was nearly open, save for the batteries at Vicksburg. But the South’s response to these defeats was not the upwelling of loyal sentiment that Scott had predicted. Consequently, Union armies needed reorganization and Federal strategy needed refreshing. At such a moment, Lincoln required the counsel of a general in chief, but had no one to turn to. His long trip to West Point testified to his belie
f that Scott—“Old Fat and Feeble,” said the wags of Washington—retained a sharp military mind.

  Traveling with Lincoln, fresh from the steamy slog to Corinth, was John Pope. The visit to West Point was a homecoming for Pope, who had entered the U.S. Military Academy at age sixteen and had been a soldier ever since, exploring and surveying the western frontier from Minnesota to New Mexico. Now forty years old, Pope was a key to Lincoln’s plans for the eastern armies, though much depended on Scott’s advice.

  Their conference began with a review of the disjointed commands in Virginia. Lincoln described the strength and positions of the forces under McDowell, Banks, and Frémont, as well as McClellan’s situation on the peninsula and the force under Sturgis in Washington. Scott absorbed the information, pronounced the capital defenses adequate, and then pointed to the scattered divisions under McDowell as the source of Lincoln’s problems. The troops at Fredericksburg were of no use. As Scott put it, they could not “be called up, directly [and] in time, by McClellan, from the want of railroad transportation, or an adequate supply train.” The old general proposed the same solution McClellan had been advocating: put McDowell’s men on ships and send them by water to the peninsula. The reinforcements would help Little Mac take Richmond, and this, “combined with our previous victories, would be a virtual end of the rebellion, [and] soon restore entire Virginia to the Union.”

  The meeting continued through the morning and covered the entire conflict. With New Orleans in Union hands, the next objectives were, in Scott’s opinion, the ports of Mobile and Charleston and the rail hub at Chattanooga. The president expressed his desire to have a properly trained general in chief in Washington: as he later explained, he “had never professed to be a military man.” But he had felt forced to take the reins, owing to “procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people … and Congress.” Who could fill the role now? “All he wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act.”

  Scott had in mind just the man: Henry Halleck. The previous autumn, Scott had done all he could to hold on to the top position until Halleck could arrive from California to replace him, but McClellan had shouldered Scott aside. Nothing since then had altered Scott’s opinion that Halleck was the best strategist of his generation. With his Corinth campaign completed, Old Brains was ripe for a new assignment.

  The discussion broke up at noon; Lincoln spent the next three hours touring the academy and inspecting the cadets. After a small dinner party back at the hotel, he paid a visit to the nearby foundry where the gunsmith Robert Parker Parrott was casting fearsome rifled cannon for the Union army and navy. By now, news had traveled throughout Dutchess County that the president was in the neighborhood; from nine to eleven P.M., Lincoln received visitors in the parlor of his hotel. At midnight, the West Point band showed up to serenade the exhausted traveler.

  By the morning of June 25, a number of newspaper reporters had reached West Point, drawn by the tantalizing intelligence that Lincoln had made an eleven-hour journey just to confer with Scott. “The President’s sudden visit set a thousand rumors buzzing,” Nicolay noted back in Washington, “as if a beehive had been overturned. There was all sorts of guessing as to what would result—the Cabinet was to break up and be reformed—Generals were to be removed and new war movements were to be organized.”

  Lincoln invited the newsmen to ride along on his return trip to Washington, so they were on hand for a stop in Jersey City, where he addressed a crowd gathered to meet his no-longer-secret train. “When birds and animals are looked at through a fog they are seen to disadvantage,” Lincoln began—precisely the sort of folksy irrelevancy with which he usually signaled his intention to avoid saying anything substantial. “So it might be with you if I were to attempt to tell you why I went to see General Scott. I can only say that my visit to West Point did not have the importance which has been attached to it.… It had nothing whatever to do with making or unmaking any General in the country.” At this, the audience laughed and applauded, allowing Lincoln to close with a joke. “The Secretary of War, you know, holds a pretty tight rein on the Press,” he said, referring to Stanton’s control of the telegraph to censor war news. “I’m afraid that if I blab too much he might draw a tight rein on me.”

  With that, the president was back inside his coach, and in the company of John Pope, who knew that Lincoln had not been entirely truthful: an important new general was in fact being made. When the train reached Washington, Pope would be given command over the combined armies of McDowell, Frémont, and Banks, thus setting up an overnight rival to McClellan’s force and authority in Virginia.

  * * *

  How many troops were gathered on the peninsula for the dramatic final week of June? Historians have found it difficult to settle on a number. One prominent authority claimed that the “Army of Northern Virginia counted some 85,000 troops, including Jackson’s command,” while “McClellan’s force on the Chickahominy came to 104,300.” Another arrived at quite a different count: “Lee [enjoyed] numerical superiority with 112,220 men present for duty to McClellan’s 101,434.” Some of these estimates may have been influenced by the writer’s feelings, pro or con, about McClellan. In any event, the question can never be resolved, given the imperfections of nineteenth-century record keeping and slippery definitions of what it meant, in armies of independent-minded volunteers and reluctant Rebel conscripts, to be “present for duty.”

  If we look past the elusive specifics, however, we can see a sharp picture of the general situation: a huge and well-supplied Union army stood at the doorstep of the Confederate capital, opposed by an army of roughly comparable size but more limited resources. The Union held the strategic advantage, according to no less an expert than Robert E. Lee, because little by little McClellan was laying the groundwork for a siege of Richmond, which meant that the Confederates would have to choose between giving up the city to save their army, or risking everything on a bold attack.

  A decision to pull back from the Rebel capital might have changed the whole course of the war by committing Lee to a guerrilla operation. From the mountains of Virginia, Lee could, as he put it, “fight those people for years to come,” but only “if my soldiers will stand by me.” But the man known as “Evacuating Lee” could not be certain that his countrymen would support a decision to leave Richmond. After taking a hard look at that vulnerable right wing of McClellan’s mighty host, the Rebel commander resolved to gamble on a desperate attack.

  An entirely different picture, painted in lurid lines and vibrant colors, existed inside the mind of George B. McClellan. The general believed that he was outnumbered by at least two to one; that virtually all the Rebels who had been in Corinth had magically relocated to his front and flank; that the administration, up to and including the president, was deliberately undermining him in order to turn the war into a long, remorseless revolution against slavery. On June 20, McClellan’s confidant Fitz John Porter put this delusion baldly in a message to a friendly newspaper editor in New York: Stanton and Lincoln, Porter claimed, were ignoring “all calls for aid.” Porter asked, “Does the President (controlled by an incompetent [Stanton]) design to cause defeat here for the purpose of prolonging the war?”

  McClellan’s flatterers assured him that the Republicans were overplaying their treacherous hand and that he would emerge from his troubles as the nation’s next president. But McClellan saw only doom. A dysfunction that had begun as an excess of secrecy half a year earlier, when Little Mac was making his plans, then soured into mistrust in March after he set out from the capital with his army, had now become a fever of paranoia. Where it counted—in his own mind—McClellan wasn’t the commander of the strongest force the Americas had ever seen. He was a vulnerable underdog menaced on all sides. Suspecting that Lee was about to attack, he narrated his defeat in advance, warning Stanton: “I regret my great inferiority in numbers but feel that I am in no way responsible for it.” Having begged for reinforceme
nts and been refused, he wrote: “I will do all that a General can do … and if [the army] is destroyed by overwhelming numbers [I] can at least die with it & share its fate. But if the result … is a disaster the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest where it belongs.”

  A week of brutal fighting across the peninsula followed that strange telegram. The Army of the Potomac proved itself an extremely tough and well-disciplined force. In the first major clash of the Seven Days battles, McClellan’s right wing under Fitz John Porter, amounting to about a fourth of the total Union strength, fought stoutly against roughly two thirds of Lee’s army. The tremendous Confederate blow was designed to crumple the Union flank and expose the Federal supply line, but a combination of Porter’s grit and Stonewall Jackson’s inexplicable lassitude allowed McClellan to execute a daring shift in his base of supplies. Day after day, the Rebels pounded Little Mac’s rearguard as he moved his army—with thousands of wagons, tons of supplies, and twenty-five hundred beef cattle—to a new base on the south side of the peninsula, anchored on the James River.

  In the final battle, on July 1 at Malvern Hill, Lee threw his nearly spent force in wave after hopeless wave against massed Union artillery. “It was not war,” said the Confederate general Daniel Hill of the battle, “it was murder.” Another Confederate general, James Longstreet, mournfully summed up the clash as a matter of “losing six thousand men and accomplishing nothing.” A mapmaker for the Union army, Robert Sneden, watched the final charge of the day: